Senator Roy Blunt

“A cut to NIH is not a cut to Washington bureaucracy, it’s a cut to lifesaving treatments and cures,” Senator Blunt has said of US investments in medical research. As chairman of the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Blunt has played a pivotal role in protecting and expanding funding for agencies engaged in global health research and development (R&D), including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Senator’s steadfast leadership has helped deliver annual increases to the NIH budget for four consecutive years, and his forceful opposition to cuts to NIH and the CDC proposed by the Administration— which he called unacceptable and indefensible—led the way for his colleagues to do the same. Additionally, when the Zika epidemic struck the Americas, Senator Blunt helped break the political stalemate and brokered a bipartisan compromise to provide emergency funding.

Senator Blunt speaks passionately about the value of R&D from both a humanitarian and economic perspective. “Research funded by NIH has prevented immeasurable human suffering,” he has stressed, and “has yielded economic benefits as well.”