Year 2, Week 6
Jan 31-Feb 6, 2026 - bureaucromancy
Hello friends,
This week, I’ve been struggling with that awful tension between needing to vent to trusted friends and not wanting to burden them with either the intensity of my emotions or the painful details of another problem that they cannot fix. In the middle of one of those moments, I could feel the wonderful human on the other side of the Zoom trying to help. At one point, she just repeated one of our shared mantras: “you’re not alone, and it’s not too late.”
I’ve heard it countless times, I’ve said it countless times, and sometimes, like this time, it is a little bit tangential to the discussion. But it always, always helps. Sometimes, just repeating a simple truth is what we need most.
This was Year 2, Week 6. Thinking through it together is easier than trying to process it alone.
What happened in science & higher ed
The civil service continues to be hollowed out, this time with a mechanism called Schedule F. You can read the full text, but in brief, it makes another 50,000 federal employees much easier to fire. It also muffles their whistleblower complaints1 and strips them of union protections and the ability to appeal “adverse actions” like demotions or suspensions.2 There’s specific concern about what this means for science agencies, given specific inclusion of grantmaking duties in targeted positions. The final rule is moving forward despite overwhelmingly negative public comment.3 The rule goes into effect on March 9.
On the funding front, I’ve been meaning to give more space to NSF happenings.
At the very end of 2025, Science ran two deeper dives on changes to grant review and staffing.4 One of toplines of those analysis was to expect fewer but broader program solicitations.5 Ostensibly, this is to encourage interdisciplinary work. I fear that instead, we’ll see more instances like the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB) announcement that went up this week. Instead of supporting fundamental research in biology, the awards now focus on “the Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Biological Sciences to Strengthen and Safeguard Biotechnology Innovations.”6
Things are strange on the predoctoral side as well. More students have been deemed “ineligible” and had their Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) proposals returned without review, despite clear alignment. Individual appeals have subsequently failed. The team at Grant Witness are on top of it. They have published a guide for applicants and advisors, including a template letter. Please get it into the hands that need it.
In 2025, the total value of NIH grant terminations was so massive that it swamped NSF losses (billions vs millions). Now, however, both agencies are hovering around $700 million in committed but unspent funds.7 This week, Jeremy Berg published a shocking analysis of outgoing funds for 2026, and I’ll be watching for more in-depth reporting on the slowdown he’s graphed so far.8
A separate thought about research funding: we’re in another uptick in earmarks.9 I anticipate needing to learn more about what they mean for universities in future budget cycles.
Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt ended new tenure appointments for faculty at his state’s regional public and community colleges. The executive order does not strip tenure from those who already have it and faculty at public research universities are not included. I agree that we need to connect the dots between weakening independent institutions, undermining academic freedom, and the erosion of democratic norms. I can’t think about new performance review criteria like the ones affected Oklahoma professors now face without also thinking about the explosion of surveillance in the classroom.And we really need to expand these conversations to include adjunct faculty and faculty teaching assistants, who are more vulnerable and often in more precarious living situations.
And finally, it’s just been reported that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) dismissed approximately 90% of new discrimination cases filed last year. This is terrible for disabled students and their advocates, who typically file the majority of complaints, and they’re not the only ones who have been abandoned. Since Biden left office, OCR has been hollowed out by layoffs and had its mission revised. In that time, it has not managed to resolve a single complaint of sexual assault or harassment, gender harassment, or pregnancy discrimination. It has, however, had plenty of bandwidth to self-initiate more ‘investigation’ of transgender women in sport.
And what’s next
I’ll end as I began, finding the way forward by repeating a simple truth: each of us has a role to play in stalling, stopping, and healing the terrible damage we perceive.
This newsletter is often a litany of terrible news. My abiding hope in presenting this smorgasbord of horrors is that you’ll latch onto some specific thing that spurs you to action.
Upset about telling silence from your university? Wish that the “secret provost club” were vocally opposing the rising authoritarian threat? Upset to see effusive statements of gratitude to the president today? You’re not alone. Look into that union you’ve been meaning to join. Make contact with the advocacy committee in your professional society. Sign up for an action hour. And please avoid falling victim to the idea that ‘fierce public opposition’ vs ‘effective advocacy’ are binary options.10
Upset about public health? Maybe seeing that measles outbreaks are now spreading to university campuses will spark your school to revive an infectious disease task force? It’s not too late. The best time to do an after-action from one global pandemic was probably when your COVID response committee was stepping down. The next best time is now.
We are creating solutions everywhere for everything that ails us. Sometimes it’s really small: here’s language you could put into a recommendation letter for a junior colleague. I love that it is such a small but meaningful way to acknowledge that the world has profoundly changed. Sometimes it’s scary: I’m going to work my way through WIRED’s new explainer on how to film ICE this weekend.
We’re writing the story of us, the story of now, and it can be beautiful. Thank you for your part in it.
Liz
PS - I realize I linked to Bluesky a lot this week! Find me there @LizNeeley and say hi.
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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Reroutes them from the independent Office of Special Counsel to internal review within their own agency, most likely a political appointee. ↩
Appeals that would otherwise go to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). I first wrote about MSPB in a footnote about hiring/firing chaos back on Week 12.A deep cut, for sure. It’s one of those entities that I think might be one of the load-bearing parts of the bureaucracy, and I’m distressed by what I do know, and how little time I have to go down this rabbithole. ↩
NPR reports that during the public comment period, OPM received more than 37,000 submissions opposing the rule (94% of the total). ↩
The NSF has not had a director since April, nor an Inspector General since the end of last February . ↩
This is the NSF term for specific, time-bound funding opportunities - I think they’re equivalent to the NIH’s Request for Applications (RFA). If you know exactly if/how I have that slightly wrong, and would make the time to help me with a very infrequent but very nerdy sense-check, I would love to connect. ↩
It was really something to see multiple scientists on bluesky celebrate the announcement and then realize what it contained. The saddest rollercoaster. And to be clear, yes, I’m deeply antagonistic to the rush to AI, but the problem here is not primarily that, it’s supplanting basic research with whatever ‘safeguarding biotechnology innovations’ is going to be used to mean. ↩
At this writing, Grant Witness calculates it at $694 million at NSF, and $720 million at NIH. ↩
It might be an artifact that disappears in a few weeks now that we have a budget. We’ll see. ↩
Earmarks are spending directives that point money to specific states, universities, or other recipients. They are set by members of Congress and circumvent competitive or merit-based allocation mechanisms. Fun fact: earmarks were prohibited from 2011-2021. There are no earmarks in NSF or NIH budgets, but other science agencies, like the National Institutes of Science & Technology (NIST) might have hundreds of millions of dollars in these dedicated funds - and note, they are not priorities set by those agencies requested. Science does not typically make up a whole lot of the total value of earmarked funds. This footnote is part of what inspired my bluesky post about bureaucromancy tonight. ↩
Earlier today, I posted about this. Loud & angry voices give private negotiations more clout, and private negotiations can unlock avenues of possibility for ferocious public advocates. Movements require a multiplicity of tactics. It’s that simple. ↩
