On the morning of March 3rd, 2022, thirty six associate members of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) from around the country booted up Zoom for a day of virtual meetings with about seventy different Congressional offices. This is what’s known as a “Hill Day;” the event we were participating in was the AACR’s annual Early-career Hill Day, which offers early-career scientists (grad students, postdocs, or fellows) the opportunity to advocate for NIH and NCI funding. The day was organized in conjunction with AACR’s National Day of Action, an online campaign to encourage scientists to write messages to their members of Congress to support NIH funding.
Hill Days are just one way to get involved in science advocacy. Personally, I’ve participated in AACR’s Early-career Hill Day for two years in a row. While I’ve yet to physically make it down to DC in person for a Hill Day, both virtual AACR Hill Days I’ve attended were great experiences that felt like they were giving me a sneak peek “under the hood” of how Capitol Hill works.
You might be wondering why that matters –– science is meant to be apolitical and to look at cold, hard facts instead of opinions. But aside from obvious reasons such as informing public health policies or laws governing what tissue samples we can use, the decisions coming out of Capitol Hill can affect our science greatly. Especially when Congress decides on the NIH’s annual budget, which determines what grants are able to get funded every year.
To (very briefly) explain how Congress affects the NIH budget: Appropriations Committees of both the House and Senate are responsible for drafting, negotiating, and passing budgets every fiscal year (FY). The federal FY runs from 1st October through 30th September annually, which means Congress has to pass a budget prior to October –– if Congress can’t reach an agreement, short-term continuing resolutions (CRs) must be passed in order to fund the government under the same funding level as the previous FY. Currently, the federal government has not yet passed a budget for FY 2022 and is operating under a CR until March 11th while appropriators are negotiating the final budget. As of writing this post, Congress has still not passed a budget. (UPDATE 3/11/2022: Congress officially passed its FY 2022 budget within hours of this post’s publication.)
That means that if you submitted a grant last year and received a borderline fundable score sometime in the fall, you might be waiting to hear back about if you’ll actually be funded or not as the institute you submitted to has yet to determine the final payline for that grant.
This affects almost all US-based scientists: labs may be waiting on hiring decisions for postdocs, grad students, or technicians because they’re unsure if they’ll get that grant. Postdocs and grad students might not know if they’ll have funding for the next few years because they’re unsure their fellowships will be funded. A young PI just starting out their lab may have to adjust their budget in case their NIH grants don’t come through. Regardless of what position you hold in a lab, it’s clear that whatever Congress decides has a lot of power over us, which is just one of the reasons science advocacy is so important.
For this year’s AACR Hill Day, we had three main goals: to thank Congress for the past six consecutive years of NIH budget increases; to urge Congress to pass FY 2022 (as has already been passed by the House, which includes significant increases to both the NIH and NCI budget); and finally, to ask Congress for another increased NIH and NCI budget in FY 2023.
In preparation for both my Hill Day experiences, I had been very surprised to learn that before the past six years, the NIH had seen more than a dozen years of flat funding despite rising costs of research. And still, even with a 42% increase since FY 2015, it’s not enough: only 1 in 4 NIH grants are funded. This statistic varies by institute, but at the NCI only about 1 in 8 R01 applications are funded in any given cycle, in spite of the fact that the NCI is one of the most well-funded institutes of the NIH. That’s a lot of scientists missing out on funding, and a lot of projects unable to come to fruition.
This is one of the reasons Hill Days exist: members of Congress and their staff appreciate hearing from the people directly affected by these issues. Sharing our stories during these meetings, especially armed with those statistics about NIH funding, can make a big impact and, in some cases, might even help sway them to vote one way or the other.
We were assigned to groups for our meetings, each with one group leader and at least two other AACR associate members. My group consisted of postdocs and fellows (and me) from New York and Pennsylvania, led by AACR’s Director for Science Policy and Legislative Affairs. Our meetings followed a standard format: after a quick round of introductions, we each took turns covering one of our “asks” and sharing personal anecdotes as to why this matter was important to us. If we were the constituent of that specific Congressional representative, we were in charge of leading that meeting. Over the course of our eight meetings of the day, we settled into a good routine and by the last meeting we’d found a good “groove.” All of our meetings went very well, and all the staff we met with were very receptive towards our “asks” –– all-in-all, it was a very successful Hill Day!
I’ve definitely learned a lot by participating in these two Hill Days. Not only have I learned more about how the federal government’s budget works, but it’s also been really great to meet other early-career scientists like me and share our stories with each other. Participating in last year’s Hill Day even inspired me to enroll in an Introduction to Science Policy course last year. While science advocacy has been gaining steam in recent years, just like science communication, it’s definitely underrated. I’d encourage anyone, both early-career or later-career scientists alike, to try participating in a Hill Day at least once –– you might end up really liking it, and it might end up kickstarting your own science advocacy journey!