Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama is sounding the alarm about “the slow disbursement rate” of National Institutes of Health funding included in the March spending bill signed by President Donald Trump.
Britt, who serves as chair of the Senate Appropriations homeland subcommittee, led a letter Friday with 13 of her GOP colleagues to White House Budget Chief Russ Vought, urging the Office of Management and Budget to “fully implement” the stopgap government funding package enacted earlier this year.
“Suspension of these appropriated funds — whether formally withheld or functionally delayed — could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science,” Britt and her colleagues warned. “It also risks inadvertently severing ongoing NIH-funded research prior to actionable results.”
It’s the latest example of Republican pushback against the Trump administration’s pattern of withholding money for any variety of programs that lawmakers have previously approved for a specific purpose.
The Republican senators stressed in their letter that they shared Vought’s “commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs.”
They also expressed their confidence in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, writing, “Our shared goal is to restore public trust in the NIH precisely because its work is focused on results, accountability, and real-world impact.”
But, they added, “Withholding or suspending these funds would jeopardize that trust and hinder progress on critical health challenges facing our nation. Ultimately, this is about finding cures and seeing them through to fruition.”
The NIH is the top funder of biomedical research in the country. The University of Alabama at Birmingham is also a major recipient of NIH funding and is the top employer in Britt’s home state.
Among the signers of the letter are Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine and several other appropriations subcommittee chairs: Sens. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Other signatures are Sens. John Boozman or Arkansas, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Todd Young of Indiana.