Wednesday, September 10th

In federal budget news, the President has asked congress to continue the current continuing resolution until January 2026. There isn’t a strong indication one way or another if this will happen. Currently there is disagreement Republican congresspeople. Some want an extension only until November.

An interesting biomedical science wrinkle to the budget process is that House appropriators today amended their proposed spending package to explicitly fund mRNA vaccine research and development at HHS (though no specific amount of money was earmarked). This could change as budget negotiations continue, however.

After a draft version was leaked last month, a finalized version of the MAHA report was released on Tuesday. The finalized report largely follows what was in the draft. Stat has a nice summary.

There is reporting out of Harvard indicating that researchers there are still unable to access their grant funds, despite recent court orders. The New York Times has reported that Harvard has received some notices of reinstatement but no funds.

The Department of Education announced today that it will no longer award discretionary grants designed to support minority serving institutions. The Chronicle has a good overview of what this means in practice.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon gave a speech today outlining her vision for education policy. There is nothing particularly surprising in there, but the Chronicle has an annotated version.

Texas A&M has fired a lecturer in their English Department and also relieved both the head of the department and dean of arts and sciences from these administrative positions after a video of a student accusing the instructor of illegally teaching “gender ideology” went viral.

Last week the Administration released its “Spring 2025 Unified Agenda”, which potentially provides some insight into what we can expect over the next several months. Skimming through, it appears that he Department of Education is working on a proposal to streamline the process of freezing federal funding to “institutions that intentionally violate Federal civil rights laws and refuse to voluntarily come into compliance.”

Susan Monarez will testify before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee next Wednesday to address her firing as CDC director. She will be joined by former senior CDC official Debra Houry, who resigned in protest following Monarez’s firing.

John Oliver spent nearly a half hour of his show on Sunday discussing the Administration’s dispute with higher education. The more serious content starts around the 4 minute mark.