contents=  Submitted to the Proceedings of the US Community Study on the
Future of Particle Physics (Snowmass 2021) ,
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# Snowmass ’21 Community Engagement Frontier 6: Public Policy and Government
Engagement
Congressional Advocacy for Areas Beyond HEP Funding

Richie Diurba  Universität Bern  Rob Fine  Los Alamos National Laboratory
Mandeep Gill  Kavli Institute  Harvey Newman  California Institute of
Technology  Kevin Pedro  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  Alexx Perloff
University of Colorado Boulder  Breese Quinn  University of Mississippi
Louise Suter  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  Shawn Westerdale
Princeton University

###### Contents

  1. 1 Introduction
  2. 2 Legislative Topics that Impact Particle Physics
    1. 2.1 Implicit Advocacy in Community Materials
  3. 3 Government Relations Resources Available to the Community
    1. 3.1 Opportunities for Expanding the Use of Existing Resources
  4. 4 Summary of Discussions on HEP Community Advocacy
    1. 4.1 Policy Areas Impacting the U.S. HEP Community
    2. 4.2 Choice of Topics for Advocacy
    3. 4.3 Defining Community Consensus
    4. 4.4 APS Resources for Advocacy
    5. 4.5 Utilization of Current Framework for Additional Advocacy
    6. 4.6 Impact to Current (Funding) Advocacy
    7. 4.7 Outreach to the Community
  5. 5 Conclusion

##  1 Introduction

This document has been prepared as a Snowmass contributed paper by the Public
Policy & Government Engagement topical group (CEF06) within the Community
Engagement Frontier. The charge of CEF06 is to review all aspects of how the
High Energy Physics (HEP) community engages with government at all levels and
how public policy impacts members of the community and the community at large,
and to assess and raise awareness within the community of direct community-
driven engagement of the US federal government (i.e. advocacy). In the
previous Snowmass process these topics were included in a broader “Community
Engagement and Outreach” group whose work culminated in the recommendations
outlined in Ref. [1].

The focus of this paper is the potential for HEP community advocacy on topics
other than funding for basic research. The HEP community has run a very active
and successful advocacy effort for many years that is targeted at the U.S.
federal legislature (i.e. Congress) and is focused on funding for HEP and
basic research overall. The full details of that effort, as well as ideas for
expanding community advocacy for funding to other government entities, are
described in two other contributed papers prepared by CEF06 [2, 3]. Throughout
this Snowmass process, one of the main themes in the activities of this group
was focused on policy issues that directly impact the HEP community at large,
as well as individual members of the community, which are not directly related
to the funding for our field. In our discussions on this topic, we attempted
to address the following questions: What should be our role as a community,
and individuals, in trying to influence legislation about these issues? What
advocacy may we already be engaged in as a community, and as individuals,
pertaining to these issues? What resources already exist to advocate for these
issues? And, should the HEP community organize an explicit effort to advocate
for these issues? We note that no consensus was ultimately reached on answers
to some of these questions. We therefore do not present answers, but rather a
summary of the discussions that took place in the framework we developed to
discuss this matter most thoroughly.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes legislative topics that
the community already implicitly advocates for. Section 3 describes currently
available resources for non-funding advocacy and how they could be better
utilized by members of the community. Section 4 summarizes the discussions
that took place on this topic as part of the Snowmass process.

##  2 Legislative Topics that Impact Particle Physics

Many topics beyond federal research funding significantly impact HEP research
and researchers. We provide a brief overview of these topics here. This
section does not include an exhaustive list of issues or impacts. Additional
details are available in the cited references where available.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) has become a catch-all term for a
broad array of issues related to improving HEP physicists’ access to research,
experience performing research, and success in the field. In particular,
expanding access to resources to perform research has been identified as
crucial for the health of the field. Many small colleges and universities have
historically had limited, if any, opportunities to participate in research.
This group includes historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs),
other minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and other small institutions, such
as liberal-arts colleges and others without graduate programs. The federal
government’s various EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive
Research) programs take a step towards addressing these inequalities, yet
their focus on state-level action neglects small colleges and universities in
states with large institutions that receive substantial funding. The new
America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology,
and Economic Strength (COMPETES) Act, recently passed by the U.S. House of
Representatives, includes a promising program to increase funding to small
institutions more broadly, without restrictions based on state [4]. Further
discussion of DEI issues can be found in the proceedings of CEF03, the
Snowmass topical group for Diversity & Inclusion. [5].

The international nature of HEP makes immigration a vital issue. Many
scientists from other countries come to the U.S. to pursue Ph.D.,
postdoctoral, or faculty positions or to collaborate with U.S. scientists and
use U.S. research facilities. The uncertainty and opacity inherent in the
current U.S. immigration system imposes substantial physical and psychological
costs on HEP researchers and reduces the field’s efficiency and productivity.
The widespread practice of educating Ph.D. researchers in the U.S. and
refusing to extend their visas or grant them permanent residency harms
national competitiveness in R&D. Attracting and retaining talented
researchers, regardless of their national origin, should be considered a
matter of importance for national security. The aforementioned America
COMPETES Act includes, as an amendment, an approach that would be
revolutionary for HEP and U.S. scientific research as a whole. This approach
is the Keep STEM Talent Act [6], which makes immigrants who earned Masters or
Ph.D. degrees in STEM fields automatically eligible to apply for permanent
residency in the U.S. This simple change, which has been proposed repeatedly
in the past, would substantially improve the prospects and experiences for
foreign researchers who seek to learn and work in the U.S. Other practical
improvements to the immigration process are also desirable, such as waiving
repeated interviews and costly, time-consuming visa stamping procedures that
require recipients to leave and reenter the U.S.

Related issues of so-called “research security” have experienced increasing
emphasis recently, with largely detrimental consequences. While the need for
extreme care and caution is widely acknowledged for classified topics, basic
research has benefited from openness and collaboration for many decades,
including throughout the Cold War. The recent introduction of vaguely-defined
“sensitive” areas of research and corresponding concerns about “foreign talent
recruitment programs” have had a widely-reported chilling effect on
international collaboration, especially with Chinese institutions and
researchers [7, 8]. Related legal actions have primarily focused on Chinese
citizens who live and work as faculty and researchers in the U.S., rising to
the level of persecution [9, 10, 11]. Punishing researchers for pursuing their
research harms U.S. national security, rather than helping it, by driving away
talented scientists. Instead, the government should provide researchers with
adequate funding to eliminate the incentive to seek support from possibly
malign foreign programs. A more comprehensive argument for increasing research
funding is covered in Ref. [2], while the argument for broadening access to
funding is discussed above. To make efficient and legal use of federal
research funding, it is still essential to avoid conflicts of interest and to
avoid obtaining multiple, overlapping sources of support for the same project,
sometimes called “double-dipping”. Therefore, funding disclosure rules should
be clarified and procedures streamlined, with any criminal implications
removed.

There are other, longer-standing issues regarding immigration status and HEP
research in the U.S. National laboratories drive a substantial amount of HEP
experimental research, and even those nominally open to the public often have
stricter access restrictions imposed than other institutions (such as
universities). Individuals who originate from “countries of concern” may be
barred from accessing otherwise publicly available resources based on a
background check for which there is no transparency and no appeal.111We note a
lack of readily available public documentation of this process, which in
itself is reflective of poor transparency. Rather, we cite anecdotal evidence
gleaned in interactions between some authors of this paper and members of the
community. Researchers visiting for workshops or conferences may be denied
visas without transparency or appeal. Denying these visas does not just harm
those researchers, but also U.S. HEP as a whole: critical research may be
delayed or even abandoned, and the international community increasingly views
the U.S. as an inhospitable location for important meetings of the field.
Ultimately, national security will be best promoted by ensuring that
procedures do not reject talented scientists. The past few decades of
increasing international collaboration have been highly successful for HEP,
and this approach should be expanded rather than discouraged.

###  2.1 Implicit Advocacy in Community Materials

Many of the above issues are touched on in the materials that the community
uses in its current advocacy efforts. The main focus of the existing HEP
advocacy efforts is to increase support for and knowledge about basic
research, and HEP research specifically. While materials that touch on the
above issues are used as part of the more extensive discussion about the
benefits of supporting HEP, the community effort does not include advocacy for
any specific policies or legislation in these areas. Similarly to the
community advocacy materials focused on funding, the materials and the message
about non-funding topics are crafted by a small group of designees of the the
Fermilab Users Executive Committee (UEC), SLAC Users Organization (SLUO), and
the U.S. Large Hadron Collider Users Association (USLUA), with input from APS
Division of Particles and Fields (APS DPF). The membership of this group is
coordinated by, but is not necessarily itself comprised of, elected
representatives of our field (i.e. the leadership of the users groups). It has
been noted (see Ref. [2]) that this group is not fully representative of our
field, and it does not ask for broader community input when crafting these
messages. These topics all fall within a category of issues that have general
community support, but the question remains if more explicit consensus-
building is needed or may be appropriate.

The follow having been identified as areas in which the community implicitly
advocates as a core component of existing advocacy efforts (this is not an
exhaustive list):

  * •

STEM education

  * •

International collaboration and international and open science

  * •

DEI impacts and efforts

  * •

Emerging technologies, QIS and AI

  * •

Basic research support as a driver of U.S. innovation, economic development,
and national security

Below is a list of community-produced materials that are used for existing
advocacy efforts and which touch on the above non-funding issues. These
materials can be found on the U.S. Particle Physics website [12], and are
jointly maintained by APS DPF, UEC, SLUO, and USLUA.

  * •

Particle Physics Makes a Difference in Your Life

    * –

Relevant issue: impact of basic research.

    * –

Summary of content: the discoveries and technological developments made by the
HEP community have an impact on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. We
know that this type of broad applicability resonates with members of Congress
and their staff. This document discusses how HEP has impacted other fields and
industries.

  * •

Particle Physics Builds STEM Leaders

    * –

Relevant issue: STEM outreach.

    * –

Summary of content: this document discusses the outreach and public engagement
activities of the field. While education is not the top issue for voters [13,
14], it is a consistently important topic among their representatives and the
funding agencies.

  * •

Particle Physicists Value Diversity and Strive Toward Equity

    * –

Relevant issue: DEI outreach.

    * –

Summary of content: most importantly, this document contains a statement of
our community values and what the field is attempting to achieve in terms of
diversity, equity, and inclusion. This document includes a clear statement
that the community has work to do to improve the climate and opportunities for
historically underrepresented groups (HUGs), and highlights a few programs
explicitly designed to empower and provide opportunities for HUG members.

  * •

Particle Physicists Deliver Discovery Science Through Collaboration

    * –

Relevant issues: international science; big science.

    * –

Summary of content: this document discusses the various institution types and
locations where HEP researchers work. The goal is to show that HEP is an
international effort and involves the best minds from across the country and
the world. This document also contains a summary of the projects outlined in
the 2013 P5 plan, their timelines, and whether each is on schedule.

  * •

Particle Physicists Advance Artificial Intelligence

    * –

Relevant issue: emerging technologies.

    * –

Summary of content: although the HEP community has been working on machine
learning (ML) for decades, artificial intelligence (AI) only became a national
initiative in March 2020 [15, 16]. This document was created to explain how
the HEP community uses ML and successfully interfaces with industrial partners
to push the boundaries of ML research and development.

  * •

Particle Physics and Quantum Information Science

    * –

Relevant issue: emerging technologies.

    * –

Summary of content: Quantum information science (QIS) is another area of
national interest [17, 18]. This document discusses the benefits of QIS, the
skill sets that make HEP researchers valuable in these endeavors, and how QIS
developments can in turn help solve fundamental problems in HEP research.

##  3 Government Relations Resources Available to the Community

The HEP community has several ways in which to advocate for funding; this is
discussed in detail in Ref. [2]. As described in Section 2, community
resources that are used in this funding advocacy also implicitly advocate for
other topics. Additional resources exist within the broader physics community
to more explicitly advocate for the topics covered in this paper and others,
and these resources are available to members of the HEP community. In many
ways the groups which represent the larger physics community have considerably
greater resources than the HEP community alone. However, the priorities of the
broader physics community are not always aligned with those of the HEP
community, and in practice there may be limitations to the use of these
additional resources that need to be considered.

The American Physical Society (APS) is a nonprofit membership organization
representing physicists within the U.S. The mission of this group is to
advance and disseminate physics knowledge and advocate for the needs of
physicists and scientists at large. More relevant to this paper, APS advocates
for many non-funding legislative issues of importance to the physics
community. However, the HEP community is only a subset of the broader APS
membership, meaning that the influence of the HEP community over the issues
taken up by APS is somewhat limited. Additionally APS, as a rule, will not
elevate the interests of one division (APS DPF, in the case of HEP) over
another in its advocacy.

There are a number of specific ways in which the HEP community can strengthen
its connection to APS advocacy efforts. APS is a trade organization available
to all physicists, though many members of the HEP community do not understand
how the APS government affairs team makes their decisions or the
infrastructure used to elect representatives. APS experts have been responsive
in the past, so this may be due to a failure of the HEP community to highlight
their work. The HEP community should invest effort into building stronger
connections with the APS team. APS also offers Congressional Science
Fellowships, which aid Congress by providing scientifically literate, skilled
personnel. In return, the fellows have the opportunity to enhance their
careers and to assist the physics community in better communicating with
members of Congress. The HEP community should raise awareness of this program
and strive to increase the number of HEP community members within the federal
government.

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is another organization that works to
promote and advance the physical sciences. AIP is an umbrella organization
that pools together the resources of ten member societies, including APS. As
an umbrella organization, the AIP can help coordinate its individual members’
activities and messages. We note that AIP has its own Congressional fellowship
program. The activities of AIP should be promoted within the HEP community.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is best known
through its journal Science and its government fellowship program. Its goal of
the advancement of science means that it has a very active government
engagement group with its own training programs and significant resources.
AAAS hosts various efforts to get scientists involved in policy, such as the
Local Science Engagement Network and National Science Policy Network. Perhaps
even moreso than APS and AIP, AAAS is an underutilized resource within the HEP
community. Further details are available on the AAAS website [19].

It should be noted that the HEP community advocacy opportunities described so
far, including those described in detail in Ref. [2], strongly revolve around
the regular U.S. budget calendar. However, many non-funding legislative issues
important to members of the HEP community are inherently irregular (i.e. they
do not follow funding timelines). In order to be serious about advocating for
non-budgetary topics, the HEP community must start to avail itself of advocacy
pathways that do not rely on the federal budget calendar.

###  3.1 Opportunities for Expanding the Use of Existing Resources

The activities of the broader physics community described above are all
currently active, but throughout the proceedings of CEF06 it has become clear
that awareness of the existence of these resources or the means to utilize
them are poorly known of within the HEP community. Strengthening connections
to these already active organizations and efforts would be beneficial to the
HEP community by enabling community members to advocate for issues that impact
them and the field overall. It is important to understand how the HEP
community can interface more directly with these other organizations. A
summary of specific items raised during conversations in this area during the
course of Snowmass discussions is below.

  * •

Effort should be taken to increase knowledge of the available resources and
other groups with these resources. Many people expressed a lack of awareness
of the resources available to them. Talks at APS and APS DPF meetings could be
a means to raise awareness.

  * •

A limitation of APS, AIP, and AAAS is that one nominally is required to be a
dues-paying member to access all of their resources. However, these groups
have been receptive to helping the HEP community in the past, so going through
APS DPF or the users groups could be a path to gaining access to these
resources for the whole community.

  * •

While the APS DPF executive committee does represent HEP broadly, there is no
straightforward mechanism for community members to use this group as a route
to providing feedback about APS advocacy. The creation of feedback mechanisms,
to provide a connection between the HEP community and APS advocacy groups via
APS DPF leadership, should be considered.

  * •

Organizers of the HEP community advocacy effort have worked with APS
government relations experts in the past, but there has not been a strong
connection between these groups in recent years. It could be very beneficial
to utilize APS DPF to build up that connection and to explore additional
connections between HEP users groups and APS government relations experts.

  * •

Current government relations experts who work with the HEP community advocacy
effort are experts in funding advocacy. Expanding the network of resources
available to the HEP effort to include connections to APS, AIP, and AAAS would
enable the community to access experts in additional areas.

  * •

It would be beneficial to create a communication method for community members
to express concerns about policy issues that affect them or the community at
large. This raises difficult questions such as: who would be the owners of
e.g. a community-wide mailing list? And, who would act in what manner when
concerns are raised?

  * •

It would be helpful to create an HEP-wide communication tool, such as an email
list, that could be used to make community members aware of ongoing advocacy
efforts. APS and APS DPF send out emails currently, but only members of those
organizations receive them, and many HEP community members do not pay
attention to them. Again this raises the question of who would maintain such a
resource.

  * •

The users groups are active in funding advocacy, but they have been less
involved in advocacy for other areas. DEI advocacy groups could be formed
within the users groups. Such groups would benefit from strong connections to
APS, AIP, and AAAS to help enable their resources to be more broadly available
within the HEP community.

##  4 Summary of Discussions on HEP Community Advocacy

Advocating for areas other than HEP funding was widely discussed as part of
the proceedings of CEF06. Assuming that there is consensus that such areas are
worthy of our support, a key question that must be addressed moving forward
is: Should we, as the HEP community, directly advocate for areas other than
HEP funding, or should we exclusively rely on the advocacy efforts of external
groups and strengthen our connections to those groups? We, the authors of this
paper, do not offer an answer to this question, but instead summarize relevant
considerations that we hope can be used for a wider community discussion on
this topic.

We note that the framework for these discussions were originally motivated by
two Snowmass “Letters of Interest” in this area submitted to CEF06:

  1. 1.

Culture change is necessary, and it requires strategic planning [20]

  2. 2.

Non Funding Government outreach [21]

###  4.1 Policy Areas Impacting the U.S. HEP Community

The following specific areas were identified as potential topics of targeted,
explicit, advocacy due to their relevance to the quality of life of community
members and the collective science output of the field of HEP.

  * •

DEI: Issues of DEI are of the utmost importance and impact the whole field.
The hardships of underrepresented minorities can not be understated, and the
lack of diversity in our field directly affects the science output of the
field.

  * •

Immigration policy: The impact of policy on international scientists working
in our field ranges from restrictions to the total exclusion of some
international groups. Many international scientists living in the U.S. lack
security in their legal status, meaning they have less stability in their
career prospects compared to U.S. citizens. This is damaging to individuals in
our community, as well as to the U.S. HEP community overall because it has the
net effect of drawing talent away. Immigration issues are particularly
impactful to early career members of the community because they are less
likely to have permanent residence and generally have less support through
their institutions in cases where public policy affects their ability to live
and work in the U.S. This issue has an especially direct impact on the science
output of the field.

  * •

STEM education: Without strong support for STEM education, U.S. science would
not retain or grow its current workforce and would not remain a leader in
world science. This issue also has a direct impact on the science output of
the field.

###  4.2 Choice of Topics for Advocacy

Current HEP community advocacy (for funding) is specifically nonpartisan and
uses, where possible, apolitical motivations for supporting HEP and basic
research. The HEP community has a history of benefiting from bipartisan
support. As noted above, as part of current advocacy efforts there is implicit
advocacy for STEM, DEI, and international science – these are topics for which
there is also generally broad bipartisan support. However, the specifics of
policy decisions and bills in these areas can be highly politicized and
divisive. During the discussions of CEF06, concerns were raised on the
potential impact to current HEP advocacy activities if the community were to
also explicitly advocate for topics perceived to be partisan in nature.

Any level of engagement in advocacy in these areas should follow from robust
community consensus – how this might be built is discussed below in Section
4.3. Supposing that community consensus does exist that action should taken by
the community in these areas, there would likely be insufficient resources to
advocate for all topics that impact the HEP community. Therefore criteria
would be required for determining the subset of topics for which the community
would advocate. One possible criterion discussed is the immediacy of an
issue’s impact on the HEP community at large or members of the community.
Identifying and quantifying impact in itself are nontrivial tasks, however,
and some issues directly affect the community by their cumulative individual
impact, which can be difficult to assess.

An additional case was discussed, which is advocacy in response to an issue
that rises to the level of a moral emergency. In this case, the issue at hand
might not be directly impactful to the work of the HEP community, but rather
directly impact the moral standards of the community. This hypothetical again
presupposes the ability of the community to clearly establish consensus or
lack thereof, whether on the impact of a particular issue or the moral
standards which the community would act to defend.

###  4.3 Defining Community Consensus

The point of community consensus, and how it should be defined, was a
recurring theme through the CEF06 discussions in this area. Foremost among the
questions raised was: to what extent is consensus required for community
members to engage in advocacy in any particular area? We note that while,
ideally, the community would have well-documented indications of consensus
before any individuals speak on behalf of the community on any topics, in
practice this is an unrealistic goal. Indeed, as noted above, existing
advocacy efforts already include implicit advocacy for some non-funding topics
and the specifics of the strategy implemented to advocate for funding are not
subject to the approval, blessing, or review of the community at large.
However, it is true, and critically important, that the broader themes of our
funding-based advocacy are driven by the contents of the P5 report, which has
strong, well-documented community support. It has been suggested that the
construction of an analogous document could be used as the basis for general
guidance on advocacy for non-funding topics, provided that it receives
similarly strong, well-documented community support. We note that materials
being produced within the Community Engagement Frontier (for example, within
the topical group for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, CEF03 [5]) may provide
a good groundwork to produce such a document.

The above points are driven by the question of whether or not the community
should continue or expand its advocacy for non-funding topics which are
broadly understood to be directly beneficial to the field and are generally
perceived to be nonpartisan. In the case of potential advocacy for issues
which are generally perceived to be partisan issues, the bar for consensus
building is raised substantially. We assert the need for very clearly outlined
and agreed-upon mechanisms to determine which individuals and representative
bodies within the community are given the authority to define community
opinion in these cases. Furthermore, we assert that this is a discussion which
should be embraced before the explicit need arises.

During the discussions of CEF06, the question of how specifically consensus
might be built was largely set aside, though we note that a recurring idea was
that there is presently a lack of a community-wide body that is able to
directly engage in advocacy-adjacent matters. None of the users groups (UEC,
SLUO, USLUA) represents the entire field, and APS DPF, which nominally does
represent the entire field, is limited in its ability to engage in advocacy
because it sits under the larger umbrella of APS. Such a body would require
government relations expertise to advise community members on the impact of
particular policies or advocacy that could be undertaken to influence policy.
APS has such expertise at their disposal, but in order to utilize their
resources we would have to work within the constraints of APS priorities,
which don’t necessarily align with HEP community priorities. We note
additionally that the cost of APS membership has the potential to pose an
exclusionary burden to community members.

###  4.4 APS Resources for Advocacy

One solution to community advocacy on non-funding topics that was identified
is to increase the utilization of the existing infrastructure maintained by
APS. It is certainly the case that APS has invested significant resources into
understanding how to effectively engage in such advocacy, and has developed a
framework to enable community members to opt into their efforts. We note that
a distinct advantage to this approach is that the APS community is larger than
the HEP community, and therefore can have a larger influence through advocacy.
Conversely, the fact that the HEP community is only one of many under the APS
umbrella has the effect to obscure the inner-workings of APS government
relations and to dilute the relative impact of HEP community opinions on
developing APS community opinions. And, as noted above, there may be cases in
which the priorities of the HEP community are not aligned with the priorities
of the broader APS community. In such cases it would be beneficial to maintain
infrastructure internally within the HEP community to engage in HEP-community-
specific advocacy. We additionally note that questions were raised regarding
the efficacy of APS advocacy efforts – we were unable to determine how to
gauge the success of specific campaigns undertaken by APS to influence policy.
Overall our working group was in consensus that steps should be taken to
support and to increase awareness of APS advocacy campaigns within the HEP
community.

###  4.5 Utilization of Current Framework for Additional Advocacy

The discussion about hypothetical community advocacy on non-funding topics was
largely motivated by the success of existing HEP community advocacy efforts
and the observation that the infrastructure to engage in that advocacy could
reasonably be expanded or adapted into a new infrastructure to engage in
additional advocacy. The idea of having the two efforts so closely linked
(hypothetically) carries distinct advantages and disadvantages.

The existing HEP community advocacy effort, anchored by the annual “DC trip”,
is aimed at advocacy for Congressional appropriations and is specifically
timed to maximally align with the cyclic nature of the Congressional budget
process. The tactics of existing efforts have been finely honed with the
federal budget cycle and process specifically in mind. If our end goal is to
influence non-funding policy, then the most appropriate tactics will be
different. Therefore, we generally have concluded that utilizing the “DC trip”
itself would not be the most effective means to advocate for other topics.
Another mechanism would need to be developed to advocate on different issues
effectively, though such an alternate mechanism could still utilize tools that
have made past HEP community advocacy successful.

###  4.6 Impact to Current (Funding) Advocacy

It is important to acknowledge that any hypothetical future advocacy by the
HEP community on “new” topics has the potential to adversely impact existing
advocacy efforts, which are focused explicitly on the funding of the field.
During CEF06 discussions two classes of potential impact on existing advocacy
efforts were identified: internal impacts and external impacts.

As discussed in detail in Ref. [2], the existing HEP community advocacy
efforts, while very successful, are not perfectly robust. There are well-
founded concerns about the continued availability of resources to sustain this
effort into the future before one adds the possibility that resources be
additionally utilized for advocacy on other topics. During discussions on this
topic, concerns were raised about dividing the limited time and labor
resources currently provided by community members between both funding and
non-funding advocacy. There is a risk that doing so would have the effect of
splitting focus, thereby diluting the impact of each effort. It was also
suggested that this division of attention could pose an existential thread to
existing advocacy efforts because the existing organization, which has grown
organically over the past 35+ years, may not be flexible enough to adapt to a
drastically new purpose.

Supposing that sufficient resources were identified for the community to
sustain such a dual-purpose advocacy effort, there is the additional concern
of the external impact that additional advocacy could have on existing
community advocacy for funding. Specifically, concerns have been raised that
our community funding advocacy could lose support from Congressional offices
due to hypothetical stances that the community might take on other (non-
funding) issues. This was discussed specifically in the context of recent
immigration policy changes in the U.S. which have impacted our field. In this
case it was argued that engaging in advocacy on this topic could be seen as
compromising political neutrality, that these kinds of advocacy are better
done through APS and DPF, and that it is important that the HEP community be
seen as nonpartisan. This is a real risk that should be comprehensively
understood in advance of any decision to engage in additional community
advocacy. However, we note that community members have asserted that there are
more important metrics by which to judge the success of our field than
funding. Choosing not to take a stance on current affairs or to engage in
advocacy on these topics is itself taking a stance, and this action too has
real consequences on the field that should be comprehensively studied. Early
career researchers in our community increasingly value the climate of the
field and some number will choose to leave because the community is not moving
fast enough or far enough towards addressing issues that they view to be
important. It is important for us to recognize that there are community
members that do not value funding for our field above all other priorities, in
particular when that funding comes at the expense of prioritizing social
aspects of our community and cultivating a culture that supports individuals
in our community.

###  4.7 Outreach to the Community

Past and ongoing HEP community advocacy efforts have failed to engage a
significant fraction of the community. This is a notable feature in the
context of funding advocacy (and is discussed in Ref. [2]), and important to
revisit in the context of hypothetical additional advocacy on other topics.
Historically, both institutions and individuals within our community have
provided mixed messages on the importance of engaging in advocacy (and
outreach) activities. This generally manifests itself as a bias in career
progression and the granting process against individuals that are perceived to
spend excessive time engaging in such activities. Simultaneously, the end
result of community advocacy for funding of the field is widely acknowledged
to be critical to its current and future successes. It is likely that the
perceived disadvantages to involvement in advocacy for non-funding topics
would not have an equivalent offset and thus would have a net negative effect
on the career progression of individuals that choose to engage in these
activities. We note that there seems to be a (slow) cultural shift towards
acknowledging the value of individuals engaging in these community-oriented
activities, but this has yet to be reflected in the formal institutions of our
field. Additionally, in the case of advocacy, there are legal limits to extent
to which the prioritization of these activities could be reflected in our
institutions. Some employees (e.g. those at national laboratories or community
members serving on HEPAP) can be prohibited from engaging in policy advocacy,
and the Hatch Act prohibits any federal funding (including grant funding and
national laboratory employee salary) to support advocacy activities.

Finally, we note that there is a tendency for work in community engagement
areas to fall on the individuals that are most impacted by the problems they
are trying to solve. It is our assertion that the people most impacted by DEI
and discriminatory immigration policy should not have to bear the
responsibility of advocating for these policies to change. They impact the
whole community and the whole community needs to participate in the choice of
how to address them. And if any advocacy is a part of the plan to address
them, then the whole community needs to participate in that advocacy.

##  5 Conclusion

This paper summarizes the legislative topics that are impactful to the High
Energy Physics community and what government engagement activities and
resources exist to engage in advocacy on these topics. We have discussed how
the community could use the currently underutilized resources from APS, AIP
and AAAS more, and have presented a summary of the discussions of CEF06 on
these topics. This includes a breakdown of the potential advantages and
complications of setting up HEP community advocacy in this area.

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