Appropriations Committees Begin Work on FY 2007 Funding Bills; House Appropriations
Chairman
Announces Subcommittee Allocations, Including Additional Funding for the
Labor,
Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee
The House and Senate Appropriations Committees have
begun efforts to determine the funding priorities and amounts for programs in the FY 2007 federal budget. On May 4th,
House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) released funding allocations for the 11 House Appropriations Subcommittees. These
allocations are the funding levels that each of the 11 Subcommittees can spend on the federal programs within their jurisdiction.
In a statement announcing the release of the subcommittee allocations, Chairman Lewis acknowledged the current tight budget environment but
expressed that the allocations would ensure that Congress would adequately fund priority programs. Chairman Lewis also repeated his intention that
all of the funding bills be individually approved by the full U.S. House of Representatives before the July 4th Congressional recess.
Under Chairman Lewis's subcommittee allocations, the
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (Labor HHS) Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over key addiction prevention and treatment
programs, will be given $141.93 billion for programs in those federal agencies, $4.136 billion over the President's FY 2007 budget request and $.843
billion over last year's enacted amount. Prior to release of the allocations, Chairman Lewis had indicated his intention to shift
$4 billion from proposed defense and foreign aid spending to the Labor HHS spending bill. This shift in funding would bring
spending in the Labor HHS spending bill to roughly where it was in FY 2006 before a one percent across-the-board cut was applied to most
discretionary spending programs.
The appropriations bill that includes funding for
programs in the Department of Justice would also receive a small increase over last year's funding levels. Under Chairman Lewis's
allocations, the Science, State, Justice and Commerce Subcommittee will receive $59.84 billion, $.11 billion over the President's budget request and
$2.63 billion over last year's allocation.
The House has not yet approved a budget resolution but
may vote on a resolution during the week of May 8th. If the House doesn't approve a budget resolution there are other ways the House could
approve a cap on discretionary spending. The Senate-approved budget resolution, which is $17 billion over the $873 billion
discretionary spending cap proposed in President Bush's FY 2007 budget, includes $7 billion that was secured by Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Tom
Harkin (D-IA) for health, education and labor funding.
The House Labor HHS Appropriations Subcommittee is
scheduled to mark up its spending bill on June 7th, with a House Appropriations Committee mark-up and a House floor vote planned for subsequent weeks
in June. However, due to the many initiatives still left on the legislative agenda for the 109th Congress, timing is still
extremely uncertain. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet released a schedule of hearings. The full
chart of House Appropriations Subcommittee allocations can be found at: http://appropriations.house.gov/_files/302bscof.pdf.
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Releases Results of
COMBINE
Study; Patients Receiving Naltrexone, Specialized Alcohol Counseling or
Both
Demonstrate Best Outcomes
On Tuesday May 2nd, the National Institutes
of Health, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) released the results from "Combining Medications and Behavioral Interventions
for Alcoholism" (The COMBINE Study). According to NIAAA, COMBINE is the largest clinical trial ever conducted of pharmacologic and
behavioral treatments for alcohol dependence. Results from the NIH supported study show that patients who received the medication
naltrexone, specialized alcohol counseling, or both demonstrated the best outcomes after 16 weeks of outpatient treatment. All patients also received
Medical Management (MM), an intervention consisting of nine brief, structured outpatient sessions provided by a health care professional.
Other highlights of the study include:
- At 16 weeks, all groups substantially reduced
drinking during treatment; overall the percent of days abstinent tripled from 25 to 73 percent, and alcohol consumption per week decreased by 80
percent
- Naltrexone continued to show a small advantage
for preventing relapse at 1 year after the end of active treatment
- Researchers found no effect on drinking of the
medication acamprosate and no additive benefit from adding acamprosate to naltrexone
Additional information on this study and other alcohol
research and publications are available at http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/.
