From March 29th-31st this year, I will be in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the United States high­-energy physics (HEP) community. I will coming as part of an annual visit to Washington which the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Users Organization conducts jointly with organizations representing the scientists using the facilities of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, and the U.S. users of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

From my experience on the trip last year, I know that many offices are concerned not only with the national impact of HEP on technology, innovation, and education, but also with the local economic impact of federal HEP spending in their districts and states. Government data on HEP grants and contracts is scattered across multiple websites and difficult to browse directly. This project grew a bit beyond the scope of a blog post, so check out the project here