WEEK OF DEC 2, 2024

What’s Ahead

Jay Bhattacharya speaks during an event in 2023. — Health economist Jay Bhattacharya speaking at an event in 2023.

Anthony Behar / Sipa USA via AP

Trump taps health economist to run NIH

President-elect Donald Trump announced last week that he intends to nominate physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and his work has focused on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. He gained national attention during the pandemic in 2020 for co-authoring The Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed protections for the most vulnerable populations but advised against restricting the activities of healthy individuals based on the theory that herd immunity against COVID-19 would be achieved rapidly. At the time of its publication, the declaration was welcomed by the Trump administration but criticized by public health leaders — including former NIH director Francis Collins — who argued its claims regarding herd immunity were dangerous and not grounded in science.

Bhattacharya has received dozens of grants from NIH during his career and has participated in various grant review panels for the agency. In 2018, he co-authored a paper suggesting that NIH research funding practices were becoming more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects. Bhattacharya’s stance on Republican proposals to reform the NIH and reduce the number of institutes it encompasses is unclear, though he has expressed a desire to revamp the agency. “I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time,” he told the Washington Post early this year.

NSF board to brainstorm NDEA 2.0

The National Science Board’s meeting this Wednesday and Thursday will feature three panels on the future of the U.S. science and technology enterprise. Members of the recently formed Vision for American S&T (VAST) task force will present policy ideas, followed by a panel discussing potential elements of a follow-on to the National Defense Education Act of 1958. A third panel will offer ideas for building partnerships across sectors of the research enterprise. NSB Chair Darío Gil has spoken previously about the board’s role in developing a proposal for a nationwide STEM talent strategy, and the VAST task force plans to present ideas for an NDEA 2.0 to the incoming Trump administration.

Among the other agenda items, eight new board members will be sworn in during the meeting, including sociologist Alondra Nelson, former interim director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The board will also take a vote pertaining to the scope of the competition for the next management contract for the U.S. Antarctic Program. The National Science Foundation and current Antarctic logistics contractor Leidos have come under scrutiny for their handling of sexual assault and harassment cases. Leidos’s current contract expires on March 31, 2025. In closed session, the board will receive the final recommendations from the NSB-NSF Commission on Merit Review and a report on the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope program. The NSF established an external panel earlier this year to help inform the agency’s decision on whether to support either of the two ELT projects currently in development: the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope. (Correction: This item previously stated incorrectly that the board was voting on the Antarctic management contract.)

Fermilab to discuss management transition

The U.S. High Energy Physics Advisory Panel will meet Friday to hear from leaders at Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois for the first time since the new management contract for the lab was awarded by the Department of Energy in October. The panel will receive a briefing from the leadership of FermiForward, which includes the Universities Research Association and the University of Chicago — both longtime operators of the lab — as well as two private firms that are joining the management team in 2025: Amentum and Longenecker & Associates. Fermilab Director Lia Merminga will also present, and DOE High Energy Physics head Regina Rameika will give the agency’s perspective on the lab. DOE solicited bids for new managers in January following a period where the lab received low performance grades.

The panel will also meet on Thursday to hear responses from DOE and the National Science Foundation to its international benchmarking report from 2023, which recommended improving procedures for large-scale international projects and bolstering the execution of small domestic projects. Among the other discussion topics for the two-day meeting are the European Strategy for Particle Physics, cooperative agreements between the U.S. and CERN, and a Committee of Visitors report on DOE’s HEP Facilities Division.

Solar scientists to pitch priorities for next decade

The National Academies will release its decadal survey for solar and space physics on Thursday, which includes a ranked research strategy to reach the highest priority science goals over the next decade. The strategy will cover ground-based and space-based projects, data and computing infrastructure, and potential partnerships. The report will also offer “decision rules” to accommodate different budget scenarios and make recommendations to address concerns about diversity and equity in the solar and space physics workforce. The survey’s sponsors are NASA and the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Air Force.

Also on our radar

The White House has requested nearly $100 billion in disaster response funding after Hurricanes Helene and Milton, including $733 million for NOAA to procure three “hurricane hunter” aircraft and $30 million for USGS to develop fire and landslide hazard maps, evaluate surface and groundwater contamination, and plan for wildfire recovery.
The Commerce Department awarded Intel nearly $8 billion for semiconductor fabrication facilities last week, on the heels of several other major awards earlier this month. Vivek Ramaswamy, who will lead the planned Department of Government Efficiency under the next Trump administration, described this CHIPS Act funding as “wasteful subsidies” and pledged to “review every one of these 11th-hour gambits.”
A new strategic plan for advancing STEM education and cultivating STEM talent was released last week by the White House.
The U.S. AI Safety Institute at NIST established an interagency task force for managing national security risks of AI. The initial group includes representatives of DOD, DOE, DHS, and NIH.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear cases that could further limit agencies’ legal authority post-Chevron by reviving the nondelegation doctrine, which holds that Congress cannot delegate its legislative power to agencies.