Current Advocacy Projects

We have organized our advocacy work into two categories: Current Issues and Special Issues.  Current issues are issues that we have addressed over the past year or two, but have not demanded constant, ongoing attention.  Special Issues are those items toward which we have dedicated several years worth of ongoing attention.  You are currently on our Current Issues page.  To look at our Special Issues, use the left-hand menu buttons to navigate.  Advocacy efforts preceding 2005 can be found in our Advocacy Archives, which are currently under construction. 

2005 and 2006

NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Threatened by Senator
On May 2 2006, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison questioned the merit and importance of NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences during a Congressional hearing.  Shortly after that, Senator Hutchison proposed an amendment that introduced an amendment to S. 2802, a bill focused on increasing America's  competitiveness. The text of this amendment instructed NSF to focus its funding dollars on the physical, mathemantical, and engineering sciences, to the exclusion of other sciences. What does this mean for our sciences?

Federation Thanks Representatives for Defeating Bill (June 2005)
Rep. Wiener (D-NY) proposed an amendment that would transfer NSF funds to a non-research related government program.  If passed, the bill would have cut the the proposed 2006 NSF budget by $147 million and diverted $126 million to the COPS program, designed to help state and local governments hire police officers.  Representatives Obey (D-WI), Wolf (R-VA), Ehlers (R-MI), Mollohan (D-WV), and Boehlert (R-NY)) spoke out successfully against this transfer, and the amendment was defeated.  We wrote letters to these members of congress thanking them for their support of NSF.
 

Visiting NAS Scientists meet with NSF Director Arden Bement (May 2005)
In May 2005, academic psychologists and NAS members Susan Carey (Harvard University), Duncan Luce (University of California, Irvine, and recent Medal of Science recipient), and Richard Shiffrin (Indiana University) visited the National Science Foundation accompanied by Federation staff.  Also with us was Philip Zimbardo (Stanford University), who was in DC for the annual meeting of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP), in the role of CSSP Executive Board Chair.  We arranged this visit to NSF in order to meet NSF Director Dr. Arden Bement and thank him for his support of the behavioral sciences.

Federation Responds to Domestic Terrorism
On November 14, 2004, the University of Iowa's Department of Psychology animal labs were vandalized by members of the extremist Animal Liberation Front (ALF) group.  Learn more about the attacks and read the Federation's 2005 letters to the FBI and NIH.