I retired my original blog back in 2009 after I left the state relations job on a full time basis, but for the past few months I’ve been thinking about resurrecting the blog as VP for External Affairs. I can’t predict how prolific I will be about posting but my goal is to try to get something 
interesting up an average of once per week. Sure it’s been almost nine years but what do you say we fire up the laptop and get started all over again?
I spent the end of last week in Washington D.C. meeting with lead staff for our state’s congressional delegation on the University’s FY 2019 Federal Agenda. Federal relations director Sarah Castro and I were able to make the rounds on Thursday and Friday thanking each of our great congressional offices for their past support and advocating for additional federal investments in scientific research, student financial assistance, health care entitlements and a number of other critical initiatives.
In conversations about the role of this office, I often get puzzled looks from folks when I mention we have a UW government relations operation in the nation’s capital. There is an understandable sense among many that Olympia is the government relationship that matters the most and I think a bit of ignorance about how much the University is truly dependent upon the federal government.
I often point out that in the UW’s $7 billion plus annual budget, most of the revenue that finances our spending comes from one or more federal government programs. Our hospital system and network of physician clinics could not survive without federal health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Our research enterprise is fueled with grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation among others. And our Husky Promise program which celebrates its 10-year anniversary this year could not function without federal Pell Grant assistance for thousands of our students. And I’ve only scratched the surface of the dozens and dozens of federal programs and grants so critical to many other parts of the campus.
So I hope it’s self-evident to you why we maintain a full time staff of three professionals in D.C. to make sure that we are providing timely fiscal and policy information to our twelve congressional offices as well as facilitating meetings with elected officials and key staffers for faculty members, students, administrators and everyone in between.
Just last fall, we called repeatedly on our delegation to resist some of the most damaging provisions of federal tax reform that would have done great harm to graduate student financial support, student loan programs, athletic department finances and University capital debt management. While our Senators and Representatives were not able to fix everything, they did manage to correct a majority of problems and the strong relationships that we have built over the years with each of the offices played a large part in our success.
If you want to follow federal issues more closely, why not check out the Federal Relations blog for the latest in information from Washington D.C.