Photo: Elvert Barnes (CC BY-SA 2.0)

America’s global leadership in science has been built over decades through bipartisan investments in research, universities and a federal workforce of scientists, physicians and public health experts whose work has led to major medical advances and protection against disease.

This foundation is now being weakened, with thousands of federal scientists and public health professionals having been jettisoned by the Trump administration during the past year and a half along with reductions in funding and the elimination of vital programs, research grants and clinical trials.

The costs of cutting American science are significant and will result in fewer life-saving treatments, diminished disease surveillance, slower responses to public health emergencies, reduced food and drug safety and a declining ability to protect Americans from threats we cannot yet foresee.

One of the most alarming consequences that cannot easily be repaired is the loss of scientific talent and expertise that has taken decades to build up - a major brain drain of accumulated experience and leadership that has disappeared.

Between September 2024 and May 2026, the arbitrary workforce cutbacks totaled 21.6% at the National Institutes of Health, 22.2% at the Food and Drug Administration, 28.1% at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35.3% at the National Science Foundation, and 72.1% at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, according to analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management. This loss of staffing includes senior leadership positions at many of these agencies, including the CDC and the NIH, where a majority of the top jobs have no permanent officials.

At the same time, morale at public health agencies has plummeted, with the Partnership’s Public Employee Viewpoint Survey showing that Department of Health and Human Services, where most of the public health agencies are located, registered an employee engagement score of just 20.4 out of 100 last year, placing it among the lowest-scoring large agencies.

This is because the day-to-day of the HHS employee has shifted from working to improve the health of Americans to censoring ideas, excluding already marginalized groups from the benefits of NIH programs, and endangering the American public. For many, whether to stay at the agency has become an impossible choice: abandon their mission and careers or risk degrading their integrity.

In addition, the Partnership analysis of USAspending data shows that project grant funding from public health and disease prevention agencies fell by 11.1% during fiscal year 2025. Even more striking, research and development contract funding from these agencies dropped by 49.4%. And at NIH, accounting changes—a shift to multiyear or forward funding, which puts the full grant amount on the government’s books in year one, instead of year-by-year as in the past—has resulted in NIH funding 24% fewer new research studies in 2025, with fewer scientists receiving project grants compared to 2024. All these NIH cuts also disproportionately affected women and racial, ethnic, and gender minority scientists who were already underrepresented in research.

When federal agencies lose scientists, physicians, epidemiologists, statisticians and laboratory experts and when medical research and public health funding is cut, the effects ripple throughout the entire scientific ecosystem.

The loss of this expertise has been accompanied by fewer research projects, fewer partnerships with universities and medical centers, fewer clinical studies and fewer opportunities for scientific innovation, all of which will take many years and enormous resources to recover from, if it is even possible. It also has meant fewer experts monitoring emerging health threats before they become national crises. Another pandemic isn’t a matter of politics, it is just a matter of time.

Science often succeeds quietly. Vaccines prevent illnesses that never occur, food inspections stop outbreaks before families become sick, researchers identify dangerous pathogens before they spread widely and drug reviewers ensure medicines reaching patients are both safe and effective. When prevention is weakened, the consequences eventually become painfully visible.

The recent outbreaks of cyclosporiasis, the resurgence of measles, the outbreak of hantavirus aboard a cruise ship as well as the spread of Ebola in Africa remind us of the dangers we face as well as the importance of both having the ability to prevent, identify and halt infectious disease outbreaks – responsibilities that have become more challenging with reduced staffing and fewer experts.

In the long term, the significant loss of scientific expertise and federal support will be measured in discoveries and medical advances never made, lives that might have been saved and a nation less prepared for whatever public health challenge comes next.

The declining federal investment in science also will have a major impact on American economic competitiveness and our national security. Discoveries originating in federally supported laboratories have fueled biotechnology, pharmaceutical innovation and countless medical advances that have improved lives, strengthened the economy and made America the world’s leading destination for scientific talent.

This American leadership is now being undermined, and rebuilding a lost generation of scientific expertise and investment will be far more difficult than dismantling it.

***

Dr. Jenna Norton is an NIH whistleblower, career government researcher and program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases writing in her personal capacity. Max Stier is the founding president and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, an organization focused on building a better government and a stronger democracy.

In June last year, hundreds of National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff published the Bethesda Declaration, calling attention to harmful, unlawful policies we were witnessing at NIH under the Trump administration. We were compelled by our belief in the NIH mission and our commitment to the American public to speak up, hoping we might build the awareness, courage, and solidarity needed to save science.

Bethesda Declaration signers have not been alone in speaking up. Some researchers, universities, states, and associations have successfully brought lawsuits to slow unlawful NIH actions. For example, the American Public Health Association, United Autoworkers Union, and several state attorneys general successfully challenged NIH’s unlawful grant terminations. They continue to challenge only slightly altered policies still in use at NIH today. Harvard University won its lawsuit against funding terminations, and several associations and universities successfully challenged a cap on indirect costs.

***

UPDATE: since I originally wrote this back in January, we’ve seen many more wins, including a successful lawsuit led by a coalition of labor unions and University of California faculty, students and staff that has led to two damning admissions by the Trump administration: they terminated grants based on keywords and political affiliation. We also saw an epic turnout of comments on Russell Vought’s proposed OMB rule. (Even if it turns out half a million was an overcount, the publicly posted comments have ticked past 58,000. I know more are still to come because mine isn’t up yet!)

***

Yet, as a lead organizer of the Bethesda Declaration, I know our mission is not yet complete. Many scientists, universities, and scientific associations, both inside the NIH and across the country, are holding out hope that silence will protect them. That if they hunker down, they can simply wait out the storm. But if the pace and scale of disruption continue, there may be little left when the storm clears.

Following Project 2025, a political blueprint to reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power, the Trump administration has fundamentally changed the NIH. The administration terminated or delayed nearly 400 clinical trials, risking the health of 74,000 participants. Although District Court Judge William Young ordered NIH to reinstate unlawfully terminated studies, his order only applied to a discrete set of plaintiffs. Thus, thousands of studies, including clinical trials, remain terminated. Even when reinstated, trial disruptions had lasting consequences: lost trust among affected communities. The White House mandated a multiyear funding (MYF) policy that decreased the amount of new science NIH could fund with the same amount of money. In 2025, this policy contributed to a 24% decrease in newly funded research at NIH, and NIH’s continued use of MYF in 2026 is impeding new science. They froze funding to entire academic institutions, turning NIH into a political cudgel to extort institutions into acquiescing to the administration’s political whims. While NIH has restored the flow of funds to most universities—either through lawsuits or negotiations—the White House has continued to pressure universities to acquiesce to political aims through the Compact for Academic Excellence and proposed rules that would require recipients of federal funding to disavow diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts. This attack on science is well documented, thanks in part to brave NIH staff and researchers who blew the whistle on these policies. The administration shows no sign of changing course. Instead, they congratulate themselves on their “wins. And recently, the administration’s Office of Management and Budget released a proposed rule on the regulation of federal financial assistance that would codify these harmful policies at NIH (and across the government).”^[20]

But this situation is not hopeless. Protecting science requires scientists—in the United States and globally—to build power together. To encourage more people to engage, I share 9 lessons we learned when organizing the Bethesda Declaration. I originally presented these lessons and actions at Dartmouth’s Moral Courage in an Uncertain Time: The Legacy of C. Everett Koop symposium in October 2025.

• Nine Lessons Learned:

  • Scientists can no longer safely claim the privilege of being outside of, or above, politics.Most US scientists depend on public resources. The sudden loss of the bipartisan support that most fields of research in the United States have received for roughly 8 decades is forcing a choice: engage with what’s happening and act, or abandon science.

  • Inaction can be riskier than action. People often heavily weigh the risks of taking action while forgetting the risks of inaction. We knew that organizing and signing the Bethesda Declaration would risk our careers. (In November 2025, I was placed on “nondisciplinary” administrative leave. In May 2026, I was recalled to work without explanation.) We also knew that failing to speak would bring greater harm—not just to our own careers but to the entire scientific enterprise and the nation’s democracy.

  • Progress requires work. Every societal advance has been the product of someone’s blood, sweat, and tears. As former President Barack Obama said (adapting phrases coined by the reformist minister Theodore Parker and the civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr), “The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own. It bends because people like us put our hands on that arc and we pull it.”

  • Do not wait for someone else. When I and other NIH staff first witnessed the destruction inside the NIH, we looked to our leadership to push back. The few people who did were quickly forced out, and the rest remained silent. Then we waited for the academic community to push back, but most people working at universities were facing the same fears and constraints as we were. Finally, we realized that we needed to speak up ourselves—together.

  • Rights must be asserted or they are lost. Free speech is a fundamental American right, enshrined by our founders to protect against authoritarianism. Civil servants have this right, when speaking in their personal capacity, as confirmed by a 1968 Supreme Court ruling, Pickering vs Board of Education. Allowing fear to keep us from asserting our rights means giving up those rights.

  • Everyone has a role. Many of us who organized the Bethesda Declaration (through an encrypted messaging service) used and continue to use pseudonyms, such as “Banana Smoothie” or “Ratson Pollock.” As well as bringing some much-needed levity, these pseudonyms leveled the playing field. Because no one knew anyone’s real identity, ideas from principal investigators were weighed equally to those from administrative assistants. Thus, the leaders of our movement have come from all levels, and people have been able to contribute diverse skills, from congressional and media outreach to copy-editing and creating artwork.

  • Meet people where they are. Each of us has different privileges, liabilities, and risk tolerances. If you are planning an action, provide options to engage individuals at differing risk levels. By allowing people to sign the Bethesda Declaration anonymously, we engaged single parents and people from already marginalized groups, who are less equipped to deal with financial or other hardship. Such individuals are continuing to find low-risk ways to engage, such as writing anonymously, talking to the press “on background” (where they remain unnamed), or supporting others.

  • Avoid burnout. The Trump administration acknowledged its strategy to overwhelm by “flooding the zone.” The onslaught seems constant, and pausing for rest can feel like failure. But we are in a marathon, punctuated with occasional sprints. If you are already organizing action, take breaks with family and friends to remind yourself what you are fighting for. If you are yet to start, know that organizing in itself brings sanity and hope.

  • Courage is contagious. The Bethesda Declaration kick-started a movement to protect science and democracy. Since we published it, staff from at least 8 other US agencies have issued letters raising public awareness of harms happening inside their organizations.

• How scientists can take action

  1. Stay informed. Fired and current NIH staff (in their personal capacities) and NIH-funded researchers are actively building organizations to protect science and share information from inside the NIH. Follow organizations and accounts like 27 UNIHTED, Science and Freedom Alliance, Save Health Research (Instagram), The Principled Investigator (Substack), and members of the NIH community (Bluesky) to get updates on ongoing and upcoming NIH policies, and how to push back when those policies are harmful.

  2. Organize locally. Connect with scientists at your institution or in your professional society. Start conversations about what you can do to protect science and democracy. Off-duty NIH staff can help by sharing updates in community assemblies. Strength exists in numbers. By bringing your voices together, you can encourage your society, institution, or state government to protect science.

  3. Talk to your neighbors. The vast majority of Americans want the United States to remain a world leader in science and believe public investment in science is worthwhile, but far fewer understand the crucial role of colleges and universities. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has tools for engaging with the public on science.

  4. Call your members of Congress. Congress oversees the NIH, and they do care about the opinions of their constituents. Make sure your senators and representatives understand how current policies are affecting your science and communities. Find scripts and contact information at 5 Calls.

As the primatologist Jane Goodall said, “Real hope... requires action and engagement.”

Through collective action we can build hope and bring change.

We are stronger together.

Comment on docket OMB-2026-0034

We are two researchers who have written about the governance structure of science agencies in the United States. We write in our personal capacities.

A common thread of the proposed rule is to centralize power over funding decisions, including science and research funding, in the office of the president. (§200.205: would formalize presidential authority to make new grants; §200.340, would formalize presidential authority to end existing grants).

This is a dangerous step. It is a shift to presidential control of funding decisions that is counter to decades of how US science agencies have operated. In the past few decades at NIH, for example, peer review has been a primary factor by which grant decisions are made. The grantmaking process is run by civil servant scientists, who are selected based on their technical training and experience. Political presidential appointees have had little role in the process [1,2]. The proposed rule would turn this science funding system on its head, formalizing that final decision-making power sits with political appointees. The rule will decrease transparency—increasing opportunities for waste, fraud, and abuse— while impairing scientific discovery. It should be withdrawn in its entirety.

An example from recent history illustrates why the presidentialization of grant decisions runs a grave risk of harming American science: the parallel United States and European Union BRAIN programs. The US BRAIN Initiative was governed and constructed by a system of checks and balances. A President called for this initiative in a State of the Union address, working groups drawn from the scientific community were convened by NIH to issue reports on the design of the NIH initiative, and based on White House interactions with Congress and the reports, high-level priorities and budget were passed into law. Also, critically, the NIH BRAIN initiative used the NIH peer review system—harnessing the scientific community’s distributed expertise—to award individual grants to many different investigators. This system was far from the presidential control system proposed by this rule. In contrast, the EU human brain project was awarded to a single group of scientists who determined the allocation of funds—evocative of the concentration of power outlined by this proposed rule. The US approach has been widely judged to be a greater success [1,3,4]. In fact, the EU approach, after an open letter from European scientists, shifted to a more decentralized funding approach, moving away from a presidential-like governance system [5].

Presidential control will create unpredictable, damaging shifts. Science research operates on long-term timelines. Giving presidents final power over grants would mean that every four years there is the potential for dramatic shifts in science directions. Science projects cannot run with that uncertainty. A three year grant or project could only be begun at the start of a presidency; a five year or longer project would be too risky to start. Moreover, using the outcome of one election—the presidential election—as the principal basis to set science priorities means that major priority shifts can happen with small numbers of marginal vote shifts, adding unpredictability. Using the legislative process to set directions is a better way to determine priorities for taxpayer expenditures on science.

The harms of this rule extend to all federal funding, not just science. Research science is merely the clearest example of these problems, as asserting presidential control over federal discretionary funding of all sorts, as the rule intends, would change the relationship between the US government and society. An article in the Harvard Business Review [6] noted that a recent Supreme Court decision to increase presidential control over agencies would likely lead to “less transparency” and “less certainty and consistency” for businesses. Similar harms hold for this rule and federal funding. This rule would make government less effective and transparent and harm funding recipients, whether universities, private companies, or local or state governments, who all need predictability and transparency to do efficient work.

Allowing the president to control grants is less, not more, accountable. The rule’s intent to increase presidential control is an extension of the logic of the unitary executive legal idea to grant decisions [7,8]. While that theory has been called “embarrassing in its speciousness” [9] based on historical and Constitutional grounds, it also relies on a flawed assertion of legitimacy. The logic behind this rule’s shift of grant control to presidential authority is often justified as increasing democratic accountability, because “the president is elected (along with the vice president) by the entire Nation” [11]. But the vast majority of the country does not have a meaningful vote in the close presidential elections of recent times, due to the Electoral College. As Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker said in 2014, “The nation as a whole is not going to elect the next president. Twelve states are.” [10] In recent elections, the battleground states represent approximately 30% of the national voting population (e.g. 31% in 2020 [12]). The lack of a meaningful vote in non-battleground states depresses voter engagement there [13], so that the total national vote count is also not a meaningful source of legitimacy.

Therefore, the proposed rule’s nearly full presidential control over grants is difficult to justify on grounds of democratic accountability [14], especially because the president is elected by such a small portion of the population [15]. The United States has historically relied on a more robust form of democratic accountability, with both Congress and the president having roles to play in agency governance [16,17]. In fact, science grantmaking is a place where the president has played a quite minimal role, with Congress doing the most to set priorities, and expert agency employees along with the scientific community implementing them [1,18]. The radical change in science grant governance proposed by this rule will make the government less accountable to the American people, not more.

We urge the proposed rule be withdrawn, and a commission be created—engaging Congressional, scientific, and public stakeholders over at least a year—to carefully and transparently weigh any proposals like this rule that would radically transform the US science and innovation ecosystem.

Mark H. Histed, University of Maryland

Natalie B. Aviles, University of Virginia

The authors are writing in their personal capacities; institutions are listed for identification purposes.

References

[1] Aviles, Natalie and Histed, Mark “Presidentialist Governance is Incompatible with the American Science Superpower” SSRN, 2026. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6347458

[2] Aviles, Natalie and Histed, Mark. “How Congress can restore the independence of US science” Nature, 2026. PMID: 41803493. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00703-9

[3] Abbott, A “Documentary Follows Implosion of Billion-Euro Brain Project” Nature, 2020 December 1.

[4] Bader, Farah, Clayton Bingham, Karen K. David, et al “The NIH BRAIN Initiative’s Impacts in Systems and Computational Neuroscience, 2014-2023” eLife, 2025 14 (April). https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.106137.1

[5] Enserink, Martin, and Kai Kupferschmidt “Updated: European Neuroscientists Revolt against the E.U.’s Human Brain Project” Science, July 11, 2024. https://www.science.org/content/article/updated-european-neuroscientists-revolt-against-eus-human-brain-project

[6] Levin, Blair and Downes, Larry “The End of Independent Federal Agencies Will Change Your Business” Harvard Business Review, June 29, 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/06/the-end-of-independent-federal-agencies-will-change-your-business

[7] Histed, Mark “The Unitary Executive Takes Over New Territory” The Atlantic, June 17, 2026 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/unitary-executive-scientific-research/687565/

[8] Marshall, Josh “Surveying the Criminal Conduct Terrain” Talking Points Memo, June 1, 2026 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/surveying-the-criminal-conduct-terrain

[9] Shane, Peter “The Unbearable Lightness of the Unitary Executive” The Regulatory Review, March 3, 2025.thttps://www.theregreview.org/2025/03/03/shane-the-unbearable-lightness-of-the-unitary-executive-theory/

[10] Gass, Nick “Walker: Only 12 states are going to pick the next president” Politico, Sept 1, 2015 https://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/scott-walker-2016-12-states-213212

[11] Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, 591 U.S. 197 (2020)

[12] Koza, John, Barry Fadem et al. “Every Vote Equal” 5th edition, October 2024. https://www.every-vote-equal.com/

[13] Gimpel, James, Karen Kaufman, and Shanna Perason-Merkowitz “Battleground States versus Blackout States: The Behavioral Implications of Modern Presidential Campaigns”, Journal of Politics, 2007 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00575.x

[14] Stephanopoulos, Nicholas “Accountability Claims in Constitutional Law”, Nw. U. L. Rev. 989, 2018.https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/nulr/vol112/iss5/2

[15] Shaw, Katherine ‘“A Mystifying and Distorting Factor”: The Electoral College and American Democracy’, Mich Law Review, 2022 April. https://michiganlawreview.org/journal/a-mystifying-and-distorting-factor-the-electoral-college-and-american-democracy/

[16] Chafetz, Josh “Of Multiplicity and Accountability”, SSRN, July 10, 2026 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6907421

[17] Lawrence, Matthew, Eloise Pasachoff, and Zachary Price “Appropriations Presidentialism”, Georgetown Law Journal, 2025 https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/submit/glj-online/glj-online-vol-114/appropriations-presidentialism/

[18] Aviles, Natalie. “An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute” Columbia University Press, 2024.

The only thing more dangerous than leadership lacking knowledge is leadership lacking intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately, the latter reflects the situation at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the current administration. NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya and Deputy Director Matthew Memoli publicly claimed in December that they “cured” DEI. These authors have been handed authority and could be mistaken for experts. However, Bhattacharya and Memoli (and the policies they are implementing) demonstrate a clear lack of expertise, or even a basic understanding of the subject matter, as well as a failure to seek out relevant information before making key decisions. They constantly conflate several distinct concepts and activities, lumping them together under a single banner of “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Any policies or programs they oppose politically are flagged with this undefined label to justify termination, despite their scientific merit.

This administration has mis-used the term ‘DEI’ to eliminate policies and practices that were intended to broaden the diversity of human study participants included in biomedical research, support studies focused on health disparities or health equity, and foster the inclusion of people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives in the scientific workforce. These are entirely different types of activities and areas of scientific investigation, each of which NIH has addressed through separate policies and programs across the research ecosystem. The breadth of different NIH activities that are now being lumped into one “DEI” bucket were implemented individually over time, and all of them were enacted to increase the quality and relevance of the science being supported.

Bhattacharya and Memoli seem unaware of why these different policies and practices were put into place at NIH in the first place, and worse, they are entirely uninterested in finding out. As a result, weaponization of the DEI label is disrupting the merit-based prioritization of cutting-edge scientific research. This does not bode well for the future of our health, healthcare workforce, or the biomedical research enterprise.

The mission of NIH is “to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and to apply that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” NIH policies to promote study inclusion, health disparities and health equity research, and workforce diversity were implemented to advance scientific discovery and innovation within this mission. The broad concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion are thus essential to achieving these goals, and the political censorship we are seeing today undermines them. The need for high-quality science has not changed. Our ability to deliver it should not be derailed by the whims of the current administration.

Diversity as the basis for scientific observation and inquiry

Variation has always been a central aspect of biological research; scientists notice patterns of similarities and differences within and across natural populations, then design studies to investigate them. When everything is the same, scientists create differences in an experimental setting to see what downstream changes occur. It turns out that studying wild mice with natural genetic diversity in their populations reveals much more about what genes do than similar studies in which lab mice have been bred to be nearly identical. The variation across animals that come from different places in the wild provides “reservoirs of functional genetic diversity” that can lead to new discoveries.

At the NIH (and elsewhere), diversity in human populations is used in many contexts and is not confined to, nor fully captured by, race, sex, or gender. In a broad sense, human diversity can apply to, among other things: ancestral origins; nationality; language; self-identified race and/or ethnicity; geographic region including rural or urban locations; sex; sexual preference; gender; age; socioeconomic status; educational background, attainment, and area(s) of expertise; physical environment, including climate, exposure to pollutants; and access to healthcare.

Drawing on multiple dimensions of natural human diversity makes for more innovative and valuable science. Including broadly diverse study populations and cohorts is paramount to robust research results that lead to better downstream health outcomes for everyone. When people are left out of research due to systemic and structural barriers, without programs or policies to address known gaps in inclusion, effectiveness suffers, not just for those who are left out, but for everyone. Research based on the full breadth and depth of human biology makes for more robust outcomes than sampling based on convenience, which often happens in the absence of funded programs to support enhanced diversity in research.

Dr. Bhattacharya frequently focuses on replication and reproducibility, and has elevated this to an agency-wide initiative. Often, the lack of replication or reproducibility of results from a previously published human study is due to the lack of diversity in the initial study population. This has caused real harm to patients as a result of missing diversity. For example, genetic studies of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a serious and potentially life-threatening heart condition, failed to include diverse control populations, producing a result that looked real in relatively homogeneous European ancestry cohorts, but was in fact a false-positive. This unreplicated finding led to unnecessary, invasive clinical interventions of unaffected African American patients–demonstrating the importance of considering diversity among control populations for discovery, as well as in replication studies. Furthermore, research areas with the greatest need for replication of prior studies include clinical drug trials, which have had limited diversity among study participants and require more (not less) prioritization on the basis of background diversity.

Research study inclusion

As Bhattacharya and Memoli assert, “everyone wants science that benefits their health.” They also state that the 100-year mission of the NIH “unites all Americans of every race, color and creed,” but history shows this is a highly idealized misrepresentation.

Throughout much of its 100-year history, NIH implicitly focused on the health of white men. (This may well be related to the fact that, for much of its history, NIH was also run disproportionately by white men…but we will get to the workforce diversity issue later on.) NIH did not consider women’s health in any systematic way until 1990, and did not require funded researchers to consider sex as a biological variable until 2016. This historical lack of inclusion led to underfunding of ovarian, uterine, and cervical cancers and other diseases, such as lupus, that primarily impact women. Failure to study the impact of social and biological differences among the genders and sexes, respectively, meant that symptoms of heart disease and autism in women and girls were often missed because they differed from symptoms in men and boys. Dr. Bhattacharya acknowledged at an NICHD Council meeting that the NIH still has a long way to go in supporting research on women’s health. It is unclear how cutting the programs that focus on inclusion will get us there.

Many NIH-funded studies excluded, abused, and/or exploited people from marginalized populations, leaving a long trail of harm and resulting mistrust that still has not been repaired. Among the most infamous cases is the agency’s widespread use of “immortal” cancer cell lines harvested from Henrietta Lacks (nicknamed “HeLa”) in 1951 without her or family’s consent. The NIH’s and federally funded researchers’ use of HeLa cells continued without consent for several decades until an agreement with the Lacks family was reached in 2013. No monetary benefits have reached the Lacks family, despite Henrietta’s cells being the material foundation for profitability of the modern biomedical research enterprise. When we ignore this history, it becomes easier to attack “DEI” in theory. In practice, inclusion is critical for the future of science.

It was not until 1993, when an act of Congress mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in federally funded biomedical research, that investigators were required to collect and report demographic information on study participants. Today, data collected in this way show that most groups traditionally excluded from clinical research are still underrepresented, and more than half of clinical trials did not meet planned enrollment targets. Other aspects of diversity have taken longer for inclusion. Sex and Gender Minorities (SGM) were officially recognized as a group designated for inclusion in NIH research in 2016, and only since 2019 have NIH studies been required to consider people across the entire lifespan, from childhood to old age, in their research proposals.

Over the course of its long history, NIH has intentionally moved towards recognizing and studying the health of all people, progressively taking into consideration more aspects of inclusion and expanded definitions of diversity. Until NIH research truly represents its entire constituency and produces results that impact “Americans of every race, color, and creed,” this focus on inclusion will continue to be a necessary element of publicly funded health research, in order to provide health solutions that work for everyone.

Health disparities and health equity research

In 1990, the Office of Minority Programs (OMP) was established to investigate and improve conditions that influence racial and ethnic differences in morbidity and mortality. Ten years later, Congress mandated the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD), which became an Institute (NIMHD) in 2010. Congress charged NIMHD with systematically supporting health disparities research by examining differences in the prevalence and outcomes among racial and ethnic groups for many chronic diseases. Bhattachaya and Memoli assert that “chronic disease does not discriminate,” however, unfortunately–the reality is that striking disparities in both prevalence and outcomes exist for many chronic diseases, including some of the leading causes of death in the US, such as heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease.

Chronic diseases are by nature complex and have multiple interacting causes, including environmental conditions, social context, and economic stability, a group of factors which are generally called “social determinants of health (SDOH).” Studying these conditions in a sufficiently large population with a disproportionate burden of disease and with appropriate variables, considering biological and social causes together, can yield novel insights into disease etiology that lead to the development of better interventions and/or treatments for everyone. For example, equity-focused quality of care interventions in maternal health and cancer have led to improved outcomes for all patients regardless of racial or ethnic identity, while also reducing disparities.

Workforce diversity

A large body of peer-reviewed evidence shows that diverse groups do better work, come to more accurate conclusions, and propose more inventive solutions than monolithic groups. NIH policies have thus expanded over the years to become more intentional and systematically inclusive in improving the diversity of perspectives within the scientific workforce. Increasing the diversity of teams conducting, evaluating, and funding scientific research is an evidence-based method to improve outcomes. Therefore, for projects involving many people, NIH applicants were asked to consider how they would enhance diverse perspectives. The NIH also set these goals for scientific review panels, advisory boards, and NIH staff for similar reasons. These decisions were made to enhance the ability of the US scientific workforce to reach ambitious scientific goals. This had nothing to do with political ideology.

While inclusion of diverse perspectives has been a specific focus of NIH programs, no individual characteristic such as race, ethnicity, sex, gender, geographic location, background, educational attainment, career level, area of expertise, experience, or way of knowing was ever prioritized or considered in lieu of rigorous qualifications for research funding. Diversity Training Programs and Diversity Supplements were always focused on supporting the best and the brightest scholars with the highest promise for scientific achievement. NIH diversity supplement applicants were required to include a ‘qualification statement’ focused on the individual’s untapped talent and skills, as well as unique perspective(s) that would be valuable to the field of study. In some cases, this statement may have included references to race, ethnicity, or gender-minority status, but not necessarily. For example, an individual with physical impairment received a supplemental award for special equipment they needed to accommodate their disability while studying their own disease. Another awardee was a non-traditional student who spent their young adulthood raising their younger siblings after their parents died. These individuals might not have taken the same academic or career path of other researchers, but they had the necessary qualifications and raw ingredients for success. Both of these awards were terminated, along with hundreds of other awards to early career scientists, and thousands of awards in total.

Terminations were implemented not with any scientific rationale, but because either the application itself or the funding announcement under which they applied (written and published according to NIH policy) contained words that the current administration found objectionable. These terminations were made using similar processes recently exposed in depositions concerning terminations of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awards, in which DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) employees describe being charged with the elimination of “waste, fraud, and abuse” across the government. DOGE staff canceled awards for DEI-related themes, despite being unable to define “DEI.” In this administration, politics have overtaken evidence as the currency of scientific merit, as funding is diverted from important research studies and promising young investigators to advance a political agenda of censorship.

Censorship

Each of the activities above are now subjected to political oversight, censorship and ultimately consideration for termination. The DEI screening processes initially implemented by DOGE are now embedded at US science agencies, carried out by civil servants who experience retaliation for speaking up. Any disagreement is overruled or even censured. As things stand, investigators must choose between removing “terms that may potentially be associated with misalignment with the agency’s priorities” or losing their funding. This is an impossible choice for investigators prioritizing research that intentionally includes diverse populations or advances health equity. This administration has instilled widespread fear among scientists at NIH and the institutions it supports, as leaders worry their actions may negatively impact others. As a result, many more people disagree with what is happening than feel safe to make this known to their colleagues. If this resonates–know that you are not alone.

The words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have been scrubbed from the approved lexicon, as have references to “underrepresented” and “marginalized” groups. NIH no longer considers “health equity” among its priorities, and the concept of gender identity and its associated terminology has been entirely eliminated from use at the agency. “LatinX,” “pregnant people,” and everyone who identifies as something other than their sex at birth are no longer acknowledged as categories of people who exist (and could therefore be intentionally included in biomedical research).

NIH deployed a “computational text analysis tool” that screens all grants and applications, flagging terms like “African American,” “Black American,” and “Hispanic American,” but not “white American” or “European American.” Scientific concepts such as “vaccine hesitancy,” “mRNA vaccines,” “pandemic response,” and “climate change” are also being removed, and the development of vaccines and new cures for HIV is being scaled back with an uncertain future. While NIH policy requires manual review of grants flagged for use of this terminology, the scientific program staff doing the review report that they are often unable to overturn the original results, regardless of the scientific justification for the flagged words. These changes are being made to active projects that were written and reviewed by members of the scientific community and deemed valuable as originally proposed.

Interfering with research proposals for political reasons in the absence of scientific rationale circumvents the agreements between NIH and the institutions that receive these awards. Requiring compliance to politically-motivated changes in order to receive funding threatens the academic and intellectual freedom of investigators, and preventing NIH staff from addressing it violates their First Amendment right to free speech. Rather than eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse at NIH, the anti-DEI campaign championed by Bhattacharya and Memoli has obligated investigators, administrators and NIH staff to waste valuable time (and taxpayer dollars) discussing, rewriting and re-reviewing language that would otherwise be unchanged. The time spent on modifying the wording of countless documents has accomplished nothing except diminishing our nation’s capacity to conduct globally competitive, cutting-edge research, and perhaps moving us closer to a world of homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion–to paraphrase US District Judge William Young.

Call to Action

Despite the concerted efforts over decades to foster diversity in the scope of its research questions and study participants, and to increase inclusion and representation in the NIH workforce, one could argue these efforts have been sporadic, progressed too slowly, and remain incomplete. None of this is an argument for halting that progress.

Politically appointed leaders at the NIH have the authority to determine how Congressional priorities are implemented, but they cannot change facts with political ideology or erase the record of established evidence for what works. NIH staff are required to follow lawful directives from leadership, but their belief in scientific principles and knowledge of established evidence remain intact. Program Officers, Institutions and investigators should continue their commitment to nurturing the careers of talented and dedicated scientists, no matter who they are, promoting good research ideas no matter who they come from, and developing programs that value and integrate diverse opinions and perspectives in order to produce better research that serves more people.

We must all continue to reject demands that require investigators and recipients of federal funding to disavow DEIA (DEI + Accessibility) programs. NIH staff and reviewers must continue to ensure that studies include representative populations for the disease(s) in question and develop new programs that consider the needs of all populations, especially those experiencing health disparities.

In order to advance science, it is important that researchers adhere to ethical and rigorous consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion in all relevant areas of their work, regardless of which words they have been allowed to use in their applications. Rather than compromising and/or complying with unreasonable (and potentially unlawful) demands, researchers and institutional leaders should stand up for their academic, intellectual, and Constitutional freedoms to conduct rigorous scientific research and publish their findings without fear of censorship, repression, or political interference.

We realize this is no small task. Alone, it is overwhelmingly daunting and can be scary. The solutions are communication, coordination and collective action. The scientific community is large and powerful. If we stand up, together, we can make necessary changes based on solid evidence for what works, while resisting politically motivated changes that seek to undermine our progress in science. Our ability to continue producing valid, scientifically sound research to improve health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability for ALL Americans depends on it.

In the past, NOFOs have been used by NIH staff, civil servant scientists, to focus funding on specific scientific areas they feel are not getting enough research attention.

There has been a discussion this week about the role of NOFOs. I’m writing here to address a central point in that discussion, about the importance of transparency and the role of the scientific community in making funding decisions. Now and going forward, we will need to defend that role, because the major thrust of Vought’s efforts now, planned in Project 2025, is to centralize power in the office of the president and strip it from agencies and from the scientific community.

Who gets to be the deciders

Earlier this week, Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at NIH most recently at NCCIH (the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health), posted an article about the lack of NOFOs under Trump. That was followed by a post from DrugMonkey, a pseudonymous NIH-funded scientist, called “NOFOs are Dead. And That is Not The Actual Problem.“

There are many points where I agree with the two posts, but I want to disagree with one thing in the second post, on democratic oversight and governance. In response to Ginexi’s observation that NOFOs have been used by NIH scientist program staff to direct funding to new areas, DrugMonkey urges her to think bigger — saying that program staff already have the ability to direct funds in new directions and should have used it1. DM says that program staff could have simply pulled out applications they like, outside the rankings and scores that result from peer review, and selected grants on understudied topics for funding.

I disagree that program staff should have done this.

There are two big reasons for that: transparency, and democratic governance principles at NIH.

Sunlight, the disinfectant

First, transparency. Rather than program staff picking grants and investigators to fund, it’s better for accountability to announce publicly when NIH wants to shift research in new directions. Published NOFOs provide that transparency. Even if the funds, after the NOFO and the review of grants, end up going to investigators that are ‘hot’ amongst their peers or favored (as DM notes can happen), at least the whole field knows what NIH is trying to do. If scientists across the country are unhappy with the new direction the NOFO announces, they have ways to respond. They can speak up — directly to program officers, through advisory panels and councils, or publicly. NIH may not be perfect at listening to the scientific community, but there are many ways in which it does so.

Transparency from NOFOs is a good thing, even if the grants funded in the end don’t always turn out the way any one of us might want. I have my own views on what parts of science are most promising, and what NIH should prioritize, but I’m only one voice and I’m glad we are drawing expertise from the whole scientific community. And if scientists are unhappy with scientific directions, we have the chance to work to persuade other scientists and build support for our views, influencing NIH from the bottom up.

NIH’s democratic engagement with the scientific community

That engagement with the scientific community — that is, democratic accountability to the scientific community — is central to what has made NIH excellent. Which leads to the second point, on democratic governance of science.

We don’t want program staff at NIH pulling out, in a wholesale way, the grants they like and choosing what to fund. NIH grant funding decisions have for many decades been made largely based on study section peer review scores, and that empowers the scientific community and gives practicing scientists power. There are few or no other agencies that give so much power over funding decisions to an external constituency. Even if we’re unhappy with aspects of NIH peer review, we can appreciate that NIH does engage scientists.

As the sociologist Natalie Aviles has described (and we have written about together), NIH has effectively had two constituencies it answers to: the public, represented by Congress and the legislative process, and the scientific community, represented formally through advisory committees, including peer review panels and institute councils. We should celebrate how well NIH has done at empowering the external scientific community.

Democratic governance reduces political capture

Why is democratic engagement with the scientific community so important?

NIH staff at all levels are often excellent, often have scientific training, and often have a strong commitment to the NIH mission over their own interests. NIH has been in many ways a model within the US government for accountability and excellence. But even with great staff, it’s just a general principle of public governance that democratic empowerment prevents political capture and provides accountability. Here we are talking about grantmaking, but a similar point has been widely discussed for regulatory agencies — that the Administrative Procedure Act, and other laws that create transparency and draw in external advice, reduce corruption and presidential capture and improve government performance.

Before Trump we might have been happy to hire exceptional NIH staff and let them make decisions about what to fund. But for at least the near future, until US democracy is re-stabilized, there are dangers in giving too much power over science to individuals or small groups of people.

The NIH peer review panels are the heart of what makes NIH excellent. And that’s because those panels give power to many different scientists to make fine-grained decisions about what grants to fund. As time goes on we are likely to see the Project 2025 / Vought forces seek to disempower peer review because they want to take power away from average scientists. We should be ready to fight that.

This is a contributed post from Mark Histed, who is writing in his personal capacity in personal time about matters of public concern.

After the bill’s passage, praise continues from scientists and organizations alike, with some overselling the bill’s wins and obscuring its weaknesses. In the words of an anonymous Congressional aide, “People are celebrating things that not that long ago would have been seen as defeats.”

Here, we review the strengths and weaknesses of the bill, examine why we are celebrating a bill that would have been seen as lackluster in prior years, and explore how this celebratory posture might affect future funding for NIH. As we prepare for fiscal year (FY) 2027 appropriation discussions, we hope to engage more scientists in the process now, and to use our collective power to set our expectations higher and fight for those expectations.

The bottom line budget

The bill gives NIH $48.7 billion for FY2026 – a $415 million raise in nominal dollars over FY2025. This is certainly far better than the 37% cut proposed by Trump and his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, Russell Vought. Passing a full budget instead of running on a continuing resolution introduces some certainty that will allow previously held scientific work to continue. And the budget reauthorized and explicitly funded some key programs, including programs at risk (or previously cut) by this administration, such as the Office of Research on Women’s Health, Primate Research Centers, and the Safe to Sleep Campaign.

Yet, estimates suggest inflation is driving the cost of doing science up by about 2.6% per year. Thus, accounting for inflation, the FY2026 budget “increase” will operate as a cut of approximately 1.7% in real dollars. This budget can only be seen as a win against the absurd baseline of the proposed Trump-Vought budget. Allowing ourselves to base our expectations on this opening bid—from a man who styles himself an artful negotiator—gives credence to his claims. Trump and Vought gave an incredibly low budget offer, seemingly as a negotiating tactic, which anchored everyone’s expectations at a low point. Now, scientists are celebrating a budget that would have looked anemic last year. As we look toward FY2027, we should recognize that the Trump administration is negotiating from a position of weakness, given broad support for public investment in science and the congressional rebuke of his budget proposal. Every government, autocratic or not, cares about public opinion, and attacks on science and biomedical research are highly unpopular.

Further, these appropriated funds remain in the hands of an administration that is “presidentializing” NIH and has repeatedly revealed an antiscience sentiment. The White House has exerted unprecedented control over how NIH functions, asserting the right to veto new funding opportunities, terminate previously funded research based on partisan priorities, control hiring, arbitrarily fire staff, replace Institute directors with cronies, among other overreaches. As discussed previously on this blog, known conspiracy theorist Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr., will continue to determine how these funds are spent, along with covid contrarian Jayanta Bhattacharya. This duo unleashed substantial damage on science in FY2025 with just about the same operating budget. Judging by Bhattacharya’s self-congratulatory stance, they don’t appear to be considering a change of course in FY2026. Whether these FY2026 funds will be spent based on science rather than partisan politics remains in question.

Indirect cost rates

On indirect costs, the appropriation bill also yields a win, but again this win is relative to lowered expectations. The bill language clearly and unquestionably refutes the NIH attempt to impose a 15% cap on indirects. But that cut in indirects was illegal. A district court ruling that deemed the cap illegal was recently upheld on appeal. The new statutory language in the bill does help ensure that a Supreme Court, which has been unabashedly siding with the Trump administration, cannot “play Calvinball” with this issue. But having to pass laws twice so Trump and Vought follow them and the Supreme Court respects the law is an abysmally low baseline. Scientific societies and advocacy groups urgently need to consider how best to confront a rogue Supreme Court and a lawless administration.

The multiyear funding squeeze

With Russell Vought—who is expert at weaponizing the mundane minutia of government buerocracy—at the head of the OMB, we must look beyond the topline budget number. When we do, we find the poison pill of multiyear funding does remain buried within the bill. Multiyear funding acts to cut NIH funding without cutting the NIH budget. In FY2025, the National Cancer Institute payline dropped to 4%, compared to 10% the prior year, and the NCI’s own website attributed this drop to multiyear funding. In FY2025, multiyear funding also contributed substantially to a 24% year-over-year drop in new research funding.

Despite oft repeated claims that the bill allows “no more” multiyear funding, it is important to note that the “more” is relative to FY2025 levels. A last minute change shifted the limit from fiscal year 2024 levels (about 6%), as proposed in the bipartisan Senate version of the bill, to fiscal year 2025 levels (about 39%). This change was driven by the White House and was reportedly delivered to House Republicans by none other than Russell Vought. While limiting multiyear funding to 39% is certainly better than the ludicrous 100% rate the administration targeted, allowing it to continue at FY2025 levels means we will see similar reductions sustained in FY2026.

So why does the Trump White House seem so insistent on this multiyear funding provision? One possible reason: reducing the number of funded grants per year shrinks the research workforce and punishes universities. As Vice President JD Vance said, “Universities are the enemy.” But another reason could be that it sets the stage for much bigger and more destructive changes to NIH. The multiyear funding strategy frees up NIH outyear commitments, potentially enabling a more rapid transition to the block grant funding model that Vought promised in Project 2025. That is, it’s harder to shift from project grants to send money to the states as block grants if a big proportion of the NIH budget remains tied up in out-year commitments. Under a block grant approach model, NIH would in practice cease to exist and science would operate in a disconnected web of state level funding. Also, if NIH follows the pattern of other programs structured as block grants) funding amounts would diminish over time. Block grants are often seen by libertarians who want to cut government as a way to create cuts that are more politically palatable than cutting popular programs.

The limitations of report language

Other wins in the NIH funding bill exist only in report language. Such report language includes direction for NIH to continue its longstanding practice of including external subject matter experts in the search process for Institute Directors. Report language carried forward from the July Senate report directs that, within 90 days of enactment, the NIH must 1) provide the Committees on Appropriations justification for “the training and career development programs that have been terminated since December 2024” and 2) re-enact the “NIGMS bridging programs that support historically underserved students and researchers to pursue STEMM studies,” including the Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers [MOSAIC] program.

Getting this down in written congressional direction is in many ways a big win. It keeps these issues front and center, and ensures (assuming NIH complies) that these issues land in the Congressional record.

But report language is not law. Given that NIH appears to be under the close watch of “shadow President,” Vought and the administration has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to push hard against the limits of the law, even breaking it, it’s hard to believe Trump’s NIH will be meaningfully constrained by the non-statutory directives from the Congressional report. While this language does not carry the weight of law, we must urge leadership at the NIH to adhere to these directions and demand that Congress hold their feet to the fire.

Where do we go from here?

With the LHHS bill well on its way to passing through Congress and being signed into law, we have little room for addressing concerns by stopping its passage. But that does not mean we can do nothing. Here are steps we recommend in this moment:

1. Read the LHHS bill. Look at the details of the appropriations bill, including both its wins and weaknesses. Understand what is in the report language–and thus does not carry the weight of law–and what is actually in the bill. Let us know if we’ve missed any major wins or losses!

2. Keep pressure on NIH leadership to follow the directions from the Congressional report language, including reinstating programs like MOSAIC, using a rigorous search process for hiring Institute Directors, and documenting the impacts of multiyear funding in real time. The administration has caved to public pressure in the past. They should follow congressional intent as expressed in the report, even if it is not statutory law.

3. Be aware of the multiyear funding language and that Vought can (and likely will) use the provisions to further gut NIH and US science. Especially if NIH fails to follow Congressional directives, we must track the impacts ourselves using tools like NIH Reporter. Also keep an eye out for new bureaucratic tricks inside NIH.

4. Demand Congress advance legislation that protects the NIH mission. For example, the Follow the Science Act, introduced by Representative Diana DeGette (CO-01), provides a strong start to mitigate political interference in NIH science and prevent future wasteful and harmful grant terminations. Bigger picture, Congress should think about how the president and executive branch have asserted unprecedented power over NIH this year and revert NIH to its pre-2025 governance approach where scientists, not the President, remained in control.

5. Start communicating with Congress about the FY2027 NIH funding bill now. The President’s budget for FY2027, already overdue, is expected in March. Should the president again propose ridiculous budget cuts, we should recognize this as a negotiating tactic. This Congress has now clearly, in a bipartisan and bicameral way, rejected NIH reorganization and big cuts in the NIH budget. The president is not going to be able, with falling public approval numbers, to force his party in Congress to jam these measures through. We must not wait to discuss what we want in the FY2027 budget to defend NIH and US science.

I would like to acknowledge the contributions of several colleagues for the thinking that went into this blog, including Mark Histed (for his insights on science policy), Ian Morgan (for his reminders on several positive aspects of the bill), Rosa Lafer-Sousa (for speaking the words that inspired this blog’s title) and others who wish to remain anonymous.

This is a false choice.

Science and democracy are fundamentally linked. Both science and democracy depend on the same underlying principles: evidence, accountability, open debate, and transparency. Science cannot flourish in the authoritarian environment advanced through the brutal and fundamentally anti-American tactics of ICE. The current administration is attacking science in part because its values are incompatible with their authoritarian regime. Further, science is an international pursuit that extends across borders and relies on participation from across the globe. More than a quarter of the United States research workforce is foreign born. While the majority of foreign-born scientists in the United States are documented, recent Supreme Court rulings allow ICE to racially profile people and as a result it has repeatedly detained citizens and lawful permanent residents, including scientists with green cards. Science cannot achieve success when so many of our colleagues feel unsafe in the country they now call home.

Even if funded, NIH remains in the hands of lawless and antiscience leaders. ICE is not a rogue agency. Its tactics are not divorced from the values and aspirations of the administration that runs it. The administration is bringing those same values—power, control, and fear—to NIH. The Department of Health and Human Services is overseen by Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr., a conspiracy theorist and modern day Lysenko, who will have substantial latitude to drive policy and funding decisions. This is particularly true under an executive order that demotes peer review to mere suggestion for consideration by political appointees. With a very similar budget in fiscal year 2025, this administration managed to execute a devastating attack on science, with no apparent concern for the harm they caused to participants and public health. They have made no indication of changing course, and instead have been congratulating themselves on their “wins.” Many inside NIH are continuing to push back, but their options are increasingly limited. The integrity of the institution has been fundamentally undermined.

The existing NIH funding bill has room for improvement. Despite the slight increase in overall funding, the current NIH budget bill will operate as a 1.8% cut in real dollars (accounting for inflation). We should continue to push for improvements to the NIH budget bill until it is passed and signed. While the current bill does marginally constrain multiyear funding, a last minute change shifted the limit originally based on the fiscal year 2024 level of about 6%, as proposed in the Senate bill, to fiscal year 2025 levels of about 39%. This change was driven by a White House veto threat delivered to House Republicans by none other than Russell Vought. In FY2025, this same 39% multiyear funding rate constricted the National Cancer Institute payline to about 4%, compared to 10% the prior year, and contributed substantially to a 24% year-over-year drop in new research funding. Allowing multiyear funding to continue at the 39% rate means we will see such cuts sustained in 2026.

We need to fight lawlessness at every Federal agency. This administration’s cruel lawlessness is most visible in ICE and Border Patrol, thanks in large part to brave American patriots in Minneapolis risking their lives to bear witness. But the same callous inhumanity and disregard for the law and constitution has infiltrated every government agency, harming Americans from every state, every county, every walk of life. As Simon Rosenberg argued, the passage of 11 bi-partisan appropriations bills was perhaps a “reasonable and defensible” way for Congress to reclaim its power of the purse only if we use this DHS fight to “mount a sustained, national, vigorous effort” to reclaim democracy and fight Trump’s lawlessness. In this light, the stand Democrats are taking on the DHS bill is in and of itself a win. It represents a burgeoning resistance in Congress to Trump’s authoritarianism, a flexing of muscles by a nascent opposition party that will need to continue to grow if we are to save democracy. We must encourage its growth.

Where do we go from here? As scientists we believe a temporary pause in federal funding for science is an acceptable price to pay for reining in lawless, authoritarian paramilitary forces like ICE and CBP. It is important to stand up for all the pillars of a democratic society. We must hang together or we shall surely hang separately.

1. Demand that your Senators withhold their votes from any legislation to send ICE more money. A call link is here. The DHS bill must include meaningful constraints on ICE. Ideally this bill should at a minimum:

   1. Rescind the exorbitant funding provided to ICE under the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

   2. Require DHS to submit to independent investigation by the States

   3. Keep Customs and Border Patrol at the Border and out of American cities.

   4. Require warrants prior to ICE arrests.

   5. Preclude ICE from operating in schools, churches, hospitals, and other venues that provide basic human necessities.

   6. Require ICE agents to wear body cameras, show visible identification, and stop using masks.

2. Ask your members of Congress to reconsider the multiyear funding language in the NIH funding bill and to return to the 2024 limit.

3. Urge your members of Congress to advance legislation that protects the NIH mission. For example, the Follow the Science Act, introduced by Representative Diana DeGette (CO-01), provides a strong start to mitigate political interference in NIH science and prevent future wasteful and harmful grant terminations.

The U.S. has never been perfect; we have never fully lived up to our ideals. But that does not mean we can neglect the task of trying to bring those ideals to reality.

So much of the letter could be said today, so much is on-point in our current fight for a more perfect democracy.

Some resonant parts:

‘While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.”’

‘I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.’ Yes. We are all in this together.

‘Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.’ Pick Big Fights.

‘Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.’ There is a difference in details—but not principle—today as we have gone from the Warren Court to the corrupt Roberts Court.

‘…more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action…’ A clear description of status quo politics; of being afraid of change.

‘One is a force of complacency. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence.’ Complacency leads to the status quo; violence harms liberal values.

‘In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.’ A critique of popularism!

‘I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes.’ Be of good cheer, people of Minneapolis.

Stay for the final paragraph:

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty. Yes. Over the whole world.

This is a contributed post from Mark Histed, a neuroscientist and policy researcher writing in his personal capacity.

Renee Good is not the first to die as a result of ICE’s brutality. She is not the first denied medical care after being violently attacked. Silverio Villegas González was also shot and killed by an ICE officer in Chicago on September 12, 2025, and Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. Jaime Alanis, Roberto Carlos Montoya, and Josue Castro Rivera were all killed in accidents while fleeing ICE raids. Many others have been shot by ICE agents using inappropriate force, including Marimar Martinez and, just one day after the murder of Renee Good, a married couple in Portland Oregon. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the deadliest year since 2004. ICE detention centers remain inadequately staffed with over 70% of deaths occurring due to violations of health standards. People detained by ICE report inhumane conditions, including neglect, physical abuse, and sexual assault. ICE has unlawfully detained countless people without due process, including hundreds of US citizens. And hundreds of people remain missing from the infamous “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility.

For months, we have spoken up about harms we have witnessed from inside the National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Veterans Health Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Park Service, among other agencies.

We have risked our careers, perhaps even our personal safety, to speak up and demand Congressional oversight, not only to defend the missions of our agencies, but to protect the American public. We see the connection between the lawlessness in our agencies and the state sanctioned violence that is occurring. This authoritarian government has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to harm the American people by threatening to withhold nutrition assistance, redirecting money from consumers to corporations, risking the well-being of research participants, suspending support for childcare, detaining people without due process, cutting workers from already understaffed Veteran’s healthcare facilities, allowing polluters to harm our most vulnerable communities, and retaliating against whistleblowers.

Career civil servants across government agencies are being asked to censor and erase words that describe the same individuals being removed from our streets. This is not a coincidence; it is by design. ICE is now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country with a budget exceeding most national militaries. This exorbitant funding comes at the expense of a social safety net to meet the basic needs of the American people. Despite this substantial public investment, ICE is operating with little oversight. Many of the entities charged with overseeing ICE, including the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Ombudsman offices at the Department of Homeland Security, have been unfunded, undermined, understaffed, and/or left to the whims of handpicked loyalists who further this authoritarian mission.

We again call on Congress to reassert its constitutional power. Congress must hold the Administration accountable for its unlawful, violent, and deadly actions. If you fail to do so, people will continue to die at the hands of ICE.

Such accountability should include:

• Removal of agency leaders—including Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—who have failed in their mission to protect the American public.

• Enforceable statutory constraints on the administration’s lawlessness, to protect the American people.

In the current Congress, opportunities for holding the administration accountable appear to be limited to appropriations legislation. Appropriators must not continue to fund a lawless executive branch. We applaud the members demanding such protections and urge their peers to join them.

We call on our fellow Americans to fight for our democratic republic before it is too late. Any of us could be the next Renee Good. We must all demand oversight from Congress and accountability for our government. Find a way you can show up in this moment:

• Download and start using 5calls

• Seek training to become a legal observer

• Join a local Indivisible chapter

• Donate to or volunteer with organizations that fight for democracy

• Show up at protests

• Talk to people in your community about the authoritarian patterns from this administration

• Report immigration officers to a local rapid response network - join the network if you can.

• Identify immigrant communities and get to know people through businesses and churches

• Share information on rights for undocumented people under the constitution

• Talk to business owners, schools and other community establishments about their rights if ICE attempts a raid

• Talk to your city and county supervisors about how they plan to respond if your community is raided - urge them to become a sanctuary city

• Know your own rights if you encounter ICE

Now is the time to act. As U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said, we must “summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”

NOTE: Story updated on 11 Jan 2026 to acknowledge Keith Porter, who was also killed by an ICE agent.

A guest post written in their personal capacities by Shiv Prasad, PhD and Jenna Norton, PhD, MPH, with contributions from anonymous NIH staff

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), institute and center directors oversee billions of taxpayer dollars for critical public health research topics, with tremendous influence over funding decisions. Right now, 11 NIH institute and center director positions remain unfilled, and candidate searches are underway. This may become 12 tomorrow, as National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Director, Walter Koroshetz, announced yesterday to his staff that his reappointment has been denied. Protecting the NIH mission to seek and apply knowledge to improve health requires that director roles are filled by scientists with the expertise and integrity to make sound decisions. As previously explained on this blog, the longstanding search process for senior level officials at the NIH has, prior to 2025, been rigorous and thorough to ensure candidates meet these standards. But the hiring and appointment trends of this administration reveal a penchant for prioritizing loyalty over qualifications and selecting vocal (but not necessarily well-informed) critics of the departments, agencies and programs that they will run. As members of the U.S. research community, we all have an interest – perhaps even an obligation – to help ensure the integrity of scientific leadership at our public institutions.

Hiring Patterns at HHS under the Trump Administration

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have not escaped the Administration’s pattern of installing critics and loyalists as leaders. Prior to his appointment as HHS Secretary, Robert F Kennedy, Jr. loudly attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH, two flagship HHS agencies. Now, inside the government, RFK Jr. has installed agency leaders and advisors who are aligned with his “Make America Healthy Again (MAHA)” agenda, lack expertise in the areas they oversee, favor fringe health theories, and eschew scientific evidence. To run NIH, the administration selected Jayanta Bhattacharya, a primary signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, a letter dissenting from prevailing public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic, who was known to misrepresent data to support preconceived conclusions and accused NIH of holding too much power.

Other recent appointments within HHS include Martin Kulldorf, another signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, as chair of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and later as chief science officer for the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE); Kyle Walsh, former roommate to Vice President JD Vance, as Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); Jim O’Neill, former Silicon Valley tech investor and advocate for unproven COVID treatments, as Acting Director of the CDC, and COVID-19 skeptic Tracy Beth Høeg as Acting Director of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Anti-Science Think Tanks Are a Major Source of Trump Administration Health Leaders

Many of these MAHA appointees have aired grievances because their dangerous theories have been rejected by mainstream science for lack of evidence. They falsely claim censorship and suggest the government constrained their freedom of speech. But even Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed that Bhattacharya, Kulldorf and other plaintiffs provided no evidence of censorship by the government.

Finding no home in the mainstream scientific arena, where ideas must hold up to scientific scrutiny to earn acceptance, they have often aligned themselves with conservative, anti-science groups where their ideas are embraced. These groups include the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER) and its closely tied offshoot organization, the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research. The Koch-funded, climate-change denying AIER orchestrated the Great Barrington Declaration, developing its content and bringing Bhattacharya’s and Kulldorf’s to a summit in Great Barrington, Massachusetts where they signed the declaration. The Brownstone Institute was founded in 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker, the former Vice President of AIER, to prioritize personal liberty and “limit the government’s role in protecting people from disease.”

Several individuals connected with the Brownstone Institute have taken positions in HHS leadership: Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorf, and Tracy Beth Høeg (who has acknowledged funding from Brownstone); Vinay Prasad who serves as Chief Medical and Science Officer and Center Director at the FDA; three newly appointed ACIP members: Retsef Levi, Robert Malone, and Catherine Stein; NIH’s briefly serving Director of Communications Thomas Buckley; and the newly appointed Chairman of the President’s Cancer Panel Harvey Risch.

Known Brownstone Affiliates to Look Out For

Given the administration’s proclivity for handing out leadership roles to Brownstone affiliates, it is not unreasonable to consider whether any will soon find themselves running an NIH institute or center. While we are not sharing inside information suggesting Brownstone affiliates have applied or are being considered, the scientific community should know the names of researchers, scientists, and clinicians with ties to Brownstone that this Administration might be inclined to prioritize for leadership positions. Some potential candidates of concern include:

Jason Locasale, PhD, former Associate Professor at Duke University. Locasale focuses on metabolism research and has an impressive list of publications, some of which are on nutrition, a cornerstone of the MAHA agenda. Recently, the Brownstone Institute posted an op-ed by Locasale, where he put forth a litany of reasons why he believes universities have strayed from their academic mission. Among them are suppressing dissent, neglecting chronic diseases, and escalating indirect costs. Locasale, like recent hires in HHS, has been critical of NIH. He recently ranted on Elon Musk’s X platform about study sections being hostile environments that discourage innovative ideas. Locasale is no longer in his position at Duke and blames several people, most of whom are women, referring to one as “emotional at work.” He also sued Duke for racial discrimination (he is biracial), alleging that White faculty were promoted ahead of him.

Peter Gotzsche, MD, Stanford University Affiliate. Given RFK Jr.’s infatuation with Denmark’s vaccine schedules and an ethically suspect clinical trial run by his cronies, a Danish physician could be a strong candidate for an institute or center director position. Gotzsche has written multiple articles for the Brownstone Institute, primarily on the alleged dangers of vaccination, but also casting doubt on approved psychiatric drugs. He supports the ACIP decision to end the recommendation of newborn immunization against Hepatitis B virus, despite differences between the US and Western Europe in disease prevalence and health care systems. Gotzsche founded the Cochrane Collaboration, from which he was later ousted for “a consistent pattern of disruptive and inappropriate behaviours.” He has written extensively about this on his own website. Gotzsche was also suspended from his position at Rigshospitalet.

Charlotte Kuperwasser, PhD, Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine. Kuperwasser, a cancer researcher, recently joined the ranks of Brownstone contributors, authoring a piece where she presented a largely theoretical connection between COVID-19 vaccines and cancer. We know Kuperwasser is on the radar of the administration, because she presented similar misinformation to the ACIP committee in September.

David Gortler, PharmD, Senior Policy Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. If an association with the Brownstone Institute isn’t enough for conservative bona fides, Gortler is also a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank and lead organizer of Project 2025, an extremist federal policy blueprint designed to restructure the executive branch in the image of Christian nationalism. Gortler’s writings express common misinformation and alarms of the right: He argues in favor of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as COVID-19 treatments, decries artificial food coloring, and is skeptical of the safety of over-the-counter birth control pills and abortion drugs. A former FDA official, Gortler accused HHS of misinformation concerning gender-affirming therapy and further cited, as support, statements from transphobic organizations like the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine and Ron DeSantis’ Florida Department of Health.

Others with connections to Brownstone to look out for include Steven Templeton, Jennifer Smith, Eyal Shahar, Allon Friedman, and Joseph Varon.

Fighting for the Integrity of Leadership at Public Science Institutions

Those who wish to ensure NIH and other federal biomedical science institutions retain their integrity should watch for these and other Brownstone affiliates being placed in future NIH, HHS and other health-related Federal roles. Because the NIH institute and center director search process has been kept confidential, we cannot be certain of the applicants’ identities. But given the characteristics of those appointed to leadership positions in HHS, the people above fit the profile: associations with the Brownstone Institute and other right-wing organizations, espousing fringe medical theories, disrespect for the scientific method and evidence, and harboring resentment against public health institutions. These qualities are suitable for authoring clickbait blogs and attracting podcast invitations, but in practice have made for at best ineffective and at worst harmful public health leadership. If the Trump administration does hire experienced, high-quality scientists into director positions, as has been the case throughout NIH history, that will be a win. And if that does happen, it will likely be due in part to you spreading the word about how bad some candidates might be for US science.

Please join us in continuing to monitor the NIH institute and center director searches, to ensure these positions are filled with scientific leaders who will prioritize evidence over politics. If you see any of these people in NIH or HHS leadership roles, be ready to raise concerns. You can help ensure rigorous hiring processes for NIH leadership positions by contacting your members of Congress to request heightened oversight and sharing this information with your friends, family and colleagues.

There is a direct line between Marco Rubio now weaponizing the government against “censorship,” Jay Bhattacharya crying “censorship,” Michael Shellenberger lying on Substack about “censorship,” and the ongoing destruction of our public health, vaccine, and science infrastructure.

First, real talk about the root issue: Today’s neofascist oligarch political movements, who seek to concentrate power into the hands of a few billionaires and their lackeys, require lies and propaganda. That’s why Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch own the New York Post, Fox, and the Wall Street Journal, why Phil Anschutz owns the Washington Examiner which is widely circulated inside Congress, why Saudi Arabian and Qatari oligarchs and Larry Ellison helped Musk buy Twitter, why Charles Koch funds pro-Trump media like the Daily Caller, why after WarnerBrosDiscovery took over under David Zaslav and his patron, billionaire John C. Malone, CNN fired John Harwood and Brian Stelter and elevated a former Daily Caller reporter, why Paul Singer’s Manhattan Institute funds City Journal, and why conservative pink slime outlets exist.

Because they depend on misinformation, the power of oligarchs is threatened by any action that makes public debate better, fairer, or more truthful.

That is the reason why the US right systematically campaigns against “censorship” and fights any efforts to block or even study misinformation. It’s about preserving their ability to pay for propaganda. That’s why House Republicans came after and Renee DiResta.

And while rightwing billionaire mouthpieces scream “censorship” and demand free speech, what they want is to boost their own speech, to tilt the marketplace of ideas. Elon Musk, Murdoch, Thiel, and Koch all know that “free speech” principles can be weaponized to elevate speech they like. That can be done by publishing or interviewing people whose ideas they like. Or by using feed algorithms or changing AI language model outputs to boost ideas they like, as Musk has done on Twitter.

This reason — weaponizing free speech to drown out speech they don’t like and preserve their ability to boost their ideas with money — is why Koch funded FIRE and a “free speech” project at the Atlantic, why FIRE was founded as a SPN (rightwing thinktank) member, and why at Koch donor summits discuss the progress of their “free speech” efforts. And why the Bradley Foundation gave Bhattacharya a “free speech” prize along with a few hundred thousand dollars.

Free speech is a vital right. It was one of FDR’s Four Freedoms and we should not give that up: the government should not suppress speech, and not retaliate against people for speech.

But freedom of speech isn’t the same as freedom of reach. When the focus is on the unfettered ability for money to promote selected individual speech, any effort to improve platforms and media can be spun as censorship[1]. This is also why Stephen Miller and his billionaire-backed law chopshop (Am First Legal) is suing Renee DiResta. These efforts are all about preserving billionaire oligarchs’ ability to influence public debate with money[2].

And now back to science: Billionaires also found during Covid that they could make scientists villains and divide the country (to get votes) by lying about public health and vaccines. American oligarchs also want to protect their ability to spread those lies.

Jay Bhattacharya is nothing special, he’s just a vessel and a tool the billionaires elevated, via money and by putting him on TV and podcasts, because he helped them by lying about science.

It’s useful for him to scream “censorship” falsely[3] because it helps protect their ability to lie.

So all these four cases in the first line here are connected— the underlying cause is oligarch power and agenda. Seeing that and talking about it is important.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

[1] The hard-right libertarians on the Roberts Supreme Court have also realized they can weaponize free speech, perverting it, to achieve their political goals. More on that in a later post.

[2] More left and liberal organizations should help fight back against these “free speech for me” efforts.

[3] What happened to Jay Bhattacharya is that his views were wrong, other scientists told him so, and he failed to persuade the scientific community using data. But rightwing money elevated his views, which is why we are still talking about them. To say it most simply: Bhattacharya wasn’t censored, he was just wrong. His ideas about herd immunity were bad, and so he failed to persuade people. Scientific institutions should reject views like that, and platforms should not elevate them. Imagine the quacks from one hundred years ago who sold bad elixirs that killed people saying “We were censored when scientific groups and the FDA said our products were deadly.” The FDA, scientific societies, and medical societies can and should say speech like that is junk science that kills people. Same for Bhattacharya — his junk science would have killed people if adopted, and the scientific community was right to say his views were fringe.

Why do the institute directors matter? Because if the Trump administration wants to send money to their cronies, the institute directors hold the keys. Imagine a billion dollars going to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, or a few billion going to OpenAI to do “cancer research” via ChatGPT. The institute directors (also called Institute and Center, or IC directors) essentially have the power to bypass NIH’s gold standard peer review mechanism, and send money to whom they want. And if they do that, ongoing, top-quality American research will be squeezed out, labs will close, and United States science superiority will have been incinerated. This post is an intro to the NIH institute directors. And here we report the details of how the NIH director searches have run in the past. We’ve consulted with several recent NIH leaders to collect this information.

The NIH institute directors are the 27 officials right below the NIH Director, who together are responsible for where most of the NIH budget goes.

The Trump administration brought Kyle Walsh on quietly, during the government shutdown, in spite of a Federal hiring freeze. The NIEHS directorship role was not publicly advertised, and no competitive selection process took place. In fact, Walsh — who has little prior research experience in environmental health — was not hired into an open position at all. To seat Walsh, the administration ousted Richard Woychik, who had served as NIEHS Director since 2020 and as NIEHS Deputy Director since 2011. Woychik had been in the institute for some time, and he was widely considered as having done an excellent job as director. One NIEHS scientist, speaking anonymously to avoid retribution from the administration, said Woychik had been “an amazing director.” Woychik’s directorship had been renewed mere months prior.

This blatant cronyism does not bode well for future Institute and Center (IC) Director selections at Trump’s NIH. Shortly after installing Walsh, the NIH posted 12 job announcements for IC Director roles. The initial postings gave a shockingly short — for scientific and academic searches — window of two weeks for applications. This is an insufficient amount of time necessary to identify, recruit and vet qualified candidates. While these time windows have since been extended a few additional weeks, Trump’s NIH has made no movement to implement rigorous search processes. Although no statutory requirements dictate such processes for selecting NIH IC directors, more than three decades of precedent call for robust and structured search processes. The NIH search model is based on what most academic institutions do to hire experts. To preserve the integrity of these powerful and influential positions, we must ensure that NIH adheres to these standards.

Why are IC Directors Critical to the Success of NIH?

IC Directors have traditionally held tremendous power and influence within their IC at NIH. They provide scientific oversight and leadership to their IC, establishing strategic priorities (with input from key stakeholders) and making final decisions on what does and does not get funded (with input from peer review, program staff, and Advisory Councils). A recent internal NIH memo suggests the Trump Administration intends to maintain that power in the hands of the Directors - but it is not clear they intend to maintain the legitimacy of those holding these roles by relying on the scientific community to advise on the hires.

What is the typical search and selection process for IC Directors?

For at least three decades, a rigorous and thorough search process has been largely successful in recruiting talented Directors whose service has maintained the NIH as a driver of biomedical innovation and economic growth in the U.S. The NIH structured search process is modeled after leadership searches at major academic institutions across the United States. Recruiting IC Directors is challenging at the best of times. Most suitable applicants would have to be willing to accept a large pay cut and divest from board seats and investments. The NIH process is designed to actively solicit outstanding scientific and medical leaders, selecting the optimal candidate through thorough and fair processes. This approach helps ensure appropriate stewardship of NIH’s public resources and preserves NIH’s status as a world leader in biomedical research.

This information is based on consultation with several past NIH institute directors.

1. Search Committee - The NIH Director approves the composition of a search committee, which is proposed by the principal deputy director in consultation with community stakeholders and NIH Institute Directors in related areas. The search committee is typically co-chaired by two Institute Directors, composed of 10-12 members, roughly half from NIH with occasional representatives from FDA, CMS, SAMHSA, CDC, or other HHS components when relevant to the mission of the Institute. The remaining members are members of the extramural scientific and/or stakeholder community, representing a broad set of approaches and perspectives. Members are selected not only for their subject matter expertise but also based on familiarity with the institute, its mission and operations. Several of these members may have had direct experience on the Institute Council, Board of Scientific Counselors, or other relationships past or present. Most if not all will have held grants/contracts through the institute.

2. Advertising the Job Announcement. With the input and approval of the search committee, a job description and posting are developed by the NIH director’s office (led by the principal deputy director) with the help of HR Staff. Minimum qualifications are agreed upon. Advertisements are placed in field-specific and general journals, professional and advocacy organization newsletters, and other appropriate venues as well as federal and NIH job posting sites. Applications are typically accepted for 8-12 weeks after the opening has been posted.

3. Recruiting Applicants. During this 8-12 week period, the search committee, aided by HR staff, uses numerous unbiased methods to identify potential candidates and conduct outreach to individuals, advocacy organizations, and professional societies to identify and encourage applications from the broadest community possible. Typical searches result in between 20 and 40 applications from qualified individuals, in addition to a variable number of others that are judged unqualified by HR staff.

4. Reviewing and Scoring Applications. Search committee members review and score each application based on agreed-upon criteria, typically inclusive of scientific excellence, leadership experience and potential, communication skills, and knowledge of the stakeholder landscape. The committee meets to discuss the qualified applicants and selects a list, typically 6-12 candidates, for interviews.

5. Interviews are conducted, in person prior to the pandemic and typically remotely since the pandemic. The committee agrees upon a set of 8-10 questions they will ask each candidate during the interviews. Each candidate is asked the same questions. Relevant tailored follow-ups are allowed as warranted by the candidates responses.

6. Committee Recommendations. The committee then discusses the interviewed applicants and selects a short list (typically 2-5 in size) of the top candidates. References are checked on these candidates, and this short list is forwarded to the NIH Director along with the reports from the reference checks. The NIH Director and deputy may solicit additional references.

7. NIH Visit. The NIH Director selects at least two of the short listed candidates to invite for in person, all day visits, in which they are interviewed and evaluated by a larger set of Institute and Center Directors as well as leaders of NIH Office of the Director components, at the discretion of the NIH Director and Principal Deputy Director, who also meet with the candidate. Part of this process is discussing potential financial or other conflicts of interest that the candidate may have. In some cases a decision is made not to move forward if it is apparent that the candidate is unable or unwilling to divest equities or responsibilities. Based on feedback from these interviews, and the Director’s own assessment, the NIH Director selects a candidate to move forward with an offer.

8. HHS Sign Off. A hiring package is then prepared by HR and sent for final signoff to the HHS Secretary. To the best of our knowledge, the HHS Secretary has approved all director job offers in the past two decades, in rare circumstances interviewing the candidate.

How can I help ensure NIH maintains high standards for IC Directors?

1. Contact your members of Congress. Most importantly, Congress members should speak out loudly and publicly, demanding real searches. Ask how you can help them get that message out — and ask them to speak up themselves. Moreover, appropriators in Congress are drafting appropriations packages for NIH, and many other agencies. Ask your members of Congress to make sure these bills include language that requires rigorous search processes for IC Directors, such as mandating search committees composed of both internal civil servant staff and independent external scientists, and requiring a minimum time period for posting job announcements.

2. Raise awareness of the open positions – and consider applying. As current NIH staff, we understand that working at NIH under this administration may not be most scientists’ dream job. But the administration cannot fill these positions with credible and qualified scientists if no credible and qualified scientists apply. If you’re in a position to apply, please do so.

3. Raise public awareness about the politicization of IC Director roles. Public support for federally funded science remains high, and most Americans trust scientists to make decisions in the public interest. Make sure your friends, family and colleagues are aware of the suspect circumstances surrounding Kyle Walsh’s appointment to the NIEHS Directorship, and how such politicization of NIH science harms all Americans. Help build public pressure around hiring credible scientists for the open Director positions. Share this blog with your colleagues or post it on social media. If you’ve got a little more time, consider writing an editorial in your local paper!

When speaking to people inside and outside government this year, we’ve often heard the idea that the law will kick in soon — that litigation would stop the Trump administration’s egregious actions.

Litigation does play an important role: the legal cases have restored some people to their jobs and saved some government programs.

But in a real way, litigation has not been enough to stop lawbreaking by the Trump administration, reportedly led by the administration’s key architect of government destruction, Russell Vought. And the failure of litigation to enforce the law is not generally because of lower courts, but because the Supreme Court conservative supermajority, the Roberts Court, has been acting lawlessly, effectively rewriting the Constitution and allowing the Trump administration to break the law.

This piece explains what is happening with the mass firings in the government — RIFs, or reductions in force. It describes why the RIFs all year should be seen as breaking the law: why the RIFs have been lawless.

First to be clear about terms: perhaps we should save the word ‘illegal’ for actions that the court system has explicitly ruled to be in violation of the law and/or Constitution. And then we can use ‘lawless’ to describe cases where a reasonable observer would decide that the actions violate the law. So, as outlined below, no matter what the Roberts Court has or has not ruled on the RIFs, reasonable members of the public can see and say that the RIFs are lawless.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen some shutdown RIFs, mass firings performed during the shutdown. Those have been ruled likely illegal and blocked by a district court judge. But we’ve been down this path before. Throughout 2025, Vought, a Project 2025 lead, has implemented mass firings. For example, there were thousands of workers fired in RIFs across the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS.

By applying common sense and a plain reading of the law, we can see that the Trump RIFs violate the law. RIF laws were designed to allow workforce numbers to be reduced in times of budget crunch, not to allow wholesale reorganization of the government without Congress, as Vought has used them. Supporting that idea, a district judge unsurprisingly ruled, using this reasoning, that the spring RIFs were illegal. But the Supreme Court effectively overruled her. This is a case where the Roberts Court is bending over backward to protect Trump. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has said, this Court is playing Calvinball, where “this administration always wins.” And the Roberts Court, when it got this appeal from the Trump administration asking it to allow the RIFs, issued an unsigned order that allowed the RIFs to continue, without ruling on whether the RIFs were legal. By allowing the firings to proceed, the Court in practice made them permanent.

So litigation is not enough, not with this Supreme Court. To be direct: we simply cannot trust the Roberts Court to follow settled law. But all is not lost, as there are actions all of us can take.

The biggest lever is public attention. The Court responds to public pressure, because the Supreme Court is ultimately a political body. What we, the public, say about Court decisions influences the justices, and thus influences the law. As with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s tangle in the 1930s with the last gasp of the right-wing Lochner SCOTUS, public pressure and threats of court reform can bring a rogue Supreme Court to heel.

Even though the SCOTUS conservative majority seems to be working to support Project 2025 and the Trump administration, we should see through their lawlessness. And talk about it. We should say the RIFs now violate the law, and the RIFs all year have violated the law. The RIFs should be stopped until litigation has run its course.

Public pressure is the first step in restraining the lawless Roberts Court. There will be more needed. Ultimately, Congress, as the most powerful and most democratic branch, should use its power to restrain the lawless Court — and restrain Vought and the lawless Trump administration.

The HHS RIFs were lawless due to clear violation of required RIF procedures

In April, thousands of Health and Human Services employees received RIF notices. Complicated procedures must be followed for RIFs to be lawful. (See the 2017 OPM Workforce Reshaping Handbook, or the 2025 CRS Overview on RIFs.) These procedures include defining rankings of displaced employees that might shift to other jobs inside the agency, allowing RIF’d employees to elect to take jobs that open, and the ‘bump and retreat’ process for how employees choose to move to other positions. Many of those procedures were not followed in the spring.

A key element of the sham Trump/Project 2025 RIF process was to declare the ‘competitive area’ for reassignment to be a single office, RIF every member of that office, and thus deny reassignment rights. Courts that respected the law would find that illegal. In fact, the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), whose decisions bind the administration, has previously found that competitive area definitions are illegal if they are too small.

Beyond the lack of reassignment rights, other clear violations of RIF procedures occurred, like the award-winning Parkinson’s disease scientists at NIH that received RIF notices. The Trump administration reportedly claimed these to be in error, but then refused for weeks to withdraw them. NIH employees were told that new layoffs of other employees would be needed to compensate for reinstating these scientists. This behavior from the Trump administration signals knowing violations of RIF law and procedure.

As law professor Nicholas Bednar summarized, “ample [public] evidence suggests that agencies have failed to follow the [RIF] procedures prescribed by 5 U.S.C. § 3502 and OPM’s regulations.”

In May, Judge Susan Illston in the Northern District of California did find the RIFs illegal and enjoin them — stop them from continuing. However, the lawless Supreme Court allowed these RIFs to take effect anyway.

The Supreme Court allowed the spring RIFs to continue, and so created ‘facts on the ground’ that will make it impossible to repair the damage

What did the Supreme Court do? First, during the district court and circuit court litigation, the Trump administration worked hard to deny access to the RIF plans by the public or courts. This made it hard for the courts to determine if the RIF rules were followed, and thus to say definitively that the RIFs were not conducted in accordance with the law.

The SCOTUS shadow docket order in this case then allowed the RIFs to continue, while dodging the question of the illegality of the RIFs. The court conservative majority, in an unsigned order, made several questionable moves: they said that the executive order directing agencies to conduct RIFs — but not the RIFs themselves — was “likely” to be found “lawful.” We should all disagree. (Though since the Court supermajority apparently feels unbound by prior case law, the Court may well assert these RIFs were ‘legal’ when they eventually decide this case on the full (merits) docket — and we should then respond with public outrage if they do that.)

The Court did not weigh in on the actual RIF procedures. As described above, these seem to clearly violate the law. Sotomayor, in dissent, said “The [RIF] plans themselves are not before this Court… and we thus have no occasion to consider [if they are] consistent with … the law.” This is a technicality: the Court said the RIF procedure documents were not available to them, so they could not rule on whether the RIF procedures were legal.

But the SCOTUS order in effect rendered the law moot by allowing the RIFs to continue. The order allowed the Trump administration to separate the lawlessly RIF’d employees from service. These employees will find other jobs. As another court ruled in September on other lawless terminations, the probationary terminations, it is hard to return employees to their jobs after illegal firings. (Judge William Alsup in September: “Too much water has passed under the bridge. The terminated employees have moved on with their lives,” even though some of those terminated have said they have not moved on.)

So when the case is eventually heard in full at the Supreme Court, it will be too late to stop the firings and return employees to their jobs. The Supreme Court had a chance to stop the damage from the RIFs, and they instead overruled the lower court injunction and let the mass firings take what is, in actuality, final effect.

In summary: the RIFs violate many aspects of the law. The lawless Calvinball Supreme Court allowed them to continue, while failing to rule on legality. That doesn’t make the RIFs legal: it merely makes the Court lawless.

The recent shutdown RIFs were blocked by a judge. But will the Supreme Court allow them again?

Fast forward to the past few weeks. In an apparent attempt to bully Democrats in Congress into submission, the Trump administration began threatening RIFs if the shutdown continued. In reality, these new RIFs had been planned for months. On Friday Oct 10, Vought posted on Twitter (now X) that “The RIFs have begun.”

These RIFs would also seem to be illegal for the same failure to follow RIF procedures. Again, a case was brought in the Northern District of California, and again Judge Susan Illston ruled these RIFs “both illegal and in excess of authority” and blocked them.

Litigation will continue. The case will likely be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court. During the shutdown, an additional argument based on violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act applies, which should strengthen the case against these RIFs. Still, given the repeated actions of the Roberts Court to ensure “[the Trump] administration always wins,” do we have confidence that this litigation will stop Vought and the Trump administration?

Perhaps this case will be deflected by the Supreme Court. Perhaps the public attention on the Court is too high now, and they will choose to take action that reduces the heat on them. Perhaps these illegal RIFs, blocked by the district judge, will also be blocked by the Supreme Court. If that happens we should count that as a win for public pressure.

But we shouldn’t count on it happening. Moreover, the fact that Vought felt comfortable issuing a large number of new RIFs during the shutdown underlines how the Supreme Court’s lawlessness is encouraging the Trump administration to act with increasing brazenness.

What can we do?

How do we get out of this vicious circle of lawlessness from Trump and Vought, backed by lawless consent from the Supreme Court majority?

1. Public pressure: the Supreme Court responds to it.

Think about the Supreme Court supermajority as politicians in robes who care enormously about their public image. When doing politics, public opinion is vital, and the Roberts Court politicians are not immune. In fact, the Court has seemed to shrink from the most egregious actions when those would draw public attention.

An example that should give us confidence is the leak of the Dobbs decision. The decision draft was widely speculated to have been leaked to lock in the vote of John Roberts, who was trying to find a way to cut Roe v. Wade gradually — without a blatant overturn which would surely draw public attention. In the end, the draft was leaked, Roberts voted to fully overturn Roe, and there was indeed electoral backlash. If Roberts didn’t care about public perception, the leak would not have affected him.

The public should criticize the Court’s lawlessness, and elected leaders should echo their concerns. That public criticism matters, both as a way to build momentum towards needed Court reform, and to to pressure the Court now to stop its worst excesses.

2. Congressional action: Power of the purse now, Court reform later

During this shutdown, Congress has leverage to pass legislation that constrains the president. Congress can insist on legislative provisions to restrain the Court in any continuing resolution.

However, there are few effective ways to constrain a rogue president with legislation when a rogue Supreme Court wishes to let the president break longstanding law. For the lawless RIFs described here, Congress could try to change the rules about how RIFs are organized, or make the RIF plans public so the Supreme Court would have a harder time allowing RIFs on that technicality. But it certainly looks like this Supreme Court majority would just find another way to “play Calvinball” and let Trump win.

Therefore, the way to stop the lawlessness is for Congress to fundamentally constrain the administration and the Court. One way is by using Congress’ power of the purse. For example, legislation could be used to cut Russell Vought’s salary, and that of the political appointees around him, say to $1, unless he stops breaking the law. Another creative measure could be to cut Trump’s travel budget to $1 unless the lawbreaking stops. For the rogue Supreme Court, Congress could cut the Court’s budget for clerks, move the Court out of its building, force the justices to ride circuit — or take other actions to exert power over the Court unless it stops its lawlessness. Such political pressure on the Court is not unusual historically; such negotiation between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches was standard in the past. In fact, these checks and balances between the branches are fundamental to our government’s design.

The RIFs are lawless, the Supreme Court majority is lawless, Russell Vought and the Trump administration are lawless. Much damage to our government has already been done. But it is not too late for the public to stand up and speak about the problem. Talking about this problem is the first step towards fixing it.

This is a contributed post to the SAFA blog. The author (follow on bluesky) is speaking in his personal capacity about widely reported matters of urgent public concern and is thus protected by the First Amendment.

If you have information to contribute to the SAFA blog, please reach out: info@scienceandfreedomalliance.org

My name is Mark Histed, and I’m a brain scientist, I’m at NIH, but I’m here as a citizen.

We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded. This administration — the White House — is lawlessly ignoring the Constitution. And the Supreme Court is lawlessly signing off on it. We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it.

Our coalition of civil servants delivered a letter to Congress last week with the same message we bring today: Based on reporting, things inside the government are much worse than are widely appreciated. We call on Congress to pass measures that rein in Trump’s lawlessness and protect the American people. More than 2,000 federal workers and thousands of allies have bravely signed this letter, many of them risking their careers to do so. You will hear from some of them today.

We see this Trump lawlessness in the mass firings — the RIFs. In the spring, tens of thousands of employees across the government were fired, ten thousand in the health agency, HHS. These mass firings harmed all Americans. They hurt people getting medical care, those who want safe drugs, safe air and water; the firings destroyed cancer research and development of cures. And these mass firings were illegal — lawless — as a district judge found. Yet the Supreme Court let them stand. The president took lawless action and the Court signed off.

My father is a history teacher. He taught his students, and me, these basic principles of the Constitution: that there are three branches: the article 1 branch, Congress. Article 2 branch: the President and executive, and Article 3: the judiciary. When the Article 2 branch is ignoring the law and the Article 3 branch is lawlessly signing off, the way out — perhaps the only way — is for Congress, intended as the most powerful branch; intended to serve as the voice of the people, to stand up and assert its power.

On Friday night the conservative Supreme Court majority showed their complete lawlessness. On their shadow docket, the Court shredded perhaps the most important part of the Constitution.

One of the most basic principles of the Anglo-American political order dating back centuries is that Congress, the legislature, has the power of the purse, the power to determine spending. Trump, with Russell Vought, the Project 2025 lead now inside the White House, has been taking this power from Congress and ignoring the Constitution.

And late Friday, as if to hide from public attention, the Supreme Court handed down a ridiculous order that signed off on this lawlessness.

There have been threats from Trump that more civil servants will be fired this week. But they already claim the right to lawlessly fire workers. From here those threats look like a sign of fear. The administration is afraid of Congress standing up. They know that Congress has the power to stop them. They know the people have the power to stop them.

I want to speak from my expertise as a scientist now: American science, the gold standard and world leading science and innovation enterprise, is being destroyed.

I have talked to scientists around the world who cannot believe that “a scientific superpower is destroying itself”. I’ll talk about medical research. Last week, headlines read “Trump is canceling the war on cancer.” That is right. Cancer cures — for you, your parents, for the American people, for everyone — are being destroyed. It’s happening for other kinds of research too: Alzheimer’s research, addiction research, pain research, infectious disease research on diseases from AIDS to Ebola to antibiotic resistant bacteria. All of this research — all of these potential cures — are being blown up. In the government, and at universities in all 50 states.

Every American should know this; everyone touched by cancer should know this: a flat budget, a normal budget, is not enough. NIH saw a flat budget this year and yet science across the country is still being destroyed by lawless presidential interference.

The same is true for immigrants, for the economy, for hospital and health care— this administration is acting lawlessly to harm them. This week in budget negotiations, Congress has a rare moment of leverage to check Trump’s executive overreach and it must stand up and do so.

I’m here today at risk to myself and my family. There is a risk of lawless retaliation. But I know that I — all of us here today — have free speech rights to be here and say this. I and all civil servants have the First Amendment right to speak in our personal capacities about matters of public concern.

The US constitution is being shredded by this administration. It must stop. Congress must stand up and stop it. Thank you.

Notes

• Air pollution https://aafa.org/cdc-layoffs-devastating-blow-to-respiratory-health-asthma-allergies/

• NIH research damage of all sorts
  https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/09/trump-ordered-nih-contract-terminations-cut-deep/

• “Congress is intended to serve as the voice of the people” https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/explore/about-congress

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My name is Kimberly Konkel. I was raised in rural Arizona by a fireman father and a public teacher mom. They taught me to run into disaster and speak truth to power. I was a Presidential Management Fellow during 9/11 and served in Presidents Bush and Obama’s White House Offices of Faith and Community Initiatives. In my last position as a Senior Public Health Advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services, I worked to protect the most vulnerable Americans.

Then, in February, I was ruled “unsuitable” for public service after making a routine medical disclosure. A couple months later, they annihilated my unit through the illegal Reductions In Force action (RIFs) and then illegally defunded our programs: ending vital services to Americans experiencing homelessness, HIV+, and mental illness simultaneously.

Now, I’m appealing both of those decisions, like thousands of my colleagues, before the Merit Systems Protection Board, a body that is being deliberately and lawlessly weakened along with other workplace protections and watchdog offices. Civil service protections are not perks. They are democracy’s immune system — shielding the government from political infection so that public servants can uphold the law and the Constitution without fear of retaliation. Civil service protections don’t protect bureaucrats. They protect the American people from a government of cronies and bullies.

I have a covenant with God to end the maltreatment of children. In an effort to keep that covenant, I made an Oath almost exactly 25 years ago today. In that oath, I pledged to defend the Constitution against all enemies and ended it with a plea for God’s help.

Russ Vought made clear his goal: to traumatize the Federal workforce. He’s failed. We are angry! We are standing up!

What he has done is make Trump historically unpopular by traumatizing America: forcing us to worry about our healthcare and Social Security, our economic productivity, the stability of our institutions, our standing in the world, and, increasingly, a government that is being weaponized against us.

Science tells us trauma is not just emotional—it rewires the brain, damages the immune system, and even cuts life short. The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences study revealed that there is a dose-relationship between the amount of trauma a child endures and risk of mental illness, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and early death. Addressing the syndemics of suicide, violence (including child sexual abuse), untreated mental illness, and addiction was the work of my unit, and now it is no more.

Remember that we all “hold these truths to be self-evident, that {we are all} created equal, that [we] are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the [people], that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter…it.”

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If Congress doesn’t stand up now and defend our democracy we will lose it. It is slipping away. We are warning you, we are all Federal workers and know what’s happening inside the buildings: things are worse than you can see. The US government is a behemoth and confusing, but I can tell you this: it used to work for the people and now it is being used to enrich billionaires and hurt us.

Let’s stand together and stand up to the bully. Remember, we have nothing to fear but fear itself!

This week we are publishing the Sept 29 speeches of federal employees, all speaking in their personal capacities about the damage to their agencies, the harm created to the American people — and the lawlessness from Trump and the courts that is allowing our government to be destroyed. Post 2 of 6: Charlotte Slaiman

I’m Charlotte Slaiman. I’m a proud union member with NTEU chapter 344, an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network, and an antitrust lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission. I have been a federal worker for 5 years and have served under 3 Presidents. I came to the FTC to fight for American consumers and workers, not to do favors for the President’s billionaire friends.

These attacks on federal workers are attacks on my community. My family members, my friends, my neighbors. We have all had our lives turned upside down by this administration. By Russell Vought’s purposeful attempt to traumatize those of us who have committed our careers to public service. Vought and his ilk think corporate greed is a virtue and public service is a vice worthy of ridicule and cruelty. For the last nine months, the Trump administration has created a crisis for the federal government that is far worse than any shutdown.

Still, when I saw the OMB memo threatening to fire more federal workers if Congress didn’t agree to their budget, I was scared. But I talked with my strong community of federal workers. Donald Trump & Russell Vought want us to be scared.

And wait a minute… We’re supposed to believe that, if Congress votes for their poison-pill budget, they will suddenly start using our government agencies properly, to advance the interests of the American people, instead of their own? That they’ll keep up their lawlessness only if they can’t get the votes to pass their budget?

This is just a political stunt, and We’re. Not. Buying. It!

This crisis of our federal government, the crisis that began almost immediately on January 20th, is taking a terrible toll on our public servants. But more importantly, it’s taking a terrible toll on the American people and the American economy and the rule of law. Vital government programs cannot run properly with a skeleton crew. At my agency, corporate lawbreakers are learning that they can get away with illegal conduct we would never have let slide in the past. We don’t have the staff to bring as many lawsuits as we did before. Last week, the Trump FTC announced that, instead of fighting, it’s settling a huge case against Amazon, for tricking people into paying them for a service they didn’t want. Amazon is paying what is basically a rounding error, and the American people won’t see the evidence against it at trial.

And those few staff hours that are left are also being misused to go after the President’s political enemies and protect his friends. Instead of blocking actual harmful corporate consolidation, the FTC started investigating Media Matters, a non-profit that criticized Elon Musk. The FTC’s subpoena was blocked by a federal court, which recognized that the action violated free speech. Here’s what the judge had to say about this lawless abuse of government power: “It should alarm all Americans when the government retaliates against individuals or organizations for engaging in constitutionally protected public debate.”

This lawlessness must be stopped. I am asking Congress, do not approve this in my name. Do not accede to the President’s demands to save my paychecks.

I am a federal worker, and I choose democracy. I choose the rule of law. I choose science, and healthcare, and corporate accountability. Do not give up for us. Fight for us.

Thank you!

My name is Jenna Norton, I am a scientist and program officer at the National Institutes of Health, but I am not here to speak in that role today.

Theodore Roosevelt said: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president…” With those words in mind, I am here today to speak as an American patriot – to stand up for our country against an Administration that is harming the American people.

The Trump Administration is destroying our fundamental American right to free speech. They are setting fire to the first Amendment of the Constitution by punishing FEMA and EPA staff for raising concerns, weaponizing the Justice Department, even trying to get Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the air.

I know speaking comes with risks. And I am afraid. But democracy demands courage: so despite the risk, I am standing firm in my right, as a federal employee, to speak freely on matters of public interest.

I am exercising my right to free speech because I know the risks will only grow.

I am exercising my right to free speech because I want my kids to grow up in a country where they can speak freely.

I am exercising my right to free speech, because I believe it is critical that everyone understand what is happening inside NIH.

I loved my job at the NIH. I had the honor of helping new scientists launch their careers and spotlighting promising scientific ideas. But all of this changed abruptly in January. Current Trump administration policies–firing critical staff, artificially cutting the NIH budget, censoring free thought, and prioritizing politics over science–make it nearly impossible for NIH staff to do our jobs: to conduct and support life-saving scientific research.

Instead of identifying new research opportunities, we now screen grants for banned words.

Instead of supporting research that saves lives, we now risk the lives of research participants by cutting off their clinical trials midstream.

Instead of being responsible stewards of taxpayer money, we are throwing research investments away. When you stop a $5 million dollar study 4 years in, you don’t save $1 million. You waste $4 million.

When we cannot do our jobs at NIH, the consequences are dire: Americans get sick and die.

We federal workers are struggling to address these wrongs from inside the executive branch.

Our grantees have tried to address these harms through the courts, but a Supreme Court in Trump’s pocket has repeatedly greenlighted Trump’s lawlessness.

Congress is the ONLY remaining chance we have to stop the gutting of the public services Americans depend on. This continuing resolution is a chance for Congress to do exactly that.

And Donald Trump knows it. Last week, Trump and his OMB chief Russel Vought tried to bully Congress into passing a budget deal that is bad for the American people, by threatening to fire federal workers like me.

As a federal worker, I am here to tell you that I will NOT ask the American people to sacrifice to protect my job, I will NOT allow him to use me to hold the American people hostage, I will NOT be Trump’s political pawn.

As a federal worker, I am here to tell you that every awful thing that would happen in a shutdown—shuttering programs that Americans rely on, damaging our economy, firing federal workers—all of this is already happening.

Giving Trump another blank check will. not. Protect Americans. It did not work in March, and it will not work now.

So I urge Senators: ONLY vote for a continuing resolution if it protects the American people, the services they rely on, and the federal workers who provide those services. Even if that means a shutdown.

We need Congress to stand up and fight for the American people!

The Trump administration has been pursuing the Project 2025 agenda, led by Project 2025 head Russell Vought, now inside the Trump White House. The Supreme Court is also aligned with the Project 2025 agenda, and is signing off on it. In fact, many members of the Supreme Court conservative supermajority have ties to Project 2025 funders and organizations, with connections between Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas, Heritage, Paul Singer, and Brett Kavanaugh, amongst others. The Trump Project 2025 forces are ignoring the law based on flimsy justifications, and the lawless Court is signing off on it.

The lawlessness from the President and the Supreme Court endangers not just our freedoms, but our health, our power as a nation, and our economy. The Court has, amongst other signoffs on Trump actions, allowed lawless mass firings, destruction of cancer research and cures, and harm to the education of our children.

Every American will be affected by the power grab for billionaires that Project 2025 head Russell Vought is executing, with consent from the Project 2025 Supreme Court.

It must end. Congress has the power to end it. Congress must stand up and do so.

The Civil Servants’ Coalition, of which SAFA is a part, has called on Congress to stand up

The letter, currently with over 1600 signatures from current and former federal workers from 60+ agencies and components, calls on Congress to stand up to stop Trump lawlessness:

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/civil-servants-coalition/

More information here:
Our FAQ on signing • Our explainer Sept 1 on “Stand Up, Congress” • Our followup Sept 9.

US science and cancer cures are affected by this lawlessness

This all impacts cancer and Alzheimer’s research, NIH, American health, and US science. The lawless Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to tear down all of these. The Court has allowed lawless mass firings, allowed lawless grant terminations, and now allowed lawless seizure of Congressional power of the purse.

Everyone interested in science and health should speak out against this Court and this Administration.

Tell Congress to check the Court. Expand it, cut its budget, send the justices to ride circuit, control the Court docket. End this nonsense.

Recommended reading: Sam Bagenstos’ amicus brief to the First Circuit in an impoundment case earlier this year. Quotes Clarence Thomas stating that one of the most fundamental principles of the Constitution is Congress’ power of the purse.

How do I sign?

Head over to our action network page to read the letter and sign. You can sign anonymously, or with your name. Signatures will not be made public (see section below ‘How is my privacy being protected’). We are also now accepting signatures from supportive members of the public (you’ll use a drop down to indicate your status).

Why this letter to Congress?

Because the Trump administration is engaged in an assault on the Constitution and thus the basis of the American Republic, endangering Americans and causing irreparable harm. And Congress must stand up to stop them.

Some things experts on law and history have said since January: “I’m a legal scholar. We’re in a Constitutional crisis”, “This is a Constitutional crisis” [Sen Adam Schiff], “We are living through a massive assault on basic premises of our constitutional system… we are in deep, deep trouble,” and “It’s not just a constitutional crisis: it’s constitutional failure.”

The American constitutional system has three branches: Legislative, Article I of the Constitution; executive, Article II; and judicial, Article III. The executive branch has acted lawlessly to tear down our government. The Trump administration and the Project 2025 forces that staff it have created this constitutional failure by ignoring law and daring others to stop them. But the third branch, the judicial branch—namely the Supreme Court—has consented to Trump’s lawlessness. (The ties between Project 2025, Trump, and the conservative Supreme Court judges in fact makes it appear the Supreme Court is aiming to aid this lawlessness.)

That leaves the Article I branch, both the most powerful and most democratic of the three branches. It is the branch closest to the people, composed of 435 elected House members and 100 elected Senators. So far, the Article I branch has not exercised its power. It could use its powers of the purse, its powers of legislation, and other constitutional powers to rein in both the rogue executive branch and the complicit Supreme Court. Moreover, it could use its powers to convene gatherings, draw attention and drive public debate to mobilize the American public.

Congress standing up to the other branches is the way out of our current crisis. As federal workers, we see government operations up close. We know what the Constitution says and the role of each branch. We know the executive branch is now rogue and lawless. So we are writing, in our personal capacities, on this matter of urgent public concern. We ask the Article I branch to stand up — stand up for us, stand up for Congress’ own power, and stand up for the American people.

Who is behind the Civil Servants’ Declaration?

This campaign is run by the Civil Servants Coalition, workers from across the federal government organizing in their personal capacities. The campaign concept was initiated by the Science and Freedom Alliance (SAFA), a group of scientists and allies, with many members connected to NIH. SAFA released a substack laying out the background and motivation for the campaign on Sept. 1st, and an update on Sept. 8th showing growing support for the approach. SAFA sought formal and informal partners, to build out a strong coalition of federal workers and allies.

Federal Workers Against Doge (FWAD), a cross-agency coalition of current and former federal workers, joined SAFA as a formal partner, bringing in a broad network of federal workers and dedicated organizers.

All working on this are doing so on their personal time, using personal resources.

Some of the federal workers involved now were involved in organizing the Bethesda Declaration and subsequent dissent letters that sounded the alarm about the damage and abuses occurring at their agencies. For them, this campaign seemed like a natural next step: federal workers had spoken out and stood up at the risk of losing their jobs. Some have faced retaliation for standing up. Other institutions, including Congress, should be called on to do the same.

Why is signing the letter within federal workers’ free speech rights?

In short: signing the letter is an expression of free speech and protected by the First Amendment. But who knows how the administration might retaliate anyway.

Federal workers have substantial free speech rights, and this administration claims to care deeply about free speech. Signers of this letter should be able to speak about this matter of public concern without worrying about retaliation.

Current legal precedent is that federal workers are often protected by the First Amendment when speaking out about matters of public concern. That may seem unusual, in an era when private employers have fired employees for speaking in their personal capacity. But the Supreme Court has ruled that a public employer, like the federal government, may not muzzle its employees or penalize them for their expression to the same extent that a private employer can. Government employees speaking in their personal capacities about matters of public concern have rights — because the public’s interest is served by being informed of things that government employees know.

More importantly, the question whether a school system [that is, government] requires additional funds is a matter of legitimate public concern on which the judgment of the school administration, including the School Board, cannot, in a society that leaves such questions to popular vote, be taken as conclusive. On such a question free and open debate is vital to informed decisionmaking by the electorate. Teachers [government employees] are, as a class, the members of a community most likely to have informed and definite opinions as to how funds allotted to the operation of the schools [government] should be spent. Accordingly, it is essential that they be able to speak out freely on such questions without fear of retaliatory dismissal.

- Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for an 8-1 Supreme Court majority in Pickering v. Board

There is almost no greater matter of public concern than the operation of our Constitution and the collapse and lawless undermining of our executive branch.

However, despite precedent, it seems likely that the current Supreme Court, if presented with the matter, would find it legal for the government to punish employees for signing a letter such as this. For that reason, for fear of retaliation for protected speech, we have provided options for anonymously signing the letter.

Will government workers be harmed if the government avoids shutdown? Is the government already shut down in some ways?

Yes, the government is already shut down in some ways. Agencies including CFPB, which protects all American consumers from exploitation — for example, limiting junk bank and card fees — have been lawlessly destroyed. The same is true for USAID. Vaccine policy at CDC and FDA has been exploded by nominees who lied during their confirmations about not being anti-vaccine. FEMA has been lawlessly gutted, endangering Americans affected by natural disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. The Department of Education, which helps rural children and teachers learn, and supports education across the whole country, has been lawlessly dismantled. Science agencies have been weaponized as tools to harm universities, and they have been internally corrupted. The Social Security Administration has illegally cut 7,000 jobs and forced Americans receiving benefits to jump through new hoops; the IRS has been lawlessly cleaned out and its ability to answer public tax questions is harmed. These are only some examples of how the Trump administration has already shut down large swaths of our government, the government that serves the American people.

Moreover, failing to stand up now will likely empower the Trump administration to damage our government further. During the last continuing resolution fight, in March, Republicans and a few Democratic Senators claimed that keeping the government open without a full shutdown would protect government workers. Instead, less than a month after the CR bill was passed, the Department of Health and Human Services announced 10,000 new (illegal) firings. If Congress rolls over again, the administration is likely to see this as an opportunity to escalate, and again further shred our government in new ways.

Federal workers have already faced enormous harm, and in some ways, dealing with short term pain now is a way to stand up for our colleagues who have suffered. Federal workers have been attacked by Trump and his OMB head Russell Vought since January: forcing returns to office without proper facilities, mass firing new hires, pushing many skilled workers into retirement, and making remaining workers’ lives more difficult. Vought vowed in secret Project 2025 videos in 2024 and before to “put government workers in trauma.”

Federal workers, who are typically informed about politics and governance, know why these attacks are coming: because Vought and the American right despise a government that works for the people. They aim to make government work poorly, so they can cut the government and with it, cut taxes on the rich and cut protections for average people that restrain billionaires’ ability to accumulate wealth.

As a government employee, consider how much your colleagues, former and current, have been harmed by this administration. Think about all the workers you know that have lost their jobs working on behalf of the American people. Make your own evaluation of what might come next from Trump and Vought if Congress does not stand up now. And then decide whether to sign the letter. We hope you will decide to sign it.

How can federal workers speak about legislative matters — aren’t they prevented from doing so?

This is a letter about the Constitution, signing the letter is an act of public service, and you can sign anonymously if you are worried about agency retaliation.

Some agencies have rules against their workers speaking out on legislative matters even in their personal capacities. While these rules violate formal and informal principles of free speech (see “Is signing the letter within federal workers’ free speech rights”), and are debatably unconstitutional, some federal employees might feel uncomfortable signing a letter discussing Congress. There are three reasons we feel comfortable urging federal workers to sign.

1. The letter is fundamentally about Constitutional matters. The letter expresses our expertise as public servants about the workings of our government and Constitution. While the letter describes provisions that could be used by Congress, those provisions are to constrain an executive branch acting lawlessly; they are about Constitutional separation of powers principles.

2. The public should want federal employees to speak out about government issues of public concern. We work in the government, we know how it works. So the American people have an interest in hearing from us when major problems arise. This is a time of major problems, the largest domestic crisis of our lifetimes, and we see this as our responsibility to speak out.

3. You can sign anonymously. To prevent retaliation, we provide ways to sign anonymously. (More details at the signon link.)

We hope federal workers will weigh these factors, and embrace their roles as public servants. Our fundamental responsibilities are to defend the Constitution, and take care that the laws — laws passed by Congress — are faithfully executed. Signing the letter is a way of fulfilling those promises.

This is a nonpartisan campaign, so signing does not violate the Hatch Act, correct?

Correct. First, this document is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for advice from your attorney. That said, current law and advice from the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC) indicate that signing this letter does not violate the Hatch Act for most employees. (Note a subset of federal employees are “further restricted” under the Hatch Act and should obtain advice.) Federal workers must sign on personal time using personal resources, including personal computers, as they are expressing their personal opinions.

Why is the letter not an issue for the Hatch Act? For one, the letter is nonpartisan. It charges both parties — Congress — to stand up. However, clearly one party in Congress is more responsible for supporting Trump. That can be seen, for example, on party votes for his nominees and his reconciliation bill.

But these choices by political parties do not make the letter partisan. The letter expresses clear values about the Constitution and about upholding the law. If the Constitution and upholding the law favor one party over another, that is not the fault of federal workers or the public, that is the responsibility of that party. In a democracy, both parties should — must, for a functional democracy — agree to follow the constitution and uphold the law. We take no partisan positions on these fundamental issues.

Moreover, even if the letter did take a partisan political position, the Hatch Act allows expression of such opinions on one’s personal time using personal resources.

In sum, the Hatch Act should not restrain someone from signing a letter like this, on a matter of public concern, in one’s personal capacity.

Nothing in this entire post constitutes legal advice; consult your attorney for such advice. This expresses current interpretation of the Hatch Act and the Trump OSC and the conservative courts could take a different view. Note that the above may not apply to Hatch Act “further restricted employees.”

Why is this the moment to stand up? And why is this is a longer-term effort?

This moment is important because funding the government past Sept 30th requires 60 votes in the Senate, so Democrats have power to block the funding bill (CR). There was a moment like this in March, during the last CR vote, but some Senate Democrats ended up voting for cloture to allow that CR to pass even with “dirty” provisions that aided Trump’s assault on the Constitution and the public.

This explainer from us has context, along with this update. And we are not unique in saying this: for example, Indivisible has launched an aligned campaign, and Ezra Klein published a column on Sep. 7 justifying calling on Congress to fight.

That said, we see this as a longer-term effort by federal workers. It is possible we will see a short-term CR, kicking the can down the road a few months. And then there will be a battle over the budget and keeping the government funded — and stopping Trump — at a later moment.

Ultimately for our government to survive, and for us to emerge from this moment of constitutional failure, Congress must stand up and begin to function again as a legislative body. That fight will not be just about Sept 30, 2025. It will continue into the future.

Side note: even when a CR or bill requiring a cloture vote is not on the table, Senators and Representatives could consider more often using procedural tools — procedural maximalism — to slow Congress, draw attention, and drive public debate. That would also help. We urge Congressional leaders to shift their attention away from purely legislating to prioritizing communication and mobilizing public opinion.

How is my privacy protected?

Although we are not offering legal advice, the letter has been reviewed by lawyers with expertise in federal employment law, who have confirmed signing this letter is within our rights. However, we do not have confidence this administration will uphold our rights, so you should sign in the manner you are most comfortable. Named signers should be emotionally and financially prepared for potential retaliation. Of the seven recent whistleblowing campaigns (NIH, HHS, CDC, EPA, FEMA, NASA, and NSF), workers at two agencies have experienced retaliation, including firings.

We take your privacy very seriously. ActionNetwork data is encrypted both in transit and at rest.website is encrypted. Your data will only be accessible by the primary action organizers, the leadership of the Science and Freedom Alliance (SAFA). We will remove your information from ActionNetwork at the end of the campaign. Full names will be released by us only to one, or a small number, of trusted Congressional oversight staffers who have experience handling whistleblower cases.

If you want to sign but hesitate to include your information via ActionNetwork, we are accepting signers via direct message on Signal. More information on that option is here.

Summary of the situation: There is a continuing resolution that must pass by Sept 30, or the government will shut down. Democrats must demand a “fighting CR,” as part of that must-pass bill, that includes measures to restrain Trump’s authoritarianism. If they don’t get that — if the bill doesn’t constrain the lawlessness — they should allow Republicans to shut down the government. The specific gains of a fighting CR are important, but just as important is the fight itself. Any fight will get attention and winning a fight will weaken Trump and help the country. As one analyst put it, “Democrats need to hand Trump a loss. They’ll know they’ve won when they see him lose. Take away something he really wants. Make it hurt. Make it visible.”

This post is an update on news over the last week about the CR fight. If we want to stop Trump and fix the federal government, we should accept a shutdown as a consequence of the fight. After the capitulation in March, we saw an emboldened Trump and Project 2025 follow up with massive government-wide firings. Avoiding the shutdown made things worse both for federal workers and the country. This time, Democrats need to hand Trump a loss.

Big news: Ezra Klein’s column and podcast

No shade to Josh Marshall, Jen Rubin, Brian Beutler, Indivisible, Murshed Zaheed, or others who wrote about the fighting CR and shutdowns (see below). But Ezra Klein is widely read by many Congressional Democrats, and so Klein’s piece on Sunday is likely to shift the whole public debate — shift it in favor of “fight.”

Klein covers many of the major points from our explainer:

• The fight itself is important because it will drive attention, and signal that things are not normal.

• Preserving the courts is not an issue, especially now that the Supreme Court is actively helping Trump tear down the government (“Calvinball”).

• Trump is destroying the executive branch even without a shutdown.

• Trump will not be defeated by sitting back and letting him defeat himself. Klein adds that tariffs did not have enough sudden economic impact to bury Trump.

In response to Klein on Sunday, some commentators fretted that any fighting CR / shutdown fight must be waged on “winning issues” like healthcare. Two things to say about that:

1. NIH, medical research, CDC, vaccines, RFK Jr, and hospital payments are all healthcare issues that touch every American. These should be front and center in any fighting CR.

2. The fight itself will change polls by signaling to Americans that things are not normal. Issues matter, but remember that when Dems fought on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Trump’s immigration numbers — an issue previously considered bad for Dems — changed to become a better issue for them.

In sum, Klein argues Schumer’s March objections don’t apply today, and concludes that Senate Dems should accept a shutdown to stop Trump. That’s good news.

Other smart analysts also concluded Schumer should fight

Jen Rubin in the Contrarian covered the CR fight. She says Democrats should hold out for five demands, including undoing rescissions (that is, returning budget power to Congress), reverting Medicaid cuts, and stopping authoritarian militarization of US cities. Rubin also lays out how Democrats should make it clear what’s at stake: “Democrats should insist on a floor vote in both houses with no Democratic assistance, on Republicans’ CR. When it fails, there will be no confusion as to who is to blame if the government shuts down.”

Indivisible, a major anti-Trump organizing group, has an explainer about the fighting CR. They say “Republicans must feel the heat” and at the same time, “Democrats must take a stand.” They have a list of action items and links to call your representatives. (Please do this! Click here.) Indivisible sums up the situation well: “Republicans are hoping Democrats will be too spineless to stop them from passing a MAGA budget [CR, Sept 30] that greenlights Trump’s lawless slash and burn of the federal government” And they also decry the March CR capitulation — “The lead Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), was reportedly stunned by Schumer’s surrender and rightfully called the CR a “complete resignation” to Trump” — and insist it must not happen again.

Brian Beutler at Off Message brought us bad news that Senate Democratic leadership is signaling they plan to fold: “The latest communique [from Schumer and Jeffries] to Republicans suggests they do not intend to fight.” He continues “The [Democratic] leaders make no demands. The closest they come is to request a meeting, in the hope of getting answers to these questions. Not to establish conditions for Democratic votes, just to see how uncompromising Republicans intend to be.” And the most important part: “unless grassroots Democrats get wind of their broader approach, and make a fuss, Schumer and Jeffries will continue down the road to surrender.” We must make a fuss! Now is the time to speak out for a fighting CR and make sure Democratic leadership stands up for us.

Beutler has a follow-up piece later in the week. That piece is mostly about Trump, but covers the CR fight too. It leads with “It’s probably an understatement to note that Democratic leaders in Congress are badly out of step with the national Democratic electorate.” This is important. One of the reasons to be hopeful now is that engaged Democratic voters are angry and want more fight, they just need to know what’s happening and what can be done. The same thing is true for scientists and science advocates: we talk to many of them who are desperately worried but don’t know what to do — don’t know who has the power to help, and how. We agree with Beutler: Schumer and Jeffries and Democratic leadership underestimate the backlash they will see if they fail to fight for this CR.

Democratic strategist and Sen. Harry Reid ex-staffer Murshed Zaheed also outlined the need for a fight for this CR (“No More Blank Checks”). “Senate Democrats have a choice to make: do they pathetically bend the knee like Schumer, Schatz and few others did back in March without extracting concessions from Trump and Musk, or do they finally show up to fight in Congress and make it clear - no more blank checks?” Zaheed explains how some Democrats have justified their lack of fight: “The argument we often hear from Schumer and Jeffries’ defenders is that focusing on fighting back against fascism is a distraction and that the Democrats need to focus on economic issues. This is all nonsense, because I don’t believe Democrats have to choose one topic over another.” An important aspect to a fighting CR is that it can absolutely include healthcare and economic issues — as well as provisions to protect cancer and Alzheimer’s research and vaccines, issues that every American cares about and which poll well in swing districts.

Zaheed notes that the polls are on our side. Polling data supports the idea that fighting will help us win future elections. “A recent poll from August also shows that 48% of Americans would blame Trump and the Republicans for a shutdown, while only 28% would blame Democrats. Further, Democrats themselves become more popular when they fight: “Governor Gavin Newsom’s public support among Californians rebounded after his “high profile” pushback against the regime’s raids in LA.” He also argues that issue polls on fascism and economic issues, even if they did favor a “kitchen table” focus, should not guide Democratic leaders’ decision-making: “Even if you could prove that boring messages resonate better, the problem is that voters usually won’t even see them. …The task before leaders is to use emotional messaging to change public opinion, not to follow it. … Franklin D. Roosevelt did not dismiss the Nazi threat as a mere distraction from unemployment.”

A Politico piece outlines a plan to fold

On the other hand, Rachael Bade in Politico argued last week that though “Democrats Flinched During the Last Spending Showdown [in March]”, “They Should Do It Again.” Probably the best way to read this piece from Politico, owned by Axel Springer (Germany’s Fox News, roughly), is as a guide to what Democratic leadership is thinking and has conveyed to the reporter. Bade cites a “Democratic aide” as saying “We would essentially be handing him even more power” — that is, the washed-up argument from March, proven wrong by the mass firings, rescissions, and massive Medicaid and hospital cuts.

Probably the clearest statement of Senate Democratic leadership thinking is this: ““You’ll probably just have to eventually fold and get nothing out of it,” the aide said, warning the scenario posed huge risks for the party: “Are we going to let the base dictate legislative strategy and just shut down the government so we can say, ‘Okay, at least we fought,’ and then two weeks later, we reopen it and get nothing in return, and in the interim do harm to actual people?” These articles we review above from this past week, including our piece, argues why fighting matters, Congress asserting its authority matters, and why starting to communicate now is vital, even though it’s easier to sit back. And Democratic leadership should have a fighting CR with an explicit list of fundamental issues they will insist on. We all can help with that by speaking out and pushing for measures in a fighting CR that stop Trump’s lawlessness.

More on fighting

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has written a series of posts explaining why Senate Democrats must stand up and what’s at stake:

• “Living In Trump’s World”

• “What Are Senate Dems Thinking?”

• “What Dems Should Ask For”

• And: ”There’s a New Budget Showdown. Senate Dems’ Current Plan Is Bullshit”

Worth reading each of these. One thing to highlight is that even John Thune (R-SD), the Republican Senate Majority leader, seems to be looking to cut a deal with Democrats. “Thune doesn’t want to lose his majority either. That’s much less likely than Republicans losing the House. But it is possible. He’s basically asking Democrats to step forward to help him.”

Side note on history: Thune hails from a state, South Dakota, that was added to the union along with North Dakota, instead of as a single state, for partisan advantage and to tilt the Senate to the anti-slavery party. When Trump is slowed or stopped — as a result of this fight and coming fights — and Democrats retake Congress, there should be no stopping them from adding states like DC. We must level the urban-rural tilt in the Senate and make Congress a functional lawmaking body again. That’s the long-term way we will repair and sustain US science and universities and our tech economy.

Summary: This can be a big moment, for health, science, and democracy

The CR fight at the end of September is a big moment for the anti-Trump forces. We must do everything we can to support Democrats in standing up to “shut Trump down.” Senate Democrats must stand up for a fighting CR. That’s important for cancer research, for vaccines, for public health, and for US democracy. Let’s do this.

Other links of potential interest

(for people who read all the way to the end of this and still want more information)

• Brian Beutler, Feb 10, 2025: “Democrats Approach Their Enabling Moment: If Democrats provide the decisive votes to fund this government, it will reverberate through history for all time.”

• Rep Jared Golden (D-ME), March 14, 2025: Golden wrote an essay in March explaining why he folded on the March CR. This is flimsy at best, as is clear when Golden’s first argument is “just wait until you see how much they could put on ice with the expanded executive authority of a government shutdown.” That’s just not true, as history showed us: Trump just went harder at ‘putting the government on ice’. This is an interesting piece because it lays out arguments we will want to be ready to rebut this time.