Year 2, Week 2
Jan 3-9, 2026 the evidence of our eyes and ears
Hello friends,
Well. Last week I signed off by saying, “Our time and attention are precious,” and woke up the next morning to news that our military entered Venezuela, captured their president and his wife, and brought them to New York to stand trial. It was not just a shock to regular people like you and me, but also to Congress, which was not briefed. On Tuesday we had the anniversary of January 6,1 and then while I was worrying about the US withdrawing from the IPCC and more than 60 other international treaties,2 ICE murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and shot two people in Portland the next day.
And I imagine that you, like me, were trying to process all this while showing up for meetings, catching up on emails,3 and generally trying to figure out how we move through times like these. For me, having workflows to collect all the news I see during the week, but knowing I can put it aside because I’ll spend my Friday night sifting through it all makes it manageable. I hope you have or find your own way(s) to stay engaged without giving up or burning out.
So, this was a lot, and it was only Year 2, Week 2.
Let’s dig in.
What happened in science & higher ed:
Let’s start with budget news, which is surprisingly positive, overall.
On Thursday, a bipartisan minibus of three bills that largely protect previous levels of science funding passed the House 397-28(!). Headlines are always limited, but “NASA’s science budget won’t be a train wreck after all” and “EPA Funding Salvaged in US Congress Spending Bill” are indicative. There are still serious concerns, not least that the threat to NCAR remains unresolved. But it seems that most science agencies now face single-digit percent decreases in their budgets, rather than the devastating version put forward by the White House. I particularly liked this summary of agency-specific upshots,4 and I thought this essay about successful NASA strategies in the face of resource limitation is worth your time and might help with conversations you need to have.
In more decent news on the NIH side of things, on Monday federal appeals court judges reinforced the ruling against that proposed 15% cap on indirects.5
But just because we’re not losing billions of dollars in research funding doesn’t mean all is well. This analysis on the tactical shift from defunding to directing, delaying, and overriding research funding decisions aligns with ours, and is why I named research interference as the first of my three major themes for 2026. Former NIH Director of Extramural Operations Jennifer Troyer used her powerful letter of resignation to name and reject the corruption of her agency’s mission.6 It’s not just an NIH problem, either: consider these huge new NSF Tech Labs awards. A small handful of projects will receive between $40 million and $2 billion over four years (or even more) for “high-risk, high-reward technical problems.” Exactly how those “unorthodox” teams are going to be selected, and by whom, is the burning question.
In university news, Oregon’s public universities are considering “institutional integration” to cope with financial pressures. This report comes right on the heels of a December announcement that the state’s two oldest private universities plan to merge as soon as this summer.7 For more context on the outlook for university finances, look to November’s downgrade in Moody’s Rating and the negative sector rating from S&P Global in December. Meanwhile, South Dakota is the latest state to adopt “post-tenure faculty review” - in this case, adding a five year performance review on top of existing annual assessments by direct supervisors.
Finally, the bad news on public health. In a unilateral move that took effect immediately, bypassing expert consultation and directly contradicting CDC career scientists, HHS overhauled the pediatric vaccine schedule on Monday. In short, the number of vaccine-avoidable diseases that all children in the US should be protected from has been reduced from 18 to 11. Contrary to administration propaganda, this is a dramatic and dangerous move that makes the US an outlier among affluent countries. The diseases that have been removed from the recommendation list are: rotavirus, RSV, hepatitis A and hepatitis B, influenza, meningococcal disease, and Covid-19. Influenza! We are in the middle of a record-breaking flu season that is particularly hard on kids. In just the quickest skim of news from the past week, I see reports of children dying from the flu in California, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and North Carolina. I am incandescently angry that the man who thinks that fewer people getting vaccinated against the flu may be “a better thing” is in charge of HHS. It’s grotesque.
And what’s next
My thoughts keep coming back around to the murder that millions of people have now witnessed because legal observers and regular people walking past risked their own lives to record it. I do not have time for arguments about whether or not you should watch the footage: what I care about what we do now that we know it exists.
For me, the immediate answers are straightforward.
Take measures to manage exposure to violent imagery. You might turn off video autoplay on your social media accounts, for example. Making deliberate choices when you have control over what you see and when just makes sense. If it helps to intellectualize: we know that there is a dose-response effect between exposure to distressing content and secondary trauma. Even if we didn’t have empirical evidence, we have all we need from the lived experience of data workers around the world. Fortunately, there are also evidence-backed interventions for coping after seeing something that torments you. Yes, it’s Tetris: no, it’s not magic, but it does save people who do atrocity documentation reviews.
Recognize that, yes, this discussion does belong in a newsletter about science. Last night, a wonderful colleague of mine posted a meme, a nested series of posts, each taking the form, “A reminder that while this is a [science] account, [science] is absolutely political, because you can’t [do research] if ICE murders you.” The originators in the version I saw were big accounts focused on money, food, and hiking - science is no different. The point is: our work is inextricably connected to our lives, our culture, and the historical moment. We cannot ignore this.
Understand that we cannot solve political violence as individuals. Maybe this means you want to read up on engaging with contestation, complexity, and plurality from critical scholars, or maybe you need a more practical guide for how communities can harness our power to end political violence. Either way, we can’t solve the problems in front of us, except through collective action.8 We don’t all have to take on the same action, either. Fortunately, there are as many ways to work together as there are those of us who care.
I trust science as a way of understanding the world around us, I believe in our ability to find our own ways through the many challenges we face, and I believe we can be incredibly powerful, together.
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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I am sorry - the landing page for this link features an onslaught of video. It is very effective because it is viscerally disturbing - and I talk about this in the wrap of today’s issue. I am sharing this because the NPR database is one of the few places that full records are still publicly available, and it’s an essential archive. ↩
I need to share the full list because it is truly appalling. In one fell stroke, we exited the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact; the Colombo Plan Council; the Commission for Environmental Cooperation; Education Cannot Wait; the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats; the Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories; the Freedom Online Coalition; the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund; the Global Counterterrorism Forum; the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise; the Global Forum on Migration and Development; the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research; the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals, and Sustainable Development; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services; the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property; the International Cotton Advisory Committee; the International Development Law Organization; the International Energy Forum; the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies; the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance; the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law; the International Lead and Zinc Study Group; the International Renewable Energy Agency; the International Solar Alliance; the International Tropical Timber Organization; International Union for Conservation of Nature; the Pan American Institute of Geography and History; the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation; the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combatting Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia; the Regional Cooperation Council; the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century; the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine; the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme; and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. This is in addition to the following United Nations organizations: the Department of Economic and Social Affairs; the Economic and Social Commissions (ECOSOCs) for Asia and the Pacific, for Western Asia, and for Latin America and the Caribbean; the International Law Commission; the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals; the International Trade Centre;the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa; the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General (OSRSGs) for Children in Armed Conflict, on Sexual Violence in Conflict, and on Violence Against Children; the Peacebuilding Commission; the Peacebuilding Fund; the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent; the UN Alliance of Civilizations; the UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries; the UN Conference on Trade and Development; the UN Democracy Fund; UN Energy; the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women; the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; the UN Human Settlements Programme; the UN Institute for Training and Research; UN Oceans; the UN Population Fund; the UN Register of Conventional Arms; the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination; the UN System Staff College; UN University; and UN Water. ↩
And/or variously teaching, reading, writing, fundraising, feeding ourselves and our families, gestating, fighting off infections, grieving, and the countless other things we carry. ↩
I encourage you to subscribe to the AIP’s FYI Science Policy News. They’re doing great work. ↩
To be more precise, the three-judge panel upheld Judge Angel Kelly’s permanent injunction from last April, in which she determined that the administration’s attempt to cap indirect costs violated the Administrative Procedure Act. ↩
Troyer wrote, “Now our mission is shifting to cater to political expediency rather than scientific advancement. Funding is being withheld by the administration as political leverage and the importance of peer-review is being de-emphasized. Grants have been terminated for political, not scientific, reasons and NIH is asking for changes to peer-reviewed science based on political, not scientific, objections to the work in progress. ...the NIH continues to pull funds from good science and is in danger of throwing money at bad science for purely political reasons. Institutions have responded to having their grant money held hostage by making deals that cost them their valuable academic freedom, and even as the courts find the holding and termination of federal funding illegal, the administration has created new policies that will allow for these morally reprehensible actions to continue. In the face of all this, our leadership remains mute.” 🔥 ↩
To be fair, university mergers are not historically rare or some new thing - Wikipedia has a long list. ↩
This doesn’t mean we don’t have any individual steps to take, though! For example, WIRED has dropped their paywall - I recommend using their guide on how to safeguard your digital security this weekend and always. ↩
