Policy Blog

Lawmakers introduced a massive spending bill on 9 December; it would provide healthy increases to the science budgets at NASA and NSF and sufficient funding to Cosmic Frontier projects at the DOE Office of Science...

NASA's Science Mission Directorate has issued a draft Cooperative Agreement Notice for its future science-education activities and requests comments by 8 December. A final notice should be released in January 2015.

In this guest post, Jason Steffen (Northwestern University) describes his recent local visit with his House representative, Randy Hultgren. With Congress in recess, now is a good time to do a visit of your own!

A National Science Foundation committee has drafted a report advising the GEO directorate on goals and priorities for the next five years and invites comments from the community by Friday, 12 September.

Debra Elmegreen, Chair of the AAS Committee on Astronomy & Public Policy (CAPP), discusses the group's recent strategic-planning retreat and how CAPP and the Society's policy staff will pursue their mission.

In this guest post, graduate student Sara Barber (University of Oklahoma) describes her experience organizing a campus visit with Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma's 4th district over the August Congressional recess.

With Congress now in week two of its five-week summer recess, here's an update on where things stand with the federal budgets for the next two fiscal years.

Consideration of the appropriations bill that funds NASA, NSF, and a host of other agencies broke down amid disagreements over potential amendments.

The House of Representatives passed their bill funding NASA and NSF on 30 May, with strong increases for research at both agencies. The Senate now looks to take up its version of the bill, which passed out of committee...

Anna Ho (MIT) was the only undergraduate AAS member who participated in Congressional Visits Day 2014. In this continuation of her earlier blog post, she describes her experience.