A senior U.S. education-research official urged researchers to intensify public advocacy for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) during a March session at the Association for Education Finance and Policy’s annual conference in Chicago. Amber Northern, now working on IES rebuilding recommendations, told attendees that rebuilding IES would require broad public pressure beyond the research community, citing stalled grant funding and recent cuts. The remarks landed amid renewed uncertainty for researchers at private research organizations that have faced firings and contract cancellations. Attendees pushed back on the idea of taking stronger public-facing action, describing how funding losses and grant delays are limiting their ability to pursue new work. Northern’s message framed IES as vulnerable to ongoing political turbulence, while also underscoring a perceived gap between affected researchers and the level of public protest over education data and evidence. The conference’s theme—sustaining education research and evidence in a turbulent era—captured the immediate challenge: researchers are being asked to defend infrastructure for learning analytics even as the pipeline for new federal evidence projects remains unstable.