The science advocacy club at Emory has been around for about 3 years now. They arrange events like a letter writing campaign, visits to meet with science staff for congress people, and occasional trips to DC to meet with senators and representatives. One of the more recent events they organized was a visit from the head of the House Budget Committee, Representative Tom Price.
Because he was an important visitor, we got to have the seminar in the fancy auditorium in the school of public health. The cool world map is actually composed of lots of little different colored stick figures, very appropriate for a public health building.
My friend Josh is the current president of the advocacy club so he got to introduce Representative Price who was a very interesting speaker. I guess he had been an orthopedic surgeon for most of his life and then got involved in local politics about 5 years ago and has moved on up to national politics. He presented for a bit about the need for people with specialized knowledge to be involved in politics because, while politicians try to make the best decisions they can, the people actually making legislation usually don't understand the things that they are regulating at all and rely on the advice they receive from their staffers.
After the presentation there was about an hour of time open for a question and answer session. The answer to just about all of the questions came down to needing to reduce mandatory spending. Essentially he said that there are always more important things that need funding and that actually the fun part of making the budget is getting to allocate funds to them. What takes most of the budget and most of the time in the meetings is allocating the mandatory spending. He had lots of ideas about how to reduce that type of spending, most of them were not related to science. But it was good to hear the simple explanation of where the budget stands and some of the challenges that need to be resolved in the next decade.
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