work hard or die tryin' girl

Obsessed with scully's apartment♡

Winter in movies:

This tumblr sexyman is your son!

I will never scare you on purpose, but right now, it’s okay if you’re a bit scared, cause there’s a call to action and it’s all hands on deck.

Russell Vought, one of the many authors of Project 2025 working in the Trump Administration, has proposed a new rule:

“Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance”

At this point, we all know that “regulation” is a dog whistle.

If this proposal goes into effect, the OMB can approve and cancel any grant for any reason.

Currently, and even more so in the before times, grant applications were peer reviewed. Experts in that field made the final decisions.

With this rule, that will no longer be the case.

Political appointees will be the ones making those calls. People who only care about pleasing Trump and have no experience in the given field at all.

To make matters worse, projects with approved grants cannot work with our adversaries or countries that work with our adversaries.

Science is collaborative, it has to be. There is no project in science or most other fields that can fit that criterion. So basically this would shut us off from the scientific world.

Secondly, and of course the most obvious — it targets grants that the administration considers “woke.” Yes, that is actually the language in the proposal:

Federal awards were often used during those years to promote a “woke” policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public.

What do they consider “woke”?

Well, based on what they’ve already shut down: research on Antisemitism and Islamophobia; the impact of data centers on populations; anything having to do with queer existence or the climate crisis; Black maternal health outcomes and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

But there is some good news.

The public comment period is happening right now.

Stand Up For Science, an incredible organization you should get involved with, if you aren’t already, has a portal for public comment. Their goal is 10k comments before the OMB closes them on July 13.

It’s unclear whether the OMB will be logging public comments like they should, so SUFS will be tracking all comments made through their portal and will sue if they don’t see them officially logged by OMB. Meaning, only use their portal, don’t try to submit a comment on the OMB’s site.

Also, comments with the same wording will count collectively as one comment so this is not a moment to copy and paste. Luckily, SUFS also has guidance for how to write a good comment which you can also find in the portal. The main guidance is to just tell a personal story — why do you care?

Finally, if you run an organization, comment as the organization, because your comment will be weighted more heavily than an individual’s. But regardless of if you are commenting for yourself or an organization, just comment.

This proposal is all bad. There isn’t one single redeeming quality. But we have the power to bring a lot of sunlight onto this proposal, and the Trump Administration doesn’t like sunlight and usually backs off when there’s too much.

This is one of the times we will be able to see the impact of our voices, and is a reminder that they are our superpower.