“If President Joe Biden’s last big science project was a moonshot, his new one has goals that are light years further. The proposed Advanced Research Projects Agency would deliver breakthrough treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and other diseases and reshape the government’s medical research efforts, by adding a nimble new agency modeled on the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which laid the groundwork for the internet. But the way Biden would make ‘ARPA-H’ and its $6.5 billion budget part of the sprawling National Institutes of Health is raising concern within the research community and in Congress about whether it will bring a new approach to old problems or become a duplicative bureaucracy with a lofty mandate. ‘Most of us did not support putting this in NIH, for the simple reason that if NIH were capable of doing this, it would have done it,’ said one person outside the government familiar with the planning who’s worried NIH’s staid culture and leadership will bog down the effort.”

“A half dozen individuals both inside and outside the administration who were involved in discussions about the plan told POLITICO there are alternative approaches being discussed, like putting ARPA-H well outside of Washington, to escape some of the Beltway’s inertia and turf battles. More autonomy could, in theory, speed up the way scientific discoveries are turned into drugs and diagnostic tests. But the prevailing view is that making the new agency part of NIH’s infrastructure will give it a foundation to spring off – and foster communication to head off unnecessary duplication. As Congress prepares for hearings on the first budget proposal, administration officials are expressing confidence ARPA-H can carve out a distinct identity, wherever it is. ‘[The established NIH culture is] a valid concern and we have to do everything to prevent that from being the default,’ NIH Director Francis Collins told Politico. Referring to his agency’s many constituent parts, he added, ‘This is not going to be the 28th institute'” – Politico.