Roman Feiman

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Hard not to worry that this isn't another attempt by OMB's Russell Vought to override Congress's power of the purse.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves

The National Science Foundation is systematically being converted to the National AI and Quantum Research Foundation.

“I see it as the administration exerting political control over what has traditionally been NSF’s ability to fund the best science.”

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w

Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?

www.techdirt.com/202...

Never imagined you as the wire mother

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Social Sciences

7/11

This is very cool!

Are you saying I didn't convince you? 😂

I think this is maybe half of my research program now

Amazing news!! We're sorry to lose you in New England -- and Duke is very lucky to get you!

Mexico, obviously

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s over last year www.science.org/content/arti... #jobs #STEM #science #research

Nevermind our paper, I forgot that we'd decided to blank out the content words instead of jabberwockyfying them. But a bunch of other papers, including the original Gillette et al, have a relevant condition.

It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation How do learners learn what no and not mean when they are only presented with what is? Given its complexity, abstractness, and roles in logic, truth-fu…

I'm open to that 🙂 Re: what people can do, I wonder if you could get mileage out of the jabberwocky conditions in existing Human Simulation Paradigm papers. Our paper has one with N, V, function words, and negation as the targets: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

No theory claims (or should claim, anyway) that people *can't* store associative info about which lexical items tend to go with which abstract structures. If they store that, reasonable to find they'd be able to infer back from structure to what-words-are-usually-associated-with-that-structure.

Thanks, I see the idea now. I agree that construction grammar predicts this naturally, but I don't know any theory of syntax that actually precludes it. On any theory of syntax, lexical info has to get in there somehow.

Much less clear what that means for what humans know or how they learn it

Agreed with all of this. One thing LLMs have uncontroversially taught us about language is that "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" really is (surprisingly!) predictably better than ungrammatical variants purely on the basis of (higher-order) correlations between words.

I'm confused about the logic. If LLMs are construction grammar learners and can translate "He dwushed a ghanc zawk" to "He dragged a spare chair", but humans can't (at least I'm pretty sure I can't), then isn't that (weak, but still) evidence *against* construction grammar as a theory of humans?

I had hoped that with time, the new NIH leadership would find their voice and stand up for the importance of NIH as a bastion of scientific progress free from political influence. I had also hoped that Congress, the Courts, and institutions would stand up for scientific funding free of ideological censorship. This is not happening. Instead, 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.

5/6

And yet, In Covid’s Wake quotes me as saying that “the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands” — literally the opposite of what I argue — to buttress their claim that the government was too busy censoring speech to adequately deal with the pandemic.

Beyond parody

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

Wow.

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article) A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew Memoli aren't bringing "gold standard science" to the #NIH, they are gutting research slowly but surely. When this time is over, they should be hauled before Congress, and shunned for the rest of their lives. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Not an exact quote, but something that stuck with me from a euro outlet right after 2024: “the security of Europe shouldn’t depend on turnout among swing voters in Wisconsin every four years”

Again, there is no plan for running our universities without federal funding, or foreign students, at scale. But the public has no idea about this because no. one. is. telling. them. this. They expect their kids are still going to be able to do all the things at college in the next 4 years, & well: