mastodon 4.7.3Computational disease ecologist. Executive Director of @rOpenSci@hachyderm.io. Brooklynite. One health, open science, #rstats, cities, civics, bikes, fun, love, progress + justice. he/him
NSF grants will fall to *half* of what they were before the Trump Admin this year, the lowest number since the early 1980s.
Why? (1) The White House is withholding $1 Billion for private projects, and (2) The NSF is using every accounting trick to make it look like they are spending without making new grants.
New reporting from Dan Garisto at Nature, using Grant Witness data.
RE: @thecarpentries@hachyderm.io
I'm awed at and incredibly grateful for what @drkariljordan@mastodon.social and Erin have done at the Carpentries, stewarding and growing this lynchpin of the open science training ecosystem.
Grant Witness has a new website at https://grantwitness.org along with a newsletter and fedi handle: @grantwitness.org
Grant Witness tracks data on federal funding to defend American science and the rule of law. Visit or follow keep up with with federal agency actions and grantmaking, read our investigations, or explore and download on granular grant-tracking data.
EDIT: One more day! Get your comment in by the end of Monday, Aug 24!
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Three more days to comment on NSF's attempt to smuggle in OMB's already-rejected policies of terminating any grant without cause, gutting civil rights obligations and restricting international collaborations.
Submit your comment today! Then call your representatives.
https://fight2win.standupforscience.net/campaign/ProtectNSF_Comment/
I don't know why but working on a laptop on a long subway ride, with 30 seconds of hotspot wifi every few minutes at the stations, is probably my most productive mode.
I got so much joy seeing how @rOpenSci@hachyderm.io played a part in these fantastic student projects using NYC's Open Data
House Science Committee members Zoe Lofgren and Whitesides write to White House OSTP director Michael Kratsios on the black hole of where NSF money is going: "We have no reason to be surprised that you chose to continue this pattern of obfuscation and disrespect of the Committee’s oversight..."
Annika Horne is making a great series of short films about the great disruption of scientific research. Here's one about the administration kicking NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies out of their building
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWf1yOq2fk&list=PLK41C0Vfc8JWbsoQr0Glvarl_y6oEkEn2
OMB has clearly decided to ignore Congressional intent and implement their own preferred budget at #NSF. It's outrageous, unconstitutional, and is gutting our scientific capacity. Their excuses are such thin bullshit -
There have been *two* SBE grants awarded this year, both for how to make humans work better with AI.
Thanks to Dan Garisto for the deep dive here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01287-0
Detailed data from Grant Witness here https://grant-witness.us/funding_curves_nsf.html
RE: @CenterforOpenScience@fosstodon.org
I've been consistently impressed by the moral clarity and steadfastness of the @CenterforOpenScience@fosstodon.org team in the past 18 months, as the administration has sought to co-opt the policies they advocate as cudgels for politicization of science. Thank you!
Making use of this one-liner today as we're getting a bunch of intermittent Internet outages in the neighborhood
while ! ping -c 1 www.google.com &> /dev/null; do sleep 1; done; say "Internet is back"
#RStats challenge: How to make a pie-beeswarm like this one from the Minnesota Star Tribune showing the relative sizes of ICE/CBP and local police forces?
https://www.startribune.com/how-ice-numbers-compare-to-twin-cities-largest-police-forces/601562617
(Challenge 2: Try not to argue about pie charts in the replies 😉)
NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics?
1) Write NSF
2) Write your Congressperson
3) CC us at grfp@grant-witness.us so we can compile for a collective follow-up with the House Science commitee and NSF leadership
Details and template at https://grant-witness.us/grfp-letter
Update: A new round of these RWRs appear to have been sent out today (Feb 4). Keep those letters coming!
I'm very excited about this collaboration between @rOpenSci@hachyderm.io's R-Universe and @bioconductor@genomic.social: modernizing build systems for #rstats while expanding and testing new models for governance and development.
Thanks to @jeroenooms@fosstodon.org for his leadership, the BioC team's collaboration, and @RConsortium@fosstodon.org's support!
I had missed that {renv} now installs packages in parallel! Many thanks to @kevinushey@fosstodon.org
What's the preferred way these days to include a font in an R package (as part of a ggplot theme)? Examples? Can we use variable fonts?
Lots of neat stuff in this month's update! My faves:
1) O nosso guia agora é trilíngue (Inglês, Espanhol e Português)!
2) @mpadge@nerdculture.de's {pkgmatch} is now run on all new package submissions, helping authors and editors find reviewers and prior art! https://github.com/ropensci/software-review/issues/671#issuecomment-4117805740
Honored to be working to defend science against authoritarianism alongside so many inspiring colleagues profiled here:
Various forms of this problem remain huge obstacles in many of the projects I work on, and typically a frontier LLM using the power of a city block solves like 30% of it and adds an extra 10% in fixing what it did wrong.
I find the {reviser} 📦 by Mark Burri + Philipp Wegmueller (now @rOpenSci@hachyderm.io reviewed!) interesting: It shows how economists deal with a problem that epidemiologists grapple with a lot: revisions of past time series https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/04/13/reviser/ @seabbs@fosstodon.org
@hrbrmstr@mastodon.social I was just writing you to see how you were doing and then saw your post!
We've released a major update to our #NIH tracking at Grant Witness. We now publish a complete, multi-source history of events to track the complex administrative and legal journey of each grant.
"Those who celebrate the triumph of ideology over intelligence have lit an indoor bonfire of our scientific capital and are now dancing around it, mistaking national self-immolation for a crowning policy achievement." - A remarkable commentary by Alex Tsai accompanying our SSM Mental Health paper on grant terminations:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560326000277
What's the current state of remote parquet-querying tools (duckdb, arrow, maybe polars) and WebR? That is, if I want a WebR/Shinylive app to query a remote parquet file and only transfer the query results? Or is the way to go, say, loading duckdb's WASM build and have a shiny call it via eval_js? Any examples?
@hrbrmstr@mastodon.social @jeroenooms@fosstodon.org @gws@fosstodon.org @kirill@fosstodon.org
Very excited to be working with Angie Reed + the Tribal Exchange Network (https://www.tribalexchangenetwork.org/) on the revival of {redoc}, an #rstats package enabling collaboration on reproducible reports via tracked changed in WYSIWYG documents. Thanks to the @RConsortium@fosstodon.org for selecting us, and congrats to the other grant winners!
https://r-consortium.org/posts/r-consortium-awards-first-round-of-2025-isc-grants/
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FOLLOW UP: We need a new name! https://github.com/redoc-dev/redoc/discussions/79
Excited that @rOpenSci@hachyderm.io's April co-working and office hours will be held jointly with the Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease Network! Join us and CSID network hosts Irene Ramos and Adamu Saleh Saidu on Apr 7 at 16:00 UTC to get to know a peer community!: https://ropensci.org/events/coworking-2026-04/
Hey @millerdl@mathstodon.xyz, do you have that animated GIF of the spatial uncertainty of dolphin distribution in the Gulf of Mexico handy somewhere?
NEW: Last week's terminations at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) total at least 150 grants worth $230M. That is over half of the agency's portfolio. It's the latest assault on healthcare, health equity, and the rule of law.
Researchers had been left hanging as AHRQ failed to renew budgets for months, sometimes over a year.
This continues the war on DEI. The word "equity" is the best predictor of termination.
https://grant-witness.us/posts/2026-07-22_ahrq-terminations/
NEW: The National Science Foundation has been doing everything it can to meet its legal requirements to spend funds while throttling awards going to U.S. Science. While both are slow, spending is twice as fast as new awards.
It's not because awards are bigger: they are *smaller* by an average of $100,000. Rather, NSF is directing more funds to support old projects, and forward-fund budgets, than actually making new awards to invest in science.
https://grant-witness.us/posts/2026-06-30-nsf-tale-of-two-charts/