Hello friends,

I’m back from some travel and back to myself in a way I haven’t been for some time.

I caught myself in a little airport habit earlier this week. Instead of letting all the strangers around me blur into an annoying crowd, I try to properly look at each person for a moment—to really notice the person in front of me—and then to silently wish them well. From second to second, it veers from earnest to funny and back again. It’s genuinely challenging, and something I started doing when I first started working in science communication and realized I needed to think very seriously about my fellow humans. It’s been too long since I last had the heart in me to really do it.

This was Year 2, Week 21. I wish us well.

What’s happening in science & higher ed

• Today, the administration announced that immigrants must return to their home country to apply for their green card through consulates. Right now, the policy is all headline and little detail. We do not yet know when the changes might take effect, for example, which visa types exactly are included, and whether people can return during processing. What we do know is that tonight, hundreds of thousands more people confront new uncertainty and even more strain. The consequences of immigrant family separation are already utterly devastating.[^1] I am simultaneously grateful and appalled that we need planning guides for families to help reduce likely health impacts on their children, and keep them out of the foster care system.¹

• The NIH is so catastrophically understaffed at this point that it is asking grad students and postdocs to volunteer as grants management specialists.² Overburdened NIH staffers are forced to focus on grant renewals. In some cases, those grantees are being directed to remove papers with international co-authorship from their annual reports, even if the work was performed in the US. While ‘foreign components’ already require approval, this change to reporting processes creates ugly and unscientific incentives around authorship.³ It’s possible that the issue is specific and limited to Institutional Development Awards, which focus on domestic capacity-building, but patchwork guidance and rumors fuel the kind of paranoia that encourages people to comply in advance. I remember an analysis from late last year of how scientific collaborations & citation networks are shifting, and I can’t help but think about how much we’re losing.

• With more than six hundred cases reported just days since the public health emergency was declared on May 17, the Ebola outbreak in DRC⁴ and Uganda is already the third-largest on record.⁵ The mortality rate of this virus, Bundibugyo, is substantially lower than the Zaire and Sudan ebolaviruses, but still estimated to be roughly 50%. We know that Ebola is not just a medical catastrophe for an infected person, it is a disease that tears communities apart, while underscoring just how connected we all are.⁶ The Trump administration’s brutal cuts to research and public health funding “hampered the detection of the outbreak and the response to it.” Meanwhile, they have expanded “entry restrictions“ to prevent even permanent residents from returning home from the region, going so far as to divert an airplane because it carried one traveller from the region. One American doctor has been infected so far, and the administration refused to bring him and his family back here for treatment, despite the fact that we built 13 emerging special pathogen treatment centers for exactly this after the last Ebola outbreak.⁷ And speaking of botching the US response to zoonotic infections emerging in conflict zones, the CDC is now censoring mpox prevention advice. A small bit of positive news on the infectious disease front: Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine will be reviewed in June, and a decision is expected by the end of summer.⁸

• I am so sick of writing about leadership shambles at our federal scientific agencies, but they just keep coming:

  • Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos is now acting as our Surgeon General. She is married to Representative Mike Haridopolos, and as of this January, she was the chief officer of the lobbying and political consulting company he founded. His clients included health care and health insurance clients as well as the American Kratom Association.⁹ Last year, the White House had moved to schedule the 7-OH kratom derivative under the Controlled Substances Act: earlier this month, the president announced that they’re now “looking very seriously” at getting it FDA approved. Three days later, we learned that he purchased more than $650,000 of stock in Eli Lilly, which just happened to be serendipitously timed to government decisions that just happened to boost their signature GLP-1 products.

  • In a hearing yesterday, senators confirmed that NIAID¹⁰ acting director Jeffery Taubenberger has stepped down, after weeks of rumors. Earlier this week, Nature broke the story that three other high-ranking NIAID staff¹¹ are being forced out

  • Two leaders of the US Preventative Services Task Force were also fired this month. That shrinks the task force down from sixteen members to just six, because Secretary Kennedy is failing to appoint new members as veterans rotate off.

  • Finally, the next phase of federal job reclassifications¹² seems to be underway at HHS. We’ve been watching this since April of last year. Right now, it looks like hundreds of GS-15 federal employees are going to lose their job protections. These federal employees are extremely specialized supervisors at the highest pay grade in our civil service, and making them ‌easier to fire is consistent with efforts to purge the government of everyone except loyalists.

• On the universities beat:

  • Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds needs to decide if she’ll sign a state budget bill that will force students to enroll in mandatory courses at the Center for Intellectual Freedom.

  • UC Berkeley Law School is prohibiting the use of AI “for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit.” They specifically forbid students from uploading course materials, like readings, slides, or lecture recordings, into generative AI systems. You might find their policy useful to think through and share in your own institution.

  • More than 2,000 system analysts, database administrators, and other technology specialists in the University of California system have voted to join the UPTE union,¹³ with some workers specifically citing the need to push for “appropriate staffing levels and guardrails around artificial intelligence and automation technologies.” The UC system very narrowly averted a strike of its largest employee union earlier this month. AFSCME¹⁴ Local 3299 represents 40,000 service, patient care and skilled craft workers, and they ratified their new contract today.

• I want to close this section out with a moment to take a bigger perspective. While the US news is all-consuming, I think it’s important to note that the UN General Assembly just passed a notable climate resolution, with 141 countries supporting, 28 abstaining from the vote, and only 8 opposing. The resolution supports an International Court of ​Justice opinion ​from last year that determined countries have a legal obligation to address climate change by reducing their use of fossil fuels. It’s not big enough or fast enough–nothing possibly can be–but good grief I think it matters.

And what’s next

This edition got longer than I anticipated so I’ll keep this bit very brief and make some specific asks:

• I’d love it if you could listen to the new podcast episode I recorded with the brilliant Neil Lewis Jr & Jamila Michener at Cornell. We talk about courage and justice, and how to tell the truth about what the data says, especially when it comes at a cost. We also talk about how to protect ourselves and communities from the risks we take on when we speak up. If it helps you, then please share it with your people too.

• I think all of us in and around academia should read and discuss the new paper “In Search of University Democracy.”

• And more than anything, I’d like to encourage you to pick one person whose work has been meaningful to you in the past few months and tell them so. It’s a bit like my little airport practice: take the time to really notice the thing in front of you, and wish that human well. I promise whichever author or scholar or organizer you’re thinking of needs to hear that what they’ve been pouring their life into is meaningful to you. They probably need it more than you can possibly know. You don’t need to say a whole lot. The most meaningful thing you can do isn’t to lay on the compliments, but just tell them, simply and plainly, how your tiny sliver of the world is different because of what they are doing.

I know that one week away doesn’t miraculously cure burnout, but one person saying “your newsletter was the thing that helped me get out of bed some days” can make all the difference in the world. Ask me how I know.

Liz

As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me. Meeting the Moment will always be free, but if you want to contribute, you can ⤵️

If this email was forwarded to you, hi! 👋 I write briefings on the week’s news for those of us who care about science and higher education. If you like what you see ⤵️

[^1]: Warning, little Orlin Hernandez Reyes suffered terribly. You can bear witness and demand justice for him without absorbing all the details.