Upton Looks to Keep Pressure on Senate on FDA Reform Bill

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton is working to push his much beloved 21st Century Cures bill over the finish line—and to do it, he'll have to keep the pressure on his colleagues in the upper chamber.

So on Tuesday, he is sitting down with Senate health committee chairman Lamar Alexander and ranking member Patty Murray, Upton said at National Journal's Conversation with the Chair event sponsored by PG&E. The Cures Act, which Upton has worked on for more than a year, would expedite prescription-drug and medical-device approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and inject more research funding into the National Institutes of Health.

It passed the House this month with 344 votes, and Upton clearly wants to use that big bipartisan vote as a tool in his talks with the Senate.

"As we have learned already, certainly in this Congress, when you can pass something with 300 votes, the other body is going to take it," the Michigan Republican said. He added that he was going to meet later in the afternoon with Alexander, Murray, and other senators.

"Our goal is to work with them to get them to do a similar type bill, go to conference, and really get it done," he said.

Alexander has been much less definitive about his committee's plans, telling National Journal in May that they were "taking the time … to get it right." Another health committee member, Sen. Richard Burr, said a bill wouldn't come to the floor until the fall at the earliest.

"I don't think we're in any hurry," Burr said at the time. No Senate legislation has been released in the following months.

Since the House passed the Cures Act, Upton's committee has sent out nearly a dozen releases touting the bill and urging the Senate to take it up. One lobbyist following the issue said that they're skeptical that the two chambers can come to an agreement and that some of the reforms in the bill could instead be wrapped up in an FDA reauthorization bill due in 2017.

One possible sticking point is how the legislation is paid for. Upton's bill uses more than $5 billion from the government's strategic petroleum reserve to help fund its reforms. But the Senate's long-term highway bill, which is likely to come back up in the fall if Congress passes a short-term bill this week, used $9 billion from the reserve to help extend the Highway Trust Fund.

Upton seemed aware it could be a contentious issue.

"Some of those who were opposed to what we did on CURES all of a sudden embraced it for highways," he said at Tuesday's event. "Our House position, on both sides of the aisle, is that they're not to use this for highways."

National Journal's Fawn Johnson asked Upton why it was OK to use the reserve to pay for the Cure Act but not for highways.

"Well, because we had it first," he said to laughs. "But it's also within our jurisdiction."

Upton noted, too, that the House wouldn't take up the Senate's long-term highway bill before the August recess.

"Their work is for naught," he said.