Appropriations:
Congress returned this week from its August recess and has just two weeks until the beginning of Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) on October 1st. Neither the House nor Senate came close to passing all their appropriation bills before departing Washington in August.
Congress will once again need to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government funded into FY25, a task further complicated by the upcoming November election. Congressional leaders in both parties will need to agree on how long to punt FY25 appropriations, and either extend the deadline to the end of the calendar year in December during a lame duck session, or, as Speaker Johnson attempted this week, extend the deadline into late March (which failed to gain full GOP support in the House; and something Democrats uniformly oppose).
Extending the budget negotiations to March would put a new Congress in charge of the process, which would likely come with new priorities. This will certainly be a contentious issue for Congress over the next few weeks.
Farm Bill Reauthorization:
Negotiations between Democrats and Republicans on the Farm Bill broke down in June over disagreements on nutrition assistance programs, holding up an already long-delayed bill critical for the renewal of USDA’s agricultural research and extension programs at institutions of higher education (IHEs).
The reauthorization deadline is September 30th, and Congress will need to pass another extension of the current Farm Bill (last reauthorized in 2018) which allows a new Congress to focus on the issue in 2025. Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the Senate Republican Whip, has already said a one-year extension is the likeliest path forward.
GOP Pushes NIH Reform:
In June, the House GOP majority on the Energy & Commerce Committee (which oversees the NIH), released a framework that proposed to consolidate the 27 current institutes and centers into 15 institutes along with other policy reforms like term limits on NIH leadership. While these reforms were included in the House FY25 funding bill for NIH, the proposal is strongly opposed by Democrats (including the Senate majority), university associations like APLU, AAU, APA, and other stakeholders in the biomedical research community.
The current framework has no realistic path forward in this Congress (and faces significant institutional hurdles even if the GOP secures majorities in both houses in November); but its inclusion in the House funding bill indicates that Congressional Republicans continue to have a healthy appetite for changes at NIH. McAllister & Quinn will continue to monitor this issue and keep our clients up to speed on any relevant developments.
As Congress returns to Washington, the key issues they’ll be focused on are the funding and reauthorization deadlines, and the election.
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The next several months will surely generate more questions and concerns around the noise of the federal budget, policies, and salient research and higher education issues, and McAllister & Quinn will continue to monitor and track substantive developments and signaling for the research community.
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