The Forsburg Lab

Holden Thorp, EiC at Science:

“Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. ….

In any other administration, when Congress appropriates money for science each year, OMB’s job is to make sure that the funds are released in accordance with the law. But in Project 2025, the blueprint used by the Trump administration to overhaul the federal government according to a theory of greater executive power, Vought called for an activist OMB that serves as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent,’” thereby moving power away from Congress.

The sweeping new regulations proposed by OMB include rendering peer review nonbinding in awarding new grants. This would allow political appointees at funding agencies to override expert judgment of scientific merit without cause. Agencies could end multiyear grants with no due process. They also could use the vague criteria of Trump’s “gold standard science” to identify institutions for preferential treatment. International collaboration with countries identified solely by the administration would be prohibited under the new rules, but more notably, all research that involves the expenditure of funds outside the US would require case-by-case approval. This bureaucratic hurdle would effectively prevent most if not all partnerships from moving forward.

…. It’s tone deaf to be grateful about money while the very values that have defined scientific merit for 80 years are obliterated. For example, curtailing research into the social determinants of health threatens to leave large swaths of university researchers with no prospects of getting a grant. This comes on top of the elimination of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Higher education and its associations need to firmly oppose these changes, which would create a massive morale and financial problem in addition to curtailing important research.

The pharmaceutical business has at least as much to lose as academia. In criticizing the industry for its failure to act, Steve Usdin, an editor at the industry publication BioCentury who has covered policy issues affecting the life sciences sector, reminded pharmaceutical leaders that their silence was “complicity in the destruction of US science.” The global dominance of American pharmaceutical companies has long relied on ready access to the best science in the US and collaborators from around the world—all chosen on the basis of scientific merit, not political ideology. By threatening technology transfer to pharma, the new regulations are out of sync with the administration’s supposed desire to see more industry collaboration and to compete with China. Pharma’s leaders, as Usdin points out, are in the strongest position to get the attention of the White House and urge the administration to change course.

The time to act is now. The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period, open until 13 July. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized. I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then. The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.””

Another red alert for American science Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the pre...

This would be the end of science as we know it. Politically approved research only

https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-changes-in-ombs-proposed?

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

Scientist Paul Mischel is championing the importance of odd rings of DNA in tumors—and their promise as targets for cancer therapy.

Learn more on : https://scim.ag/4gjWL2d

AI Isn’t Killing Scientific Credibility – Scientists Are 🧠⚠️
A sobering new analysis in Nature reveals that over 110,000 scholarly papers from 2025 alone may contain completely fabricated, AI‑generated references – citations to studies that simply do not exist.

Key findings:

Fake citations are exploding – At three computer science conferences, hallucinated references jumped from 0.3% of papers (2024) to 2.6% (2025).

“Frankenstein citations” – Real author names + invented titles + existing journals + fake DOIs. Plausible looking, totally false.

Publishers are fighting back – Frontiers and IOP Publishing now use detection tools; one journal rejected 25% of submissions in January for fake references alone.

Root cause = author accountability – LLMs hallucinate by design. Skipping verification isn’t “saving time” – it’s polluting the scientific record.

Bottom line: No tool will fix a culture that doesn’t check its own work. Verify every citation against primary sources. Period.