Let me pick up a couple of the themes that you hit upon. One of them, continuing on with research in this area of this part of the country, and certainly in the San Francisco Bay area, where I represent, health care research is huge. It is an extraordinarily big part of the economy, both the research and then the spin-offs from it. We call this the biotech. And this is almost entirely health care-related biotech. We also have the biofuels, again coming out of research. The Republican continuing resolution reduces funding for the National Institutes of Health by $1.6 billion. We are talking about 25,000 health-related research projects that will either stop, be delayed, or pushed off the track--25,000. We're talking about things that are really serious to us: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all of the things that affect every American and literally everybody in this world. The research would be slowed down, stopped, and in some cases terminated as a result of the feeding frenzy that went on here on this floor where more than 400 amendments were considered with very, very little thought.
Editor's note · Context
Garamendi addresses the impact of funding cuts to health care research and the National Institutes of Health.
Share
More from John Garamendi
Minimum-wage workers in California must work an average of 88 hours per week just to afford a modest one-bedroom rental at fair market rates. That is unacceptable.
As California’s Insurance Commissioner, I saw firsthand the devastating impact wildfires can have on families and communities. Homes were destroyed, lives were upended, and memories built over generations were lost in a matter of hours.
The environmental impacts, along with the economic fallout from those impacts, are simply too great, especially when there is little to no benefit for California consumers.
Despite these successes, they cannot overcome the fundamental flaws in this legislation.





