Fears grow about plan to cut Pentagon medical research fund

WASHINGTON — A legislative proposal to cut in half a Pentagon-funded medical research account, subtracting hundreds of millions of dollars in this fiscal year alone, would jeopardize the fight against deadly diseases, experts said this week.

The six-month continuing resolution for fiscal 2025, which the House has passed and the Senate is expected to take up soon, would cut the Defense Health Program’s research and development account by $1.2 billion — from $2.9 billion in fiscal 2024 to $1.7 billion, or 41%. The biggest subset of that cut is an $859 million, or 57%, reduction to the so-called Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program: from $1.5 billion to $650 million.

That program, created and sustained by Congress, competitively awards funds to hundreds of projects each year at both Defense Department labs and outside research institutions, including at many American universities, to study everything from cancer to battlefield wounds to suicide prevention.

Democrats in Congress, in particular, have been criticizing the proposed cut in speeches and statements. But, as Washington is awash in wave after wave of news of Trump administration actions and as a government shutdown looms, the debate over the Pentagon research program has been largely obscured.

But not for Fran Visco, the president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy group.

Visco is herself a survivor of breast cancer, which is the second-leading cause of death in women. In a March 11 statement to lawmakers, she said the Defense-funded medical research program “has saved many lives, and we can continue that progress if Congress passes a defense appropriations bill. We will ruin it if Congress passes this CR.”

Power of the purse

The CR, unlike a regular Defense appropriations bill, “gives no direction” about how the money should be spent, except for enumerating allocations in broad categories, Visco noted, and so it cedes more of Congress’ so-called power of the purse — its primary source of clout — to the executive branch. As such, the work of both the House and Senate Defense appropriations bills for fiscal 2025 will be largely for naught when a CR is enacted.

For congressionally directed medical research, each of those Defense bills, which were passed in committee on a bipartisan basis, proposed funding for dozens of projects totaling nearly $1 billion in the Senate’s measure and $1.27 billion in the House’s. For example, the House bill directed that $5 million go to a project to “improve care during the ‘golden hour’ for servicemembers with life-threatening injuries” and to advance “treatments for warfighters deployed around the world.”

Typically, such House and Senate funding proposals would be combined and reconciled to stipulate how the Pentagon should spend the funds. But not under a CR.

Other medical research groups are also lobbying Congress this week to do something about the proposed cuts.

The Defense Health Research Consortium of more than 60 research organizations, including the American Psychological Association and ZERO Prostate Cancer, is calling on the Senate to undo the $859 million cut to the Pentagon’s congressionally directed medical research prior to voting on a CR.

“Cutting these vital research funds does a great disservice to our warfighters and veterans, and creates a vacuum in global leadership on medical research that China would be more than happy to fulfill,” said Mark Vieth, the coordinator of the consortium, in an email.

‘Devastating’ cutbacks

The Trump administration has also proposed limiting support for medical research funded at the National Institutes of Health, which bankrolls some $37 billion in studies and experiments each year, many times more than the Pentagon’s effort.

At the same time, the CR would create “an utterly massive hole in the NIH budget” of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday.

Such funding reductions at both the Pentagon and NIH “would be devastating to our medical research infrastructure throughout the United States,” said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who is the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee and a senior member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

“We would quickly go from the leading medical research nation in the world to much less,” he said. “And then it would cause incredible impact locally, and these impacts would be spread throughout the country.”

Millions of people affected

The Pentagon medical research money is in some cases focused on disorders and diseases that are particular challenges for servicemembers, including wound and burn care, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide ideation and prosthetics. The funding also serves the fight against scourges that directly or indirectly affect everyone, such as multiple types of cancer as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Visco, who was diagnosed just last year with a metastatic form of breast cancer 37 years after her initial diagnosis, successfully underwent a treatment that grew out of Pentagon-funded medical research, she said in her statement to Congress. There are others, she said, including the anti-cancer drug Herceptin and CDK inhibitor therapies.

Likewise, the congressionally directed medical research program at the Pentagon posted news on its website just last month that it had contributed to the development of a treatment for neurofibromastosis, a set of tumor-causing disorders.

The CR “could be responsible for ending critically important research that has already benefited millions of people with many different types of cancer,” Visco wrote. “Today’s researchers could hold the key to preventing cancer altogether. You cannot stop them in their tracks.”

More than 30 years of research

The congressionally directed medical research program, which is managed by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Maryland, was launched with a $210 million appropriation in 1992. In recent years, its annual funding allotment has been in the neighborhood of $1 billion.

The Pentagon does not request this money, and it has instead been added each year by Congress. To some, this is considered pork-barrel spending.

The late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., used to crusade against the Pentagon medical research spending as a diversion of defense funds that he argued should instead be used to make the military more lethal. The program also used to come in for criticism for not adequately coordinating its spending with NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But the Government Accountability Office, in a 2022 report directed by Congress, gave the program’s management a positive assessment, including on its coordination with other departments and agencies.

The Pentagon’s congressionally directed medical research initiative has been in a state of suspended animation in recent weeks, due not only to the proposed cuts but also to the uncertainty about future appropriations.

Atop the program’s website is this announcement: “The FY25 Defense Appropriations Bill has not been signed into law. CDMRP is unable to release new funding opportunities under the current Continuing Resolution. Pre-application and application deadlines will be available when opportunities are released, contingent upon future funding.”

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