Cole Donovan
@colesci.bsky.social
Director of Science Policy and Advocacy, Stand Up for Science Foundation. Former White House OSTP, Federation of American Scientists, NOAA Office of Space Commerce, National Academies, State Department. Science advocate. Geeky painter. Views own.
I am going down a tree law rabbit hole and I can tell you, folks, that it seems like it’s in your financial interests to plant as many trees as possible. This, coming from a guy who gets mad at grass fields in Maryland, is about to make me even more insufferable.
Reddit's Tree Lawyers Are Losing Their Minds
YouTube video by LegalEagle
youtu.be
My terror that we’re gonna do 2021 again in an article. It’s not even that I disagree that a level of strategic autonomy is a good thing, or that supporting authoritarians is bad. It’s that this type of thinking tends to crowd out all other policy, and we are going to need to do other policy.
The True Cost of Decoupling from China
Breaking with Beijing is more affordable than you think.
commonplace.org
Or, you know, you could *not* vote Blanche out of committee. Why on earth would you take the spineless position that the president has to be obeyed on this? What an absolute abandonment of any pretense of principle or senatorial duty to advise on the suitability of nominees.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdayCornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president"
TLDR: Google be like “things that are actually harming people right now aren’t harms. The only harms that exist are the ones that might occasionally happen and look really bad so we need the protection of a regulator who we can blame for sleeping at the wheel when those things happen, too.”
Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 2d agoGoogle's policy plan offers lawmakers a map of AI harm, writes Gregory Gondwe, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. It puts frontier threats at the center,and more familiar structural harms at the edges.
Re: the AAU capitulation campaign to sell out universities to the Trump admin. Please watch this keynote speech from JD in 2021, where he explicitly says "universities are the enemy" & "professors are evil," and then look me in the eye and say this is a good faith effort. youtu.be/0FR65Cifnhw?...
J.D. Vance | The Universities are the Enemy | National Conservatism Conference II
YouTube video by National Conservatism
youtu.be
Ayup. Institutions who don’t sign and are excluded should sue. Seriously, just sue the government anyway. It’s not like the conservative playbook for “keeping the government the fuck out of your institutions” isn’t RIGHT THERE for the taking.
Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽@needhibhalla.bsky.social · 2d ago“A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said institutions that do announce reforms could be more likely to be involved in discussions around reshaping the roughly $200 billion federal research funding apparatus that is vital to higher education.” It’s extortion
I appreciate that folks are expecting @standupforscience.net to act like many organizations/institutions and declare a win, then take our foot off the gas. Unfortunately for everyone involved, we are declaring a win and PUTTING PEDAL TO THE METAL. NEXT ACTION STEPS FORTH COMING TEAM!
Colette Delawalla, PhD@cdelawalla.bsky.social · 3d agoTHIS IS WHAT PEOPLE POWER ACCOMPLISHES! Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who wrote comments, contacted Congress, and yelled! This is OUR WIN! @standupforscience.net www.politico.com/news/2026/08...
New: In about 10 minutes the Senate should start an initial vote on a continuing resolution. The CR contains a provision that would temporarily (but completely) block OMB's proposal to overhaul federal grants. Our story on that Senate measure and some of the pushback which lead to it:
Controversial White House plan to overhaul US science funding faces Senate opposition
Proposal to put political appointees in charge of research grants could be temporarily halted if lawmakers’ efforts are successful.
nature.com
“This is exactly what can make the project of revisiting the past so vital: It’s not about the past. It’s about choosing our future... www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...
Opinion | Trump's Smithsonian Attacks Are Attacks on America’s Future (Gift Article)
This is how we decide who we are and who we want to be.
nytimes.com
The great irony of this is that it is all happening at the moment that the academic community gets rewarded for learning how to do collective resistance, AAU falls back on their time-worn strategy of focusing principally on the executive and stopping bad legislation.
Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social · 2d agoTime to add another formerly respected institution to the garbage pile, this time @aau.edu, which just worked with the Trump admin to endorse resegregation in high education, embedding MAGA fraudsters as faculty, and banning student expression. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
First time making orange chicken. Could have used a few Szechuan chilis. Used the Kenji Lopez Alt recipe for the chicken, which ended up being not quite as crunchy as advertised. Feeling very confident with char siu at this point. Outstanding complex flavor. Sister made a broccoli slaw.
This is an outstanding result, but we’re not done yet! The NSF update is still open for comment and not directly impacted. Keep the pressure up! fight2win.standupforscience.net
Stand up for Science
Stand up for Science
fight2win.standupforscience.net
Colette Delawalla, PhD@cdelawalla.bsky.social · 3d agoTHIS IS WHAT PEOPLE POWER ACCOMPLISHES! Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who wrote comments, contacted Congress, and yelled! This is OUR WIN! @standupforscience.net www.politico.com/news/2026/08...
saw the Odyssey. It's OK. My hot take is that it goes on a bit
ORGANIZING AND MOBILIZING AND FIGHTING BACK WORKS. This wasn’t institutions stepping up and fighting. This was INDIVIDUALS standing up UNITED TOGETHER, fighting for the world we want to live in.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE POWER ACCOMPLISHES! Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who wrote comments, contacted Congress, and yelled! This is OUR WIN! @standupforscience.net www.politico.com/news/2026/08...
Senate finalizes funding patch that would block Trump’s grant overhaul
Language is included to delay the president’s move to put political appointees in charge of grant approval.
politico.com
I asked my nephew what I should make for my birthday, and he said Chinese, so I’m preparing about eight pounds of char siu pork and five of orange chicken (for the non-red meat eaters). Then I learned that he’s not going to be coming 🤦 Oh well, guess we’re all gonna have good food either way.
Also for those who are new followers: Hi! I’m a former science diplomat at the State Department/OSTP/NOAA and a former OSTP policymaker. A quick thing to understand is that my role has, for about 14 years, been to stack the deck in order to get the best possible result for America and scientists. 🧵
And just to clarify: This is based on a fairly good bit of information I received. It didn’t have any/many details attached. Hoping that I’m not correct/this forces a change in direction/scope. That said, I am hoping that people ask their own contacts about this and that the response is a denial.
Cole Donovan@colesci.bsky.social · 4d agoHearing that NSF is going to pilot moving awards from institutions to individuals. Hello compliance nightmare. Especially because a lot of federal requirements for these awards (research security) are tied to institutional requirements. Potentially devastating for scientific collections/archives.
For what it’s worth, these awards are also probably taxable to the individual.
Cole Donovan@colesci.bsky.social · 4d agoHearing that NSF is going to pilot moving awards from institutions to individuals. Hello compliance nightmare. Especially because a lot of federal requirements for these awards (research security) are tied to institutional requirements. Potentially devastating for scientific collections/archives.
Hearing that NSF is going to pilot moving awards from institutions to individuals. Hello compliance nightmare. Especially because a lot of federal requirements for these awards (research security) are tied to institutional requirements. Potentially devastating for scientific collections/archives.
so much I wanted to quote here about why we as scientists seem to find ourselves in this current political situation: “When and why powerful and wealthy outsiders chose to pluck scholars and ideas from obscurity should be of key concern to those of us interested in the independence of science.”
Jeff Lockhart@jwlockhart.bsky.social · 5d agoI wrote about science funding, science reform, and anti-science agendas. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/s...
This is literally false. They create an initial wave of construction work, which is often contracted out of the locality, and then when operational they require only minimal staff.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5d agoHassett: "Data centers are very good for towns bc they create so many jobs & bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses & stuff like that. So if you take a sleepy town that hasn't seen much in the last 30 years & put a data center there, there are gonna be a bunch of happy residents."
Back on my BS, my sense of the science reform movement (its virtues and its warts) is that the dynamics and pathologies are very different from the battles over sex and race essentialism that I wrote my dissertation on.
Some starting points: Peterson and panofsky on metascience as a scientific social movement philpapers.org/rec/PETMAA-5
philpapers.org
I wrote about science funding, science reform, and anti-science agendas. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/s...
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…
scatter.wordpress.com
I will say I think we need serious empirical research on the growth and cooptation of the current science reform movement as a scientific social movement. In the first draft, we initially just wanted to point out that feminists might reasonably wonder about outside interests with big donor funding.
This is literally what they’re also doing to civil rights in the NSF Guidelines on Financial Assistance. Just tell institutions that they don’t need people to monitor compliance with 504/Title IX, etc…
elizabethginexi.bsky.social@elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 5d ago‼️ Trump Administration Plans to Upend Head Start by Deregulating It. The White House tried but failed to block funding for preschool for poor children. Instead, it will seek to strip away standards on health, literacy — and brushing teeth. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/u...
Taps the Sign: No bid contracts should be regarded with some suspicion. These are our tax dollars. We are looking major failures in SNAP (next year) and Social Security (2030).
Scott MacFarlane@macfarlanenews.bsky.social · 5d agoFLASH: Justice Dept seeks to dismiss Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool criminal case against former Olympian David Hearn Trump Admin acknowledges: "Damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor"
