Latest GOP obscenity: the cynical "Gabriella Miller Kids 1st Research Act" doesn't appropriate $1

[Bill USA]

for pediatric research. As written it would "end $12.5 million in funding for party nominating conventions and authorize the money for pediatric research grants instead." Note that "authorizing" funds does NOT appropriate any money. Democrats say it's to divert attention from the GOP's execrable record on cutting funding to the National Institutes of Health.

http://blogs.rollcall.com/218/the-surprise-bill-that-has-democrats-and-republicans-at-each-others-throats/
(emphases my own)

But Democrats see the bill as nothing more than a cynical messaging ploy.

Matt Dennis, a spokesman for Appropriations Democrats, said it wouldn’t boost funding “by one dime.”

“Rather than increasing the amount that can be appropriated to NIH, it merely creates an unnecessary and unfunded authorization — a solution completely irrelevant to the problem,” Dennis said. “It is a cynical attempt by the majority to obscure their shameful record on medical research funding.”

The NIH has been squeezed by billions of dollars since Republicans took over the House, Democrats note, and the caps under the sequester for the Labor-HHS-Education budget would not be changed by the bill.
(more)

even if the funds were approved - a big "IF" given GOP's implacable opposition to funding social programs at the expense of obscenely low tax rates for hedge fund gambler managers - it would "add about four-tenths of 1 percent to the roughly $3.6 billion the NIH spent on pediatric research last year"