Katie Porter: “despite the need to make very deep cuts in spending in this bill and despite a budget resolution that would have made…”

“despite the need to make very deep cuts in spending in this bill and despite a budget resolution that would have made very deep cuts in funding for the National Institutes of Health, 80 percent of whose money goes to local academic medical research centers all across America, we raised funding for NIH by 5.7 percent. This increase occurred while everything else in the bill was being cut. Last year we increased NIH by 7.5 percent and this year increased it by 6 percent. The increases for the National Cancer Institute were higher than the NIH average and we have placed biomedical research at a very, very high priority in crafting the Labor-HHS bill. I hope at the end of this process we will all have looked back on the process and said it was done in a fair way, it was done in a way that gave us an opportunity to participate and that we can live with the result.”