Parkinson's Community Budget Implications

As you all know, the budget battle over the last few weeks and months has been consuming for Washington and frustrating for many of us.  But, regardless of your views on the budget negotiations, it is important that our community not lose sight of the issues that are important to us.  I want to take this opportunity to update you on how we see the issues most important to us being handled in the current negotiations.  

Assuming that the Continuing Resolution (CR) agreement that was announced earlier this week is, in fact, passed by the House today and by the Senate tomorrow, this is the impact that we see on some of our significant issues.  Please remember that this bill is a spending bill for Fiscal Year 2011; it only appropriates funds through the end of September, 2011.  

Let's start with the good news:

The Continuing Resolution allocates $20 million for the Department of Defense Neurotoxin Exposure Treatment Parkinson's Research (NETPR) program for the remainder of FY 2011.  While that is a decrease from the 2010 level of $25 million, we are relieved that funding was maintained.

Now, on to the news we wish were better:

The CR includes a reduction of $260 million for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the remainder of FY 2011.  $50 million of this will come out of the intramural research program and the remaining $210 million in cuts will be prorated across all the NIH Institutes.  This decrease, coupled with the flat funding that NIH has seen in recent years, significantly undermines its ability to fund the very important basic and translational research that we need in this country to better understand and treat diseases like Parkinson's and so many others.

Our biggest disappointment is that there is no funding allocated for the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN) at NIH for the remainder of FY 2011.  As you may recall, CAN, a new initiative, has been very important to our community in our efforts to ensure that NIH-funded basic research discoveries are pursued for their full therapeutic potential.  In the coming weeks and months, we will be pushing very hard to ensure that the CAN program has the funding that it needs to get started at NIH in 2012.

The Food & Drug Administration will see a $107 million increase over FY 2010 funding levels, but those dollars are largely allocated to food safety programs.  The drug and devices offices will essentially be flat funded.  

While I think most people agree that we are at a time when tough funding decisions need to be made, at PAN, we believe that biomedical research is not the place to make those cuts.  In addition to the immeasurable value to families and loved ones of treating currently incurable diseases, the economic value of biomedical research is real.  In the short term there is the economic value of job creation resulting from innovation and in the longer term significant savings are realized by having a healthier population.  In the coming weeks the Parkinson's community will be joining with other health and disease policy organizations to raise the level of awareness that biomedical research cannot be left behind in these budget battles.  I ask you to please be alert for PAN Action Alerts and respond to them.  It is very important that we ensure that our voices are heard in this time when so many important choices are being made about the priorities for our country.

  
 

Amy Comstock Rick