Iowans should push candidates for research money
PERRY BEEMAN Sep 22, 2015 | 8:30 pm
1 min read time
332 wordsAll Latest News, Government Policy and LawMary Woolley, president and CEO of Research America, this morning urged Iowans to ask the presidential candidates for their first-year budgets for the federal government, and push for research and development money that has been dwindling in recent years.
Woolley is in town for tonight’s Concord Coalition event at Drake University. The coalition will help stage an interactive budget-building exercise for anyone who wants to show up. The event will be from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Parents Hall in the Olmsted Center, 2507 University Ave.
“We need to rethink how money is spent, leading up to the presidential caucus,” said Woolley, whose organization bills itself as a “not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance committed to making research to improve health a higher national priority.”
“We are looking for solutions to the problems that ail us, and research and development money is down,” Woolley said in a park-bench interview outside Cowles Library on the Drake campus.
“Forty years ago, 22 percent of the federal budget went to research and development, and transportation, and a few other things. Now, that figure is 13 percent.”
In Iowa, where residents have ready access to presidential candidates hoping to use the Iowa caucuses as a springboard to the White House, the question rings loudly, Woolley said. The state also is heavily invested in technology and research, a phenomenon that underpins the work of the Cultivation Corridor.
The United States risks losing ground if it continues to shortchange the sciences, Woolley said.
“Global competition is driven by research and development,” she said. “We have changed our priorities. We have a lot of mandatory spending on health and spending on debt, but less on discretionary things.”
“In other countries, they are taking a page from our playbook,” Woolley said. “The governments are paying for the basic research, so that companies can then apply it. We need to take innovation to the next level. We need to find the cures, and the apps, and the products.” Read about tonight’s event here.
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