Opposing Cuts to Nih Funding for Indirect Costs

Floor Speech

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Mr. AUCHINCLOSS. Madam Speaker, I rise today in opposition to the illegal and unwise policy recently announced by the National Institutes of Health to limit their indirect cost recapture rate to 15 percent.

To start with, as we start with most Trump administration maneuvers these last 3 weeks, it is illegal. I know that my Republican colleagues don't think that it is possible for the President to answer to the rule of law, but it is critical, particularly with the biomedical enterprise that makes long-term, expensive investments, to have confidence that when Congress or the President make a commitment, they stand by it over the course of years and even across decades. Undermining the rule of law undermines our ability to do the kinds of long-term, transformational science that changes lives.

In 2017, when the Trump administration first attempted to lower the indirect cost recapture rate to 10 percent, the Appropriations Committee, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote, rejected it and froze the IDC at its current level. That has been reauthorized every single year from 2017 through 2024.

I ask my Republican colleagues: You voted for this. They are breaking that law that you voted for. What are you going to do about it?

Now, the NIH might say: Well, we are referring to a different section of the code whereby we can, for a subset of grants with documentation, reduce the IDC.

That is not the NIH policy, though. The NIH did not do a subset of grants. They did it for every single grant and with zero documentation.

Wake up, Republicans. They are breaking your law.

The NIH might claim that what we are doing here is actually not cuts to the NIH because the same $35 billion is going to go out to science, but now it is just going to be more of those direct experiments, the people, the reagents, and the travel, and less of that expensive overhead. While it is true that the same amount of dollars could go out the door, in reality, these institutions, whether universities or hospitals, are going to be decreasingly able to afford to accept them.

Of any given experiment, the overhead associated with that experiment is well more than 15 percent. Research facilities, energy bills, support personnel, and data and technology, these things are expensive. We are not in the era of beakers in somebody's backyard doing chemical experiments. We are in an era of cutting-edge genetic engineering, and the equipment costs money.

Fewer institutions and investigators are going to be able to accept these grants. What we are ultimately going to do is privatize research infrastructure, so we are going to get less of it. It is just as though the Department of Transportation told businesses to build their own bridges and sidewalks. We just wouldn't get as many of them.

The impact in Massachusetts is going to be profound. It is a $2 billion attack on the research infrastructure that undergirds our eds and meds enterprise, an enterprise that creates billions of dollars in economic activity that supports hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs. Each of those jobs in biopharma, for example, can create five other jobs. That is a profound economic multiplier.

The work that we do in Massachusetts changes lives. There is progress on Alzheimer's, under which 15 million Americans will suffer by 2050 if we do not come up with therapies. Gestational diabetes--and, just recently, a non-opiate painkiller was developed in Massachusetts with NIH basic research funds that will provide outlets for acute pain that do not expose people to this most addictive chemical that has caused so much pain.

My Republican colleagues might say, ``Yeah, that is Massachusetts.'' That is the whole point, don't you see? ``It is the blue State and those universities and hospitals who think they are so much better than everybody else.'' That is exactly the point.

Here is my challenge to my Republican colleagues: Go back to your districts, talk to your universities, and talk to your hospitals. See how they are feeling about this policy. What you are going to hear is that they can't afford to take these grants. The research, the development, and the commercialization that you brag about when you go home, the ribbons that you cut for new companies and for new projects, all rest upon this research infrastructure that is getting cut.

Go talk to these companies. Go talk to these institutions of higher education. Go talk to these hospitals. They don't want to see this policy go into effect, and they want to see you vote for it and explain it back home, not hide behind the NIH.

So, they are losing. Who is winning? China. There were two main themes in the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. One was artificial intelligence, which, by the way, requires a lot of research infrastructure. The second was how good China has gotten at biotech in the last few years.

The Chinese biotech enterprise is looking at the United States cutting our own research infrastructure at a time when they are investing tens of billions of dollars, and they cannot believe their luck.

My Republican colleagues need to wake up, stand up, and support basic science.

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