Updates: The US government and STEM research

Now that we're 6 weeks into the new year, I think it's worth it to do an incomplete roundup of where we are on US federal support of STEM research.  Feel free to skip this post if you don't want to read about this.  

• Appropriators in Congress largely went against the FY26 presidential budget request, and various spending bills by and large slightly-less-than level-funded most US science agencies. A physics-oriented take is here. The devil is in the details.  The AAAS federal R&D dashboard lets you explore this at a finer level.  Nature has an interactive widget that visualizes what has been cut and what remains.
• Bear in mind, that was just year 1 of the present administration.  All of the effort, all of the work pushing back against proffered absolutely draconian, agency-destroying cuts?  That likely will have to be done again this year.  And in subsequent years, if the administration still invests effort in pushing enormously slashed budgets in their budget requests.
• There is an issue of Science with the whole news section about how the past year has changed the science funding and pipeline in the US.
• In NSF news, the rate of awards remains very low, though there is almost certainly a major delay because of the lateness of the budget, coping with reduced staffing levels, and restructuring now that Divisions no longer exist.  How greater emphasis on specific strategic priorities (beyond what is in the program calls) will affect operations remains unclear, at least to me.
• Also, some NSF graduate research fellowship applications, especially in the life sciences, seem to be getting kicked back without review - see here (sorry about the paywall).  This seems to be a broad research area issue, despite no information to applicants about this (that lack of information flow is perhaps unsurprising).  
• I'm not well-immersed in the world of NIH and the FDA, but I know things are bad.  Fifteen out of 27 of the NIH institutes have vacant or acting director positions.  The FDA declined to even take the application for Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine, a move not popular even with the Wall Street Journal.  Moderna has also decided to shelve promising vaccines for a number of diseases because they no longer think the US will be a market for them, and it practically seems like someone wants to bring back polio.  (Note:   I will not have the comments become a back-and-forth about vaccines.)
• The back and forth about indirect cost rates continues, along with the relevant court cases.  The recent appropriations have language to prevent sudden changes in rates.  The FAIR model is not yet passed.
• Concerns still loom about impoundment.
• There has been an exodus of technically trained PhDs from government service.
• I could go on.  I know I've left out critical areas, and I haven't talked about DOE or NASA or DOD or EPA or NOAA explicitly.  

Honest people can have discussions about the right balance of federal vs state vs industrial vs philanthropic support for research.  There are no easy answers in the present time.  For those who think that robust public investment in science and engineering research is critical to societal good, economic competitiveness, and security, we need to keep pushing and not let fatigue or fatalism win the day.