President Barack Obama will ask Congress for $755 million for fiscal year 2017, and will try to spend $195 million this year to get things started. Since the Republican-controlled Congress controls the purse strings, much of Obama’s budget likely will stay on the drawing board.
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The “cancer moonshot” was something Vice President Biden committed to last year after his 46-year-old son Beau Biden died of brain cancer on May 30.
The White House is working with Republicans on a host of reforms to the criminal justice system.
A White House task force on cancer is scheduled to meet for the first time Monday in Biden’s ceremonial office at the White House.
Multiple departments within the executive branch of government, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs will receive funding. The officials declined to be specific about how that progress would be measured, saying more information would be given in the coming weeks.
Its priorities, as laid out by the White House, are to “focus on making the most of Federal investments, targeted incentives, private sector efforts from industry and philanthropy, patient engagement initiatives, and other mechanisms to support cancer research and enable progress in treatment and care”. The White House also has promised to boost data sharing among researchers who in the past have tended to keep a close hold on their proprietary work.
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The proposal will include a new “Vice President’s Exceptional Opportunities in Cancer Research Fund” to provide “flexible” competitive funding for high-risk, high-return research, and partnerships with industry and philanthropic groups, the White House said. The money would be spent on developing vaccines, genomic analysis, early cancer detection tests, and cancer immunotherapy and combination therapy research. The administration officials declined to be more specific about what kind of research would be the target of that funding, saying more information would be available soon.
