This Week in Congress

Appropriations

Senate

This week the Senate Appropriations Committee began the FY’24 appropriations process with the Agriculture and Military Construction-VA bills. The Committee will also mark up the 302(b) subcommittee allocations.

Press releases, bill texts, allocations and supporting materials can be found here

House

This week the House Appropriations Committee continued their markup of FY24 appropriations bills. The Labor, Health and Human Services and Education is expected to be marked up after the July 4^th recess.

Press releases, bill texts, and committee reports found here

Censure of Rep. Schiff

By a vote of 213-209, the Housed passed a resolution censuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) for his past actions while chair of the House Intelligence Committee in leading investigations into then-President Donald Trump. The vote was entirely along party lines.  Rep. Schiff called the resolution “false and defamatory.”

House Votes on Impeachment of President Biden

This week, the Republican-led House, by a vote of 219 to 208, defeated a bill that would have referred two articles of impeachment against President Biden — one for abuse of power and the other for dereliction of duty — to the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees. Representative Boebert prompted the action by forcing a vote on a resolution that accuses Mr. Biden of orchestrating an “invasion” of the United States through lax immigration policies.

National Defense Authorization Act

The House Armed Services Committee completed its work on the FY’24 NDAA.  The Senate Armed Services Committee is also working to complete action on their bill this week.

Other Legislative Happenings Around the Nation

Disease Intervention Specialists (DIS)

Over the past three weeks, NCSD has been engaged in an intense campaign to protect funding for Disease Intervention Specialists (DIS), as the Biden administration has tried to implement cuts that were included in the debt ceiling deal negotiated between the administration and Congress. At stake is the $400 million remaining to cover the final two years of DIS workforce funds. The NCSD update can be found here

New CDC Director

The Biden administration officially announced that Mandy Cohen, a physician, and a former North Carolina health secretary, will be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, assuming leadership of an agency left battered by the coronavirus pandemic. President Biden highlighted bipartisan praise Cohen received for her leadership, noting that leaders from both parties have recognized her “ability to find common ground and put complex policy into action.” But last week 28 Republican lawmakers wrote a letter to the President, arguing that Cohen was too partisan for the role. However, since the CDC job doesn’t require Senate confirmation, they can’t block the appointment. The letter can be found here

RSV Vaccine

A CDC advisory panel on vaccinations voted not to recommend new RSV vaccines from Pfizer and GSK for all older adults. Instead, the panel voted 9-5 to recommend that people 65 and older “may” get an RSV vaccine, based on “shared decision-making,” meaning a discussion with a doctor. And by a vote of 13-0, with one abstention, the panel recommended the same policy for people age 60 to 64. Both vaccines were approved last month by the FDA for people 60 and older. Earlier yesterday, it looked like the vaccines would get full recommendations, but several committee members expressed serious concerns about the decisions they were being asked to make based on the data the companies had provided. These recommendations now go to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who must sign off on them before the vaccines can be made available.

Mpox

A study in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report looked at a recent cluster of 40 mpox cases in Chicago and suggests that vaccine protection may wane over time, but vaccinated patients do well while recovering at home, and that the vaccination protects against severe mpox. Patients who received only one dose of Jynneos or no vaccines had a higher prevalence of lesions affecting the genital (43% versus 6%) or ocular (29% versus none) mucosa, the authors said. The article can be found here

Bicillin

Pfizer has announced that it expects to run out of Bicillin, the drug for treating syphilis in the near future — a looming problem that health professionals say could exacerbate syphilis rates, widen racial disparities in STDs, and stymie global access to the antibiotic, especially within lower-income countries. In a letter, Pfizer estimated that the supply for kids may run out as early as the end of the month, while supply for adults could deplete in September. The letter can be found here

Updated Covid-19 Shots

Moderna has submitted an application to the FDA for authorization of its updated COVID-19 vaccine for this year’s inoculation campaign, meant to target the current dominant strain in the U.S. This latest version of the coronavirus vaccine, the second update to the original that was first authorized at the end of 2020, will have proteins designed to confer protection against the XBB.1.5 subvariant. Unlike the bivalent vaccine that was made available last year, this shot does not include protection against the ancestral Wuhan strain.

Abortion

Iowa

Abortion will remain legal in Iowa after the state’s high court declined to reinstate a law that would have largely banned the procedure, rebuffing Republican Gov Reynolds and, for now, keeping the conservative state from joining others with strict abortion limits. In a rare 3-3 decision, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld a 2019 district court ruling that blocked the law.

Kansas

Kansas officials have agreed not to enforce a new restriction on medication abortions until a state court judge decides a lawsuit challenging it and other existing rules. For now, providers won’t have to tell patients that they can stop a medication abortion using a regimen that providers and major medical groups consider unproven and potentially dangerous. The new rule was set to take effect July 1.

Kentucky

Abortion-rights groups filed a court motion to dismiss their lawsuit challenging Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban but signaled that the legal fight is far from over. The groups’ strategy will focus on the next legal challenge expected to come from pregnant women who were denied abortion services in Kentucky. “We will be back in court when we have a patient plaintiff,” said Kentucky’s state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates.

New York

Anti-abortion Activists: A U.S. appeals court has upheld a New York county’s law barring anti-abortion activists from approaching people outside abortion clinics, teeing up potential review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Legal Protection for Physicians

The New York State Legislature has approved legislation that provides legal protection for New York doctors to prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in states that have outlawed abortion. The bill, along with similar new laws in several other states controlled by Democrats, could significantly expand medication abortion access by allowing more patients in states that restrict abortion to end pregnancies at home, without traveling to states where abortion is legal.

North Carolina

Abortion providers in North Carolina filed a federal lawsuit that challenges several provisions of a state law banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy in the dwindling days before the new restrictions take effect. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Dr. Beverly Gray, a Duke University OB-GYN, are asking a federal judge to block numerous provisions they argue are unclear and unconstitutional, or to place an injunction on the law to prevent it from being enforced.

South Carolina

The U.S. Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling that blocked South Carolina from ending public funding to Planned Parenthood, giving the Republican-governed state another chance to defend its bid to deprive the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider of government money.

Wyoming

Abortion pills will remain legal in Wyoming for now, after a judge ruled that the state’s first-in-the-nation law to ban them won’t take effect July 1 as planned while a lawsuit proceeds. Attorneys for Wyoming failed to show that allowing the ban to take effect on schedule wouldn’t harm the lawsuit’s plaintiffs before their lawsuit can be resolved. While other states have instituted de facto bans on the medication by broadly prohibiting abortion, Wyoming in March became the first U.S. state to specifically ban abortion pills.

Transgender Care

Arkansas

A federal judge in Arkansas struck down the state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions, blocking what had been the first in a wave of such measures championed by conservative lawmakers across the country. The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans or severe restrictions on transition care for minors, which have since been enacted by 19 other states, could withstand legal challenges being brought by activists and civil liberties groups. It is the first ruling to broadly block such a ban for an entire state, though judges have intervened to temporarily delay similar laws from going into effect.

Florida

A federal judge struck down Florida’s prohibition on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, the second decision to up end restrictions put into place at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis. This week a U.S. District Judge ruled against the ban by using some of the same conclusions and language that he used in another recent decision where he determined three Florida transgender minors could receive “puberty blockers” and other types of gender-affirming care despite a state-enacted prohibition on such treatment for those under the age of 18. In both rulings, the judge stated that “gender identity is real. The record makes this clear.”

Indiana

A federal judge issued an order stopping an Indiana ban on puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors from taking effect as scheduled July 1.

Wisconsin

Wisconsinites who are transgender would be barred from utilizing Medicaid health care coverage to pay for puberty-blocking drugs or surgeries under a provision Republican lawmakers voted to include in the next two-year state budget plan. GOP lawmakers on the state legislature’s budget-writing committee voted to include the measure as part of a $3 billion spending plan for health care but it’s unclear whether the provision will withstand legal scrutiny.