Wretched imbecility
grant reviews by political appointees make American Lysenkoism possible
the GOP in Trump 2.0 has morphed into a Bolshevist-Leninist type party structure -- leader above the party and party above the country
https://public-inspection.federalreg...2026-10817.pdf
Last edited by Winehole23; 05-28-2026 at 08:23 PM.
https://elizabethginexi.substack.com...-ombs-proposedThis is arguably the most consequential change in the rule. Senior political appointees, rather than career scientists or program officers, would now be required to conduct a “pre-issuance review” of every discretionary grant before it is awarded. These appointees are explicitly forbidden from deferring to peer reviewers or routinely ratifying their recommendations.
The criteria they must apply include blocking awards that touch on denial of “the sex binary in humans,” illegal immigration, or anything deemed to “promote anti-American values.” The rule also requires that discretionary awards must:
“...demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”
In practice, this gives political appointees a veto over any science that conflicts with the current administration’s ideology.
this is viewpoint discrimination
https://elizabethginexi.substack.com...-ombs-proposed
Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.
"One thing that actually propelled actual US greatness after World War II was tying large scientific investments to a non-partisan, merit-based process. But that is not the way of Trump, who wants to extend tools of control and retribution over science."
normal descriptions sound insane when you say them out loud
policies like this -- right-wing Leninism -- only make sense if Republicans are planning to stay in power forever
no way would they be cool with Democrats wielding similar executive amplitude
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/u...mb-vought.htmlTrump claims federal grant money appropriated by Congress actually is money appropriated for use solely to his political liking, notwithstanding that it's actually earmarked for nonpolitical funding of nonpolitical interests like medical and other scientific research.
all Trump does is f@ck sh!t up and hurt people
https://www.notus.org/policy/usda-bed-bugs-infestationA bed bug infestation at an Agriculture Department building is riling agency staff, reigniting frustrations over remote work policy and making at least some employees sick.
The bugs were found in the building that houses the Animal and Plant Inspection Service, the agency responsible for containing and mitigating the spread of invasive pests in the U.S. The irony, one USDA employee said, “was lost on no one.”
https://apnews.com/article/climate-o...7468a25f8b2674Scientists lose critical climate record as ocean observatory will go dark under Trump funding cuts
...
The initiative launched in 2015 after more than a decade of community planning and construction. It was designed as a 25 to 30-year project, built in part around the oceanographic consensus that detecting meaningful climate signals requires at least three decades of continuous data. “We’ve just got to the 10 year record,” Dever said, “which will give you some hints, but it won’t continue on.”
One significant piece will remain: a seafloor cable network managed by the University of Washington off the Pacific Northwest coast, which will continue providing data on volcanic and seismic activity in the region.
Scientists had seen warning signs as the administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55% cut to the science foundation. Official word to begin shutting down arrived in early May.
The initiative was coordinated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Ins ution in collaboration with the University of Washington and Oregon State University, as well as past partners including Rutgers University and Scripps Ins ution of Oceanography.
The initiative operated on roughly $48 million a year, not including the cost of research vessels, which adds substantially to the overall price. Prior to budget cuts, which began in 2025, around 60 to 70 people worked directly on the project across its partner ins utions, Dever said.
“What’s happening with the Ocean Observatories Initiative is not unique,” he said. “This is just one of a number of science facilities that is being dismantled at the present time. It seems to really mark the end of a federal commitment to basic scientific research — a commitment that has served this nation very well for the last 70 years.”
I can’t stress to everyone how much the Administration just relies on wild assertions of power that lack in any statutory basis. OMB’s claim to be able for instance, to police all grantmaking by agencies, is well, McStuffins. Peer review is often established by statute.
no data, no problem!
science.org joins the resistance
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej3572OMB’s job is to make sure that the funds are released in accordance with the law. But in Project 2025, the blueprint used by the Trump administration to overhaul the federal government according to a theory of greater executive power, Vought called for an activist OMB that serves as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent,’” thereby moving power away from Congress.
The sweeping new regulations proposed by OMB would subject every federal research funding decision to political review.
wasting goods and services we already bought -- spoliation of the public weal
open borders policy for screwworms
Does Jay Bhattacharya still protect scientific researchers from government censorship?
Oh wait, Bhattacharya is the government now
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/w...smid=url-shareSeveral diabetes experts were escorted out of an influential medical conference by the police on Friday after they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific research.
The incident took place Friday morning at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in New Orleans, shortly before Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Ins utes of Health, was scheduled to speak. An organizer announced just before Dr. Bhattacharya’s session that he would no longer be speaking; a senior adviser at the N.I.H. took his place.
The researchers were handing out copies of the editorial, recently published in the association’s flagship journal, which detailed the effects of N.I.H. cuts and other Trump administration actions on diabetes research and outcomes, when security staff asked them to step outside and tried to take away the papers, said Aaron Kelly, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota who was among the researchers escorted out. A video taken by MedPage Today, which first reported the news, shows a tense confrontation, including a man in uniform putting his hands on an expert.
The researchers re-entered the convention center from another entrance, but were confronted again by security staff and police officers.
Last edited by Winehole23; 06-05-2026 at 09:33 PM.
"911, what's your emergency?"
" o, Police? Yeah, our highest award recipient is at our meeting handing out copies of an article that we published."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ics-is-broken/U.S. science is in chaos
...
Last June the budget hawks in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed NASA into offering a broad package of buyouts, paid leave and early retirement. Over the next few weeks nearly 4,000 NASA employees—about a fifth of the workforce—took the deal. Reynolds’s AXIS team lost 20 people. The engineer designing the heaters to keep the x-ray mirror at a constant temperature: gone. The lead project manager: gone. William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope’s mirror technology: gone. “We were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they’d done and where we were with aspects of the design,” Reynolds says.
Around the same time President Donald Trump’s budget proposal came out—with massive cuts to science funding. In the U.S., private money funds vast amounts of scientific development research, and philanthropy contributes a bit, but something like 40 percent of all the funding for basic, blue-sky, exploratory research comes from the federal government. The program that would have funded AXIS was zeroed out entirely.
...
Now, Reynolds says, he’s fine, mostly. He’s a tenured professor and has other research to work on. “The jobs that are lost are the future jobs,” he says. “And there’s an entire field of study in which U.S. leadership is at stake.” The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”
Countless scientists around the country are going through the same thing. Thousands of federal grants have been frozen or canceled, with perhaps 2,600 still in limbo—about $1.4 billion worth. The National Science Foundation and the National Ins utes of Health are awarding three quarters of their usual number of grants. Fewer people are entering graduate programs. Nearly 95,000 scientists have left federal government employment. The NIH used to issue as many as 850 “Notices of Funding Opportunity” every year—requests for proposals that sought specific kinds of research. In 2025 the agency issued 120. By mid-March of 2026, the NIH had sent 14.
...
DEI associations aren’t the only topics that get captured by the new political filters. Now, for the first time, grant recipients aren’t allowed to subcontract to collaborators on projects overseas. “That’s obviously a problem when you study nasty diseases such as Lassa fever and Ebola, because they’re not in this country,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif. “That’s my whole career. This is why I came to the United States.”
Most years, when Andersen advertises a postdoctoral research opportunity in his laboratory, he gets up to 200 applicants with perhaps a third of them from Europe. This year he had 100 applicants and none from Europe. Typically his lab would apply for two or three so-called center grants every year. This past year there were none in virology, immunology or viral immunology to apply for. So what’s next? Andersen, who’s Danish, says that “for people like myself, I think the best option is probably to leave and do science elsewhere.” And he isn’t the only one thinking of getting out. Of about 1,650 scientists who responded to a poll by the journal Nature, 75 percent said they were considering it.
...
Last year a team of economists imagined what this new future might look like by creating an alternative past. In 2025 the NIH cut the amount of grant money awarded by more than 40 percent compared with years prior. What if, the team members asked, the NIH research budget had been 40 percent smaller for the past few decades? Grants in the bottom 40 percent of the priority queue, they reasoned, wouldn’t have been funded. The team tracked those grants to their outcomes—research that never happened in this parallel universe—and found that something like half of all drugs simply wouldn’t exist today. The lost therapies include imatinib, the first real treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, and the lung cancer drug erlotinib.
...
TACOs on ocean monitoring
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/c...nitiative.htmlTrump Administration Backs Off Plan to End Ocean Monitoring
The reversal comes after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday to block the removal of deep-sea monitoring instruments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...core-ios-shareA slow, heavy desert lizard called the Gila monster can go months between meals. In the early 1990s, a physician-scientist named John Eng grew curious about how it keeps its blood sugar steady across those long fasts… Years later, a synthetic version of that molecule became the first GLP-1 drugs
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