FIRST IN PI — AARP FLIES IN: Hundreds of advocates will flood the Hill tomorrow for AARP’s first in-person fly-in since before the pandemic. The fly-in will be singularly focused on support for family caregivers, and is being timed to spotlight the issue ahead of the first presidential debate Thursday night. — AARP members and staff from all 50 states (plus a couple dozen celebrities) have meetings on the books with more than 200 offices on the Hill, including several member-level meetings and huddles with House and Senate leadership. AARP will also have a billboard truck circling the Capitol throughout the day. Actors Yvette Nicole Brown, Diedrich Bader and Marg Helgenberger are among the celebrity participants in the fly-in. — Participants will push two bills in particular: one that would provide up to a $5,000 tax credit for working family caregivers who regularly cut back on their own health care or dip into their savings; and another aimed at improving coordination between family caregivers and the Medicare helpline. — AARP is billing the push as a priority comparable in urgency to their campaign to include drug pricing provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, arguing that more than 48 million Americans — or 20 percent of voters — are serving as family caregivers. — In an election focused on perceptions of the economy and in which “voters ages 50+ will be the deciding factor, we urge Congress to prioritize what matters most to older Americans, such as caregiving,” the group’s top lobbyist, Nancy LeaMond, said in a statement. Support for caregivers, she added, would provide a key voting bloc “with much-needed financial relief.” IN OTHER CAREGIVING NEWS: The National Alliance for Caregiving has launched a new push to advance its priorities at the state level by providing caregiving advocates across 10 states an outlet to coordinate and support each others’ efforts to shape policy on the issue. The Caregiver Nation Network is funded in part by the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York and RRF Foundation for Aging and consists of caregiving leaders from Arizona, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. THE CENTER OF THE MAGA INTELLECTUAL UNIVERSE IS WHERE?: “Over the past decade, business figures led by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer have poured nearly $200 million into a New York think tank that’s now projecting its own vision for Trump’s America,” Bloomberg’s Simone Foxman, Emily Birnbaum and Jeff Green write of the Manhattan Institute, the new “intellectual staging ground for the American right.” — “One head-spinning result: a growing number of Republican statehouses are effectively outsourcing the job of drafting laws about race and gender to policy wonks centered in Manhattan, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 10:1.” — “For Singer, this is only the beginning. Founder of the $66 billion Elliott Investment Management and one of the most feared activist investors in the world, Singer speaks of building a Wall Street equivalent of the Federalist Society, the legal juggernaut that’s spent decades ruthlessly pushing America’s judiciary to the right.” KNOWING MIRIAM ADELSON: Adelson, who plans to spend north of $90 million to elect Trump, “is poised to become one of the biggest donors in the presidential election — and, if Mr. Trump wins, one of the most powerful private citizens with a say in American foreign policy,” per The New York Times’ Teddy Schleifer. “Fiercely hawkish on Israel, she was deeply unnerved by the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 and would be likely to shape a second Trump administration’s posture on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” — “Dr. Adelson, 78, has never been a shrinking violet, but she long operated in the shadow of her husband, Sheldon G. Adelson, who ascended to first-name-only status in Republican circles. Mr. Adelson died at 87 in January 2021, ushering her into a new era: For the first time in presidential politics, she is a solo practitioner.” — “She is, in some ways, a political carbon copy of her husband: intensely pro-Israel, rabidly partisan, and a believer in the nobility of using her money, north of $30 billion, and her media empire to buy influence and shape the world. But she is also, by the accounts of people who have pitched her, a tougher ask.” WHAT HUAWEI’S BEEN UP TO: Bloomberg’s Kate O'Keeffe has a follow-up to her report last month revealing that China-based telecom giant Huawei was secretly sponsoring a research competition hosted by the prominent science society Optica, pulling back the curtain on how the decades-long relationship between the two organizations “effectively helped Huawei preserve access to a pipeline of top-notch U.S. scientists despite its pariah status in Washington.” — For example, “at least three of the six U.S. researchers Huawei secretly sponsored through the Optica competition won Pentagon funding around the same time,” and a whistleblower complaint filed this spring “raised concerns about the company’s role in choosing which scientists would receive funding through the competition.” — “For Optica, a century-old organization that publishes influential scientific journals, the tie-up with a Chinese industrial champion helped it maintain a foothold in a crucial region even as China’s rivalry with the US intensified … Yet it’s a delicate dance, as research by Optica’s 24,000 individual members applies to sensitive areas such as semiconductors — a key battleground in the US-China tech competition, and one where Huawei is a major player.” ALSO FLYING IN: American Truck Dealers, part of the National Automobile Dealers Association, are hitting the Hill to discuss the industry’s opposition to EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Phase 3 rule and so-called “right-to-repair” legislation as well as truckers’ support for catalytic converter anti-theft legislation. Attendees will also hear from Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa). — Advocates with the National Association of Rural Health Clinics will be at the Capitol tomorrow for meetings focused on telehealth, Medicare Advantage reimbursement reforms and a technical bill to modernize portions of the statute that regulates rural health clinics.
| 
