A few weeks ago, the Research Works Act (RWA) was introduced in Congress. This legislation would forbid federal agencies from insisting that publications arising from research supported by their grants should be freely available to the public. It would therefore contribute to the trend of increasingly exhorbitant costs of access to most research publications.
In part because of the outcry against the RWA, there is a now a competing bill that goes in the opposite direction, and that deserves enthusiastic support: the (revised) Federal Research Public Access Act, or FRPAA. Here is the text of the bill and here is a good explanation.
For background, details, and a call to action, see below.
(Full disclosure: I work for MSP, a nonprofit publisher. Our goal is to make scientific research widely accessible at a low cost to the reader.)