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RTK.NET Mail 171540 Jul 9 23:58:44 1996 Bob, I don't know much about politics but have "gleaned" quite a bit during the last couple of D.C lobbies (especially from Mikulski's staffer handling Udall the minority staff director for the Aging subcommittee of Senate Labor and Human Resources Most major federal agencies have Authorization Acts which say why they are there and what they are supposed to do. These get re-done about every three years for many agencies, including NIH. Budgets, of course, are done every year, and a failure to pass the budget results in a shut-down without a continuing resolution. NIH is due for a Reauthorization Act this year and it should happen, but lots of stuff that is scheduled to happen this year is not going to happen. As of the last forum there were two primary hopes for getting the Udall bill passed: by attaching it to the NIH Reauthorization Act (which won't happen if the Act doesn't get passed this year) by getting 50%+ cosponsorship in both the House and Senate, then Mark Hatfield says "Look, we've shown this bill can pass, just give me one hour of floor time" I believe the main obstacles to the latter are 1) not getting the # of cosponsors we need in time to get the bill on the floor this way and 2) not being able to get the floor time or get the bill passed in 1 hour because of the specter of another fetal tissue debate. I think we do need another return to D.C. and we need some activity in places where representatives haven't even heard of the Udall bill or have never gotten a visit from a constituent about the bill. Susan Hamburger posted recently about another forum in July, I believe. Perhaps we'll hear more details soon. Another mini-forum would also make a great human-interest story. Anyone have any Washington Post or Times contacts? Sherri