Biophysical Society Bulletin | April 2019

Public Affairs

years 2020 and 2021. Without raising the caps, the entire discretionary spending pie may be reduced by over $50 billion and many federal agencies would see significant cuts. Our Public Affairs Committee believes that we should be calling for a budget that actually responds to the national need. We believe this is not currently the case for the NIH budget. Consider the more than 5 million Americans suffering from debilitating Alzheimer’s disease. Their care costs some 20% of the Medicare and Medicaid budgets, over $250 billion dollar/year. Yet the overall NIH investment in searching for deeper understanding, better diagnosis, and better therapies, is of the order of $1 billion/year. This is clearly an inadequate national investment given the human suffering and social and economic costs of Alzheimer’s. What Controls the Overall Budget Allocation? The division of the budget follows the influence of major eco- nomic and social constituencies in US Society. Thus the Na- tional Association of Homebuilders presses for more housing spending; the Pharmaceutical Manufacturer’s Assn generally supports NIH budgets, but opposes increases in regulations and cost controls on medical care; The National Education Assn and American Federation of Teachers support increased spending on pre-K education and Title I education programs; the Defense Industry - the most powerful and best funded of all the lobbying groups - presses for increases in weapons purchases and maintenance; the American Legion and Veter- ans of Foreign Wars press for increases in the Veteran’s Ad- ministration budgets. Snapshots of these efforts comes from the publicly reported lobbying reports of the various groups. The Biophysical Society works together in coalitions with a number of biomedical research groups, professional medi- cal societies, and patient advocacy groups. Among the most important of these are the Ad Hoc Coalition for Medical Research, the Coalition for Health Funding, the Coalition for National Science Funding, and the Energy Sciences Coalition. In the coming months the Public Affairs Committee will report to you on our relations with other allied groups in more detail, and our plans to increase the scope and effectiveness of our basic and biomedical research advocacy efforts. In the meantime, we encourage you to work with our team to take advantage of our advocacy activities. Our team is ready to assist you in hosting your Member of Congress for a lab tour or arranging a meeting at their District office, developing an opinion piece on your science to share with a local newspaper, and we are bringing our work to you as we are piloting state and local advocacy activities in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin this year. We will continue to provide Action Alerts

to you when there are pressing science funding issues coming up for debate in Congress. To get involved in BPS advocacy, please visit - https:/www.biophysics.org/Policy-Advocacy/ Take-Action or contact Sean at Swinkler@biophysics.org. Sources: Schick, Allen (1995) The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process. Brookings Institution, Washington DC https:/appropriations.house.gov/about https:/www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2017/budget-in-brief/ nih/index.html https:/www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2018/03/20/alz- heimers-costs-reach-277-billion/.

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Use Your Expertise to Make a Difference! Be an inspiration to your community and help change the lives of those interested in or studying science. The FaB Network is free and accessible by members and non- members, but only BPS members may add their names to FaB. The network is designed to provide the best match to users searching for a biophysicist for any of the afore- mentioned activities. To join FaB, login or create your myBPS account and get involved. Help build this new network by signing up today. For more information, visit biophysics.org/ get-involved.

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