Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2017--Motion to Proceed--

Floor Speech

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Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Sanders' objection and amendment. Massachusetts is home to many of the Nation's best scientists and most innovative biomedical companies. I believe we have a moral imperative to save money and save lives by expanding medical innovation in the United States.

I have been here for almost 4 years. I have spent nearly the entire time working both publicly and privately to try to fix the broken medical innovation system in this country. I will be blunt: It has been maddening because we know what we need to do to fix this problem. We know that medical cures come from taxpayer investments in basic research, followed by private industry making its investments to turn that research into viable treatments. Nobody in Congress seriously disputes that.

Every single person I have talked to here says they support increasing funding for the National Institutes of Health. Yet for over a decade Congress has decimated the NIH's budget. It has effectively been cut by nearly 25 percent. Those cuts are singlehandedly choking off support for the projects that could lead to the next major breakthrough against ALS, Alzheimer's cancer, and rare pediatric diseases. Those cuts are driving scientists out of the country or out of research entirely. Those cuts are discouraging a whole generation of brilliant young researchers who see no path to launch the work that could save millions of lives. Only in Washington can every single elected official say they are committed to fix something and then do nothing.

Newt Gingrich and I do not agree on much of anything, but we teamed up last year to plead with Congress to address this travesty. Newt Gingrich said: ``To allow research funding to languish at a time of historic opportunity when you could be saving lives and saving money takes a special kind of stupidity that is reserved for this city.'' I agree.

For 2 years, Republicans in the Senate have claimed loudly that they want to do something about this. For a year they talked to Democrats about a comprehensive, bipartisan package that would include investments in NIH and FDA. Then one day they stopped talking and instead started pushing a bunch of small, piecemeal bills through the committee, all without a single dime of new money for medical research, and then declared themselves the conquering heros of medical innovation.

Now, look, I support some of these bills. I helped write some of these bills. Others, like the Advancing Hope Act, I have serious concerns about. But without new funding for medical research, this bundle of bills will not move the needle on medical innovation. The Advancing Hope Act is an example. I support getting more transformative cures for pediatric rare diseases, but the Advancing Hope Act doesn't put a dime of additional money into medical research or approval--not one dime. This bill just hands drug companies vouchers so they can jump to the front of the line at the FDA. The drug companies love it. Most of them have turned around and sold off their vouchers, sometimes for hundreds of millions of dollars. But the FDA has said there is no evidence this program is effective at incentivizing drug development for rare pediatric diseases.

Who knows what breakthrough cancer or Alzheimer's treatment now takes longer to approve because some giant drug company uses a voucher to move something more lucrative but less important to the head of the line. I am not opposed to these vouchers under any circumstances, but without more, these vouchers cynically ask people with diabetes and people with breast cancer to fight the parents of children with rare pediatric diseases over who gets approved first.

I want cures, and to get them, we need to put more money into the NIH so that we can cure more diseases. We need to put more money into the FDA so they can approve everything that is worth approving as quickly as possible.

Senate Democrats have made their position clear. Whatever our views on these individual policies, we do not support moving piecemeal bills without a real, bipartisan agreement on new investments. Every Democrat on the HELP Committee has cosponsored a serious proposal to provide $50 billion in new mandatory NIH and FDA funding. Republicans have put no proposal on the table--nothing. Chairman Alexander said publicly that he understood the importance of getting this done, but it has been months and we have seen nothing.

The supporters of this expiring voucher program want to extend it to the end of December. I am willing to do that. I will join Senator Sanders in that.

I believed Chairman Alexander's promise to work in good faith on a bipartisan package that will actually fix medical innovation in this country. Despite months of silence, I still believe it. I want to give him every opportunity to keep that promise.

If Republicans want to ignore the real problems here and play political games instead, if they want to cynically use sick children and desperate moms in the runup to an election as a political football to avoid actually doing the right thing by these families, I cannot stop them, but I will not play along.

We are losing an entire generation of scientists and researchers because Congress will not face the hard fact that medical research takes money. We are forfeiting cures and treatments that could help people all across this country because Congress will not make the investments in basic research. We are losing our mothers, our fathers, our sons, and our daughters because Congress plays politics with people's lives. I will not play along, and I will do every single thing I can to get the funding we need to support real medical innovation in this country.

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