Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. UPTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank my very good friend, and I certainly appreciate his kind words. The good news is I am not done yet. We have a lot of work to do, and this is yet one more piece that we are going to be driving forward. But, certainly, I rise in support of this legislation, the ARPA-H authorization bill.

While I have been a longtime supporter of many different versions of this bill, I thank, in particular, Chairman Pallone, my Republican Leader Rodgers, certainly Anna Eshoo--who is my good friend--and Brett Guthrie for their leadership on working together on language with the goal of really making this issue bipartisan and one that is going to work.

I am glad that we came together to add even more important guardrails to ensure that this bill, ARPA-H, works as it was intended as well as, hopefully, have a very strong bipartisan vote a little bit later this afternoon.

This bill is going to establish an entity not unlike the Defense Advanced Research Projects entity--that was our goal--DARPA. It is going to be game-changing, health research. Like DARPA, this entity is going to be focused on producing research on things that, frankly, may be too risky for the private sector. It is going to move at a faster pace than the current structure. There may be a high failure rate, but its successes are going to have the potential to be absolutely groundbreaking, answering the prayers of millions.

It really is a follow-up to what we did in this body with the 21st Century Cures with the Upton and DeGette effort that passed our committee 53-0, then passed here on the House floor 392-26.

There has been a lot of debate on where ARPA-H is going to be housed.

Should it be in NIH?

Should it be in HHS or someplace else?

Wherever this entity is finally located, we need to make sure that it is lean, that it is independent and nimble, and that there are the appropriate guardrails to keep other agencies from mission creep and siphoning that funding. The legislation that was introduced did a very good job of that and I am pleased to see that these protections were strengthened in the final product that we are going to be voting on this afternoon.

My partner in 21st Century Cures, Diana DeGette, and really everybody on our committee were happy to include language for ARPA-H in our Cures 2.0 bill that we introduced more than a year ago. We thought that it was a great follow-up to the work that we did to enhance basic research on the first Cures bill which added $45 billion--paid for--in additional health research.

Funding for the NIH and the FDA included many important things such as the Cancer Moonshot and the Brain Initiative.

We are still in a pandemic. We have awful diseases that need cures, whether it be cancer, Alzheimer's, lupus, or diabetes that strike literally every single family.

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Mr. UPTON. This bill, ARPA-H, can provide the breakthroughs necessary to find cures for those diseases. The President has already signed $1 billion for this program into law. So what we need now is bipartisan authorization to complete the work. This bill certainly accomplishes that goal.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues, like we did before, to vote for this bill a little bit later this afternoon. Again, I just want to commend our great staff. As our leader, Congresswoman Rodgers, said: We have the best staff there is.

Is there any objection to that?

Hearing none--sorry, Ways and Means; sorry appropriators.

We do. We are the Energy and Commerce Committee, and we are going to find a cure for these diseases. This bill is a step in that direction.

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