ICYMI: On Monday, President Biden announced his budget for FY23, a $5.8 trillion proposal that covers many of his priorities (and some of BIO’s). Let’s remember that the budget is meant to showcase the administration’s priorities. It is not a law, but a ‘roadmap’ that both parties often view through their own partisan lens. Here’s what’s in it.
Health Provisions
The proposed budget includes $81.7 billion for “transformative investments in pandemic preparedness and biodefense”—which BIO strongly supports. This includes:
- $40 billion to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response to invest in advanced development and manufacturing of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for high-priority threats. BIO strongly supports.
- $12.1 billion for NIH for R&D, for vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics against high-priority biological threats, including safe and secure laboratory capacity and clinical trial infrastructure.
- $1.6 billion for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expand and modernize regulatory capacity, information technology, and laboratory infrastructure to support the evaluation of medical countermeasures.
- Increases for biodefense, including $828 million for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), $83 million above the FY22 enacted level, and $975 million for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), $130 million above the FY22 enacted level. BIO supports the increases.
More:White House Fact Sheet: The Biden Administration’s Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense
Additional vaccine-related measures include:
- $4.5 billion in seed funding to establish global, regional, and local capacity through a new financial intermediary fund at the World Bank focused on global health security and pandemic preparedness.
- A new Vaccines for Adults (VFA) program, which would provide uninsured adults with access to all vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at no cost. Along with the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, VFA would reduce disparities in vaccine coverage and promote infrastructure for broad access to routine and outbreak vaccines. (Sounds good, but BIO’s still working through the details.)
- Expansion of the VFC program, to include all children under age 19 enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program and consolidate vaccine coverage under Medicare Part B, making more preventive vaccines available at no cost to Medicare beneficiaries.
What about ARPA-H? Biden’s budget includes $5 billion for the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a biomedical research agency that would focus on diseases including cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. This is $4 billion above FY22 enacted. (BIO supports ARPA-H, but there are still some questions about the new agency.)
What they’re saying: “Additional funding brings new ways to leverage opportunities to protect and advance the health of every American with reliable and science-based information,” said FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf.
Agriculture and Climate Provisions
The proposed budget includes $1.8 billion for climate-related programs at USDA, which BIO also supports. This includes:
Other things BIO supports:
- $9.2 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) clean energy research, development, and demonstration, an increase of more than 33% from the FY21 enacted level. BIO and member company LanzaTech made the case for more R&D at a House Science Committee 10 days ago—read more here and here.
- $7.8 billion for DOE Office of Science, including new programs that would promote U.S. leadership in the industries of the future, including biotechnology and biomanufacturing.
- $1.6 billion for National Science Foundation R&D, an increase of more than $500 million above FY21 enacted, to better understand and prepare for the adverse impacts of climate change. This would support research in renewable energy technologies, materials sciences, and plant genomics.
What they’re saying: The proposed budget “will help rural communities build resilience to the climate crisis, increase landscape resiliency to the impacts of climate change, create more and better markets for our hardworking producers, bolster access to healthy and affordable nutrition for families, help connect all Americans to high-speed, affordable, and reliable internet, strengthen USDA’s efforts to build equitable systems and programming, and position the United States to be a leader in Agricultural Research,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
More News:
Medpage Today (Opinion): Superbugs are getting stronger – our defenses are getting weaker
“[T]he antibacterial pipeline is grievously small. And it's shrinking compared to previous decades,” write BIO’s David Thomas and Emily Wheeler. “Meanwhile, superbugs continue to grow stronger. New research estimates they claimed 1.27 million lives in 2019—more than twice the estimated number of annual deaths just 5 years prior.”
Nature: The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more
“One firm that has released LCAs is LanzaTech, headquartered in Skokie, Illinois. The company uses bioreactors filled with Clostridium autoethanogenum bacteria to ferment industrial CO2, CO and hydrogen waste emissions into ethanol. Its chief executive, Jennifer Holmgren, notes that this kind of bioconversion can handle messy waste-gas streams, such as those from municipal waste gasifiers, better than chemical processes do.”
