This week’s cover image was taken way back in 1962, when John Glenn became the first person to take a photograph in space - using a camera he bought in a drug store! Unrelated: I now have a Minolta Hi-Matic on the way from Japan.
The heading is from one of the top ten best tweets. There’s some bonus moon content at the end of this week’s newsletter and, spoiler alert, I have some on deck for next week.
The Artemis II mission may be on its way to the (frickin) moon, but back but here on earth…
Federal Research Policy
The White House has released the President’s 2027 budget request. Stat has a good summary.
The proposed budget would increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion (a 42% increase) and would reduce non-defense spending by 10%
The budget requests $111.1 for the Department of Health and Human Services (a 12.5% decrease) and “refocuses HHS on its core mission by eliminating bloated, woke, and ineffcient programs that do not advance MAHA goals.”
The budget proposes a $5 billion cut to NIH (≈10% cut), including the elimination of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and substantial reforms at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Library of Medicine.
Also in the budget request: What looks to be a government-wide prohibition on the use of federal funds for “expensive” academic journal subscriptions and "prohibitively high publishing costs."
The President’s budget serves as a “starting point” as congress puts the budget together for the fiscal year. Congress is under no obligation to adopt all or any of the President’s budget and often makes significant changes, as they did last year.
NIH is ending its continuous submission policy, which allowed investigators who serve as standing members of its review panels extra time to submit their own grant applications.
NIH Director and CDC leader Jay Bhattacharya spoke at CPAC last week and invoked the legacy of Vannevar Bush and the Endless Frontier [PDF]. Stat has additional coverage.
Both Director Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Marty Makery marked one year as the heads of their respective agencies this week.
Public Health
The CDC has temporarily paused testing for rabies and pox viruses on behalf of state and local public health laboratories that are not equipped to conduct them.
Propublica has an extensive piece on the potentially forthcoming reversal of the FDA’s ban on peptides.
Higher Education
I’m just going to post this headline verbatim: “Federal Judge Approves Trump Effort to Obtain List of Jews From Penn”
Editor’s Note
There is a new batch of papers out describing a lack of replicability in social science papers. The work done here represents a tremendous amount of effort by hundreds of scientists. There are lots of conclusions that can be drawn here, but the main one seems to be that science is incremental. Scientific advances, however those may defined, come from bodies of work rather than individual studies or analyses.
Which, yes, absolutely. It is vital to always keep this all in mind. Understanding that science is an incremental and collaborative process is scientific literacy 101.
My angle on all this is that there is always room for improvement in how the process of science is communicated. Data and code can be shared. Processes and procedures can be documented and made transparent. The related practices are often beneficial for both the day-to-day practice of doing science and the broader research enterprise. To me, in 2026, this is all pretty inside baseball stuff.
All of which is to say, I am uncomfortable with the “science in crisis!” framing that so often accompanies coverage around these kinds of reproducibility efforts. Don’t get me wrong, there have been times in my scientific career where it has felt like the epistemological sky was falling. But, in retrospect, these were (somewhat harrowing) examples of methodological correction - science moving forward incrementally.
There has always been a political valence to these discussions, but the “science in crisis” framing has now found its way into executive orders, government reports, and federal policies. The research enterprise is far from perfect and it is particularly tough out there right now. But I hope we can all be a little more prudent in our language.