Hello friends,
Earlier this week, a friend of mine sent an open letter to more than fifty collaborators and colleagues. He reminded us not just that our work inspires him, but that how we choose to approach the work is itself something precious. Most importantly, by pointedly copying us all on the email, he reminded us that we’re far from alone. There are people doing incredible and tireless work all around us.

It made me think about and appreciate you. Every week, I sit down and write this alone, hit send, and hope that it matters. And week in and week out, something like three thousand of you actually read it. That’s extraordinary! It’s an antidote to the despair of feeling like no one else is paying attention. Thank you.

This was Year 2, Week 26. The news is dark, but you’re in good company.

What’s happening in science & higher ed

• Evidence-based public health education took a hit again this week. After losing the legal fight over program content last summer, HHS is now dismantling the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, cancelling 53 of 67 active grants. That’s roughly $68 million of funding, all told, stripped from universities, city and state health departments, and community groups. Some groups received termination letters that allege their current programming “normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.” The money is being rapidly redirected into “body literacy education” intended to promote abstinence and ensure “parental rights” over educational material. Similarly, the Guardian reports that a new CDC memo conveying new administration priorities, including an emphasis on “parental authority.” Evidently, the memo also directs federal grant recipients to deprioritize harm-reduction measures, like overdose education. I haven’t been able to find corroborative reporting or the memo itself yet, but it is consistent with the administration’s vilification of life-saving measures for people struggling with addiction. It’s even more distressing to watch this happen just as new super-potent opioids are entering the mix while withdrawal becomes even more dangerous and complicated.
• While we’re on the topic of fights over education, the Texas State Board of Education has added Bible stories to the mandatory reading lists for K-12 students, beginning in 2030. No texts from other religions are included. In most other states, specific texts are selected by teachers at the district and school-level. This change to the reading curriculum follows the adoption and incentivized use of error-ridden Bluebonnet curriculum materials built around Bible stories, as well as requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State University system confirms that it is mounting Ten Commandments posters in campus classrooms before fall classes start. The University of Arkansas complied with state law requiring “prominent display” of Ten Commandments in classrooms and libraries last year, but the mandate was blocked by a federal judge earlier this year.
• Multiple people have died while hiking the Grand Canyon recently, from what is being reported as “heat-related symptoms.” The high temperatures at the bottom of the Canyon were between 103 and 112 Fahrenheit–the same temperature that it has been in Paris this week. In just one week, forty people have drowned in France as communities desperately seek relief from the scorching heat. New records have been repeatedly set, and then broken again, in the UK and Germany. More than 150 million people across Europe were estimated to be coping with temperatures above 95F today. While European governments scramble to mitigate the danger or at least convey information to people, the Trump administration has upended standing protocol and banned National Park Service staff from publicly reporting deaths or severe injuries on our public lands. Meanwhile, millions of dollars needed for repairs and park staff are instead being funneled into White House vanity projects.
• And a few final pieces of unfortunate news:
  • Yale is reported to be seeking a settlement with the administration, instead of fighting it like Harvard has been.
  • Springer Nature has sold Scientific American to LabX Media Group and is laying off fifteen staff members. The staff had just voted on unionization–ballots were due to be counted by the National Labor Review Board today.
  • Science reports that roughly $1.5 billion dollars of NSF funding is being diverted away from research grants and into new quantum and AI-focused X-Labs, a mechanism that makes it possible to fund “nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm.” One internal memo described a functional budget cut of 30% to their unit and forbade program officers from telling scientists about it. I sadly remember initial coverage of the concept (initially called “Tech Labs”) quoting scientists who express guarded enthusiasm and hope that the concept won’t cannibalize basic research funding. Separately, the NSF has its own new proposed Guidance on Financial Assistance that is now posted and open for public comment. I would like to see confirmation from people skilled at reading regulations of whether researchers are paradoxically required to immediately publish in open access formats, but forbidden from paying publishing charges
  • The good people at Grant Witness have documented a massive slowdown in non-competing grant renewals: the rate of overdue renewals has tripled since last year. And Nature provides a deep dive inside the political review system that is hindering NIH grant review overall. There are currently 235 “disfavored” words (PDF) on the list, and if any of them appear in an application, it classifies the proposal as “not clean” which means it, “likely needs, at a minimum, a revision to align its terminology with NIH priorities.” The unclean words are grouped into categories for climate change, DEI, gender, misinformation, and vaccine hesitancy.

And what’s next

I found myself more angry than usual writing this all up tonight. So much of it feels so egregiously unfair that I decided not to even cover the House Science Committee hearing about combatting “research fraud” using the False Claims Act.

But serendipitously, one of the bright spots in my week just happened to be a webinar on disrupting racist narratives about fraud in Medicaid and other public services, like SNAP. I want to be careful not to conflate the research enterprise with our obligation to help people meet their basic needs with dignity. But one of the speakers beautifully summed up our shared challenge when she said, "If data and facts were enough, we'd be free by now."

We know that the data are not enough, and they never have been, but they give us a powerful place to start. Another speaker offered a lovely gardening metaphor of intercropping–planting and tending our own narrative seeds amidst the dominant frames. In the public benefits space, that looks like differentiating fraud from unintentional mistakes, for example, and naming the powerful actors who are committing intentional fraud.

We have a long gardening season ahead, to be sure. Let’s dig in.
Liz