Category: Health/Medical

Nearly three months into the new fiscal year and after months of seemingly little-to-no negotiations,

Congressional leaders released the much-awaited FY2023 omnibus appropriations package late yesterday.  Coming in at more than 4,100 pages, it contains all 12 spending bills for FY2023.  The current short-term government funding measure expires at midnight Saturday and Congressional leaders are working to get the new measure passed before then.

The Office of Federal Relations is in the process of digging through the package and details will emerge throughout the process.  We will share new information contained in the bill along the way.  In the meantime, we wanted to highlight a few of the initial highlights from the bill below:

• The Pell Grant maximum would increase by $500 and the new maximum would increase to $7,395 for the next academic year.
• NIH would be funded at $47.5 billion, an increase of $2.5 billion.
• ARPA-H would see a total of $1.5 billion, which is also authorized, an increased of $500 M. ARPA-H will be administratively within NIH, but the bill prohibits ARPA-H, including its headquarters, from being physically located on any part of the existing NIH campus, and it requires ARPA-H to have offices or facilities in not less than 3 geographic areas. Further, in determining the location of these offices or facilities, the director is required to make “fair and open consideration” of the characteristics of the intended location and the extent to which the location will facilitate the advancement of the goals and functions of the agency.
• NSF would be funded at $9.87 billion for FY2023, with the appropriators acknowledging that expectations were set for the agency by the CHIPS and Science Act, passed earlier this year.
  • Of the funds allocated to NSF, approximately $7.8 M would be for the Research and Related Activities Account while $1.37 billion would be for the Education and Human Resources Account.
• Within NASA, which would be funded at $25.4 billion, $7.8 billion would go to Science. Space Grant would be funded at $58 million.
• NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be funded at $661.3 million, which would include funding of $104 million for the cooperative institutes.
• Base Sea Grant would be funded at $80 million while Sea Grant Aquaculture would see a funding level of $14 million.

With respect to a provision that applies to a host of programs across different departments and agencies, the bill would wave “PAYGO” rules, which would implement mandatory sequester cuts to various programs, for FY2023 and FY2024.

As we said above, we will continue to dig through the legislation and the accompanying reports.  Both are available on the Senate Appropriations Committee webpage here.