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WASHINGTON (AP) — In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. “Dissent,” he said, ”is the very essence of science.”

That commitment is being put to the test.

On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

It says: “We dissent.”

AP AUDIO: NIH scientists publish declaration criticizing Trump’s deep cuts in public health research AP correspondent Julie Walker reports NIH scientists have published a declaration criticizing Trump’s deep cuts in public health research

In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, 92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific review officers put their signatures on the letter — and their careers on the line. An additional 250 of their colleagues across the agency endorsed the declaration without using their names.

The letter, addressed to Bhattacharya, also was sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the administration’s approach to federal research and said President Donald Trump is focused on restoring a “Gold Standard” of science, not “ideological activism.”

The letter came out a day before Bhattacharya is to testify to a Senate committee about Trump’s proposed budget, opening him to questions about the broadside from declaration signers, and it stirred Democrats on a House panel to ask the Republican chair for hearings on the matter.

Confronting a ‘culture of fear’

The signers went public in the face of a “culture of fear and suppression” they say Trump’s administration has spread through the federal civil service. “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” the declaration says.

Bhattacharya responded to the declaration by saying it “has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months,” such as suggestions that NIH has ended international collaboration.

“Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive,” he said in a statement. “We all want the NIH to succeed.”

Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.

It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.

In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.

In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”

The mask comes off

Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.

At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.

“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.

The signers said they modeled their indictment after Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, when he was a professor at Stanford University Medical School.

His declaration drew together likeminded infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists who dissented from what they saw as excessive COVID-19 lockdown policies and felt ostracized by the larger public health community that pushed those policies, including the NIH.

“He is proud of his statement, and we are proud of ours,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute who signed the Bethesda Declaration.

Cancer research is sidelined

As chief of the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch, Kobrin provides scientific oversight of researchers across the country who’ve been funded by the cancer institute or want to be. Cuts in personnel and money have shifted her work from improving cancer care research to what she sees as minimizing its destruction. “So much of it is gone — my work,” she said.

The 21-year NIH veteran said she signed because she didn’t want to be “a collaborator” in the political manipulation of biomedical science.

Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, also signed the declaration. “We have a saying in basic science,” he said. “You go and become a physician if you want to treat thousands of patients. You go and become a researcher if you want to save billions of patients.

“We are doing the research that is going to go and create the cures of the future,” he added. But that won’t happen, he said, if Trump’s Republican administration prevails with its searing grant cuts.

The NIH employees interviewed by the AP emphasized they were speaking for themselves and not for their institutes nor the NIH.

Dissenters range across the breadth of NIH

Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.

The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”

The Trump administration has gone at public health research on several fronts, both directly, as part of its broad effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion values throughout the bureaucracy, and as part of its drive to starve some universities of federal money.

At the White House, Desai said Americans “have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized healthcare and research apparatus that has been obsessed with DEI and COVID, which the majority of Americans moved on from years ago.”

A blunt ax swings

This has forced “indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,” the declaration says.

Some NIH employees have previously come forward in televised protests to air grievances, and many walked out of Bhattacharya’s town hall with staff. The declaration is the first cohesive effort to register agency-wide dismay with the NIH’s direction.

The dissenters remind Bhattacharya in their letter of his oft-stated ethic that academic freedom must be a lynchpin in science.

With that in place, he said in a statement in April, “NIH scientists can be certain they are afforded the ability to engage in open, academic discourse as part of their official duties and in their personal capacities without risk of official interference, professional disadvantage or workplace retaliation.”

Now it will be seen whether that’s enough to protect those NIH employees challenging the Trump administration and him.

“There’s a book I read to my kids, and it talks about how you can’t be brave if you’re not scared,” said Norton, who has three young children. “I am so scared about doing this, but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it’s only going to get harder to speak up.

“Maybe I’m putting my kids at risk by doing this,” she added. “And I’m doing it anyway because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”

___

Associated Press Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

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Twenty-seven minutes into a town hall with staff last week, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya acknowledged that he was going to get into uncomfortable territory.

“This one’s a tough one for me,” Bhattacharya told the audience of researchers and other NIH employees gathered in an auditorium at the biomedical research agency’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, last Monday, before introducing one of the most divisive topics in science.

“It’s possible that the [Covid-19] pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings,” he said, according to a video obtained by CNN. “And it’s also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research. And if that’s true – ”

At that point, Bhattacharya paused to watch as dozens of NIH staffers stood and filed out of the auditorium.

“It’s nice to have free speech,” he said with a smile. “Welcome, you guys.”

Bhattacharya then persisted.

“If it’s true that we sponsored research that caused a pandemic – and if you look at polls of the American people, that’s what most people believe, and I looked at the scientific evidence; I believe it – what we have to do is make sure that we do not engage in research that’s any risk of posing any risk to human populations,” he said.

Video Ad Feedback Walkout during NIH director’s town hall 1:08 – Source: CNN Walkout during NIH director’s town hall 1:08

The walkout was a gentle protest, one Bhattacharya – a former Stanford professor of health policy and economics who frequently claimed to have been censored during the Covid-19 pandemic for communicating views in opposition with those held by US scientific leadership at the time – referred to later in the town hall as “silent dissent.”

It represented not just disagreement with – and dismay over – Bhattacharya’s assertion that the NIH may bear some responsibility for the pandemic, which killed more than 7 million people worldwide, by sponsoring so-called gain-of-function research that created the SARS-CoV-2 virus that then leaked from a lab. That’s a view not shared by a large number of expert virologists and epidemiologists, who think it’s more likely the virus emerged via a spillover from animals.

It was also a preplanned protest over working conditions; the staffers just chose to leave a little earlier than intended, as Bhattacharya made those comments, some told CNN. The walkout was designed to communicate frustrations over scientists’ inability to do their jobs under the second Trump administration, they said.

“We’d been trying to meet with Dr. Bhattacharya as members of the union to discuss issues we’ve had with working conditions that prevented us from doing our jobs and research,” said Dr. Kaitlyn Hajdarovic, a postdoctoral researcher at NIH. Like others who spoke with CNN, she emphasized that she was speaking in a personal capacity and as a member of a union representing about 5,000 early-career researchers at the NIH.

Disruptions to research

Hajdarovic and others described issues obtaining materials for research because the people who do the purchasing had been dismissed; the firings and rehirings of scientist colleagues; the fear of a proposed 40% cut to the NIH budget; and general chaos and unpredictability that are disruptive to their day-to-day jobs.

“We were trying to use this walkout as a way to get a sit-down meeting with Dr. Bhattacharya,” said Dr. Matt Manion, another NIH postdoctoral researcher and union member. “We’ve asked at least twice since he took over the role.”

The union members, joined by others at the agency, had planned to leave the town hall at the start of Bhattacharya’s time answering pre-submitted questions, added Dr. Matthew Brown, a third union member and postdoctoral fellow. Bhattacharya and his chief of staff, Seana Cranston, noted several times that about 1,200 questions had been submitted and that they’d chosen the “hard ones” to answer.

“Having these sort of preplanned town halls is not a substitute for actually sitting down with scientists who will do the research that improves the health of the American public,” Brown said.

In response to CNN’s request for comment, a spokesman for HHS said, “at Monday’s town hall, the NIH Director addressed staff openly and took unscripted questions from the audience. The individuals who walked out had the opportunity to engage directly and voice their concerns constructively. Instead, they chose to walk out, seemingly driven more by political motives because of their dissent with this administration.”

Brown countered that the group’s dissent “is based on the tremendous damage that has been done to taxpayer-funded biomedical research over the past four months. Protecting our research into diseases like cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s deserves more than a short question and answer session.”

‘Asking for another pandemic’

Still, although the walkout was planned for a different reason, the gain-of-function comments didn’t go over well. One NIH scientist tied the comments to a new policy that says the agency will prohibit foreign subaward grants, or research funding arrangements in which a grant recipient passes on some of the funding to foreign collaborators; the White House budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 cited NIH’s funding of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of its reasoning for a proposed nearly $18 billion cut to the NIH’s budget.

“The notion that you can use the lab leak theory as justification to cancel all foreign subawards is ridiculous,” said the scientist, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They are doing it purely for political and/or ideological reasons.

“Whether or not you agree with the theory, foreign subawards support research to prevent the next pandemic,” the scientist added. “Canceling them all at once with little to no warning is asking for another pandemic.”

A spokesman for HHS said, “NIH is transitioning from foreign subawards to foreign subprojects to ensure that all recipients of American taxpayer dollars—whether domestic or international—are held to the same rigorous standards of oversight, accountability, and transparency.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, speaks as President Donald Trump listens during an event at the White House this month. Mark Schiefelbein/AP

There were other points of tension during the town hall, too.

At one point, Bhattacharya took a previously submitted question about the NIH’s approach to diversity, equity and inclusion, an issue the Trump administration has targeted, terminating a large number of research grants.

“The question is, how should we define health disparities research in a way that clearly separates it from DEI while continuing to address the costly consequences of US health disparities?” Cranston prompted Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya responded that he has, “in my own research, focused on vulnerable populations, and very often that means minority populations.”

But, he continued, “there’s been a line of research supported by the NIH that I don’t actually fundamentally believe is scientific, that is ideological in nature.”

To provide an example, Bhattacharya cited redlining, or racial discrimination in housing and lending practices.

“You could imagine a study looking at the effect of redlining on the access to health care for people, right? That’s a completely legitimate kind of study,” Bhattacharya said. “That would be a, I think, completely legitimate kind of study for the NIH to support.”

A member of the audience then spoke up. “Then why is NIH terminating them?” she said.

“I’m sorry, the NIH is not terminating those studies,” Bhattacharya responded. “I want to make a distinction –”

“Oh, I disagree!” the audience member shot back as colleagues applauded.

“Let me finish,” Bhattacharya said. “So the other kind of studies, for instance, what I want to distinguish from is something like ‘structural racism causes poor health in minority populations.’ ”

“What do you think redlining is?” the audience member said.

“The problem there is that it’s not a scientific hypothesis,” Bhattacharya argued. “You can’t, in principle, think of a way to test that hypothesis where, in principle, you could falsify it.”

‘Ridiculous’ 5-points email

The director also told NIH staff that he’d arrived in the job the day of mass dismissals as part of the HHS’ Reduction in Force, or RIF, April 1, and that he hadn’t had a say in them.

HHS said it cut 1,200 employees from the NIH.

“I actually don’t have any transparency in how those decisions were made,” Bhattacharya said. “And I was quite upset about that. It would be nice to have had some say.”

Bhattacharya said he’s tried to make conditions better since he arrived based on feedback from employees, including by turning purchasing cards back on and enabling travel to conferences. He also suggested that he’d put a stop to a requirement that employees send an email each week detailing five things they’d accomplished.

“I heard you guys have to do five points every week,” Bhattacharya said. “That was ridiculous. I’m really flat proud that we don’t have to have some of the best scientists in the world tell me what they did last week with five points. That made no sense.”

The audience applauded that. And later in the program, Bhattacharya took a few questions from the audience that didn’t appear planned. To one, which was inaudible on the video CNN reviewed, Bhattacharya responded, “No gloves? … That should not be happening. We’ll get that fixed.”

A week after the town hall, the union members said they still hadn’t heard from Bhattacharya’s office about scheduling a meeting.

What’s Ahead

White House staff secretary Will Scharf, center left, describes an executive order on “Gold Standard Science” to President Donald Trump during a signing ceremony. The president did not comment on the order during the ceremony, which focused on four separate executive orders dedicated to nuclear energy. Molly Riley / The White House

Trump issues order on ‘Gold Standard Science’

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last Friday that directs agencies to revise their scientific integrity policies to adhere to the principles of “Gold Standard Science,” defined as science that is reproducible, transparent, falsifiable, subject to unbiased peer review, clear about errors and uncertainties, skeptical of assumptions, collaborative, interdisciplinary, accepting of negative results, and free from conflicts of interest. The order also states the new policies should “encourage the open exchange of ideas, provide for consideration of different or dissenting viewpoints, and protect employees from efforts to prevent or deter consideration of alternative scientific opinions.” Enforcement of the policy will be assigned to a political appointee designated by each agency head.

The order directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to issue guidance for federal agency adoption of “Gold Standard Science” principles in the next 30 days. Agencies will then update their policies related to the production and use of scientific information, in consultation with OSTP and the Office of Management and Budget.

OSTP Director Michael Kratsios previewed some of the goals of the executive order in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences on May 19. “At the heart of the practices that make up Gold Standard Science is a suspicion of blind consensus and a celebration of informed dissent,” Kratsios said. He described a “crisis of confidence” in scientists that “stems from fear that political biases are displacing the vital search for truth.” He also took aim at DEI initiatives, which he said represent “an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community.”

Trump signed the order at the end of a ceremony held to highlight four other executive orders promoting nuclear energy that he signed earlier in the event. Among them is an order that overhauls oversight of advanced reactor testing and sets the goal of the Department of Energy approving three pilot reactor projects that are capable of achieving criticality by next summer.

House schedules 2026 budget hearings

The House Appropriations Committee will ramp up its work on the federal budget for fiscal year 2026 starting next week. Subcommittees will meet through June and into mid-July to advance funding proposals for agencies under their jurisdiction. The most research-heavy agencies will not come up until July, when the three subcommittees responsible for the departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, and Commerce meet. One of those subcommittees also covers the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The Defense subcommittee, which oversees all Defense Department research spending, will meet the second week of June. The subcommittee responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency and much of the Interior Department, including the U.S. Geological Survey, will meet in late June.

President Trump’s efforts to withhold and reallocate funds contrary to congressional appropriations promise to complicate the 2026 budget process. The Government Accountability Office concluded last week that the Trump administration had improperly withheld congressionally appropriated funds for electric vehicles in violation of the Impoundment Control Act. Administration officials dismissed the determination, with budget director Russell Vought calling it “rearview mirror stuff.” GAO has 39 similar investigations in progress.

Trump administration tightens screws on Harvard

The Trump administration moved to cancel all of the federal government’s remaining contracts with Harvard University today, worth an estimated $100 million. This latest round of cancellations comes after the administration froze or cancelled more than $3 billion in grants and contracts awarded to Harvard as part of a protracted dispute between the administration and the university. The administration has accused Harvard of failing to meet its civil rights obligations, including failing to adequately address antisemitic behavior on campus. Harvard denies any wrongdoing and has sued to block the previously cancelled grants.

In addition to funding freezes, the administration pulled Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor program certification last week, aiming to prevent the university from enrolling foreign students and jeopardizing the legal status of thousands of existing students. Harvard successfully obtained a temporary restraining order blocking the decertification last week.

Also on our radar

Sen. Susan Collins — a Republican from Maine — spoke out Wednesday against Trump administration medical research funding cuts and research funding rule changes.

One administration proposal would cap the percentage of a federal National Institutes of Health research grant that a university lab could use to pay for “indirect costs,” such as lab space and graduate students stipends, at 15%, from a typical ratio of 50% to 60% today.

“This cap will mean less basic research and fewer clinical trials,” Collins said. “It will cause our scientists and researchers to leave the United States and go to other countries.”

Collins said she strongly believes the proposed indirect cost cap is poorly thought out and harmful.

“And I know that it violates current law,” Collins said, noting that, since 2018, Congress has included provisions in appropriations bills preventing NIH from imposing such caps.

Collins talked about medical research funding during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services budget for fiscal year 2026, which starts Oct. 1.

The only witness at the hearing was HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy said HHS has a plan to address Collins’ concerns and that he would contact her after the hearing to talk about the plan.

What it means: Employers and benefits advisors who are hoping that government-funded medical research might find ways to improve the quality of health care and lower the cost might have to lower their expectations.

The backdrop: The Trump administration has submitted a 2026 budget request that would cut funding for one HHS research arm and infection control arm, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to $6.1 billion from $9.8 billion this year.

The budget request would also cut funding the National Institutes of Health, an HHS arm that pays for basic medical research, to $30.3 billion, from $48.3 billion this year. Related: NIH to create primary care-based ‘real world’ research network The hearings: The Senate HELP Committee held one hearing and has posted a video recording of the hearing on its website.

The House Appropriations also held an HHS 2026 budget hearing and has posted a video recording of its own proceedings on its website.

More hearing details: Collins was not the only Republican lawmaker to express concerns about the proposed cuts for 2026.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the Senate HELP chairman, said he represents Tulane University and Louisiana State University, which have been using NIH funding to tackle urgent health care issues, such as long COVID and Lyme disease.

“How will the NIH successfully do more with less?” Cassidy asked. “How will we build those new scientists to find these cures?”

Rep. Stephanie Bice, R-Okla., talked at the House hearing about the work the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, a research organization in her state, is doing on conditions such as cancer and sickle cell anemia.

“I hope you and your team will continue to work with OMRF so they can continue the positive impact in Oklahoma and across the country to make America healthy again,” Bice said.

Democratic lawmakers at the hearings talked about a report posted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, showing that the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion in NIH research funding in the first three months of this year.

The Sanders report shows, for example, that NIH cut cancer research funding for the first three months of the year to less than $800 million, down from more than $1.1 billion in the first three months of 2024.

“I do not believe the American people want less cancer research,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told Kennedy.

The impact: The views of senators like Collins and Cassidy could have a bigger impact than usual right now because Republicans have just 53 seats in the Senate.

The Trump administration and Republican congressional leaders are depending on their support and support from other Senate Republicans with an independent streak, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rand Paul of Kentucky, to get a big budget and tax bill through the Senate.

That means the potential budget bill swing voters may be able to persuade colleagues to add research-funding provisions or other provisions to the budget bill to win their votes.

What’s Ahead

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-ME). J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Senators to mull Trump’s proposed science cuts

Hearings this week may shed more light on whether Senate appropriators are open to the massive cuts to science agencies proposed in the Trump administration’s 2026 budget request. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright will testify on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, on their agencies’ budget requests. Democrats have roundly condemned the proposed cuts, but a key question is how the Republican majorities on the Senate appropriations subcommittees react to them. Some Republican senators have criticized other research cuts carried out by the Trump administration, while others have gone out of their way to endorse them.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), chair of the DOE subcommittee that Wright will appear before, has defended the administration’s attempt to cap the National Institutes of Health’s indirect cost reimbursements for research grants at 15%. DOE implemented its own 15% cap on indirect research costs in April and extended it to additional types of awards in May. (The research caps at DOE and NIH have since been blocked in court.) At the same hearing in which Kennedy praised the NIH caps, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-ME) criticized them as “arbitrary” and “poorly thought out.” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), chair of the HHS appropriations subcommittee before which RFK Jr. will testify, has praised the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to a range of federal programs but has also criticized cuts to two federally funded research operations in her state: DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

NSF pauses RIFs, expands scope of grant terminations

The National Science Foundation has paused reductions in force (RIFs) and restructuring moves after the underlying executive order was temporarily blocked in court on May 9, according to an internal NSF memo reviewed by FYI. The agency had announced earlier that day that it was initiating RIFs of executive positions, eliminating its Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, and moving rotator staff out of positions that supervise federal employees. The temporary restraining order prohibits executing any existing RIF notices, issuing additional RIF notices, and placing employees on administrative leave at least until May 23, the memo states. The agency has also paused the reassignment of rotator staff. The memo said NSF will continue accepting applications for deferred resignations and voluntary early retirements, but it cannot put the agreements into effect until the court permits.

Meanwhile, NSF has continued to terminate grants and has updated its list of award types that are being terminated to include “environmental justice.” The influence of Department of Government Efficiency employees over grantmaking decisions contributed to the resignation last Tuesday of NSF board member Alondra Nelson, who was appointed to the body by President Joe Biden last year. In announcing the move, Nelson argued the board’s role has been “strategically neutralized.” Later in the week, the remaining 22 members of the board released a statement that highlights the role of federal funding in supporting U.S. competitiveness and asserts that private sector funding will not compensate for “drastic reductions” in federal support.

Harvard hit by new grant cuts

More federal agencies are pulling their research funding to Harvard University, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation, according to an updated lawsuit filed by the university. Last Tuesday, the federal Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that eight agencies were terminating about $450 million in grants to Harvard, in addition to the $2.2 billion from the National Institutes of Health that was terminated the prior week. The agencies’ termination letters state that Harvard has carried out “race discrimination” in its admissions process and other areas of student life and has permitted “antisemitism and bias” on campus.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit states that the funding freezes and terminations violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights and go beyond the scope of agencies’ anti-discrimination procedures by targeting research programs that are not connected to the alleged discrimination. It adds that if Harvard continues to replace the frozen and terminated funding using its own money it will be “forced to reduce the number of graduate students it admits and the number of faculty and research staff it pays to conduct research.” Separately, dozens of higher education associations signed an open letter last week calling to “reforge the historic compact between higher education and the federal government,” writing that the balance between the two sectors is “dangerously disrupted when billions of dollars in funding for education and competitively awarded research grants are held hostage for political reasons and without due process.”

Major tax changes included in House reconciliation bill

House Republicans’ reconciliation bill cleared a Budget Committee vote on Sunday despite facing opposition from some Republicans seeking deeper budget cuts for fiscal year 2025. The bill would slash clean energy tax breaks introduced during the Biden administration, reintroduce immediate expensing for R&D conducted domestically, and expand taxes on university endowments. The bill would also restore the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum auction authority and provide a $150 billion boost to defense spending, with $25 billion in funding for Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense program. University associations have strongly opposed the new endowment taxes while welcoming the renewed R&D tax credit. The bill will now move to the House Rules Committee before a final House floor vote. This effort is separate from the ongoing deliberations over discretionary spending for fiscal year 2026.

Meteorologists to discuss federal cuts at Washington Forum

The American Meteorological Society will hold its Washington Forum Tuesday through Thursday. Among the speakers are David Applegate, chief scientist and former director of the U.S. Geological Survey; Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences; and Craig McLean, former assistant administrator for research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Other sessions will discuss an AMS report on the impact of funding and staffing cuts to NOAA and other federal agencies, the role of scientific societies during a period of rapid policy change, emerging applications of AI, and assessing implementation of the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act. (AMS is an AIP Member Society.)

Also on our radar