Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Social Sciences 7/11

I think this is maybe half of my research program now

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s over last year www.science.org/content/arti... #jobs #STEM #science #research

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

5/6

And yet, In Covid’s Wake quotes me as saying that “the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands” — literally the opposite of what I argue — to buttress their claim that the government was too busy censoring speech to adequately deal with the pandemic.

Beyond parody

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew Memoli aren't bringing "gold standard science" to the #NIH, they are gutting research slowly but surely. When this time is over, they should be hauled before Congress, and shunned for the rest of their lives. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Again, there is no plan for running our universities without federal funding, or foreign students, at scale. But the public has no idea about this because no. one. is. telling. them. this. They expect their kids are still going to be able to do all the things at college in the next 4 years, & well:

"They had submitted extensive paperwork and paid fees. The foreign spouses had been fingerprinted and passed medical exams. None had criminal records. None had entered the country illegally. They had already been granted employment authorization." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

🚨🚨🚨 Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17 🚨🚨🚨 We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

I really am just working from the basic premise of political science that public opinion isn’t just measurable — you can and should CREATE it.

My biggest beef with all of it is the insistence on treating public opinion as something that is stable and designed to be mined for strategy/platform rather than something that is malleable and can be shaped when you are value driven.

Some charts for those who don't know the extent of the US public (and private) investment in research (particularly in biomedical research) compared to other countries and institutions. The destruction of the US' scientific institutions has global implications.

New paper with @romanfeiman.bsky.social's lab, special to me given the inspiration from a parenting observation, when my then-2yo would regularly (and sensibly) confuse "anything" with "nothing"; turns out she was not alone and we can learn something about negative concord and semantic variation too

When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh? We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939 #AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

Nice piece by @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social where he implies that the only interdisciplinary conversations worth having are those at SPP (@socphilpsych.bsky.social). I agree! A big shoutout to @levelsof.bsky.social & @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social for putting together a conversation-inspiring SPP 2025!

BREAKING: ICE is sending Russian dissidents back to Russia. When the dissidents arrived in Russia, the Russian authorities were given documents relating to their asylum applications in the US which under US law are confidential. This seems to be part of a secret agreement between Trump and Putin.

"Delays in interview appointments, increased documentation checks, and a sharp rise in rejection rates have created a cloud of uncertainty over the entire higher education system." www.m9.news/usa-news/us-...

NSF makes you say who you got conflicts (coauthored) with. We (really just Jordan Matelsky) just built you a tool for that. Literally one click: bib.experiments.kordinglab.com/nsf-coa

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

The NIH’s 2024 budget of just under $37B generated $95B in economic activity in 2024 alone. 99.4% of new pharmaceuticals approved from 2010-2019 came from NIH-funded research. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that generates as much direct economic benefit as our NIH did before they destroyed it

NIH advisory councils are being gutted - reviewers were ousted before starting. NIH staff were told to nominate Trump-loyal scientists, and warned that even those could be replaced by handpicked cronies. What’s happening at Trump’s NIH is a hostile takeover of science. zurl.co/WQS6B

To me, one of the hardest parts is that there has long been bipartisan support for research—who wants deaf children suffer?? Science cannot be a partisan issue. I met with folks on both sides of the aisle on the Hill, and am grateful to see that there continues to be support for this work. (15/16)

Okay y’all, gather round for a chat. It’s been a roller coaster, and I thought I’d share what we’ve learned. 🧵 (1/16) bsky.app/profile/luck...

Just sent this as an email to my department but figured I'd share more broadly in case it is useful. This describes the procedure happening now for science funding in Congress (@davidimiller.bsky.social can correct me if I got this wrong). Importantly, there are still actions that can be taken.

The Senate appropriations committee has voiced its intent to ignore the request by President Donald Trump to slash the budgets of the National Science Foundation and NASA science programs. scim.ag/4nW7XWi

🚨 BREAKING 🚨 The National Science Foundation has sent an email out to its members to collect signatures for a dissent declaration similar to the NIH’s Bethesda Declaration and the EPA’s Declaration of Dissent. This comes on the heels of Lee Zeldin putting 139 EPA declaration signers on admin leave

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding. Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24. See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it. 🧵 1/3

Whenever I read "big beautiful bill" I just hear the Wait Wait intro in my head and it turns into "I'm the big beautiful Bill Kurtis! And here is your host..." You're welcome

I hope everyone is having a good Fourth of July break. Here is how I ended up spending some of mine... 1/n

"A generation of scientific talent at the brink of being lost to overseas competitors by dismantling of NSF" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

"Columbia University, Baker said, had bent over backwards and still not gotten its grants back. Instead, it’s been reported to its accreditor." www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

One of best public universities on one of the five most beautiful campuses in the country. Decimated.

It seems that only the science community is noticing that NIH and NSF budgets are cut 40% and 55% in the budget bill, respectively. If you live in Maine, West Va, Pennsylvania, Alabama, or Louisiana, CALL YOUR SENATOR as they could make a difference. See below. prospect.org/politics/202...

Near the end of the Biden years, Elizabeth Prelogar asked the Supreme Court to rein in nationwide injunctions in a low-stakes case where a Republican judge/Fifth Circuit blocked an act of Congress from applying to anyone anywhere. They declined and took up Trump’s patently illegal order instead.

For comparison, here's how the Times described Orban's attack on Central European University in Hungary: CEU was "forced from its campus in Budapest by the increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban" www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/w...

Am I understanding correctly that... OMB hasn't even given NSF about $2.5B of Congressionally appropriated funds??? I had thought (in part) the situation was (a) NSF had the money and (b) the admin was intervening to avoid the spending of it. IIUC, sounds like even (a) might be suspect.

I know there’s a lot of news right now but this is really crazy. They’re booting the National Science Foundation out of its newish building with no plans for where 1800 people are going to go.

They haven’t posted it here but @votehub.com made an incredible graphic of the NYC primary showing results with population by precinct on the Z axis designed to look like a building map of NYC. One of my favorite political maps ever.

“NSF employees are being displaced with no plan, no communication, and no respect. This callous disregard for taxpayer dollars and NSF employees comes after the Administration already cut NSF’s budget, staff and science grants.”

Always loved the people who are like, "But my ancestors came here the legal way!" and by that they mean they arrived via ratship to an island, a man asked them their name, they were like, "Uh, Jeff... Smith?" another guy said "sure?" and then they became permanent residents of the United States.

"While it’s mostly gone unremarked upon in the mainstream media, institutions of higher learning across the country are about to be pummeled by the looming reconciliation bill, which may portend an extinction event for higher education as we know it." newrepublic.com/article/1970...

Jay, please stop gaslighting early career researchers.