This is something that I always try to understand – both the technical legislative details as well as the way it all plays in political terms. The details are still blurred for me but I want to get the contours in front of you. At the end of summer, we will arrive at the end of the exercise. DOGE has canceled tons of NIH subsidies and does various things to make NIH and other HHS parties to do their job and spend money appropriate by the congress. Thus, at the end of August, a very large pot of money will be built and you will arrive at the end of the financial year in which the congress forced that it is spent.
The White House apparently wants to essentially create a crisis around what to do with this pile of money and force the Democrats to allow them to pass or really support what is called a bill on termination. A cancellation invoice is when the money accumulates like this, the congress realizes that it appropriated too much money, so it votes to resume the money. In this case, you ask the Democrats to buffer in rubber or have all of these NIH biomedical research cuts. Now, why would Democrats do this? As was presented to me originally, it is presented as a kind of constitutional crisis. If we do not spend this money, we violate the Constitution. At that time, we may have two weeks left during the year, it is therefore not possible to spend it even if you wanted it. Thus, the White House says that if you do not help us, you will force us to violate the Constitution.
As I said to the people I was talking to, logic here did not make much sense to me. But I think the idea is slightly different. Either the Democrats help the White House de facto The restraint of these funds and in substance becomes the law of the country by the force of action if not a legal examination. And of course, the White House wants the restraint to become the law of the country. So winning for them. Or at least that's how they see it.
All this remains very vague for me, I suspect largely because it is vague. There are a lot of chaos in planning all of this as much as execution. But I am raising this here because whatever this orchestrated crisis, Democrats must start planning for this and send a message now. We have painfully saw what is happening when you reach a cold decision point. This is particularly important because I do not think it is or must be a crisis point for Democrats. I think the White House and the Republicans of Congress are much more vulnerable. I am in fact completely skeptical that the republicans of the congress will vote on this subject.
I don't care about the kind of parliamentary or even constitutional system in which you dress, people hate these cuts. Biomedical research cuts when questioned are like 70-30 or 80-20 against. But it is only on the edges of the news. You want to push him to the center of the news. The whole of the essentials of the last three months has been that the Republicans of the Congress need to have none of these extra-legal actions. They are only passers -by. This vote means that they finally have it. There is a billion dollars who wait to be spent on cancer and the search for Alzheimers and they say: “No, we want to give them to Elon for tax reductions or to build his space ship on Mars.”
Let us have this vote. Push this problem up of the news feed and make the Republicans have these cuts. You especially want to do it when we will now write the budget of next years. You want the emphasis on the financing of cancer and the Alzheimers heal research with regard to writing the budget of the coming years.
This message has no thesis or a clear action plan. The details are not so clear. At least to me. My point here is to put this problem, this chronology in front of you and to make you think.
More soon.
