Building on two years of success in advocating for equity and inclusion, disaster relief, and sustainability, AIA will prioritize six legislative goals in the 116th Congress. On Wednesday, March 6, more than 600 architects from firms across the country traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers on behalf of sustainability and school safety. Housing, student loan debt relief, architecture firms involved in public/private partnerships, and disaster relief are the additional categories where AIA will focus its advocacy efforts this year.
In 2017, AIA’s advocacy team secured an important provision in the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, ensuring that tens of thousands of architecture businesses organized as “pass throughs” would not be unfairly taxed. The organization followed that success in 2018 by backing two pieces of legislation that became law: The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, which will allow federal grant money to be used to market new architecture curricula to historically underrepresented populations in the profession, among other things; and the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, a significant rewrite of disaster recovery and disaster response policies. The latter includes a provision that, for the first time, the role of architects to local and state officials and their communities after a disaster will be legally recognized.
