July 27, 2022

AGU sends letter of Support for CHIPS innovation package to Congress

Posted by Caitlin Bergstrom

On 27 July 2022, AGU sent a letter to leadership in the House of Representatives supporting the CHIPS+ innovation package and highlighting AGU priorities included in the bill. 

 

As Congress prepares to vote on the CHIPS + Act, we want to thank Congress for including several critical pieces of bipartisan legislation of priority to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and our community of 130,000 in the Earth and space sciences. Specifically, we strongly appreciate the inclusion of:

    • Legislation that seeks to comprehensively advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences, including the Combatting Sexual Harassment in Science Act; the Rural STEM Education Research Act; the STEM Opportunities Act; and provisions from the Supporting STEM Learning Opportunities Act.
    • Robust research security balanced with preservation of America’s core values of openness, transparency, integrity, and democracy that have contributed to our scientific leadership.
    • Investments in mitigating the severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on STEM professionals, especially students and early-career scientists, by including the bipartisan Supporting Early-Career Researchers Act. Our national STEM ecosystem cannot afford any degradation and these investments will ensure our country emerges from the pandemic with the STEM workforce necessary to address the challenges of the future .
    • Sustained robust funding for the National Science Foundation, complemented by the creation of the new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate to fund use-inspired research, translation to decision-makers, and new systems of science, including the Convergence Accelerator, that accelerates the loop between research and operations. This new directorate will give the agency enough flexibility to assess the most promising areas of innovation to support.
    • Vital measures to recruit and retrain underrepresented students including, the codification the NSF INCLUDES initiative, requiring that NSF funding proposals support mentoring for graduate students, and increasing financial support for students in NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Additionally, we support the provisions that diversify scientific infrastructure use and management, establish a pilot partnership program with emerging research infrastructures, and provide support for HBCUs, MSIs, and Tribal Colleges and Universities to build their research capacity.
    • Investments in DOE’s Office of Science, which enable the agency to build and maintain a diverse highly skilled workforce key to our future energy security and maintain American leadership in science and technology through bold new investments in the offices’ core program areas, emerging technologies, and scientific infrastructure.

AGU appreciates your continued efforts to support groundbreaking research and pioneer new paths in our country’s global scientific leadership.

Read the full text of the letter here. here.