Public Policy

Sixteen AAS members traveled to Washington, DC, from 16 to 18 March to advocate for strong and sustained support for the astronomical sciences from Congress and the White House.

Please contact your member of the House of Representatives this week to ask them to sign two bipartisan letters in support of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.

That thud you heard was the arrival of President Obama's fiscal year 2016 budget. Here the AAS public-policy staff presents "just the facts" about what's in the request for the astronomical sciences.

Kelly Korreck describes why she enjoyed Congressional Visits Day last year and encourages all fellow AAS members to volunteer to participate and to advocate for the astronomical sciences.

The AAS policy team will be at #aas225 in Seattle all next week (4-8 January 2015)! Come find us at the AAS booth or at one of the three events we'll be coordinating on Monday and Wednesday.

This year CVD will be 17-18 March 2015. The AAS aims to select at least 15 volunteers to come to Washington, DC, to raise visibility and support for science. Sign-up deadline: 3 February 2015.

Applications are now being accepted for the next AAS John N. Bahcall Public Policy Fellow. If you have, or will have, a PhD by Fall 2015 and are interested in science policy, you are encouraged to apply!

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!