Week 32
Aug 23-29, 2025 - on persistence vs consistence
Hello friends,
I have a small note pinned on the front screen of my phone. It just says “Fix what’s in front of you.” I posted it at the beginning of the year, at the same time I wrote my post on starting this marathon. I find a certain kind of comfort in advice that is so simple, and often close this newsletter out with some variation on “one step in front of the other.” The risk, of course, is tuning out, numbing out, and getting stuck in a pattern that is not actually helpful. So I’m not saying we should turn our brains off - quite the opposite. This week I’m thinking about the distinction between strategic persistence and foolish consistency.
This was Week 32, it was grueling, and until just now, I had almost completely forgotten that it’s Labor Day Weekend. Let’s dig deep and dig in.
What’s happening now
There’s been chaos and courage at the CDC. On Wednesday, HHS posted on X1 that “Susan Monarez as no longer Director” of the CDC. Almost immediately after the news broke,2 four agency directors resigned3, some publicly sharing furious resignation letters. The news was shocking, and got more complicated when lawyers for Monarez contradicted the news reports, announcing that she had not, in fact, been fired, nor had she resigned. On Thursday, the administration confirmed Jim O’Neill as the acting CDC director. CDC staff walked out and joined hundreds of people gathered to honor the leaders who resigned, including a moving salute by uniformed members of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The context here is important. Physicians are in revolt, with, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics has now issued its own immunization schedule. Some states are openly planning to diverge from federal guidance, and others are exploring the possibility of directly purchasing and distributing vaccines. The utility of such approaches becomes clear when we look at how the FDA just approved the next round of COVID vaccines, but substantially tightened guidelines for who is eligible to receive them. This has prompted the country's two biggest pharmacies, CVS and Walgreens, to entirely end COVID vaccine availability in some states, and require prescriptions in many others. To bring this back to the CDC firings and resignations , I wanted to say that when the stakes are this high, it makes sense to me that people are arguing heatedly about staying in a job to keep fighting versus walking away. I think understanding the backstory of what happened to Monarez this week is crucial. It inspires me to specifically name the red lines I will refuse to cross in my own life. In brief, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. tried to force her to do two things: 1) approve unscientific vaccine recommendations from the now-corrupted ACIP,4 and 2) fire high-level CDC scientific staff for political reasons. As a result, Patty Murray is demanding his immediate termination, and even Bill Cassidy5 has (reissued) a call to postpone the September 18 ACIP meeting. Expect more on this during testimony to the Senate Finance Committee hearings next week.
In other news of principled objections, we have confirmation that the EPA has fired at least some of the signatories of that agency’s Declaration of Dissent. There has also been another shocking round of firings at FEMA, though it appears to be separate(?) from the recent disciplinary actions taken against signatories of FEMA’s own Katrina Declaration.
And in other troubling updates:
This morning, the administration unilaterally decided not to spend $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid and peacekeeping support. The mechanism they used - called a pocket rescission - is something we’ve been worried about for weeks and represents a huge threat to the way federal funding has been negotiated and run for essentially all of our lifetimes. I’m tired, you’re tired, and only a small handful of us relish these financial details - but we all need to understand how this administration is radically altering the process. This is going to be a big theme starting next week, as our elected representatives return to session and the government shutdown deadline looms.
Yet another presidential memo of concern, this one ostensibly about using grant funding to pay for lobbying, which is already prohibited. It directs the Attorney General to investigate and pursue action.
After 26 years, the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium has stopped enrolling new patients, due to federal funding issues. Leadership is working on transferring studies to the Pediatric Early Phase Clinical Trials Network, but I can’t imagine being in the terrible position of having a child I love in need of these treatments and unable to get help immediately.
I’m also sad to see the news that ARCUS is ending in September. The Arctic Research Consortium of the United was a nonprofit dedicated to connecting Arctic research and education across organizations, disciplines, geographies, sectors, knowledge systems, and cultures. It hosted all kinds of resources, like researcher directories and, crucially, sea ice outlook reports. If you know about where that work will happen in the future, I’m curious and would like to hear.
Finally, worth some deep thought on the long weekend: the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a long piece on the maneuvers seeking to disempower faculty senates across the country. As old mechanisms for exerting influence are captured or diminished, how are you thinking about building power?
What’s next & what to do
Some of us are all over the news and deep into plans for how to shape what happens next week and beyond. If you’re reading this, hello, you’re incredible. If you’re bewildered, exhausted, or otherwise overwhelmed, hi, I’m so grateful you’re making the effort to be here.
No matter where you fall on that spectrum, I believe that two things are all extremely likely at the same time: 1) some of our contributions will make an enormous difference, and 2) many (most?) of our contributions will go absolutely nowhere at all, even the really clever, theoretically sound ones. To make it even more complicated, I think it will be almost impossible to truly know if a specific action falls into category 1 or 2, AND all the actions I’m referring to entirely rely on other people believing in them and joining in.
Lately I’ve been grappling with the challenge of how to move forward under so much uncertainty. Is ‘one foot in front of the other’ actually good advice when our old strategies are failing? How do we cope with the disconnect created by our need for systems thinking while understanding that our actions are necessarily individual and specific?
This week, I finally found writing about strategy development6 that has meaningfully helped me grapple with these questions. Specifically, Rumelt’s notion of “chain link systems” is clarifying. He uses this phrase to describe contingencies that allow the weakest part of the system to constrain the performance of the whole.7 In systems like this, making improvements to one subcomponent not only fails to improve overall performance, it can actually degrade it. It’s tricky to think about applying these ideas to systems where the parts aren’t physical components, but rather people, relationships, and behaviors.
And so I return to the idea of fixing what’s in front of me. No matter what, changing systems is difficult, but absolutely possible. Instead of trying to change everything at once, or worse, giving up without ever trying, what we need are well-sequenced actions planned by leader who are willing to bear the short-term costs for long-term gains. I believe we can and must get behind such leaders, whether that means finding them or stepping up in our own capacities.
Believing that we are not helpless, that we do have the power to do something, is essential. I was reading earlier this week about how it is one of the definitive differences between those who took action versus bystanders and perpetrators of genocide.
I think this also helps me solve my opening problem of not knowing which of our elegant plans are the most effective.
So for this week, the ‘what to do’ feels quite simple, even if we each take it in wildly different and complex directions. I refuse to believe that I’m helpless. I refuse to stop trying just because I don’t know which of my actions will be the most important, or when my critical moment will come.
I hope you are with me.
Liz
As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me. Please share it with your people. Meeting the Moment will always be free, but if you want to contribute ⤵️
If this email was forwarded to you, hi. This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among friends and colleagues who’ve had a rough week. Every Friday night, I share two or three pieces of news that feel most important to those of us who care about science and higher education. I try to offer a helpful way to think about the problems in front of us, and at least one useful thing to do. If you like what you see ⤵️
Although I was on Twitter for more than a decade, I left it back in 2023 and refuse to use it now. You can see the post in question without logging in, and I’m providing the link here for completeness, rather than encouraging you to click it. ↩
I’m using the Wayback machine archive to link you to the article as it was first published. Here’s the updated version if you’re curious to compare. ↩
Those leaders were Drs. Daniel Jerniga (director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases), Debra Houry (CDC Chief Medical Officer), Demetre Daskalakis (director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases), and Jennifer Layden (director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology). ↩
“Every one of the seventeen members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was removed from their post on Monday, despite assurances that this specifically would not occur. This independent body of doctors and researchers advises the CDC on which vaccines should be recommended for Americans, including how much, to whom, and when. On Thursday, the administration appointed eight new members to ACIP. The American Medical Association has criticized the new members as insufficiently vetted and issued an emergency resolution, which calls for a Senate investigation, among other things. They do not directly say that some of the new members have spread appalling misinformation, though that is also true.”
A deciding vote in approving RFK Jr’s nomination - that he is a doctor with a record of pro-vaccine work made that even more devastating. ↩
If you’re going to buy the book, let me warmly/strongly recommend Bookshop.org. They are a certified B-cope and profits from your purchase - whether it’s hard copy or the ebook - go to your choice of independent bookstores. You should read more about their model. ↩
The shorthand Rumelt uses for this is the Challenger disaster. As long as the shuttle can be destroyed by cracked o-rings in the rocket boosters, efforts to improve the fuel mix or navigation systems will never be good investments. ↩