For many of us, it has been a long week since we heard that the National Institutes of Health suspended scientific review panels and placed a moratorium on external communication. Unfortunately, the latter is preventing us from learning anything more about the former, leading many of us (especially trainees and early career researchers) to worry or even panic about the future.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, and the waiting truly is the hardest part. That being said, there isn’t going to be any piece of news that is going to alleviate all our concerns moving forward.

Even though things may look bleak, there’s more we can do than just sit and worry! Here are three ways that you can channel your fears into actions that can protect funding for scientific research.

1) Live Every Day Like It’s Day on the Hill. As one of my colleagues pointed out recently, the NIH budget grew during Donald Trump’s first term, despite his proposals to slash their funding. There’s no guarantee that will happen again, but it is possible legislators will again support funding for scientific research, or at least funding for their state. One way we can make this more likely is to contact our members of congress.

Everyone living in a US state is represented by two senators and one House representative. You can look up your senators and representative here. I’d recommend either calling or writing a letter to their office and let them know that you want them to protect funding for biomedical research.

Here are some tips on calling the office of your member of Congress:

• Yes, it can be scary to call their office. But you aren’t going to speak with your member of congress directly; the phone is going to be answered by a staffer who can take your message. The staffers cannot promise you anything (at most, they’ll direct you to a statement that your congressperson made) and they probably can’t answer your questions, but they do tally how many people call with specific concerns!
• You don’t have to have a conversation with the staffer. You can tell them why you are calling and give them a short preprepared statement (which you can write yourself or ask a chatbot for help writing).
• If you are interested in having a conversation, you can ask if the office has a staffer who handles policy related to medicine or science and whether that person is available. If they do, this staffer may have a better idea of their boss’s position or whether they are working on any solutions. They may not be available, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
• If at first you don’t succeed, try again! If you are able to, leave a message. If you get a busy tone (or a note that the mailbox is full), call again later. The DC offices are busy, but they will pick up eventually and they are the ones you want to talk to! (You can call local offices, but those are typically reserved for procedural matters rather than policy matters.) If you ask for a response and you don’t hear anything after a few days, call again!

As for what to talk about, here are some starting points:

• Begin by telling them that you are one of their constituents. For example, I start every call by saying my name and that I am their constituent from Nashville, TN (and, when talking to my house representative’s office, I give my zip code so they know I’m in their district). If you request follow-up, they will take down your phone number and email.
• If you think it may help to make appeals based on the populations you study, make sure you emphasize the local impact (e.g., there are this many people in Tennessee with this condition; this policy affects this many senior citizens in Tennessee) or the impact on people that your congressperson wants to help (e.g., this condition impacts xx% of the veteran population).
• Regardless of what else you want to say, make sure you include a statement about the economics of scientific funding. We put this information on our aims pages for a reason! You can easily lookup how much money the NIH spent in your state (and congressional districts) here, and there are tools available for other economic data related to the NIH (e.g., the economic impact of those grants). Members of Congress do not want to lose funding for their state/district!

If you don’t want to call, the best alternative is to write a letter or send a fax to their office. It’s hard to ignore when dozens of letters on the same topic arrive at once, so maybe hold a lab party to write them 🙂

2) Reach Out to Your Advocates. Several professional organizations you belong to are likely to have an advocacy arm. For example, larger organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the AMA have large advocacy infrastructures with professional lobbyists, while smaller organizations (e.g., Society for Research in Child Development) and even some disease-specific organizations (e.g., American Heart Association, Susan G. Komen, Alzheimer’s Association) will have some political advocacy efforts.

Check the advocacy page for all the professional organizations (local, state, and national) you belong to and see what advocacy they are doing for continued research funding. Many of these organizations will have an email address you can send advocacy-related concerns to (though you may need to log into their website to find this email). As a junior researcher, I’m only a member of one professional organization with an advocacy arm (the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association), but I was able to find the email for their advocacy group with minimal searching!

If your professional organizations are advocating for continued funding for biomedical research already, you can ask the lobbying arm what they are specifically doing and whether you can help with their efforts. The lobbyists’ job is to communicate with members of Congress most likely to advance the organization’s agenda, and they might need testimonials or data to show. If your professional organization has an advocacy arm that isn’t involved in this type of work, ask them to get involved! The more times members of Congress hear from constituents and professionals, the more likely it is that we can make a difference, and the lobbyists employed by these organizations know how to get that message across!

3) Share this Advice. Sadly, we are all freaking out in our silos, whether in physical spaces (e.g., colleagues, fellow students, lab meetings) or virtual (e.g., science Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the comments section). In the absence of a unified leader of scientists, it’s up to us to organize however we can!

Send this advice to your fellow scientist friends! Send it to your colleagues and collaborators in other states! Send it to folks in other disciplines and have them apply it to federal research funding sources they rely on. In addition, go beyond your professional sphere – science advocacy doesn’t need to be limited to scientists! We can have our friends and our family members, patient advocacy groups, and members of the public advocate for continued funding for biomedical research! You don’t need to be a scientist to want better treatments or health care outcomes.

The more people we have contacting members of Congress, the more they will know that funding for science matters!

To close out, I hope that I have given you some ideas for actions you can take instead of worrying about the future of the NIH. It’s okay if none of these actions work for you or if you’re not able or ready to engage, but taking matters into my own hands has already made me feel better about the future. In the words of Nick Fury, “Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

I would like to thank Micheal Sandbank for her Facebook posts on how to act, the members of the Vanderbilt TL1/KL2 WIP for letting me air all of this in public, and Rebecca Helton for her assistance in turning this into my first Edge for Scholars Blog post.

About the Author

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Jacob Feldman, PhD, CCC-SLP

About Me

Jacob is a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His work focuses on links between sensory development and language development in autism and interventions to improve language in autistic children.