Bhattacharya, Letai & other politicals at NIH keep trying to to say all at NIH is fine, because they spent the full budget last year. This well researched article from @carolynyjohnson.bsky.social explains exactly why many scientists are still struggling. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...
"Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial: Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later."
I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.
“A.I. is one of the most energy-intensive technologies ever built. In Virginia, where data centers are most concentrated, they already consume 26 percent of the state’s electricity”
Yikes.
"The average taxpayer in 2025 paid: $4,049 for weapons and war, vs. $2,492 for Medicaid, which provided health insurance to 68.5 million Americans in 2025 — about one in five Americans."
Washington Post article on STEM cuts at federal agencies. NSF tops it at -42%!
“Between January 2025 and February 2026, STEM and health employees at science-focused agencies saw nearly 15,000 jobs cut. The rate outpaced cuts among other federal workers.”
OPM data - Figure from Wash Post article 19 April. (Where US science has been hit hardest.)
NSF at -42%!
I do not want to create an account or open a subscription I just want to buy a thing and never hear from you again why is this so hard.
Sadly, applications to the Advanced Python summer school have dropped significantly over the past 2 years.
Plus, there'll be no external funding for the 1st time in *17 years*.
Likely all because of GenAI - but programming skills still matter🔥
Deadline May 3, please help by sharing:
aspp.school
I’m looking for an automated way to read others’s scientific data without giving credit or acknowledgement, and also claim full credit for insights from it. And I want it to have a fitting name
OAI: say no more
This is a handy little website if you want to keep track of how things are going with science funding.
sciencespending.org#overview
DOGGETT: Doesn't your budget propose another 12% cut for NIH?
VOUGHT: Most of what you said is untrue. NIH was not cut at all--
D: My Q is don't you propose another 12% cut?
VOUGHT: We propose a cut
D: Is it your feeling that we just can't afford to invest more in doing something about cancer?
Fluoride in drinking water has no effect on IQ or brain function, a long-term study shows.
The new research is the first to measure community water fluoridation exposure during childhood and any potential impact on cognition up to age 80.
The results contradict RFK Jr. statements.
Even under optimistic projections, suc- cess rates for grant applications remain low—hovering around one in ten. But, Letai encourages observers to distin- guish between short-term fluctuations (“the weather”) and long-term structur- al realities (“the climate”). “I think there’s been a lot of focus on the weather lately, and people bring up im- portant details, like the loss of paylines, whether or not we’re going to have to institute multi-year funding, whether indirect costs are going to fall down, and priorities that are more temporally close, right?
Then this bit on weather vs climate.
How incredibly out of touch does one have to be with most scientists whose labs survive award to award to suggest they shouldn't be worried about short term fluctuations? Especially folks just starting labs!
How many labs will shutdown during the "bad weather?"
This piece from Letai in the Cancer letter gives "he doth protest too much" vibes. cancerletter.com/conversation...
It's a bold move to tell scientists, especially early career scientists, that they aren't experiencing what they are experiencing. ⛽💡
Anyone else constantly being called out by comics and memes online?
Happy Tuesday, all!
Anyone in the DFW region in need of a snuggly only-dog?
Holy shit, you have to be TRULY EVIL to make Switzerland get up off the neutral fence and call you out FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME SINCE 1815?!?
trump MUST be removed from office.
Same goes for his enablers in Congress.
“It wasn’t only that America was a big, dynamic country with many world-class research institutions. It was that here, unlike so many other places, differences of opinion were encouraged, and the prevailing ethos was to let the best ideas win.”
Compelling article, must-read. 🧪
$165,626,742,154.29
That's the cost of the Trump administration's mismanagement, as estimated by a new tool from @ourpublicservice.bsky.social:
federalharmstracker.org/cost-to-our-...
$1.26B lost from terminated NIH grants as of Feb 2026.
$1,028.74 for each person in the country.
May I interest you in £10k for humanities or social science research? Our small grants scheme is open. Apply by 3rd June.
We allocate through partial randomisation - awarding randomly between all applications that meet our quality threshold
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...
Just got off the #WCBR executive committee meeting. We're starting to plan things for #WCBR2027 and we need your help!
I am hearing from several sources that NIH will be doing the bulk of multi-year grant funding later in the year
Apparently the goal (presumably from OMB) is that NIH should hit the max legally allowed amount (the same as last year) which was intended as a cap not as a goal
Vought with this plan...
The recent presidential budget request has a 40% increase in military spending and 10% cut to non-military spending, including a 25% cut to the NIH.
It seems worth pointing out that NIH (and other R&D) boosts the economy by 250%, whereas military spending (except R&D) shrinks the economy by 10%.
This researcher created a fictional illness, and fake studies funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and University of the Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad.
LLMs warned people the illness was real.
go.nature.com/48mAyh9
Washington Post Trump warns ‘a whole civilization will die’ if Iran doesn’t make a deal The president had issued a deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern time for Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz, pledging destruction by midnight if leaders don’t comply. April 7, 2026 at 9:22 a.m. EDT26 minutes ago 2 min
Completely unstable and perilous. The House must bring up impeachment articles, and the Senate needs to remove a president who wants to commit war crimes. We cannot sit idly by as Donald Trump threatens to end an entire civilization.
Kim: Three weeks of the war in Iran could have funded vision, hearing, and dental coverage for every senior in America on Medicare. I mean, it just gives you a sense of the trade-off.
There are no grants for data storage.
We were running our own servers because NIH and NSF grants have not kept up with inflation for over 20 years.
Yet that institution and many others are implementing an IT infrastructure that is actively hostile to open science and data sharing.
It's a problem.
I am shocked to see this language from the NSF.
“The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”
📊 New NBER data: China's share of top-journal publications rose from near zero to 32%. The U.S. fell from 60% to 24%.
Do not just tell your reps "fund NIH." Ask why FY2026 awards are at a fraction of historical rates when Congress already provided the funding.
grant-witness.us 3/3
