Make Your Science Case Heard
How researchers and higher ed leaders can gain the support of policymakers—and the public.
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Since President Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, his administration’s anti-science directives have cratered the nation’s scientific research enterprise. The administration has terminated billions in higher education grant funding, halting research on scores of high-impact projects ranging from infectious disease and cancer research to computer science education and climate change work. As the shock waves reverberate, an urgent, existential question has emerged: How can higher education leaders and researchers across the United States demonstrate to policymakers the indispensable value of university- and college-led scientific research?
The way forward starts by harnessing forces that have fueled conflicts between the political world and the academy for centuries. From the Vatican’s battles with Galileo in the seventeenth century over the heliocentric solar system, to the Nazis’ persecution of Albert Einstein in the twentieth century, to the vilification of Anthony Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians have been on a collision course with scientists and educators throughout history. Politicians pursue power in order to implement a policy agenda and often see scientists and educators as obstacles in the way. Specifically, to achieve their goals, politicians need public approval enabled by trust and confidence. Yet scientists and educators routinely garner higher ratings in these categories. For example, in an October 2024 Pew Research Center survey, only 33 percent of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of confidence in elected officials to act in the public’s best interests. In the same survey, 76 percent of respondents felt that way when asked about scientists. When political ideology and goals clash with scientific findings, science and education often become casualties. Understanding this dynamic and how to effectively operate within it can be helpful in making a strong persuasive case to policymakers and the public.
I served as a chief of staff in the US Senate and House of Representatives during a twenty-year career on Capitol Hill. Since retiring from federal service, I’ve focused on empowering researchers and leaders in higher education to achieve their priorities by effectively communicating with stakeholders, including lawmakers, public citizens, and members of the media, all of whom can accelerate or extinguish progress toward research goals. The following are proven, powerful ways scientists and leaders can build and broaden their influence with policymakers.
Answer the big question: Why should they care?
Imagine you’re a university president who has just walked through security into the soaring main entrance of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC. Rayburn is one of the buildings where members of the US House of Representatives have their offices, and you’re there to meet with your district’s congresswoman. The reason for your visit: A multimillion-dollar research grant the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded your university last year is now in jeopardy. As you make your way through the building’s bustling, gleaming white marble corridors, you’re confident of the demonstrable value of the research and the need for the grant.
You enter the office ready to make your case. Ten seconds into the meeting, though, you sense that your preparation focused on answering the wrong question. The right question, you realize, is not why the funding should be safeguarded; it’s why, amid scores of similarly situated research grants the congresswoman is struggling to save, her office should devote its already-strained resources to protect your institution’s particular funding.
As a university president, your institution’s top priorities are the center of your professional universe. But immersed in a constellation of policy issues and requests for support, lawmakers need to gauge whether your particular issue is worth their attention. Why, specifically, should they work on yours? Why should they care? The answer transcends the merits.
Here are the factors lawmakers assess in deciding if they are going to actively support your initiative.
- Impact on the congressional district (for representatives) or state (for senators). How many jobs does your research support in the district or state? What’s the likelihood that the research could be commercialized to create jobs in the district or state? Are local industry partners already interested in the commercialization potential?
- Constituent interest and involvement. Are actual voters in the congressional district or state advocating for your research? How many are involved in doing the work?
- Level of support from other elected officials and local interest groups. Have any state legislators contacted the office or spoken to the policymaker in support of your research? Have relevant local nonprofits or companies weighed in to express their support?
- Previous policymaker support. Did your congressional office initially help secure the grant by, for example, writing a letter during the selection process? Is the policymaker personally familiar with the work (did the lawmaker do a lab visit)? Does the research aim to improve or treat a condition of personal interest to the policymaker (the research is on Alzheimer disease, and the policymaker’s father suffered with the disease)?
- Press attention. Has the mainstream press—not just academic journals or trade publications—covered your institution’s work as part of this specific research project?
Elected officials of good faith and integrity generally want to support worthy initiatives. Still, in a universe with an overabundance of meritorious projects, lawmakers must decide which to actively support. As President John Kennedy famously said, “To govern is to choose.” Invest your energy in making sure policymakers know why they should choose your research.
Present your specific ask.
When scientists and higher education leaders sit down with policymakers and staffers to pitch the value of a research project, the meetings tend to follow a pattern that fails to meet the needs of nontechnical, time-deprived listeners. These meetings typically start with specifics about the particular disease, disorder, or condition that’s the focus of the research, say diabetes. It’s a logical place to begin, but scientists often overemphasize this piece of the pitch, including unnecessary details and terminology unfamiliar to policymakers who aren’t experts on the topic. If this part of the presentation goes on too long (beyond two minutes), you will have wasted the valuable airtime at the beginning of meetings, when your listeners are assessing whether to pay attention (I call this the window of attentional opportunity).
Scientists then typically walk through (often in great detail) the novel approach of the research. Here, they are in their native habitat. The tendency is to take listeners deep into scientific techniques. These are irrelevant and possibly incomprehensible to nonscientists, and you are in danger of losing the policymaker’s and staffers’ attention.
The last piece of the presentation—the part the policymaker and staffers have been listening for from the start—is “the ask.” Put another way: What do you want the boss to do? Options include:
- Vote in favor of legislation funding the project.
- Sign a letter of support.
- Send a letter seeking the status of project funding.
- Contact another policymaker to help advance your initiative.
- Ask a question at an oversight hearing about the funding.
- Participate in a panel or take a tour of a lab.
- Introduce legislation or offer an amendment.
Sometimes a specific ask is missing. Instead, scientists make a generic request for the lawmaker to “support” the research or “do what you can.” This lack of detail frustrates policymakers and staff. Without a focused ask, scientists and higher education leaders are essentially presenting a problem without proposing a measurable result lawmakers can aim to achieve.
A more productive approach is to ask elected officials to take specific actions within their purview. For example, you might request they send an oversight letter to the federal agency with responsibility for your priority issue or sign a “Dear Colleague” letter currently being circulated to request information from the NIH. The letter could ask about the timeline for the release of grant funding, seek support for a particular programmatic priority, or request detailed responses related to a recent administrative decision.
An example of a misdirected ask is to request that a member of Congress hold a hearing on your research priority when your issue is not within the jurisdiction of any of the committees on which the member serves. For instance: requesting that your representative hold a hearing on research related to next-generation batteries for NASA space missions when your representative does not serve on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which oversees NASA research and development programs.
Leading with a specific ask at the start of a presentation will demonstrate your sophistication as a science policy practitioner and your grasp of the challenges and opportunities of the policy ecosystem. You’ll be better positioned to achieve your policy goals and build and broaden relationships with your elected officials.
Mind the forgetting curve.
The memorability of even the most concise, well-structured policy communications begins to fade soon after delivery. This short shelf life isn’t unique to policy communications; it’s a feature of human memory retention. According to research pioneered by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s and replicated in more recent years, listeners forget all but approximately 10 percent of the new information they learn within forty-eight hours. This is called “Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve.” Remember it when structuring your communications. Focus on what I call the “10 percent takeaway”: the concise message you want the elected official or staff members to retain. Expect that listeners will retain only three minutes of your content in a thirty-minute meeting or presentation. Start policy communications with a clear ask. Reiterate the ask during the course of the meeting (“So that’s why we’re asking you to . . .”) and return to the ask at the end. The three minutes (a.k.a. the 10 percent takeaway in a half-hour meeting) should be crisp and unmistakable, easy for your listener to recognize and remember.
The messenger matters (a lot).
A few years ago, I was speaking to a group of vice CEOs at a large energy company in the Middle East. During the Q&A, one of the executives explained that the audit committee in the country’s parliament holds an annual hearing on his energy company’s finances and corporate strategy (the company is partially state owned). Every year, as the hearing approaches, the company’s CEO has the same question: “Who is the chair of the Audit Committee this year?” And every year, the CEO sends a member of the same tribe as the committee chair to respond to questions at the hearing.
The lesson is straightforward: Strategically select your messengers. As the merits of research seem to matter less in the current political environment, particularly at the federal level, the importance of messengers rises. Selecting the best people to deliver the message is arguably as important as the message itself. In choosing your messengers, consider the following questions:
- Do your messengers have a pre-existing positive working relationship with the policymaker or staff members?
- Do they connect with the legislator based on similarities, such as the same alma mater, mutual friends or colleagues, shared interests, or even the same hometown?
- Can they demonstrate credibility as experts actually “doing the work” for which they’re seeking support and also project genuine relatability?
Choosing messengers who embody these characteristics may feel unseemly, a regrettable concession to the weakened influence of facts in today’s anti-science policy environment. However, the power of strategically selected messengers has been recognized—and used to move audiences—for at least 2,300 years. In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that persuasion occurs through the speaker’s characteristics (ethos) in addition to the logic of the argument and its emotional impact. You don’t want policymakers to figuratively “shoot” your messengers by tuning them out; you want policymakers to connect with them.
All politics are local.
In certain cases, some of your institution’s funding priorities may conflict with the policy positions of the member of Congress representing your community. Your US representative may not be willing to submit a support letter for a grant request related to women’s reproductive health, for example, or may decline to contact an agency about an overseas public health project. What should you do?
Working with your local elected officials can be a more fruitful strategy for particular issues. While their responsibilities and spheres of authority are naturally state focused (or county or city focused), local officials can offer important support to scientists and the higher education institutions in the legislator’s district. An example drawn from my recent work: On the national level, a member of Congress wanted to weaken, or even gut, the Endangered Species Act. However, a particular type of whale in the waters off the member’s state is critically endangered. Scientists from several state universities instead focused on informing elected officials in the state capital about environmental policy options that could increase the chances of saving the whales. The scientists shared their expertise and research results with state representatives eager to craft policies to protect the dwindling whale population.
Be a resource, not just a request.
Soliciting support for your institution from an elected official may seem like a one-way street. After all, within the policymaking process, the official is the insider, vested with authority and resources that can influence whether your priority advances or stalls. However, underneath this familiar dynamic is another less visible and often overlooked policymaking relationship in which requestor and legislator operate like partners. Recognizing and nurturing this mutually beneficial relationship can strongly position your institution to increase its influence with policymakers and their office.
The origins of this symbiotic dynamic are in the legislator’s need for a consistent flow of new policy ideas. These ideas, filtered to address the needs and preferences of voters in the official’s district or state, are essential to staying in office. Specifically, legislative accomplishments are touted as “delivering for the district.” During campaigns, they’re cited as reasons to re-elect the lawmaker. But there’s a rub. It’s tough for policymakers and their staff to consistently come up with ideas for new public policies; assess their costs, benefits, and viability; and master the details all within the fast-paced, deadline-driven environment of legislative bodies.
Academic institutions, though, with scores of subject matter experts, are a trusted source of information—and policy ideas—for lawmakers. Professors and university researchers can also help assess the merits of potential policies as they’re being developed, offering feedback on draft legislation. Here are some other ways to build influence with policymakers and their staff members by sharing subject matter expertise:
- Host a panel or roundtable on an issue important to the policymaker and the community (new research-backed approaches to lowering violent crime, for example, or advances in home health care).
- Invite the elected official to speak at a ground-breaking or ribbon-cutting for a new building.
- Coordinate a lab visit so the elected official and staff members can see firsthand the research associated with a grant request.
In each case, be sure to reach out to the press before the event to maximize coverage, which benefits the elected official as well as your institution. Collaborating on media strategy with the policymaker’s office is another great way to begin to build mutually beneficial relationships with your elected officials.
Use the media to your advantage.
The strength of the media’s influence with policymakers presents opportunities for higher education institutions. Elected officials need to pay close attention to stories and editorials about their local communities. These pieces help officeholders tune in to issues that matter to constituents, offering a snapshot of public opinion. Coverage of lawmakers’ own work also shapes constituents’ opinions about how good of a job their elected officials are doing, which affects lawmakers’ reelection prospects. As a result, media coverage can play an important part in helping you make your case to policymakers.
Coverage by traditional media like daily news outlets can raise the profile of institutional priorities, which can be particularly useful after attempts to directly engage with a legislator’s office have failed to produce a response. If you can cite coverage of your specific issue when you request a meeting with a legislator’s office, you will differentiate your ask from others. Offering to organize and invite your elected official to participate on a panel or in another public event likely to attract media attention also can be a powerful relationship-building and influence-broadening tool. Consistently calling out or commending your elected official on social media keeps your institution on your officeholders’ radar screens.
The assault on scientific research, on the institutions of higher education where it’s conducted, and even on individual scientists is not unprecedented. Throughout history, politicians have sought to sideline science when scientific findings conflict with political ideology and aims. Amid the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-science crusade, scientists and higher education leaders can still effectively make the case for the scientific research enterprise. The mindsets, strategies, and tools outlined above, native to the political world, are a guide for overcoming funding challenges facing scientific research in the United States.
Illustrations by Glenn Harvey
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