Bush Boosts Biodefense Budget Request

The Bush administration’s fiscal 2008 budget request would provide $309 million more for civilian biodefense than its previous request, boosting funding for the Health and Human Services, Defense and Agriculture departments, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity said Monday (see GSN, June 11).

The Homeland Security Department and other agencies, though, would receive less funding, according to an article written by two center analysts.

The White House request for civilian biodefense totals $5.42 billion.  Nearly 80 percent of the funds would go to Health and Human Services, which researches treatments for infectious diseases through the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC BioSurveillance initiative, a project to develop an early-warning system tracking the spread of dangerous biological agents, would receive a $10 million boost for a total budget of $88 million.

The budget would nearly double the budget of the U.S. Agriculture Department biodefense program, for a total of $340 million. Funding for the Food Emergency Response Network would increase to $19 million, from $2 million from the present fiscal year.  The network of food laboratories is expanding across the country and being equipped to rapidly test large volumes of food for dangerous biological agents.

The budget of the Agricultural Research Service would be increased to $58 million, from $23 million.  The service researches sources of manmade and natural food contamination and creates systems to survey the food supply and detect biological threats.  Pest detection and animal health monitoring programs would receive a $42 million increase to total $119 million.

The Defense Department would receive a 23 percent increase in funding for biodefense projects.  Pentagon programs include civil support teams to respond to WMD attacks and a threat reduction program to locate, collect and destroy deadly biological agents produced by the former Soviet Union.

The Homeland Security Department would receive $26 million less in 2008 than in the 2007 budget cycle, a 7 percent reduction attributable to the elimination of the Metropolitan Medical Response System, a program for preparing medical first responders for public health emergencies, according to the center.

The Environmental Protection Agency would experience across-the-board cuts in funding for its homeland security initiatives in the proposed budget, including a decrease of 8.5 percent or $14.2 million for biodefense.

Requested funding for State Department biodefense programs would fall 10.4 million, to $53.5 million (Franco/Deitch, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, July 2007).

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