Eric Swalwell: “Thank you. And I do wish to thank Ms. Speier, my neighbor across the San Mateo Bridge, for hosting this Special Order…”

“Thank you. And I do wish to thank Ms. Speier, my neighbor across the San Mateo Bridge, for hosting this Special Order hour on NIH funding. This is not the first time I have had the opportunity to work with Ms. Speier on these issues. In fact, in my short year in Congress, Ms. Speier has hosted a number of different roundtables, informal and formal, on the importance of NIH funding, and it is appropriate for her district, having the birthplace of the United States' biotechnology research. But it is also important that we want the biotech research to stay in the South San Francisco area, to stay in the East Bay area. And the folks in the district who are making advances that will hopefully bend the health care cost curves are counting on the United States Congress to keep NIH funding from being cut. And actually, it is my hope that we can increase it. The cuts to the NIH mean that there are fewer opportunities right now for biomedical research in the United States. It means that the decline in funding is meaning that there are more promising paths outside the United States for the promising minds who are putting their careers into this research. Faculty at top universities across the country are reporting cutting labor spending by 7 percent and operating with skeleton staffs, severely limiting job opportunities for any researcher that would want to go into this field.…”