Earlier this month, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, released a white paper, NIH in the 21st Century: Ensuring Transparency and American Biomedical Leadership. The document provides a brief legislative history and proposes improvements to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), drawing from comments received last fall in response to his request for stakeholder input, including from FABBS (See comments).
While this white paper appears to be early steps of legislation to reauthorize NIH, reauthorizing federal agencies, especially ones as big and closely watched as NIH, are typically led by Committee Chairs, rather than Ranking Members and can take years to pass Congress.
Over on the House side, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-WA) Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee (with has oversight over NIH), has announced her plans to retire and that she is interested in passing NIH legislation before doing so. Noting that this is an election, year with many Members of Congress already spending much of their time out of DC to campaign, the advocacy community is watching closely for NIH-related proposals. In the past, important legislation has passed in lame-duck sessions.
The report included three key themes:
- Maximizing the Effectiveness of Current NIH Funding
- Sustaining the United States’ Competitive Advantage in Biomedical Research
- Restoring Public Trust in Science
In the report, Senator Cassidy details the challenges of balancing the NIH portfolio with consideration to investments in basic science and applied research, NIH driven and field-initiated topics, as well as across all career stages from early to senior researchers. The paper also addresses reducing redundancy and inefficiencies. It identifies opportunities to learn from scientific successes and failures by recommending that NIH consider how to better capture negative results, as these are much less frequently published in journals.
With the goal of enabling the United States to make new and innovative treatments as quickly as possible, Cassidy recommends streamlining peer review of research, and addressing challenges in recruiting and maintaining our biomedical workforce. He highlighted opportunities for robust collaboration between NIH, public health and health care institutions, and the private sector.
According to the document, “public sentiment toward scientific institutions has degraded in recent years, exacerbated by a perceived lack of transparency and concerns about political biases during the COVID-19 pandemic response.” To address this, Cassidy emphasized the need for NIH to enhance transparency by reconstituting the Science Management Review Board (SMRB) and creating an apparatus allowing public input on agency practices. Additional sections recommend promoting research integrity and adhering to grants management processes.
FABBS will be following up on these recommendations and meeting with Congressional offices to share feedback and input as the committee moves forward, however quickly or slowly, to reauthorize NIH.
