314 Action Fund drives doctors and scientists into US office

The 314 Action Fund, a political action committee that backs pro‑science candidates, spent above $30 million in the 2024 election cycle and helped a wave of doctors and scientists win public office in the United States. The money was used to support campaigns for both congressional seats and state offices, according to the committee’s own figures.

The PAC raised $3.6 million for pediatrician Annie Andrews in the contest for the former Lindsay Graham Senate seat in South Carolina and $3 million for physician Acton in the closely fought Ohio governor race. Its overall success rate topped 80 percent, with 14 of 17 House candidates winning and nine seats flipping from Republican to Democrat. Victors included an oncology nurse‑practitioner, a mathematician, a microbiologist, a nuclear engineer and an agricultural scientist.

“We really benefit by having those data‑driven, fact‑based decisionmakers actually in a position at the governing table,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist and founder of the committee after her 2016 congressional bid. She added that the outcome “It did turn out to be a health care election.”

Richard Frank, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Health Policy, noted that health‑care workers and scientists have always been present in Congress but not in such numbers. “What is unusual,” he said, “is just how many came in one wave.” He linked the surge to the Trump administration’s hostility toward scientific expertise, stating “Science has been under attack,” and that it was “not surprising that scientists have recognized that, and some of them went out and ran for Congress.”

Historian Kristoffer Shields of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics pointed to federal defunding of laboratories and the pandemic’s legacy as drivers of the trend. He said, “Some of it certainly is a reaction to what's been happening at the federal level, the defunding of a lot of laboratories and scientific exploration.”

Earlier this year, candidate El‑Sayed told WIRED that his campaign focused on public health, citing a cyclospora outbreak he linked to Trump‑era policies. He remarked, “We DOGE’d our whole service that keeps the lettuce safe,” referring to the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts at the Food and Drug Administration.

In 2024 the PAC’s previous acceptance of money from groups tied to the pro‑Israel lobbying group AIPAC attracted scrutiny; the organisation now refuses AIPAC funding and has backed candidates such as El‑Sayed who criticize the Israeli government. Unlike other medical PACs, 314 Action explicitly aims to elect Democratic health and science experts and opposes the former Trump administration’s public‑health approach.

Microbiologist Jasmine Clark, the incoming Georgia representative, said to The Guardian, “I am appalled seeing infectious diseases spreading through our communities that we had once declared eradicated.” Clark first received support from 314 Action eight years ago and, according to Naughton, was part of the first class of scientists the committee helped elect in 2018 before moving to the federal level.

South Carolina’s Annie Andrews has called health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. her “archnemesis” and pledged to hold him accountable. In 2025 the PAC launched a Guardians of Public Health initiative to recruit more health‑care experts, stating, “We thought it was important to speak directly to doctors and people in publ.”