President Biden’s proposed budget for the Department of Health and Human Services emphasizes pandemic preparedness, signaling the administration’s concern about future pathogens that could complicate progress against the coronavirus or threaten a different pandemic altogether.
Swaths of the proposed spending would build on funding passed by Congress earlier this month as part of a major annual spending bill. The budget proposes an increase of nearly 27 percent in discretionary funding for H.H.S. over spending in 2021.
Nearly $82 billion is proposed for the department over five years “to prevent, detect and respond to emerging biological catastrophes,” funds that would help speed the time between when scientists recognize a new virus and when vaccines and treatments are deployed, a key goal in the White House’s new pandemic preparedness plan. The budget would expand clinical trial infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.
“That is a drop in the bucket compared to what it’s cost so far to deal with Covid,” Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, told reporters on Monday about the close to $82 billion in pandemic preparedness funds.
Mr. Becerra added that the requests in the budget proposal were different from the billions of dollars the administration has pleaded with Congress to pass to fund more immediate needs in the pandemic, such as tests, treatments and vaccines.
“What we need to continue to finish the job on Covid, we need immediately,” he said. “What we’re asking for in this budget for long term preparedness is very separate.”
Among other new initiatives, the budget proposes a so-called Vaccines for Adults program, modeled after a similar program for children, that the proposal seeks to expand. Under the new program, uninsured adults would receive vaccines purchased in bulk by the federal government, for free, after they are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee.
The proposed budget also includes almost $10 billion for the C.D.C. and hard-hit state and local health departments, funds that would go to disease surveillance and forecasting, vaccination programs, data modernization and research on so-called “long Covid,” including options for treating people suffering from the virus’s aftereffects. That $9.9 billion represents a $2.8 billion increase over the funds allocated for 2021, the administration said.
A new biomedical research agency that has been a key health priority for Mr. Biden, and that could be housed at the well-funded National Institutes of Health, would receive $5 billion under the budget proposal. The recent congressional spending bill allocated only $1 billion for the program.
The Biden administration’s proposal also recommends broad investments in maternal and mental health and addiction services, and an almost 40 percent increase in spending on Title X family planning services for low-income Americans, which had been whittled down by the Trump administration. Nearly $500 million would go to maternal health programs, an effort designed in part to reduce morbidity and mortality rates among pregnant women and new mothers, the administration said.
The budget recommended very few formal policy proposals in the massive Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health care programs. But the White House still seeks to make major changes to those programs as part of its Build Back Better legislation, which has been stalled in Congress since December. Rather than itemize and score those priorities, the budget simply notes them and sets aside a deficit-neutral reserve fund to accommodate them. That makes it difficult to understand what the package’s overall impact would be on federal spending or revenues.
The most recent version of the legislative package included a plan to lower the prices paid by the government and some individuals for prescription drugs, an extension of insurance subsidies for people who buy health plans in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and an expansion of Medicaid coverage to poor adults in states that did not expand their programs.
Anushka Patil contributed reporting.