Year 2, Week 12
Mar 14-20, 2026 - equinox
Hello friends,
In cities around the country, homicide rates have plummeted. Some states, like California, are approaching historic lows. Where I live in Oakland, murders have fallen by half. The trend includes cities like Baltimore1, Chicago2, New York3, and more.
Smoking rates are also at historic lows. Cigarette smoking has fallen below 10% for the first time since we started collecting data in 1965.4 That’s very good news for the leading cause of preventable death. Cities around the world are breathing a little easier too. Amsterdam, Beijing, London, San Francisco, and Warsaw are just a few of the places5 that have achieved “remarkable reductions” in air pollution. And the Tar Creek Superfund site, one of the most toxic landscapes in the US,6 is returning to life under the care of the Quapaw people.
We must face heroes who’ve betrayed us, systems that are failing us, a broken democracy, and a rapidly heating world. But despair is not inevitable, and better is not impossible.
Today was the spring equinox, and this was Year 2, Week 12.
What happened in science & higher ed
The big news this week is a massive decision from US District Judge Brian Murphy, who ruled that the ACIP7 is likely no longer lawfully constituted because it is not fairly balanced with respect to relevant expertise.8 Notice that I wrote “likely”: this ruling is a preliminary injunction. Even though these are temporary stays, the lawsuit brought by AAP9 has really big ramifications. It not only indefinitely postpones the ACIP meeting that was scheduled for March 18, but it also invalidates previous votes and decisions this group made—like when they overhauled the pediatric vaccine schedule back in January.10 BUT this was not the only court ruling this week overturning attempted changes to the US healthcare system. On Thursday, US District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai announced that he will halt the declaration that empowered HHS to punish healthcare providers who offer gender-affirming care to youth by excluding them from all Medicaid and Medicare payments. STAT counts at least 17 hospitals that were already referred for investigation under this declaration, and many of which ceased care in response to the threat.
OMB approval of the NIH spending plan11 for its apportionment seems to have finally come through. (That convoluted sentence is a result of the two-step process the administration is using to exert control of funds even after Congressional appropriations.12 It means that funding still hadn’t been going out the door until this week, and between inflation, forward funding, the threat of recissions, it’s complex). The director of the NIH insists that everything is just fine. The data say otherwise:
A new survey of 1,000 NIH-funded researchers reports that last year 15% of them had a grant terminated early, 34% had funding paused or frozen, and 45% had a grant start late. Only 35% of those affected by cuts, changes, and delays said their funding has been fully restored. Roughly half of respondents coped by pausing, cancelling, and rescoping planned work. You can dig into the survey itself for much more, but 93% of PIs describe reduced staff morale, and 53% of them are encouraging their trainees to seek careers outside the US.
A barnburner of an essay by a 20-year veteran NIH program official lays out the situation with NOFOs:13 for decades there were on the order of 750 NOFOs, give or take. In 2024 there were 756. In 2025, there were 120. So far in 2026, there have been 16. “This is not a temporary slowdown. It is a structural collapse.”
We also finally have some14 data on NIH 2025 awards. One PI calculates15 that the latest R01-equivalent success rate of 13.0% means that “To get yourself over the 80% probability in FY2025 you needed to submit five more R01 proposals than you did in FY2023.” And success rates are just one more place where anti-Black racism shows up; NIH fellowships are another.
And finally, the Partnership for Public Service has released a big report summarizing a year of our unraveling public science sphere. Across the science agencies, the federal workforce shrank by 95,000 employees, including more than 10,000 STEM PhDs. You can explore what it means for biomedical, agricultural, environmental, and innovation domains. As you do, I think it’s essential to foreground the people who have borne the brunt of these layoffs. Black women comprised just 12% of the federal workforce, but 33% of the cuts in 2025, more than any other demographic group.
Very quickly, I would be remiss if I failed to share that the administration has launched yet another new lawsuit against Harvard and has opened another investigation into Cornell.
And what’s next
Reject the narrative of inevitability. Refuse to acquiesce. Don’t just hold the line, force it back.
This week, the National Academies refused to remove the new climate chapter from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, despite the fact that their partners at the Federal Judicial Center caved to pressures to post a redacted version in February. What censorship efforts masquerading as ‘institutional neutrality’ can you defy? What important and yet-again-confirmed-as-legal DEI efforts can you force your university to reinstate?
I lit up when I read Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, exhorting students to demand a say in their own future. “I’m not saying you should resist in spite of the risk. I’m saying you should resist because of the risk. The risk is what helps you remember... that there is something that learning is for, that thinking is for, that work is for, and that you are for, the discovery of which belongs to you. If you start now taking risks that help you remember this, you may become the kind of person who cannot be pushed around by bullies and autocrats, or manipulated by propaganda, or satisfied by a life lived solely for the sake of self-protection and self-enrichment.”16
Doesn’t that feel worth fighting for?
Liz
As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me. Meeting the Moment will always be free, but if you want to contribute, you can ⤵️
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you can get this delivered weeklyLast year, they had the fewest homicides in 50 years. ↩
They loggeed lowest homicide rate in 60 years in 2025. ↩
The first two months of 2026 had the “fewest shooting incidents, shooting victims and murders” since 1994. ↩
When 42% of respondents were current smokers! I mean, look at this graph! ↩
The full report is available as a downloadable PDF. ↩
Hundreds of zinc and lead mines across the Tri-State Mining District spanning Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri powered the American war machine. Some estimates trace 75% of American munitions used in the World Wars (yes both of them) back to this region. The massive mining operations left behind mounds of toxic rock piles, collapsing tunnels filled with acid minewaters, and extremely high levels of lead, cadmium, and other metals. ↩
The Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. I first started writing about them back in Week 21. ↩
Judge Murphy writes, “First, of the fifteen members currently on ACIP, even under the most generous reading, only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines… At least six ACIP members… appear to lack any expertise or professional qualifications related to vaccines or immunization as required by ACIP’s Charter. ” It’s a very readable ruling (PDF). I also find the overview of the full case tracker is helpful. (That URL is formatted to trigger the search for you in the JustSecurity litigation tracker. In case it isn’t working properly, search for 1:25-cv-11916 and you’ll find it.) ↩
American Academy of Pediatrics. If you’re looking to support organizations that have made a difference, you can donate to them directly. ↩
See my write-up in Year 2, Week 2, and here’s some further analysis I relied on to understand what the AAP has achieved by bringing this lawsuit, and what to anticipate as the next moves on vaccine policy. ↩
I wrote about concerns around these in Year 2, Week 10. ↩
The NIH is hardly the only science agency struggling with this. Two of the largest NSF two biggest accounts ($7 billion for research and $1 billion for science education) are hung up in vague OMB footnotes that typically signal unresolved internal conflict. ↩
Notices of Funding Opportunities. ↩
I say “some” b/c a footnote on the page says that the NIH Data Book is “being updated with more FY 2025 grants and application data on a rolling basis.” ↩
With all due caveats! ↩
In this piece, she is writing—at no small personal risk—about chatbots and AI.It’s no coincidence that the ProPublica guild just overwhelmingly voted to approve a strike if management will not put guardrails around artificial intelligence in the newsroom, among other demands. The humans behind the chatbots are organizing too. Data labelers and content moderators do the dirty jobs that power the most wealthy companies in the world. ↩
