What's Happening Now?

Heather and I spent the first part of year visiting with Members and their staffs educating them on the current federal funding issues (which I will write about sometime soon). All told including meetings that I conducted in November and December, we visited with over 150 offices in about a 5-month span. We have had very promising visits with most of them and it has been surprising how much education we have to do. We just finished a big push to get Members and Senators to join Reps. DeLauro and King and Senators Johnson and Crapo respectively in sending a letter requesting the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to provide $100 million for prostate cancer research in their funding bills that will begin to navigate the legislative process sometime in the next couple of months.

The bills that we are currently monitoring are the Manton Bill - to create a federal prostate cancer screening and treatment program - and the Defense Appropriations bill.

The Manton Bill has been slowly and surely gaining momentum over the past weeks. Not only have co-sponsors been added to the bill, Members in the Energy and Commerce Committee (the Committee with jurisdiction) have been asking for more information about the bill. We are hoping to get something moving and will continue to bring the bill to the attention of Members and their staffs.

The Appropriations process right now is in the middle of budget hearings with the various government agencies. While they have begun the process of drafting the main parts of most of the bills, we won't see any real action on these until mid- to late-May at the very earliest.

We will be gearing up our office visits again in a week or two. Our focus will turn now to Manton and the Prostate Cancer Awareness Month resolutions. There is a new House resolution for PCAM that we would like to pass this year and we're hoping to add co-sponsors onto this year's Senate resolution.

In addition to the blog, I have also had a form added to the website that will allow you to lookup your elected officials at both the federal and state levels. I hope you all have a chance to try this out. Unfortunately, I'm unable to connect it to email addresses, but it does give you phone, fax and snail mail options.

Please feel free to contact me with comments, suggestions or questions.