Congressional Calendar Leaves Little Time for Legislating

Jun 25

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Advocacy at a Glance offers you the bullet point summary of current advocacy issues associated with the goals of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA.

Congressional Calendar Leaves Little Time for Legislating. The House is now on recess through July 5, comes back for less than 2 weeks and then is gone from July 15 until after Labor Day, back for a few weeks, then off to campaign non-stop. The Senate is in the next 3 weeks, then on the same schedule. For a discussion of the legislative and appropriations picture relative to the Congressional calendar, see this week’s Analysis and Commentary.

Thinking Ahead: Maybe an Omnibus Instead of a Continuing Resolution. Morning Consult reports that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer on Tuesday does not expect the current flurry of appropriations bills to become law, in which case he advocates an end-of-year omnibus rather than a CR. Hoyer said: I do not expect the appropriations process to be done. I think there will be any very, very few — if any — bills that get to the president. And the president has so far indicated that he’s going to veto the bills that have passed the House.

Zika Supplemental Funding: No FDA Monies So Far. The President’s more than $1.8 billion request for emergency funding to combat Zika virus included $10 million for FDA’s efforts. Both House and Senate have whittled the total amount down to $1.1 billion, with the chief difference between House and Senate being whether some of this should be offset by spending cuts. The House version does. As the total amount of proposed spending on Zika has decreased dramatically, FDA’s $10 million does not look likely to survive.

No Friday Update on July 1. Our regular Friday updates will not be published next Friday, ahead of the holiday weekend. We wish everyone a fun Fourth of July.

Time to Face Up to the Future