After clearing a procedural hurdle earlier this week, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) was confirmed as NASA Administrator earlier this afternoon on a party line vote of 50 to 49.
Category: Administration
NASA Administrator Nomination Advances in Senate
The nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) for NASA Administrator moved forward earlier today after a Senator switched his vote. Initially, the vote to move the nomination forward stood tied at 49 to 49. After a number of conversations, Jeff Flake (R-AZ) changed his vote to a ‘yes’ to move forward on the nomination. The vote cut off debate on the nomination and sets up a final vote.
Immigration Stalled Again
The Senate on Thursday effectively failed to move forward with any of four immigration proposals put forward today. This included a Republican proposal backed by President Donald Trump that would grant 1.8 million “Dreamers” a path to citizenship and provide $25 billion for a border wall and security improvements.
The action came on a 39-60 vote to limit debate on an amendment by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), to an unrelated bill (HR 2579) related to the Administration’s “Four Pillars” proposal Sixty votes were needed to invoke cloture.
Grassley’s proposal mirrored Trump’s framework to provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers brought to the United States as children in exchange for border security funding. It would also end family-based immigration or “chain migration” and phase out a diversity lottery program. Democrats considered the restrictions on family-based immigration a nonstarter.
The Senate earlier rejected three other immigration proposals, including a bipartisan deal by 16 mostly centrist Senators, calling themselves the “Common Sense Caucus,” that Trump threatened to veto because it did not do enough to limit family-based immigration.
All amendments failed this afternoon.
There was no clear path forward in the House for any of these proposals.
HHS Budget FY2019
The President’s Budget request for HHS proposes $95.4 billion in discretionary budget authority and $1,120 billion in mandatory funding while proposing to shift many mandatory programs to discretionary, including GME. The budget would also consolidate all GME funding into one program while maintaining the site caps. Additionally, the budget proposes to cut or eliminate all public health training funding, including Title VII and Title VIII (Nursing Workforce Development received $83 million, a $145 million cut).
Certain research functions from across the HHS are proposed to be consolidated within NIH and established as three new NIH institutes: the National Institute for Research on Safety and Quality; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, including the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program; and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
Prior to the two-year budget deal passed by Congress, NIH was slated for a 27 percent cut, but would now receive $35.517 billion.
Overall, NIH fared well considering, highlights include:
- funding via the 21st Century Cures Act;
- funding for three existing agencies elsewhere that the administration is proposing to consolidate within NIH; and
- funding from the HHS-wide initiative for opioids.
The budget does impose a salary cap as to the percentage of investigator salary that can be paid with grant funds and by reducing the limit for salaries paid with grant funds from $187,000 to $152,000 and includes a provision to “cap the percentage of investigator salary that can be paid with grant funds to 90 percent of total salary” for principal investigators funded by NIH. The budget does discuss that the Administration has been prohibited from instituting or investigating an F&A cap by Congress.
HHS Budget in Brief: summarizes NIH proposals on pages 44-50 of the PDF (40-46 of the document)/
Budget Addendum: reflecting changes after the enactment of the Bipartisan Budget Act on Friday
More Information About FY2019 Budget Request
Department of Defense
The Pentagon’s FY2019 budget request includes $445.9 million for the basic research (6.1) programs funded by the Army, a cut of about $41 million compared to the FY2017 level. At the same time, the budget request asks for $919.6 million for Army applied research (6.2) programs, a decrease of about $300 million from FY2017.
Navy 6.1 programs would be cut by about $34 million and would receive approximately $597 million and Navy 6.2 programs would see a cut of roughly $89 million below the FY2017 level and would be funded at about $891 million under the FY2019 budget proposal.
At nearly $518 million, Air Force 6.1 would be cut by $27 million while Air Force 6.2 programs would see a total of roughly $1.31 billion, a $13-million cut.
Defense-wide basic research program would see a slight bump to $708 million while defense-wide 6.2 program would seen an increase of $207 million to $1.98 billion.
Additional details about the FY2019 Pentagon research budget request are available here.