Will Pennsylvania’s congressional appropriators help save Pennsylvanians’ health and jobs?

As the smokestack-based economy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began to recede in the later decades of the last century, many wondered what could replace it as a continuing engine of economic growth and well-being for our communities and families.

In recent decades, the answer has seemed pretty clear – “Eds and Meds,“with steel and glass facilities taking their place on our skylines, our institutions of higher learning, most especially our medical research and healthcare delivery institutions, became huge employers, to a great extent the anchors of the economies of both metropolitan Philadelphia and metropolitan Pittsburgh — with powerful positive impacts in between as well.

The jobs were safer, our air and water got cleaner and this burgeoning sector provided strong, quality job growth for our communities while, of course, increasing the health and quality of life of the 100 percent of humans who need the best possible healthcare in their lives.

Today, the Eds and Meds model of economic dynamism in the Commonwealth is at grave risk of being blown apart by the proposed fiscal year 2026 budget of President Trump, particularly the demand to Congress to cut spending at the National Institutes of Health by 40 percent.

Such a cut would reduce federal investment in medical research, in nominal dollars, back to the level of a generation ago, and in real dollars back well into the 20th century — essentially eviscerating the continuing enormous promise of the progress in medicine made since the American “moonshot” to decode the human genome.

An ad hoc coalition of institutions in the healthcare, medical research, and biotechnology sectors have come together and written an open letter to the two Pennsylvania members of the US House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee —Representatives Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA14) and Madeleine Dean (D-PA4) — to make the case, both for Pennsylvania and for the nation, that the White House’s proposed catastrophic cuts to American investment in medical science must be rejected.

The letter points out that “for decades, support of substantial funding for the NIH — though still an extremely small percentage of discretionary federal spending — has been a bipartisan consensus in Congress, in both Houses, most certainly including among Pennsylvania’s delegation, with national leadership on this matter frequently coming from Pennsylvania’s elected representatives to Washington, including Senators Arlen Specter and John Heinz and Congressman Jack Murtha.”

My former boss and mentor, Senator Specter was a particularly passionate and effective champion of medical research, always calling the NIH the “crowned jewel of our federal government”, before he himself lost a fight to a form of cancer for which we still don’t yet have a cure.

The letter continues, “as the bipartisan representatives of the Commonwealth on the House Appropriations Committee, we urge you to maintain this important tradition as your Committee considers NIH appropriations for fiscal 2026.”

Just before Congress recessed for August, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 26 to 3 to reject the President’s proposed giant cuts, and instead supported a modest increase in the NIH funding level over the current year. The signatories to the letter to Representatives Reschenthaler and Dean ask them to likewise support the Senate version of this spending bill.

As the Senate committee vote proved, this is an issue which can transcend, and should, all the divisions in our deeply polarized politics. We all want better health for ourselves and our loved ones. None of us want the science on which our future health depends to be owned and operated by China. And the modern economies we have built, from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia — significantly fueled by the good jobs created in our broad healthcare and biotech technology sector — need this investment in American innovation to continue.

Hopefully, Pennsylvania’s representatives on the House Appropriations Committee will agree and help finalize the necessary and appropriate level of funding for the NIH for next year, along the lines of the work already accomplished in the Senate.

Craig Snyder is a former Chief of Staff to Pennsylvania’s longest serving US Senator, Arlen Specter, and is currently leading the PA Ad Hoc Coalition for NIH Funding.