Science Doesn't Speak for Itself

Federal support for science and technology is not a permanent feature of American governance. It is contested and renegotiated every year through budget requests, appropriations, authorizing legislation, regulatory decisions, and the countless conversations in congressional offices and federal agencies that shape those outcomes. 

Scientific findings do not automatically translate into policy. Research priorities do not advocate for themselves. Funding levels do not hold without sustained, organized engagement from the communities that understand what is at stake and can explain why it matters.

That is the starting point for scientific society advocacy. The relationship between science and government requires active stewardship. Organizations that invest in that stewardship help shape the conditions under which research is funded, used, and protected. Organizations that do not invest in stewardship leave those conditions to be defined by others.

For the INFORMS community, this is not abstract. Operations research and analytics depend on federal funding, federal data, and federal policy environments that can either enable or constrain the work. Just as important, the field is directly relevant to how government makes decisions. Advocacy, then, is not merely about protecting the research enterprise. It is also about ensuring that analytical expertise is present where major public decisions are made.

Why Societies Engage

Scientific societies engage in federal advocacy for three basic reasons:

• To protect and strengthen the research funding on which their members depend. Federal R&D remains one of the largest and most consequential public investments in science anywhere in the world. Yet that investment does not renew by default. It sits within the discretionary budget, competing annually against every other national priority.
• To shape the policy environment in which science is practiced. Rules governing workforce development, visa policy, data access, regulatory standards, grant administration, and research integrity all affect the scientific enterprise. In many of these areas, policymakers are making decisions with direct consequences for research communities, often under time pressure and with incomplete technical understanding.
• To ensure that evidence-based reasoning and domain expertise are present when the government is making decisions that affect public welfare. Policymakers are generalists. They work under severe constraints, face competing demands, and respond the quickest to what is visible, salient, and politically actionable. Research communities that are absent from those conversations 
  should not be surprised when decisions are made without them.

There is also a stewardship obligation. Federal research funding is taxpayer money. Scientists and scientific institutions that benefit from it have a responsibility to explain its value in terms that elected officials and the broader public can understand. Publications and patents matter, but they are not enough on their own. In a democratic system, the burden also falls on the scientific community to clearly, concretely, and repeatedly articulate the public return on that investment.

How Advocacy Works

Scientific society advocacy is not one activity. It is a coordinated set of mechanisms, each serving a different function in the policy process.

The most direct of those activities is professional government relations work. Major societies maintain a Washington presence through in-house staff, outside consultants, or both. These professionals monitor legislation and regulation; maintain relationships on Capitol Hill and in federal agencies; secure meetings with government officials; and translate technical issues into the concise, decision-oriented language the policy process demands. Their job is not simply to react to threats. It is to ensure that the society they represent is known, credible, and reachable before key decisions are made.

That work becomes more powerful when members of a society themselves are engaged. Staff and consultants can open doors, but subject-matter experts supply credibility. A researcher who can walk into a congressional office as a constituent, explain in plain terms what federal support enables, and answer a technical question with authority is often more persuasive than any written submission from an association. Effective advocacy depends on both professional infrastructure and expert voice.

Coalitions 

Coalitions multiply that influence. The federal advocacy landscape includes umbrella groups that aggregate the voices of many societies and institutions regarding common priorities. During appropriations season in particular, unified recommendations often carry more weight than fragmented requests. Coalition work also helps smaller or more specialized communities extend their reach without having to build every capability alone.

Communications

Formal communications matter as well. Letters to committees, hearing testimony, comments on proposed regulations, and responses to agency requests for information all become part of the 
policy record. They signal seriousness, provide technical depth, and establish an organization as a reliable source of expertise for future debates.

Public Relations

Public relations is another essential, and often underappreciated, part of the advocacy portfolio. Congressional offices pay attention to the media environment in which their constituents operate. Editorial coverage, op-eds, expert commentary, and well-placed stories about the real-world effects of policy choices create public visibility that direct lobbying alone cannot generate. 

What ties all this together is sustained presence. Influence rarely comes from showing up only when a crisis hits. It comes from being visible, credible, and useful over time.

What Impact Looks Like

The history of federal science funding offers repeated evidence that organized advocacy matters.

One of the clearest examples is the doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget between fiscal years 1998 and 2003. NIH funding rose from about $13.6 billion to $27.1 billion over five years, one of the most significant expansions of federal science investment in modern history. That did not happen spontaneously. It followed sustained advocacy by patient groups, universities, medical societies, and research organizations making a coordinated case for biomedical research.

The period that followed is equally instructive. After 2003, NIH appropriations failed for years to keep pace with biomedical inflation, steadily eroding purchasing power and tightening grant success rates. The advocacy community responded with renewed coordination and persistent pressure. Between fiscal years 2016 and 2020, Congress delivered a series of increases that helped reverse that decline. The lesson is straightforward: gains are not self-sustaining. Advocacy has to be continuous.

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 offers a more recent example. The law authorized substantial increases for the National Science Foundation (NSF) through fiscal year 2027, reflecting years of argument that research capacity is central to long-term economic and technological competitiveness. But authorization is not appropriation. The gap between what was authorized and what was ultimately funded underscores a hard truth about science policy: statutory wins still require annual defense.

That lesson became even clearer in the NSF battles of the past year. The administration’s FY 2026 budget request proposed slashing NSF by roughly 57%, reducing the agency's budget from around $9 billion to approximately $3.9 billion. At the same time, actions inside the agency created uncertainty regarding grant activity and the 
broader research environment. 

The response from the scientific community was immediate and organized. Societies, coalitions, universities, and disciplinary groups activated their advocacy infrastructure through action 
alerts, direct lobbying, media engagement, testimony, and appropriations outreach. Congress ultimately rejected the proposed cuts, and the Senate appropriations outcome held NSF funding at a level far above what had been requested. That result was not accidental. It reflected organized advocacy doing what it is supposed to do: converting relationships, credibility, and coordination into political resilience.

Scientific societies have also influenced policy well beyond top-line funding. They have shapeddebates over graduate student taxation, federal data collection, research integrity, and scientific advisory processes. In each case, the pattern is similar. Durable influence comes not from sheer size, but from technical credibility, persistence, and the ability to connect specialized expertise to public consequences.

Why This Matters to INFORMS

For INFORMS, the case for advocacy is especially strong because operations research and analytics occupy a distinctive place in the federal landscape.

Like other scientific communities, our members depend on federal support. Research funding flows through NSF, the Department of War, NIH, the Department of Energy, and many other agencies. Federal statistical infrastructure also matters enormously. The Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and related agencies generate data that underpins empirical work across the field. Threats to those institutions are not distant political events. They affect the conditions under which our community can conduct research, train talent, and generate value.

But the argument for advocacy in our field goes beyond protecting funding streams. In many cases, advocacy also begins with explanation, that is, helping policymakers and agency leaders understand what operations research and analytics are, where those leaders already shape critical decisions, and why the broader use of those capabilities serves the public interest.

Operations research and analytics are not simply disciplines seeking support. They are decision sciences with direct relevance to how government functions. Questions of resource allocation, logistics, resilience, healthcare operations, defense readiness, emergency response, infrastructure planning, statistical modeling, and public service delivery are not incidental applications of our field. They are precisely the kinds of challenges our field is built to address.

That gives the INFORMS community a dual role in federal policy. It is a constituency with legitimate interests in the strength of the research enterprise, and it is a source of expertise that can improve the quality of public decision-making itself. Advocacy, then, is not only about defending what our members need; it is also about advancing what our discipline uniquely contributes.

INFORMS has recognized this for some time. Through its advocacy governance structure, including its Advocacy Governance Committee and Federal Research Engagement Committee, together with staff and outside advisors, INFORMS works to maintain sustained engagement with Congress, federal agencies, and the media.

Federal agencies that engage seriously with operations research and analytics experts are better equipped to make sound decisions. Those agencies allocate resources more intelligently, design systems more effectively, and respond to complexity with greater rigor. Agencies that do not engage with experts are more likely to rely on intuition, fragmentation, or outdated processes where disciplined analysis is needed. Ensuring that analytical expertise has standing in those environments is therefore an advocacy goal in its own right.

This is why advocacy cannot be treated as peripheral to the mission of a society like INFORMS. If our field is absent from federal conversations, others will shape the funding environment, the policy architecture, and the decision frameworks within which our members work. If our field is present, organized, and credible, it can help shape those conditions instead.

The Obligation of Presence

The policy environment for science is not static, and it is certainly not self-correcting. The past year made that plain. Proposed cuts to major research agencies, disruptions to grantmaking, and broader challenges to the place of expertise in government all demonstrated the same thing: advocacy infrastructure matters most when conditions deteriorate. But it only works in a crisis if it existed before that crisis.

Scientific societies engage in advocacy because public decisions will be made either way. Budgets will be set. Rules will be written. Agencies will define priorities. Legislators and staff will seek input from whomever is organized enough to provide it. The question is not whether the process moves forward; it will. The question is whether the scientific community is present in that process with enough credibility, consistency, and strategic discipline to shape the outcome.

That is why advocacy is part of a scientific society’s work. Not because science is political in some partisan sense, but because the institutions and investments on which science depends are political in the most practical sense possible: they are governed through public decisions.

For INFORMS, this is inseparable from who we are. A field devoted to better decision-making cannot afford to be absent from the places where consequential public decisions are made. If operations research and analytics are central to solving real problems, then ensuring that policymakers understand, support, and use that expertise is not optional. It is part of what it means to be the professional home of this community.