House Appropriations Committee Research Articles

Maryland universities receive $2.5 million in funds for MH training

Four Maryland universities will receive more than $2.5 million in federal funding to beef up the number of mental health professionals available to schools, National Public Radio reported on May 16. The University of Maryland, Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University; Bowie State University and Loyola University Maryland each will receive federal grants from the U.S. Education Department ranging from $377,000 for Loyola to $825,000 for UMD‐Baltimore. The funds stem from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, legislation signed into law nearly a year ago. The five‐year program gives out funds to tackle mental health crises in schools and has already awarded $286 million across 48 states and territories. “Disruption in schools due to COVID‐19, economic anxiety, job losses, and learning challenges have exacer‐bated pre‐existing mental health challenges,” said House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D‐Conn.). “Our youth need help, and this is a burden that teachers, administrators, and parents cannot alleviate on their own. These grants will expand the program's reach, helping to move us closer to my goal of ensuring every child goes to a school that has a qualified mental health professional on staff.”

How to Be an Epistemic Trespasser

How to Be an Epistemic Trespasser

Recovery set‐aside in approps bill for SAPT BG

Last week, the House Appropriations Committee released the draft fiscal year 2022 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies funding bill, which now moves on to subcommittee consideration. It includes a new 10% recovery set‐aside for the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment block grant (SAPT BG) and an increase of $1.6 billion over the 2021 enacted level for the block grant overall.

Hal Rogers’s Kentucky Kingdom

This year marks Harold “Hal” Rogers’s twenty-first consecutive electoral victory in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, making him the secondlongest-serving Republican in Congress. He rode into office on the wave of the Reagan Revolution in 1980, and the governing style he’s employed in the Fifth District—which covers the rural, mountainous, Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky—can mostly be described as Reaganite: pro–War on Drugs, pro–prison expansion, anti-regulation of extractive industries, and pro-family. The congressman has had to improvise a little over the years in response to changes in the economy and political system, but he’s wellpositioned to do so: as a former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the elite “College of Cardinals” that manages the government’s budget, and the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, he’s one of the most influential men in Washington. Rogers has extraordinary discretion over where and how the government exercises power domestically and overseas, especially within the border regions; he can coerce other lawmakers to support his policies by withholding funding; and, crucially, he can funnel tons of “pork” back to his home district

In Case You Haven't Heard…

The House Appropriations Committee last week approved $25 million for the new substance use disorder (SUD) professionals loan repayment program. In general, workforce did very well in the House appropriations bill. There are increases at the Health Resources and Services Administration Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training program, especially for the training of peers, noted Andrew Kessler, principal for Slingshot Solutions, in a comment to ADAW last week. “There is also a very generous appropriation for the new peer support technical assistance center,” said Kessler. “The workforce used to be an afterthought for appropriators,” he said. “Through the advocacy of IC&RC, as well as several state‐based professional associations, appropriators and the rest of Congress have come to realize that without a highly trained workforce, progress in our fight against substance use disorders will be minimal. This is an investment that, if sustained, will most certainly pay off, both in the near future and for decades to come.” The House appropriations bill was marked up May 8. “Now we very much need the Senate to follow suit,” said Kessler. For the bill, go to https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press‐releases/appropriations‐committee‐releases‐fy‐2020‐subcommittee‐allocations‐labor‐hhs.

Briefly Noted

Last week, a sign‐on letter spearheaded by Rep. Paul Tonko (D‐New York) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R‐Pennsylvania) picked up signatures from lawmakers calling for an additional $500 million for the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (SAPT) block grant. The letter is addressed to the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. The increase would bring the SAPT block grant to $2,358,070,000. For decades, the SAPT block grant has been below $2 billion. “Any sustainable strategy designed to address the substance use crisis in America must include a strong commitment to the SAPT block grant, particularly in the midst of the ongoing opioid epidemic,” the March 26 letter states. “The SAPT Block Grant, distributed by formula to all States and Territories, funds services that result in exceptional outcomes,” the letter continues. Last year, the House Appropriations Committee voted to provide an additional $500 million to the SAPT block grant, and reduced the SOR appropriation by the same amount, a move that was embraced by the full House, but not by the Senate. As the benefits of flexibility in terms of federal resources get more traction (see story on the Bipartisan Policy Center on p. 5, and story on the Senate hearing in ADAW, March 11), the need to increase the block grant becomes more obvious. It's not just opioids anymore, as methamphetamine and cocaine use increases. “We believe over time that transitioning opioid‐specific funding to the SAPT block grant is good public policy and the appropriate step to take,” said Rob Morrison, executive director of the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors, when asked to comment on the sign‐on letter. “This approach ensures resources flow to the lead agency for alcohol and drug issues; provides the flexibility needed to address all substance use disorders that may exist in a particular state; and ensures federal resources contribute to a coordinated approach to planning and implementation at the state level. The House supported the beginning of a transition last year, and we see some momentum for the same step this year.”

Sign‐on letter for SAPT increase due March 20

Representatives Paul Tonko (D‐New York) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R‐Pennsylvania) need signatures for their letter to the House Appropriations Committee urging a $500 million increase for the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (SAPT) block grant in fiscal year 2020. “This funding stream serves as the cornerstone of States' substance abuse treatment, prevention, and recovery systems,” states the letter. “SAPT Block Grant funds, which are distributed by formula to all States and Territories, provide lifesaving treatment services to approximately 1.5 million individuals per year. In some States, the SAPT investment accounts for 100 percent of substance use prevention dollars. Unfortunately, SAPT Block Grant funding has not kept up with inflation, resulting in a 24 percent—or $444 million—decrease in actual funding since 2009.” The block grant has been just over $2 billion for decades. The letter requests that legislators fund just over $2.358 million for the SAPT block grant, which is equal to what the House of Representatives approved in the FY2019 Labor‐Health and Human Services Appropriations legislation and a $500 million increase over current funding levels. To sign on to the letter, contact Jeff Morgan in Rep. Tonko's office at jeff.morgan@mail.house.gov or Joseph Knowles in Rep. Fitzpatrick's office at joseph.knowles@mail.house.gov.

President's Message Summer Musings…Still Uncertain Times for Science

President's Message Summer Musings…Still Uncertain Times for Science

How the Budget Process Works in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee and Its Implications for the Korean Government

The recent recession and subsequent rescue efforts along with snowballing annual deficits and national debts in the United States have made it urgent for scholars to examine national budget processes across countries. The House Appropriations Committee is a key cog in the annual appropriations process in the United States and understanding how it behaves offers a clue for what to do with central government deficits. I offer a comprehensive review of scholarly contributions on the behavior of House Appropriation Committee since Fenno`s seminal works in 1962 and 1966. Then, I note potential lessons that these studies and U.S experiences can offer for the Korean government.

Strong NSF Funding Favored by House Spending Committee

Although the federal budget request lowers the agency’s funding by 11%, a House appropriations committee chair declared at a hearing his panel’s commitment to U.S. leadership in fundamental research.

House appropriations committee focuses on federal funding gaps in opioid crisis

Alcoholism & Drug Abuse WeeklyVolume 29, Issue 15 p. 1-3 Articles House appropriations committee focuses on federal funding gaps in opioid crisis Alison Knopf, Alison KnopfSearch for more papers by this author Alison Knopf, Alison KnopfSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 April 2017 https://doi.org/10.1002/adaw.30912Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume29, Issue1510 April 2017Pages 1-3 RelatedInformation

A Replication of “Political Influence behind the Veil of Peer Review” (Journal of Law and Economics 2009)

Using U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant panel data, Hegde and Mowery and Hegde look at political influence at the US congressional level on the allocation of these funds. Their key finding is that members of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee and former New York Senator Al D’Amato as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee were able to indirectly steer NIH grant money to organizations in their home states. A reexamination of their evidence does not support that conclusion.

Fenno on the House Appropriations Committee's Success: (Or, How to Construct a Nash Equilibrium Without Really Trying)

Fenno's classic paper, "The Appropriations Committee as a Political System" (1962), focuses on the norms and institutions that are the foundations of House Appropriations Committee’s (HAC) success. The fundamental idea is that of committee integration, the degree to which committee members cooperate so as to capture the gains from cooperation. According to Fenno, cooperation requires procedures and norms for successful bargaining, first within committee then before the whole chamber. As Fenno reports, cooperation requires that committee members adhere to several norms: committee integration, the ability to make decisions without creating disorder; members specialize by subcommittee, focusing on matters before their subcommittee, not those matters before other subcommittees; committee members practice reciprocity, by which members not on a given subcommittee defer to and support the recommendations of that subcommittee; and members exhibit to subcommittee unity, the practice that, no matter what the disagreements in the subcommittee about the bill, all subcommittee members support the subcommittee’s recommendations in the full committee. This paper shows that Fenno constructs a Nash equilibrium of committee integration that explains why committee members had incentives to follow the HAC norms.

R&D ekes out an increase in FY 2015 budget request

With spending caps in place, President Obama proposes an off-budget fund to support additional R&D. NASA would ground a flying observatory, and DOE would sharply curtail its nonproliferation programs.

“I Have Never Cut His Budget and I Never Expect to”: The House Appropriations Committee's Role in Increasing the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cold War Power

In July 1971, officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) faced an unexpected challenge. Assistant Director Thomas Bishop received a memo from Milton Jones, who served as the head of the...

Editorial

There are 35 years of AAIDD journals on my bookshelves. Seven and a half linear feet, give or take a few inches for duplicates and issues borrowed but never returned. The first of these is a 1977 Mental Retardation (volume 15, no. 3). Implementation of Public Law 94-142 loomed large on the horizon and much of the issue focused on the potential for integrated education. The opening article was a faux courtroom transcript justifying citizenship rights for persons with intellectual disabilities. The closing piece was Edward Zigler's testimony to the Senate and House Appropriations Committee summarizing a 20-year history of intellectual disability research. I just placed volume 49 (5) on the shelf. The lead article was an exploration of disability identity among self-advocates. Disability identity. Self-advocates. A remarkable transformation in policies, practices, and perspectives is chronicled on that shelf.I am in the enviable position of having Steven Taylor as my predecessor. Under his leadership, IDD embraced multiple different methodological traditions, styles of exposition, and contributors beyond the traditional academic research community. Unique in the inclusion of diverse voices, IDD is an important forum for the sometime raucous debates of our field. Dr. Taylor set the precedents that are the guide posts for the next stage of IDD's journey. I want to personally thank him for his mentorship over the years and his gracious assistance in the early months of my editorship.Readers will note modest changes: organizing articles according to IDD's triparte focus on policies, practices, and perspectives and allocating more pages to articles by moving association minutes and abstracts to the AAIDD website. As in the past, we encourage manuscripts focused on the analysis of contemporary policy, either through empirical work or narrative policy analyses, and research that informs practice. The publication of rigorously peer reviewed manuscripts remains our central identity as an academic journal. In a departure from past issues, in form if not substance, is the expansion of perspective articles into article-length theoretical pieces, conceptual papers, and syntheses of literature. We encourage the submission of works of controversy and thoughtful risk taking. It is time to move beyond the “quantitative” and “qualitative” distinction that traditionally frames our perspectives on inquiry and expand and deepen our connections with scholarship in critical inquiry, historical narratives, philosophical investigation, and other disciplines not typically associated with IDD.Our narratives are no longer dominated by the great debates over rights, community, and inclusion that threaded through that first issue on my shelf. This is progress. Yet the core themes are still resonant, stubbornly relevant decades later. What a wonderful challenge: refining the what, how, and why of our practice, articulating the relationship of a society to those in need of its supports, and seeking to understand and challenge the meanings of disability in our culture. There is room on my shelf. Please share your good works and grand ideas.I end on a bittersweet note. Yvette Taylor is leaving after 39 years of service to the journals of AAIDD. A tough copyeditor, she has disciplined and improved the writing of a generation of our scholars, including this new IDD editor. I will miss her steady hand and good counsel.

Recentralizing the U.S. House Appropriations Process, 1919–20

In 1920, a critical number of U.S. representatives supported institutional reform that transferred their own committees’ spending power to the House Appropriations Committee. Why did these legislators vote to give up their direct influence over appropriations? The choice is particularly puzzling because appropriations power offers access to distributive public policy, an important commodity for any reelection bid. In this article, we explore the logic behind this surprising decision. We find that legislators who agreed to surrender their “power of the purse” actually were acting in their electoral interests because their constituents demanded fiscal responsibility, and not pork barrel projects. We also find that legislators who voted against relinquishing appropriations jurisdiction, thereby ignoring the public's call for budgetary reforms, did so because favorable electoral circumstances gave them considerable flexibility in their roll call decisions. This evidence contributes to our understanding of the historical development of congressional institutions by highlighting and detailing their electoral origins.

Political Influence behind the Veil of Peer Review: An Analysis of Public Biomedical Research Funding in the United States

The U.S. public biomedical research system is renowned for its peer review process that awards federal funds to meritorious research performers. Although congressional appropriators do not earmark federal funds for biomedical research performers, I argue that they support allocations for those research fields that are most likely to benefit performers in their constituencies. Such disguised transfers mitigate the reputational penalties to appropriators of interfering with a merit‐driven system. I use data on all peer‐reviewed grants by the National Institutes of Health during the years 1984–2003 and find that performers in the states of certain House Appropriations Committee members receive 5.9–10.3 percent more research funds than those at unrepresented institutions. The returns to representation are concentrated in state universities and small businesses. Members support funding for the projects of represented performers in fields in which they are relatively weak and counteract the distributive effect of the peer review process.

Advocacy Defeats N.C. Medicaid Cuts

Advocacy Defeats N.C. Medicaid Cuts

U.S. Readies for Now-Pandemic H1N1

Even as the rate of new 2009-H1N1 infections steadied in the Northern Hemisphere, the World Heath Organization on June 11 declared a pandemic. Now heath authorities are bracing for the influenza's re-emergence in the United States this fall. David Obey (D-Wis.), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, has called for $2.05 billion in supplemental funding to increase surveillance of outbreaks and to purchase medications. Efforts are under way to develop a vaccine for 2009-H1N1. “We're taking those initial steps that are important and necessary should a vaccine [for 2009-H1N1] need to be made,” said Richard E. Besser, MD, director of emergency response and past acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There are a lot of decisions that need to be made” by this fall, when people start receiving their flu shots. Current gaps in knowledge about 2009-H1N1 are expected to be filled in the coming months as the flu season unfolds in the Southern Hemisphere. During this time, he said, epidemiologists will be seeking answers to several questions: How does the virus compete with other viruses that are circulating in the community? Does it develop resistance? The earliest a 2009-H1N1 vaccine will be available is in September, according to Klaus Stöhr, DVM, vice president and global head of Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Ltd. and former head of the WHO's Global Influenza Program. Dr. Stöhr spoke at the international conference on Influenza Vaccines for the World held in Cannes, France. The number of inoculations necessary will depend on how potent the vaccine needs to be, explained William Schaffner, MD, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. In all likelihood, the 2009-H1N1 vaccine will require two shots to ensure immunity. Couple that with the logistics of providing the seasonal influenza vaccine and “the potential for confusion is vast,” he said in an interview. A lot could happen between now and the fall. “We could see the current strain fizzle out and never come back again. We could see the current strain come back as it currently is, or we could see it mutate and come back in a more severe form. What we need to do during this period is make sure that we're prepared as a government, as a public health agency, [and] that our laboratories are ready should this come back as a much more severe infection,” Dr. Besser said at a CDC press briefing. In the meantime, long-term care facilities should follow infection control procedures to reduce the spread of viral organisms, said AMDA Director of Clinical Affairs Jacqueline Vance, RNC, CDONA/LTC. “This includes stressing hand washing for staff and visitors alike and putting policies in place to restrict entering the facility if anyone—staff and visitors alike—has any signs or symptoms of the flu,” she said. So far, the genetic analysis of 2009-H1N1 has shown no sign of the virulence markers found in the 1918 pandemic influenza strain, also an H1N1 type, said Nancy Cox, PhD, chief of the influenza division at the CDC. She echoed the caution, however, that a great deal about 2009-H1N1 is still unknown. The 2009-H1N1 strain is “easily transmitted,” with an attack rate of about 25%-30%, based on early analyses of person-to-person spread within families and households, said Anne Schuchat, MD, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. This attack rate is comparable to what is usually seen among most seasonal influenza strains. Given that rate of 2009-H1N1 transition, the swine flu outbreak serves as “a stark reminder of the unpredictability of the timing and of the speed by which the pandemic situation can change,” Dr. Stöhr said.