With grumblings over spending in Congress, does the bill have a chance of succeeding?
The focus in the news on “pork barrel spending” pertains to something called “earmarks”—federal funding set aside at the request of a member of Congress for a specific project based in his/her district or state. PPARCCA is in no way related to earmark spending. PPARCCA is what’s known as authorizing legislation, which means it creates programs, expands initiatives and establishes new policies. The bill does not call for a specific amount of funding for psoriasis research because many members of Congress won’t endorse bills that detail spending for specific disease research at the National Institutes of Health. The bill does call for the federal government to make psoriasis research a priority and specifies a budget amount for the psoriasis patient registry to be developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
