Proposed Grantmaking Reforms Prompt Huge, Negative Response

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

Russell Vought is going destroy American Science

Spending deal comes with a bonus: Blocking political control of grants

Congress pauses the OMB's attempt to rewrite how research is funded.

Seth Bannon on Twitter / X

There are some exceptionally good ideas here for reforming and accelerating science.Some of my favorite proposals:Apply the scientific method to science funding (track applications, reviewers, funding decisions, and outcomes, then experimentally test which grantmaking methods… https://t.co/Q0JmqTBPYm— Seth Bannon (@sethbannon) July 22, 2026

What’s Wrong with NIH Grants?

“Science is fundamentally different than remodeling a kitchen”

Congress warns science agency over AI grant to tech-linked think tank

Lawmakers are worried the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s planned grant to the RAND Corp. lacks transparency.

The Rise of Large Language Models and the Direction and Impact of US Federal Research Funding

Federal research funding shapes the direction, diversity, and impact of the US scientific enterprise. Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly diffusing into scientific practice, holding substantial promise while raising widespread concerns. Despite growing attention to AI use in scientific writing and evaluation, little is known about how the rise of LLMs is reshaping the public funding landscape. Here, we examine LLM involvement at key stages of the federal funding pipeline by combining two complementary data sources: confidential National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposal submissions from two large US R1 universities, including funded, unfunded, and pending proposals, and the full population of publicly released NSF and NIH awards. We find that LLM use rises sharply beginning in 2023 and exhibits a bimodal distribution, indicating a clear split between minimal and substantive use. Across both private submissions and public awards, higher LLM involvement is consistently associated with lower semantic distinctiveness, positioning projects closer to recently funded work within the same agency. The consequences of this shift are agency-dependent. LLM use is positively associated with proposal success and higher early-stage publication output at NIH, whereas no comparable associations are observed at NSF. Notably, the productivity gains at NIH are concentrated in non-hit papers rather than the most highly cited work. Together, these findings provide large-scale evidence that the rise of LLMs is reshaping how scientific ideas are positioned, selected, and translated into publicly funded research, with implications for portfolio governance, research diversity, and the long-run impact of science.

How Standards Are Made

Recently I received a large grant from Bluesky Social PBC to fund my work on FedCM for decentralized web. So whilst the response has been overwhelmingly positive, there's currently a tiny tiny percentage of people in my mentions on the fediverse right now that are accusing me of horrible

Guest Post - Proposed Uniform Guidance Revisions Would Eliminate Journal Subscriptions and APCs as Allowable Federal Grant Costs - The Scholarly Kitchen

New guidance from the US government on research funding makes publishing and journal subscription costs unallowable.

The natural selection of bad science

Abstract. Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, sugg

Dark-Moneyed Denialists Are Running 'Fixing Science' Symposium of Doubt

The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims. Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For […]

What's changing?

Explaining the changes to political funding and disclosure

NSF plans cuts to core science programmes to fund White House initiative

A proposed clawback of already distributed research funds comes as the US agency struggles with a squeezed budget and a backlog of grant applications.

science funding and the cherry picking problem

Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…