Budget cuts more than $600 million from Bioshield program

budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “When you have a huge initiative … they put all the pot of money in one place and then, as they find agencies that are more equipped to handle a certain aspect of that project, they’ll divvy up” the funds to those agencies. “That’s not a big deal at all,” he told GSN. “This isn’t anything new or anything to be concerned about.”

Both Smith and Clemins predicted Congress and the White House will continue to take dollars from Bioshield. “I’d like to be optimistic but I think the trend is fairly clear,” Smith said. Even though Bioshield has been able to “move some money out the door … I think folks in Congress will say, ‘Well, if you’re not spending your money we’re going to do something else with it’ and I think, clearly, the White House is starting to come along to that view as well.”

The money withdrawn from the program this fiscal year “will definitely not be replaced,” Clemins said in a follow-up e-mail to Matishak. He noted that appropriations for the effort are meant to last until 2013 “so we’ll probably have to wait until then to see if Congress decides to fund it again.”

“If the program is judged to be successful (and necessary) at that point, I’d say there’s a good chance that the program would be funded to a lesser degree to maintain the stockpiles of countermeasures as they expire,” according to Clemins.

If the program “continues to underperform by [congressional] standards,” however — as alluded to in the House version of the legislation that sought to take $500 million from Bioshield — “they won’t hesitate to transfer that money to an agency with a strong performance history,” he said.

House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) defended the move in a statement to GSN. “I agree with the appropriators that the Bioshield process has not lived up to expectations, and that we in Congress need to try to do something to help the project succeed,” he said. The Mississippi lawmaker did not elaborate. “By moving some of the funding from procurement to development, we hope to spur innovation and help these smaller biotech companies obtain funding that will allow them to take medical countermeasure innovations from concept to finished products, thus increasing our homeland security,” according to Thompson. “If this works and there are more products that can actually be acquired, we can find more funding in future appropriations to increase the reserve fund as appropriate.”

The move to HHS

Both Smith and Clemins approved of the Obama administration’s plan to move responsibility for the project’s reserve fund from DHS to Health and Human Services (HHS). DHS was responsible for carrying out threat assessments and subsequently issuing determinations stating which materials, such as anthrax, are a threat to the country that demanded attention from Project Bioshield. HHS could only issue program contracts to procure new medicines and countermeasures for threats identified by DHS.

That model will essentially stay the same but HHS will now have full programmatic responsibility for the reserve account, according to Smith. “It was happening in drips and drabs on a contract by contract basis,” he said. “They just moved the whole thing in one fell swoop so now they won’t have to do that interagency paperwork.” Clemins predicted the shift would save the effort on overheard and administrative costs.

Other Biodefense spending

The Defense Department’s chemical and biological defense program has a budget request of $1.2 billion for fiscal 2010, up from $1.1 billion the previous year. The U.S. Army received $34 million for procurement of biodefense equipment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which operates within HHS, received nearly $596 million for its Strategic National Stockpile program. That dollar amount did not change from the White House’s initial budget request. HHS also received nearly $6.4 billion to carry out disease control research and training, the legislation states.

DHS’s Metropolitan Medical Response System received $41 million, according to the conference agreement. The effort is meant to integrate emergency management and health systems into a coordinated response to mass casualty incidents caused by any hazard. The House initially proposed $44 million while the Senate wanted $40 million for the effort.

Matishak writes that Conferees rejected the administration’s proposal to replace the program with a “medical surge grant program” and advised the Federal Emergency Management Agency to work with the HHS preparedness and response assistant secretary to develop medical surge guidelines for communities.

The agreement also included $89.5 million for DHS’s Biowatch program proposed by the Senate instead of roughly $79.5 proposed by the House. The program is designed to detect pathogens released into the air as part of a terrorist attack on major U.S. cities.