National Institutes of Health

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, on a separate topic, as I reflect on my time in public service, I have been thinking about the issues that have meant the most during my career. There are a few that stand out, including my steadfast belief that the promise of medical research funding is one of the most important. That conviction led me to join forces more than 10 years ago with a bipartisan group of Senators: myself; Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington; Senator Roy Blunt, then-Republican Senator from Missouri; and Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican Senator from Tennessee.

Our team of four, Democrats and Republicans, came together and decided to speak up and be committed to increasing Federal funding for the National Institutes of Health. The National Institutes of Health is the premier medical research laboratory in the world.

I did my best to make sure with my friends that we fought for a 5- percent increase in growth in medical research each and every year. We did it too. A 60-percent increase to NIH's budget over the last decade--60 percent, money that is used to research and develop new ways to fight childhood cancer, ALS, Alzheimer's, you name it.

If you own a television and you ever turn it on, you can't avoid an ad for a new prescription drug. They are on all the time, with great promise, and many of them are breakthrough drugs. Did you know over 99 percent of those drugs, those new breakthrough drugs that you see on television, were developed by America's taxpayers at the National Institutes of Health. Sure, the drug companies sell them and market them, do a good job in that regard. They charge too much in most instances, but having done the basic research at the expense of American taxpayers, those drugs are available in America, as they should be.

A 60-percent increase in the NIH budget over the past decade resulted in many of those drugs being discovered and being sold to American families and bringing relief to them in ways no one imagined.

That progress and the hope it brings to patients and families is why I am absolutely dismayed to see how President Trump has dismantled medical research in America during his 100 days in office.

Was that what we were voting for last November? a cutback on medical research in America? to give up our leadership in a world of developing new cures and medicines for people who are afflicted with disease? I don't think that was the message of the last campaign at all.

President Trump has frozen funding to university labs and hospitals across the board. For example, Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, a cancer research powerhouse that earns hundreds of millions of dollars of NIH grants annually has had its accounts frozen by the NIH for the past 6 weeks.

This chart gives you an indication of what this freeze in funding means. Take a look at the numbers for funding for competitive grants and medical research: President Biden, first term President Trump, President Obama, and now down at the bottom, President Trump in his current term.

We need people to speak up in Congress, in the Senate, in the House, Democrats and Republicans. Silence is not acceptable. The amount of funding awarded in Trump's first 100 days is dramatically lower than past years, with more than $2 billion in research funding being held up so far this year. Two billion dollars isn't just lost opportunity, but it discourages researchers from staying on the job, breaks their will to continue to dedicate their lives to finding cures for things that we, in America, view as dangerous.

President Trump has canceled hundreds of NIH-supported grants and clinical trials and placed gag orders on experts, eliminated the programs that attract young people to the field, and fired nearly 2,000 NIH scientists and healthcare professionals, 2,000 researchers. Is one of those researchers working on a cure for a disease that will affect someone in your family? It is quite possible.

On Friday, the President released a preview of his budget, which proposes to slash NIH's medical research budget nearly in half, wiping out all the gains we have made in the last 10 years. That is heartbreaking. These actions are devastating to medical research across America.

We are ceding our competitiveness to China, weakening our scientific expertise as the envy in the world, and unfortunately, Americans are paying the price.

So imagine my surprise by my Republican colleagues and their reaction. What has their reaction been? Silence. Crickets. It is the ``Silence of the Lambs.''

It only took two or three Republican Senators in the past 2 years to join with Democratic Senators, including myself, to make a dramatic difference in medical research. It only takes three or four now to step up to say to the President: We are sorry. This is part of your budget we cannot go along with. We are not going to walk away from medical research. We are going to stand together on a bipartisan basis because it means so much.

I came to the floor a few weeks ago to announce that if Republican Senators won't stand up for NIH funding in their States, then I would. So today, I want to highlight what NIH means to one State, Arkansas.

Last year, Arkansas received more than $100 million in NIH funding that supported more than 1,500 jobs and generated nearly $300 million in economic activity.

Among the top-funded NIH institutions were the University of Arkansas System and Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock. Arkansas Children's used NIH funding to research why kids in rural, smalltown areas were experiencing higher rates of pediatric asthma and improving their treatment options.

They also used Arkansas NIH funding to research how to limit the negative long-term impact of chemotherapy for kids with leukemia. Is that important to you? If a member of your family was afflicted by asthma or needed chemotherapy, it would be critical.

I won't speak for either Senator of Arkansas, but helping pediatric cancer survivors and asthmatic kids in small towns sure seems like something worth fighting for, and I hope the Senators from Arkansas agree with me that this is a serious mistake for President Trump to cut the funding for that kind of research.

I look forward to working with those Senators if they want a bipartisan effort to restore this medical research in Arkansas.

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee heard testimony from a mother whose child beat cancer, thanks to NIH-funded clinical trials and treatment. It was great testimony by this young lady who brought her little girl with her, her 5-year-old little girl with her.

Here is what she said:

Cuts to medical research are not just numbers on a spreadsheet--they are stolen chances, unfinished stories, and futures left unrealized.

I plead with my Republican colleagues: Break your silence. Let us work together to ensure the chances for medical research are not stolen. These stories should not be left unfinished, and those futures should be realized. Let us protect medical research together. Medical disease doesn't care what your party is. It strikes at any and every family in America. Let's stand up for these families and their kids.

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