On Friday, March 14, the Senate passed a Continuing Appropriations Resolution (CR) to fund the federal government for the remainder of Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 thus preventing a government shutdown.
While the measure ultimately passed on a near-party line vote, it was able to move forward when Democrats helped provided Republican colleagues with the 60 votes necessary to clear procedural hurdles. The measure narrowly-passed the House earlier this week and is expected to be signed by the President.
The text of the CR can be found here and a section-by-section Summary of the CR can be found here. Additional information can be found here. Initial analysis with key items of interest is included below:
- The National Institutes of Health, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, public health programs and patient care programs along with Education and Labor programs are level-funded (or near level-funded at their FY 2024 levels. Line-items and report language already adopted for FY 2024 appear to be maintained for FY 2025 (including for various programs that have been targeted or otherwise disrupted by administration funding guidance). The provisions in the base FY 2024 spending bill providing congressional instructions and protections on facilities and administrative costs for research is similarly continued.
- By level-funding federal programs, the final FY 2025 spending bill forgoes increases proposed by the Senate and the increased spending agreed to under the Fiscal Responsibility Act. This includes forfeiting the additional resources provided to correct funding shortfalls for the Cancer Moonshot and other programs funded through the 21st Century Cures Act.
- The Department of Defense (DOD) Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP) was targeted for cuts totaling about 57% with instructions to apply the cuts equally across all activities, including line-item funding, the Peer-Reviewed Cancer Research Program (PRCRP), and the Peer-Reviewed Medical Research Program (PRMRP). The complete eligible conditions lists from FY 2024 for the PRCRP and PRMRP are maintained for FY 2025 (the overall funding available is simply reduced by about half). Congressional and community efforts are already underway to fully restore CDMRP.
- The CR extends telehealth flexibilities for the remainder of the fiscal year but does not include a high-profile fix to Medicare Physician Reimbursement. It is our understanding the popular Medicare fix may be considered under regular order or folded into a subsequent package. The CR does not include patient care legislation and various reauthorizations previously considered as part of the December 20th appropriations package that failed to move forward.
- It appears that through an agreement with the White House, the CR will be considered a completed appropriations bill for the purposes of preventing 1% sequester cuts to non-defense programs and 3% cuts to defense programs that were scheduled to take effect if a final spending measure for FY 2025 was not enacted by Congress by April 30th.
Congress is already working to address various items excluded from the FY 2025 CR, including a budget shortfall for the District of Columbia, popular legislation and timely reauthorizations that could not be added to the package, and restoration of funding and consideration of Senate priorities for the DOD CDMRP. Moreover, the FY 2026 appropriations process is already underway with new appropriations measures under development ahead of the October 1st start of the fiscal year.