[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 9297]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           BUDGET CONFERENCE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I talked yesterday at some length on the 
budget. It is important. We are approaching 3 months where we have not 
been able to go to conference on this budget. This is so extremely 
important. I spent yesterday morning at the NIH. I was not able to meet 
with all the heads of the Institutes, but I met with four of them, plus 
Dr. Collins, who runs the NIH, the National Institutes of Health.
  I will have more to say about this later, but South Africa, England, 
France, India--China is increasing their spending by almost 25 percent 
for programs just like we have at NIH. What are we doing at NIH? We are 
cutting spending. They have been flat-funded since about 2004. With the 
stimulus bill, which is now going on 5 years ago, we gave them a shot 
in the arm because of Senator Specter. But that money has long since 
been gone. They are headed downhill, and they have been for several 
years now. These wonderful scientists we have there are leaving.
  One of the scientists from the University of Michigan, who, by the 
way, is best friends with my chief of staff, is basically staying away 
from NIH because you cannot have--and he is an expert, one of if not 
the leading expert in the world on melanoma. He is not making 
application for NIH grants anymore because they cannot do scientific 
research when it is only available for a year or two. So I hope we can 
move forward on this budget conference and get something done on this 
to set the Nation's financial problems in the right direction. We are 
not going to get anything done unless we are able to get something done 
on the budget. We cannot do this.
  I am proud of the budget we passed. I think it is a very good budget, 
but I realize if we go to conference we may have to change some of the 
things we have in our budget. But we are never going to get this done 
unless we sit down and work this out, as we have done for more than two 
centuries here in conferences between the House and the Senate.

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