Jenna Norton

Stand up for science.

@standupforscience.bsky.social
Via @nbcwashington.com

FDA’s controversial vaccine chief will exit agency next month | CNN The US Food and Drug Administration’s head of vaccines and biologic medicines will leave the agency at the end of April, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Friday.

Vinay Prasad has been an a noxious influence on public health and drug regulation. Good riddance. UCSF should not take him back. He should wander in the wilderness forever. www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/h...

AHRQ has been hit even harder than NIH. They have no grant making staff at all.

If you block junior scientists from ensuring that they can afford to live (or start families!) in the exorbitantly expensive areas around their workplaces, only family-subsidized solitary rich kids will be able to pursue careers in research - amidst exponential inflation, increasingly few people.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s being refined/retrained over time on a growing sample of grants?

Either way, it does not seem to be totally static.

Love the spirit!

I don’t think they have been FOIAed yet. This might be tricky. It’s an AI tool, so it learns. We believe the terms may be evolving over time. Some brave folks did assemble a partial list from everything flagged across multiple ICs recently, see last pages. www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/u...

Thread. You can’t trust the Trump/RFK/Bhattacharya regime, even when they make representations to courts.

Civil Servants Demand: Impeach Russell Vought The Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is the central architect driving the destruction of your government. Russell Vought created lawlessness in every part of the Trump administ...

Its time to impeach: actionnetwork.org/forms/civil-...

Russell Vought: The Shadow President YouTube video by ProPublica

Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. He may also be among the most cold-hearted, extreme and cruel. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Lu...

Excited and honored to speak at the @standupforscience.bsky.social rally in DC tomorrow!

I hope to see you all out there, standing up for science (and democracy!) together. It is going to take all of us working in solidarity to demand a science that serves all of us.

#StandUpForScience

News article clipping: Some NIH Scientists Say Ending Union Recognition Undermines Bhattacharya’s Early-Career Push. By Maaisha Osman / March 5, 2026 at 4:09 PM. The National Institutes of Health is ending recognition of a union representing early-career scientists, a move some agency employees say undermines Director Jay Bhattacharya’s stated goal of supporting researchers beginning their scientific careers. In an email sent Monday (March 2) by NIH’s Office of Human Resources and reviewed by Inside Health Policy, the agency said it will no longer recognize NIH Fellows United, which represents more than 5,000 NIH scientists, about 34% of whom are visiting international fellows. NIH Fellows United, part of the United Auto Workers (UAW Local 2750), represents early-career researchers in the National Institutes of Health Intramural Research Program, including postbaccalaureate, predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers, as well as clinical, research and visiting fellows. The group organizes thousands of scientists working across NIH labs as part of the agency’s internal research enterprise.

I agree!

This middle part of the thread points to specific examples of potential/ongoing automation of ideology-driven evaluation, i.e., using tools to screen for alignment with administration priorities. There are significant implications here for oversight of what is unfolding with NIH grants & reviews.

At NIH, this is being enforced top down from Bhattacharya, Memoli, and Lorsch.

Civil Servants Demand: Impeach Russell Vought The Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is the central architect driving the destruction of your government. Russell Vought created lawlessness in every part of the Trump administ...

I know, it's across the government. And it's awful.

That's why we need to impeach the mastermind behind much of it! actionnetwork.org/forms/civil-...

Obligations for scientific research and development contracts at the CDC decreased by 79% from fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2025.

Obligations for scientific research and development contracts at the CDC decreased by 79% from fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2025.

The workforce in biomedical agencies decreased by 36,146 employees between September 2024 and December 2025, a 7.3% decline.

The workforce in biomedical agencies decreased by 36,146 employees between September 2024 and December 2025, a 7.3% decline.

Agencies in the biomedical sector obligated $43.3 billion in project grants in fiscal year 2025, a 2.9% decrease from fiscal year 2024.

Agencies in the biomedical sector obligated $43.3 billion in project grants in fiscal year 2025, a 2.9% decrease from fiscal year 2024.

New tool from @ourpublicservice.bsky.social explores the unraveling of public science during the first year of the Trump administration.

Highlighting some of their findings for biomedical research.

@jeremymberg.bsky.social perhaps its time for another email?

14/ ...These are also identities shared by my husband and my children, and it is getting harder to look them in the face when I return from work.”

- anonymous NIH PO

13/ “The categories of people I am being asked to remove from grants share the same identities of people being forcibly removed, detained, and killed in our country...

12/“I spent five hours creating a justification for why the word the screening tool picked up was a false positive - I was told my judgment was wrong. When I asked to document that my decision was overruled I was told that the decision memo could not include “dissenting language.”
- anonymous NIH PO

11/ ...When people are being shot, detained inhumanely, deported, and abused for having the same identities we are removing from grants, it is abundantly clear we are participating in hate.”

- anonymous NIH program officer

10/ “I wish I could see censoring grants as saving science, but it’s a short term monetary solution with a long term goal of ultimately discriminating against who we most need to serve...

9/ I also want to note that this censorship process is blatantly discriminatory, and so it really weighs on my heart and the hearts of many of my colleagues who are being forced to carry this out from the inside.

I want to share these quotes from some of my colleagues:

8/ The only course of action that allows the study to be or remain funded seems to be removing the “potentially misaligned terms” and renegotiating the grant. They are receiving emails from their leadership explicitly telling them to stop disagreeing with the tool’s output. That its a waste of time.

7/ In reality, my colleagues still inside NIH tell me that their assessments are largely ignored.

Once a grant or application is picked up by the tool, they are almost never able to move the grant forward as is - regardless of the scientific justification.

6/ On paper, a computational text analysis tool is supposed to screen grants and identify words potentially associated with misalignment with agency priorities.

Then, actual human scientists are supposed to look at the screen positive grants and use their scientific judgement to make a call.

5/ Right now, they are arguing in court that they have replaced the old, unlawful process.

But my colleagues inside say this is false.

NIH isn't actually following the new processes they laid out.