A small victory for higher education on the budget
March 17, 2006
Yesterday, national higher education associations achieved a small victory when the Senate increased funding for education and biomedical research over and above President Bush’s proposed budget. While any victory is important, this one is small because student aid is still funded at lower levels than that provided in budgets from two years ago.
Read the full story here: http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/17/budget
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which organized the successful grassroots campaign to urge Senators to increase funding for biomedical research, sent more than 8,400 letters to Senators. Notably, this is not a very large amount of letters to hit Capitol Hill; most advocacy groups have to send hundreds of thousands of letters in order for a campaign to be successful. This demonstrates that it is not always the quantity of the letters that matter on Capitol Hill but rather be the quality.
This is just another example of the positive impact that grassroots advocacy can have on the budget process. It makes me wonder why higher education does not get on board.
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