This is something I’m still trying to get my head around — both the technical legislative details as well as how all this plays in political terms. The details are still fuzzy to me, but I want to get the outlines in front of you. At the end of the summer we’ll be coming to the end of the fiscal year. DOGE has canceled tons of NIH grants and done various other things to make it really hard for NIH and other grant-making parts of HHS to do their work and spend the congressionally appropriated money. So by late August a very large pot of money will have built up and you will be coming to the end of the fiscal year in which Congress mandated that it be spent.
The White House apparently wants to essentially create a crisis around what to do with that pile of money and force Democrats either to allow them to pass or actually support passing what’s called a rescission bill. A rescission bill is when money piles up like this, Congress realizes it appropriated too much money, so it votes to take the money back. In this case, you get Democrats to sort of rubber stamp or own all those NIH biomedical research cuts. Now why would Democrats do that? As this was originally presented to me, it’s framed as a kind of constitutional crisis. If we don’t spend this money, we’re violating the Constitution. By this time we have maybe two weeks left in the fiscal year so it’s not possible to spend it even if you wanted to. So the White House says, if you don’t help us you’ll be forcing us to violate the Constitution.
As I told the people I discussed this with, the logic here didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But I think the idea is slightly different. Either Democrats help the White House keep the whole thing in constitutional bounds or it becomes de facto impoundment of those funds and in essence impoundment becomes the law of the land by force of action if not legal review. And of course the White House very much wants impoundment to become the law of the land. So win-win for them. Or at least that’s how they see it.
All of this remains very fuzzy to me, I suspect in large part because it is fuzzy. There’s a lot of chaos in the planning for all this as much as the execution. But I raise this here because whatever this orchestrated crisis is, Democrats need to start planning for it and messaging for it now. We’ve seen, painfully, what happens when you hit a decision point cold. It’s especially important because I don’t think this is or needs to be a crisis point for Democrats at all. I think the White House and congressional Republicans are far more vulnerable. I’m actually quite skeptical congressional Republicans are going to be up to vote on this.
I don’t care what kind of parliamentary or even constitutional apparatus you dress this up in, people hate these cuts. The biomedical research cuts when they’re polled are like 70-30 or 80-20 against. But it’s only on the edges of the news. You want to push it to the center of the news. The whole gist of the last three months has been that congressional Republicans don’t have to own any of these extra-legal actions. They’re just bystanders. This vote means they finally own it. There’s X billions of dollars waiting to be spent on cancer and Alzheimers research and they say, “No, we want to give them to Elon for tax cuts or to build his space ship to Mars.”
Let’s have that vote. Push this issue to the top of the news feed and make Republicans own these cuts. You especially want to do this when we’re now getting down to writing next year’s budget. You want the focus on defunding cancer and Alzheimers cure research when it comes down to writing next year’s budget.
This post doesn’t have a clear thesis or plan of action. The details aren’t that clear. At least to me. My point here is to put this issue, this timeline, in front of you and get you thinking about it.
More soon.
