Executive Branch News
Administration Expands Ban on “Promotion” of Structural Racism/Sexism to Contractors, Grantees
As part of the Administration’s ongoing effort to crack down on perceived “political correctness” in government, President Trump issued an executive order on September 22 to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.” This order expands on a recent memorandum from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that required federal agencies to cease funding for training that addresses critical race theory and white privilege (see previous coverage). The executive order applies this prohibition to federal contractors and grant recipients. In addition, it expands the original OMB memo beyond employee training to require that federal…
ICE Proposes Major New Restrictions to International Student Visas
On September 25, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released a proposed rule fixing the initial visa term for all international students, exchange visitors, and foreign media representatives to four years, among other restrictions. Furthermore, the proposal would restrict the initial visa term to two years for individuals born in countries designated as state-sponsors of terrorism and citizens of countries with student and exchange visitor overstay rates over 10 percent. Applications to extend the duration of the visa would be possible “if the additional time needed is due to a compelling academic reason, documented medical illness…
With Days Left, Census Deadline Still in Flux
A federal judge issued an order that would prohibit the Census Bureau with ending its field enumerations efforts on September 30, as it had announced (see COSSA’s previous coverage). The preliminary injunction, issued on September 24 as part of a lawsuit brought by a group of civil rights organizations, would require the 2020 Census to continue its counting operations into October as it had originally planned. The Department of Commerce filed an appeal to this injunction and separately announced a “target date” of October 5 for ending self-response and field enumeration activities. It is unclear how this new end date…
CIA Establishes First-Ever Federal Laboratory
On September 21, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced the establishment of CIA Labs, a new research and development office focused on science and technology issues affecting national intelligence, marking the establishment of the CIA’s first ever federal laboratory. Some of the stated priorities of the laboratory include: advanced materials and manufacturing; artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics; bioscience and biotechnology; distributed ledger/blockchain-enabled technologies; virtual and augmented reality; high performance and quantum computing; future wireless and telecommunications technologies; and robotic, autonomous, and human interface systems. While it appears CIA Labs will be primarily performing in-house research, the CIA’s announcement…
COSSA Endorses Bipartisan Bill to Extend Census Deadline
COSSA joined over 200 organizations in endorsing a new bipartisan bill that would extend the statutory deadlines for the 2020 Census and require the Census Bureau to continue its enumeration operation through October 31. As previously reported, the Department of Commerce announced plans to end counting activities for the 2020 Census a month ahead of its originally planned schedule, leading to concern that the resulting data will be inaccurate. The 2020 Census Deadline Extensions Act, introduced by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-HI), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Dan Sullivan (R-AK) would require the 2020 Census to stick to its originally planned schedule…
White House Directs Federal Agencies to Defund Race-Related Trainings for Federal Employees
On September 4, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memorandum calling for federal agencies to cease funding training sessions for federal employees addressing critical race theory and white privilege. The memo alleges that “executive branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” citing unnamed press reports as evidence that “employees across the executive branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism.’” The…
USDA Names New ERS Administrator
Dr. Spiro Stefanou has been appointed to lead the Economic Research Service (ERS), one of the two principal statistics agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Stefanou is an agricultural economist who previously served as a professor of economics at the University of Florida and at Penn State University. Stefanou will be taking the helm of an agency that has had a rocky several years, after the Administration’s controversial decision to move the agency to Kansas City led to significant attrition and loss of expertise at the agency. Back to this issue’s table of contents.
National Academies Releases Consensus Study on Assessing Morbidity and Mortality After Disasters
The National Academies has published a new consensus study report: A Framework for Assessing Mortality and Morbidity after Large-Scale Disasters. The Congressionally-mandated study was sponsored by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and was intended to identify ways to better understand the scope of death and injury caused by large-scale disasters (both natural and human-caused). Among the report’s recommendations are adopting a uniform framework across federal agencies for data collection and adopting methods that distinguish direct and indirect deaths resulting from disasters. While the study commenced prior to the pandemic, COVID-19 provided a case study illustrating the needs described in the…
White House Outlines FY 2022 R&D Budget Priorities
On August 14, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum laying out the Trump Administration’s research and development budget (R&D) priorities for fiscal year (FY) 2022. The memo cites five key White House priorities and four “high-priority crosscutting actions” for U.S. federal agencies to consider as they develop their FY 2022 budget submissions. While the FY 2022 memo shares similar priorities to R&D memos from previous fiscal years, a notable difference is the inclusion of public health security and innovation as a priority in light of the…
Stakeholders Rally to Salvage 2020 Census
With less than a month remaining before the Census Bureau plans to end all of its counting efforts for the 2020 Census, advocates are actively working to force the Bureau to take more time to ensure an accurate count. As previously reported, the Census Bureau announced in August that it would shorten its counting efforts by a full month, moving up its deadline from October 31 to September 30. According to the Bureau, the shortened timeframe is needed to in order to produce statutorily mandated apportionment counts by the end of the year. The House’s most recent coronavirus relief bill…
NIMH Requesting Comments on Improving Mental Health Disparities
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is requesting stakeholder comments to inform potential research seeking to improve mental health outcomes among minority and health disparity populations. The request specifically seeks input on how certain social determinants can affect mental health outcomes, how racial discrimination may affect mental health outcomes, potentially understudied social or behavioral determinants of mental health, ideas or innovations to reduce mental health disparities, promising interventions to treat mental health disparities, tools to properly measure mental health outcomes, and ideas on preventing racial discrimination at the individual, family, or community…
Applications Open for FY 2020 Title VI International Research and Studies Program
The International and Foreign Language Education Office (IFLE) within the U.S. Department of Education is accepting applications for the International Research and Studies (IRS) program for fiscal year (FY) 2020. The IRS program provides competitive grants to institutions and individuals to conduct research on improving education in foreign language and other international fields. Each year, the IRS program awards up to five additional points to applications that meet one of several competitive preference priorities. The priorities for FY 2020 are: Research on more effective methods of providing instruction and achieving competency in modern foreign languages, area studies, or other international…
Census Announces Early End to 2020 Operations, Jeopardizing Accuracy of the Count
Census Bureau Director Stephen Dillingham announced that the Census Bureau will cut short its counting operations for the 2020 Census by a full month in order to produce apportionment counts by its legally mandated deadline of December 31, 2020. According to the announcement, the Census Bureau will end field data and self-response collection on September 30, rather than October 31 as previously planned. This change comes months after the Census Bureau itself asked Congress to delay the deadline for producing apportionment counts in order to allow more time to recover from the delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the…
NIDA Seeking Comments on 2021-2025 Strategic Plan
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking stakeholder feedback on the draft version of its upcoming 2021-2025 Strategic Plan. The strategic plan is intended to guide the agency’s research priorities for the next five years by outlining cross-cutting research topics and approaches. NIDA’s draft strategic plan highlights several research topics that are relevant to the social and behavioral science community, including: Identifying and developing approaches to reduce stigma, Identifying and developing approaches to reduce health disparities, Understanding differences based on sex and gender, and Understanding interactions between substance use, HIV, and…
Research Applications Increase in Wake of COVID-19 Shutdowns, NIH Finds
A recent blog post from Mike Lauer, Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), highlights how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected extramural research applications at NIH and how application rates compare to previous years. According to data collected by NIH, the number of R01-equivalent applications received by NIH between May 1 and June 5 of 2020 was 10 percent higher than the same period in 2019. The data also reflects more than a 10 percent increase of applications across all research project grants between 2020 and 2019. In addition to the spike in applications…
HHS Bypasses CDC in COVID-19 Data Collection, Sparking Concerns
On July 10, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released new guidance that instructed hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in reporting COVID-19 data and instead send the information directly to the Department through a relatively new system called HHS Protect. The change has raised concerns among many public health and science stakeholder groups that it could signal an effort to sideline the CDC in responding to the pandemic and to limit the data available to the public. Prior to the change, hospitals submitted COVID-19 information to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network…
NIH Releases Agency-Wide Strategic Plan for COVID-19 Research
On July 13, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released an agency-wide strategic plan on how NIH intends to direct research in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The plan is intended to provide a framework of new research programs and repurposing of existing programs that would assist in mobilizing the research community in developing treatments, prevention methods, and vaccines. The strategic plan cites five overarching priorities for NIH in responding to COVID-19: Improve fundamental knowledge of COVID-19 disease progression, outcomes, and recovery. Advance research to improve detection by developing and validating new assays and retooling existing diagnostic platforms. Support research…
NIMHD Funding Research on Digital Interventions to COVID-19
The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) within the National Institutes of Health has released a funding opportunity seeking research applications on digital healthcare practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The funding announcement cites the primary focus of the research to be the role of digital health interventions like telehealth, mobile health, health information technology, and wearable devices in addressing health disparities that may be caused or exacerbated by the pandemic. Applications will be accepted through August 20, 2020. More information is available on the NIH website. Back to this issue’s table of contents.
Federal Research Agencies Release Guidance on OMB’s Administrative Flexibility Changes
In response to a June 18 memo (M 20-26) issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) extending certain administrative flexibilities to federal grant recipients as relief for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, federal research agencies have released guidance statements clarifying the memo’s implications for recipients of research grants. On June 25, both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) released nearly identical sets of guidance in response to the OMB memo explaining how the changes to the flexibilities will specifically affect recipients of their grants. The flexibilities include an allowance to continue…
Census Releases Updated Demonstration Data Products
The Census Bureau has released a new set of demonstration data products that show how its new disclosure avoidance strategy (DAS) will impact the quality of its 2020 Census data products (see previous coverage). The Census Bureau is releasing a set of benchmark metrics to track the impact of the ongoing development and improvements to its privacy-protecting algorithm on data accuracy. These metrics will be updated every six weeks so data users can track the ongoing improvements Bureau staff are making to the algorithm. In addition, the Census Bureau has released a set of privacy-protected microdata files (PPMF) to allow…