Hello friends, 

Scientists in my workshops often ask me about correcting misinformation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time¹, and my answers often surprise the group. It’s completely understandable why experts fear and focus on incorrect facts, but I am more worried about interpretations - how patterns of facts are woven into descriptions of reality that form grounds for decisions. My go-to for sophisticated thinking on this is Kate Starbird, whose research focuses on collective sensemaking gone awry. In short, if we care about consensus reality, getting both our facts and our frames right is essential.²

I think that’s the big challenge for us in 2026. Similarly, the hazards to science and higher ed aren’t changing, but the tactics are. We need to update our sense of what to be watching for, and break the cycle of panic and neglect.

This  was Year 2, Week 3. Let’s dig in.

What happened in science & higher ed

I’m tempted to call this a week of reversals. Some news, like federal judge Beryl A. Howell restoring` $12 million in funding to the AAP³ that the administration had terminated as retaliation for the organization’s public advocacy, seemed both relatively simple and good. It’s so important to celebrate good news when it happens. And it is also imperative to use our critical thinking skills before we categorize something as a win and move on. For example:

• On Tuesday, the administration decided to reinstate NIOSH⁴ staff. It's great news for firefighters, fishermen, miners and other workers who rely on the agency for research and services that protect their lives and safety. But terminations at that agency began in April, and we do not know how many of those workers are being asked to return or whether they will. 

• Also on Tuesday, we learned of the immediate termination of nearly $2 billions dollars in federal grants for our mental health and drug addiction support. Something like 2,800 grants, more than a quarter of SAMHSA’s⁵ budget, were just vaporized, with no warning or consultation of agency staff. After massive outcry on Wednesday, the administration abruptly reversed course. It is a huge relief to thousands of organizations providing front-line preventative care and treatment. But who made the decision to cut that funding in the first place? SAMHSA does not have a permanent director, is operating with roughly half the staff it previously had, and already lost $2 billion in funding in 2025. 

• On Thursday, I was heartened by African health officials announcing that a wildly unethical Hepatitis B trial in Guinea-Bissau was cancelled. But HHS officials are insisting the trial will indeed go forward. I think it’s important to know that the CDC awarded funding to this project in December without any of the usual competition and review, and that the Danish researchers leading it have been systematically misinterpreting vaccination data for decades. 

• And finally, on Thursday, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the minibus bill that keeps funding for science agencies relatively flat, instead of slashing their budgets by billions of dollars.This is a public, bipartisan action that is not at all what the White House proposed. In that sense, it’s tremendous. But there are two darker layers here: first, appropriations used to be the goal line, and are just the first stage of the fight now. Impoundments and pocket rescissions have been weaponized and create much more uncertainty. Second, and even more importantly, we cannot simply focus on how much funding science receives, we must also concern ourselves with who decides and how? A fundamental restructuring of funding discretion is much harder to understand and to explain than a massive number on the GrantWitness dashboard. In some ways, it’s so much worse.

A few other items have caught my attention or concern:

• In the vein of academic integrity and scholarly freedom - funding for eight Smithsonian museums hangs in the balance as the administration seeks to censor their exhibits and control “improper ideology.”

• A sweeping higher education law passed in Ohio last year offers a demonstration of what these policies do to universities in practice. 

• The newly revived Food Pyramid has been flipped upside down. While the topline recommendation of “Eat Real Food” is vague, it’s not going to hurt people. That is harder to say about other aspects of the recommendations, which seem to be better aligned with dairy and meat industry interests rather than health science. 

And what’s next

As I finished writing this briefing, I started seeing the news that the DOJ has opened criminal investigations of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. We started the week with similar news about a new criminal investigation of the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell. What do we do about all of this? The intimidation, the violence, the co-option of our processes? 

1. The first step is that we have to see it clearly and be able to name what we see in the areas we know best. The NIH is not fine, academic institutions are not back-to-normal, and science is not “doing okay” - even if the current situation is better than what we had feared. 

2. Next, I find it helpful to focus on why some of those outcomes haven’t materialized. Pushback and outcry do matter: there are still many meaningful levers to pull and methods to exert useful pressure. When we understand that pushback works, and how it works, we are less prone to magical thinking. We are less likely to misinterpret the facts of small, temporary wins as evidence for frames that suggest the threat was overblown in the first place. 

3. I’ve been preparing for my next workshops by thinking a lot about our modern dynamics of participatory disinformation campaigns. These are situations in which false or misleading content is fueled by the combined efforts of  “witting agents” who deliberately seed misinformation and “unwitting crowds” who supply factually-correct accounts that amplify and buttress the poisoned frames. 

So the next time you hear someone say, “people have lost trust in science” - think about that claim both in terms of the underlying facts and the overarching frame. “...since the start of the pandemic” is a description of a timeframe while “...because of the way we handled the pandemic” is an argument for change. 

What people need the most right now is not only the facts of the matter, but help understanding how to interpret them. Whether that means better calibrating our responses to good news or guarding ourselves against learned helplessness, may we all be on guard against becoming unwitting agents of noxious narratives. 

Liz

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