It finally came!! We received our NOA today for an R01 submitted in October 2024. Somewhere in there I had lost all hope. But today, we have been funded to do this important work. Stay tuned for more to come about this project! 🧪 #AcademicSky #WomeninSTEM

"Nobody cares about the bomb that didn't go off" - Tenet

Big day for the Nothing Ever Happens people. But also: “And while we’ve taken the worst of the worst-case scenarios off the table, we’ve run out of time to keep warming below 1.5°C, and 2°C — the upper limit that the 2015 Paris Accords sought to prevent.”

Still all quiet on the #NSF front. No new awards in the past week. REMINDER: We still are hearing of trickles of terminations, suspensions, and money being held back from grantees, which NSF isn't reporting. We need your help - please report! 🧪 grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0...

I KNEW I noticed a difference

“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Important update: This morning NSF removed its internal flags on 3 of the 4 universities (Princeton's remains). We've updated our story to reflect this and the release of the new awards to Harvard and Duke.

Small update: Since yesterday afternoon, when our article was published, 4 new awards have gone out to Harvard PIs—the first since December.

Behaviores Report: 100% goode!

We have an open PhD position in our Mol. Biochemistry of Plant-Microbe Interactions Lab Saurlab.com. Please see details below, share and consider applying. jobportal.uni-koeln.de/ausschreibun...

If, like me, you have questions about what these things actually are, it’s better not to Google. Trust me. You’re better off not knowing.

Yesterday—4 days after OMB released its proposal to revamp all federal funding—there were 3500+ comments. Today there are nearly 4,500. Our story on the damage the proposal could inflict on science and the researchers pushing back. Reported w/@marilenharo.bsky.social:

The list of NSF positions is extremely narrow... with the exception of the Office of Award Management, nearly all of which (~30 or so) will now be Policy/Career.

'Positions of “Health Scientist Administrator”' 'Positions of branch chief or division director' Health Scientist Administrators include #NIH program officers and scientific review officers (who run peer review). Branch chief/div. directors supervise program officers. This could be a bloodbath. 🧪

What’s it gonna cost to dismantle this network? Seems like a huge undertaking.

Oh, yes. That too.

📚 Librarians (especially those involved in professional orgs): this also covers IMLS, and includes an explicit ban on using federal grants to attend conferences except where specifically approved.

The public comment period closes approximately July 13, 2026 (45 days from May 29 publication). Comments must be submitted to regulations.gov, Docket OMB-2026-0034

I know there is a lot going on, and not all of this is new, but numerous aspects of this OMB proposal are highly alarming and would, if enacted, effectively force American scientists receiving federal funding (which is...most of them in some capacity or another) to stop engaging with the public.

And then there’s this: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

I don’t know about y’all, but I usually don’t know whether I’m attending a conference until I 1) know where it will be and 2) have an abstract accepted. Neither of these things are knowable at the time of grant submission.

"costs for attending conferences are allowable only if participation in the conference is expressly approved by the agency and included in the terms and conditions of the award" I.e., if that conference you were hoping to go to was not, specifically, in the terms, you're out of luck.

"OMB also proposes to add a provision that agencies may consider an applicant’s history of questionable practices based on publicly available and verifiable information"

BREAKING: New proposed OMB regulation, applying to all federal grants, requiring grant reviews by senior political appointees and re-emphasizes that "peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion". #standupforscience public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-10817.pdf

4) International scientific collaboration is severely restricted. For the better part of a century the greatest strength of US science has been its position as a focal point of international research activity. This policy dooms US science to inevitable irrelevance.

3) Any grant can be terminated for any reason at any time—a devastating change that makes it impossible hire personnel, plan experiments, conduct field studies, or carry out most of the day-to-day activities that constitute effective science.

A few critical points: 1) Program officers will be replaced by political appointees in the grantmaking process. The role of peer review—originally introduced into US funding agencies for large part to prevent political interference with scientific research—is strongly diminished.

It is hard to convey how destructive this change would be. In a climate where far less grants are being awarded, the initial score provides crucial information not just to applicants but to department chairs, center directors, and promotion referees about a faculty member's prospects for funding.

My PO said I had to fill out this form for 3 of my papers for the RPPR of my NIGMS MIRA grant in February, or I could not include them in my progress report. It looks like things have gotten even worse since then.

Some absolutely horrendous pipetting happening in the latest episode of For All Mankind.

And the NOFO has to allow foreign components. Some specifically do not.

Yes, I had to file a 'foreign component' declaration with my NIH proposal, and have it approved by my PO, because the papers resulting from the proposed studies *might* have Israeli co-authors.

This is a disaster. Science is an international endeavor. Major steps forward happen through serendipity and collaboration. Grants fund science, but people -- Americans and non-Americans, both in our country and overseas -- create science. That makes us healthier, richer, and safer.

I was told that I needed to request permission to collaborate with physicians from European countries before testing the effects of patient mutations they identified on an enzyme we study. For each collaborator, NIH is asking for email, institution, street address, phone number (!!). Insane.

This is not super great. “ordering them to remove from annual progress reports to NIH any publications that include “co-authors affiliated with foreign institutions if NIH had not previously approved a foreign component for the grant.””

“Science said the forbidden partners could even include foreign students working in the U.S. and scientists who left the country after the research.” So like…every fifth grad student?

“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.

“Those co-authors could include visiting colleagues, students, or postdoctoral researchers temporarily working in the U.S.; overseas researchers who donated research material but didn’t take part in the research; and scientists who moved abroad after conducting the work in the U.S.”

everything I've seen this morning is bad except for this this is v good

academics trying to normalize acceptance of AI hallucinated citations in their field: do you seriously expect me to show my work and check my work me, baffled, a naïf, a fool: yes that’s why it’s called *your* *work*

Most frustrating part of anti-NIH rhetoric is how it frames NIH as only doing one thing at a time. There has always been cancer research, there has always been diabetes research. All of NIAID was 13% of the NIH budget in 2024.

When it rains it pours. The RasgonLab was just awarded 2 NIH grants (R01 and R21). This is also actually the first time in my career that I've successfully renewed an R01

Nothing like a threat to throw out tubes from then -70 freezer to bring the lab together. Found a box labeled 2005.

I was once asked by a non-science friend why I chose to do what I do. And the only explanation I could come up was “Science ‘fails’ about 95% of the time. Most of the time, things just don’t work. But the high I get that 5% of the time when they do is better than any drug you could ever offer me.”

You wouldn’t think that one tiny bottle of TaqMan mix would warrant *thirteen* ice packs. And yet…

Guys, we’ve all been doing it wrong!