May 3, 2025

Week 15

Figuring out what to focus on now & next in science and higher ed

This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among colleagues who’ve had a rough week. I share two or three pieces of the puzzle that feel are most important, hazard a guess about what to expect next, and offer at least one useful thing to do.

MEETING THE MOMENT: 2025-05-02

Hello friends,

I open this newsletter the same way every week¹, like I’m standing at the front door, welcoming you in. Typing “Hello friends,” is such a comforting ritual now that it’s funny to remember I wasn’t always confident in the opening. I worried it could ring untrue, since I wasn’t really sure then what we all were to each other back then. 

But I am thinking a lot about friends at the moment, inspired partly by new projects I’m excited to share with you, and partly, by a post I saw go by on Bluesky. There was a thread where people were trying to cope with tariffs by brainstorming necessities together - prescriptions? sewing supplies? canned goods? maybe seeds? My favorite answer by far² was,  “What should we stock up on? Honestly: friends.” What we need the most are more people we can count on, and who can count on us in return. 

And this solves so many problems, right? We all have material needs, yes, but meeting them is not about filling more houses with more stuff. When we build networks and communities, we don’t all need to hoard supplies. We don’t need to learn every survival skill. We don’t need to figure out everything ourselves. Which is good news because, realistically, the vast majority of us simply can’t. 

As we contemplate everything we’re losing, I keep reminding myself that we’ve got each other, and that’s a lot. This was week 15, let’s give it a shot.³

What’s happening now

This has been another grim week. I feel buffeted by news about due process and tariffs, not to mention the weather service itself. Meanwhile, the administration is cancelling the National Climate Assessment, reorganizing the EPA with major cuts to research, and manipulating the accreditation process, among other moves. For my own well-being, I am going to focus on just two lines of attack tonight: how the administration is hijacking the research enterprise and how it is undermining public health. Take these slow if you’re feeling fragile, okay?

• As feared, NSF-funded research is in chaos. Late yesterday, news broke that the NSF has stopped awarding new grants or paying against existing ones “until further notice.” Today brought another wave of grant terminations,⁴ yet another attempt to cap indirect costs at 15%,⁵ and the release of a truly shocking budget proposal. It’s relatively straightforward to absorb the big headline numbers or horrible personal stories, but systems thinking is harder. I think our challenge is to do all three things together. Fortunately, we don’t need to piece it together ourselves - we can, for example, take the word of NSF employees when they describe how the agency is being destroyed or explain how research funding is now being used to censor science. Here are a few hopeful/helpful resources to support you: 

  • Noam Ross & his collaborators are doing heroic work to track grant terminations, collate the details, and produce enlightening summaries.⁶ 

  • The AAMC,AAU, APLU, and others convened a joint taskforce on indirect costs to spur the development of “a more efficient and transparent funding model.” I’m curious what they will produce. 

  • I’m heartened by the announcement of the Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program today. These are $25,000 grants earmarked for early-career researchers whose NSF-funded research on STEM and education has just been terminated.⁷ I hope this and other examples of institution-based bridge grants inspire more funders into immediate and practical action.

  • Finally, it’s important to know that the proposed budget cuts the NIH budget by a staggering 40%, EPA by 55%, and NSF by 56%. But it’s also important to remind ourselves that this so-called “skinny budget” is just a proposal, and the summary version of the proposal at that. We’ll see more later this month, but in the meantime, reading up on expert analyses and exploring the new Save NSF initiative is well-worth your time. 

• Public health: We passed the administration’s first 100 days on Tuesday, and I’ve appreciated the reporting that attempts to summarize the impact on public health and the polling about public attitudes toward health institutions responding to those impacts. But I’m struggling with where to even start for what happened this week.⁸ Measles were a solved problem in this country, but cases are skyrocketing now. The outbreak has infected more than 2,500 people across North America and Texas is the epicenter of the largest single outbreak since endemic spread was declared over in 2000. While new modeling research reinforces the urgency of childhood vaccination, the HHS secretary is spreading misinformation about vaccine ingredients, ignoring decades of research by continuing to emphasize vitamins and supplement as cures and encouraging parents of newborns to “do their own research”. HHS has also released a statement asserting that they will require placebo-controlled trials for vaccines, which is unethical and will delay availability of COVID boosters. If only we still had an Office for Long COVID Research and Practice…

What’s next and what to do

I’ve been worried about tariffs, rising prices, and shortages since Week 2. I hope I’m somehow overreacting, but it really does feel like we’re in what one Bluesky poster described as “that weird liminal Wile E. Coyote–over-the-chasm moment” where the disaster is locked in but not yet manifest.  

So when I opened tonight’s debrief with the idea of “stocking up on friends,” I meant it. Who have you been meaning to reconnect with? Do you have a neighbor you’ve been meaning to introduce yourself to? Do you know who lost grants or jobs in your network this week?

Social connections take emotional energy, and cultivating them takes time. So maybe that can be a focus for you this week. You have a standing invitation to join us for Meeting the Moment co-working time - the next one is Monday at 4pm PT. My priority for that meeting is continuing to develop the nascent mutual aid project we are standing up within Liminal. Science communication is already precarious work, and we are anticipating that as jobs get scarce and prices go up, life is going to get much harder. Put simply, we would rather face it together than alone.

And in that vein, now I get to share something precious to me. In all my free time, I’ve been working with a tremendous group of new friends to create an ambitious sensemaking project. We are focused on the administration’s moves to destroy, hollow-out, and weaponize the government, or as I like to say, “What all of this means for all of us”. Later this month, we’ll be launching a  new project called Unbreaking. Please read my co-founder Erin’s vastly more eloquent explanation of the work at hand.

Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear,

Liz

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