As Obama gets back to work, one of the major challenges facing his administration is the fiscal cliff and the threat of 'sequestration' in January. Sequestration was included in the Budget Control Act of 2011 as an 'incentive' to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to find $1.2 trillion in additional savings in the public purse. If the committee hasn't agreed on a package, or if Congress votes it down by January, then automatic, across-the-board cuts go into effect. This will hit all parts of government and would be a body blow for the US National Institutes of Health: according to figures from the US Congressional Budget Office, it could result in a 7.8% (∼$2.6 billion) reduction in the NIH budget, potentially cutting funding for 2,300 grants. If sequestration goes into effect, says Judith S. Bond, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland, “labs will be forced to close, resulting in layoffs of tens of thousands of researchers.” She calls the pending effects of sequestration “devastating.” Officials at the American Association for the Advancement of Science say that sequestration will put a “major strain” on science, research and innovation. “Together, we will work to persuade lawmakers to take a stand against arbitrary budget cuts in order to protect the nation's health and maintain our global competitiveness,” says Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America in Washington.
One positive outcome of the election for industry is increased certainty and continuity that leadership at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will remain in place, according to Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg is likely to stay put for now, he says. Michael Werner, a life sciences partner at Holland & Knight in Washington, agrees: “Sometimes, with a change in administration, the lack of a commissioner puts FDA into a holding pattern.” What's more, having Hamburg, who is a “tough cookie,” remain at the FDA provides something of a “public health bulwark against political intrusions,” says Pitts. The Plan B 'incident' at the end of 2011, when US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled Hamburg and agency officials when they sought to make that contraceptive more widely available, was an “awful precedent,” he says, “and I hope it was a mistake because if it becomes ongoing it would be most debilitating for FDA. Companies would be lobbying the Secretary, and the agency would be neutered.”
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