🍻🍾🎉 Side note: Gotta hand it to the student reporters at @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social. They’ve been all over this stuff for months.

The National Academies' response to the EPA's proposed removal of the endangerment finding is out today. It does not mince words about the effect of GHGs on the climate. Kudos to the authors. Key paragraph below; you can read the whole thing here: nas.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?...

Facing a proposed $1.2-billion fine and severe medical research grant cuts at UCLA, the University of California has not gone head-to-head with Trump in court. So on Tuesday, groups representing more than 100,000 of its employees did. www.latimes.com/california/s...

This is the energy we need.

As a UC employee*: Fuck off into the sun forever with this bullshit and then continue to get fucked until you land in another sun 10 million light years from this one. *Opinion not representative of the UC system. Unfortunately.

JUST IN: A judge quashed the subpoena to Boston Children's Hospital by the DoJ that sought the records of trans patients. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Y'all. The NIH NOAs are starting to flow at Harvard. 💪✊🥳

Holy hell what warped timeline are we in right now?? Harvard beat Trump in court. But I've been asked by 3 different reporters whether Harvard should settle with Trump now that it won. Would you ask a robbery victim to hand over his wallet right after the robber was found guilty? Come on, man. 🤦‍♂️

They keep losing in court because everything they’re doing is illegal

FINALLY: Harvard [mostly] wins. We'll see what happens next. www.courtlistener.com/docket/69921...

I had forgotten how jaw-dropping these curves were. 👀

Moderna vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... ) 2/2

Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... ) 1/2

Good 🧵on grant terminations

Presupposing the Trump Admin takes the advice of HHS lawyers and chooses not to re-terminate the 900ish grants, this is helpful for another reason: NIH staff are busting their asses to get awards out the door before the end of FY25. If they had to re-terminate, they'd lose time to make new awards.

BREAKING: per email sent to agency staff NIH will _NOT_ reterminate the ~900 grants which were reinstated. "[W]e would strongly recommend against re-terminating such grants, because it will likely be viewed as a reapplication of the now-vacated Challenged Directives."

NEW: Don't ask too many questions, but... NIH may not re-terminate the 900ish grants at issue in the main NIH lawsuits after all. To the PIs of reinstated grants, SPEND NOW! 🧵 Here's what NIH is probably thinking. Bear with me:

Another EO about grants, this one directing the attorney general to investigate "lobbying" in the form of "taxpayer funds ... being spent on grants with highly political overtones." Expect we'll see more targeting of universities by the DOJ.

I’m with the late great Molly Ivins:

Conservatives now control federal research funding. The next step: actually manipulating research. A conservative law firm is demanding Brown retract research showing connections between anti-wind groups and the fossil fuel industry. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

i am afraid that university leaders see themselves as narrowly defending specific grants and policies, perhaps even asserting university prerogatives, when they are in fact, like it or not, on the front lines of defending democracy.

Scientists are removing words like “diverse” and “disparities” from hundreds of federal grant renewals to avoid getting flagged in the Trump administration’s focus on eliminating diversity.

Of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, which allows hundreds of NIH grant terminations to proceed, @scott-delaney.bsky.social says: “I see no viable, no reasonably likely scenario where that research comes back. I think it’s gone.” www.chronicle.com/article/trac...

🧵 Three more thoughts from yesterday's NIH SCOTUS catastrophe: 1️⃣ By casting the deciding vote to re-terminate "DEI" and trans health grants, Justice Barrett has found another way to attack trans folks. She's now authored multiple opinions subverting their rights. She really hates trans people.

This ⤵️

The practical upshot is that justice delayed is justice denied; or to be more precise, a lab which had to fire all of its researchers and halt work on groundbreaking research isn't going to be able to ever restore itself to the same position it would have been without a multi-year pause in funding.

If you had told me 30 years ago that Michael Luttig and Bill Kristol would have a clearer understanding about what's going on than a lot of Democratic leaders, I'd have wondered whether you tried the brown acid.

A helpful explainer from @stevevladeck.bsky.social ⤵️ Steve finds some positives here bc Barrett signaled that plaintiffs might win in the Court of Federal Claims (CFC). But you can't just pause research for so many months & restart it after you win in the CFC. The research is effectively gone.

You know that it's a rough day at #SCOTUS when it hands down a ruling from which *eight* justices dissent (albeit in different parts).

This is scant comfort to NIH-funded researchers. It would take many months or more than a year to re-file cases in Federal Claims Court, win them, and get grant money back. It's also expensive. Lawyers fees add up. The practical result is that all of this research is gone. What a waste.

🚨 SCOTUS just issued a decision in the NIH grant termination cases. And it's awful. In plain English, the likely result of this is that SCOTUS just re-terminated ~900 NIH grants worth over $1.9 billion in unspent funds This is an atrocious decision by Justice Barrett & the right wing of the Court.

This is the best product listing copy I’ve ever read

🚨ACTION OF THE DAY🚨 @standupforscience.bsky.social Day 21! QUACK-O-GRAM THURSDAY! For $3 we will hand deliver an "IMPEACH THE QUACK" rubber ducky to your House Representative! (By one of our team members in a duck suit!) DO IT (AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS) act.standupforscience.net/fundraising/...

I have NIGMS R35, impact score 12 NIHGRI R21, 4th percentile NHGRI R01, 7th percentile (co-I) and it seems like none will be funded. 0/3. PO (who has been very helpful) said "Unfortunately, I do not expect this application will be selected for funding in FY25." 😭

2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll..... 13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/

Been hearing folks don’t realize NIH is more than its internal labs. That cutting NIH is ok because Dana Farber will still do cancer research. Joslin will cover diabetes, etc. But these centers get most of their funding from NIH. Stop NIH, and the whole system fails, across the entire US.

When Trump signed an EO signaling more political oversight of research it didn’t set off new alarm bells inside the NIH They’d already been ringing for months @mmolteni.bsky.social @angusrohan.bsky.social & I document how politicization has slowed the agency down www.statnews.com/2025/08/15/i...

🔥 from Kristen Weld and Andrew Manuel Crespo at Harvard: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/14/o... A key reminder that no matter what university Boards do, faculty, staff, and students will continue this fight. Because the Globe is mostly paywalled, some choice quotes:

Good morning! It's August 15, 2025, and Jay Bhattacharya is still a very terrible NIH Director.

NIH will no longer list NIH grant opportunities through the NIH Guide. Sure, grants.gov was duplicative. But grants.gov is shitty. And NIH's Guide was less shitty. Not a huge deal. But just one more example of exec branch consolidation and NIH enshittification grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

The mayor and the governor should be threatening now to use every newton of power they have to punish Harvard if they do this. Eye-watering state and local endowment taxes, zoning and land use, litigation, you name it.

FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

This story is a really big problem. TLDR: NIH will likely ban all science considering gender. That means no health research on topics affecting ~5% (at a min) of the population. ~1% of people will get Parkinson's. 3% of women will get uterine cancer. 1-2% have red hair. 5% is a huge number.

SCOOP: The NIH is moving to prohibit funded scientists, inside and outside the agency, from collecting data about gender, according to a draft policy I obtained. It’s part of the NIH’s aggressive crackdown on gender-identity research. www.chronicle.com/article/gend...

🎤 BOOM: Federal judge just ruled to *reinstate* the suspended ~300 NSF grants at UCLA. Determines that NSF violated the previous court order by attempting to swap "termination" with "suspension". storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Look, Harvard either fights and wins or folds and accepts a permanently diminished role within higher education and American society. Leaders don't fold. Cowards do.

This is a key point--terminations have hit every corner of the country. See, e.g., the map below from our homepage at grant-witness.us Awful lotta orange and yellow in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio. Even Missouri. UAB alone has lost over $18M in funds it was previously awarded.