Dr. Emily Dolson

@emilydolson.bsky.social

3055 Followers 1540 Following

Assistant Professor at Michigan State University studying eco-evolutionary dynamics in artificial life, cancer, and evolutionary computation. she/her 🏳️‍🌈 @emilydolson@ecoevo.social on Mastodon

Thank you for contacting me about your support for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

Like you, I believe that consumers should be protected against bad actors. That’s why, beyond the CFPB, there are multiple agencies working to do just that, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and various state-level regulators. These agencies enforce laws against fraud, deceptive practices, and unfair financial activities to ensure that people are not left on their own when it comes to financial protections.

Unfortunately, in recent years, the CFPB has become an increasingly politicized arm of the federal bureaucracy that has been leveraged against certain industries and individuals. While the future of the CFPB is uncertain, the truth is that our country has strong institutions and laws in place to protect consumers and hold financial entities accountable. My main focus is on making sure that government regulations are effective, reasonable, and don’t cause unintended consequences that hurt small businesses, community banks, or working Michiganders like you.

In the meantime, my top priority as your advocate in Congress is to listen to you and lead on solutions you can count on, so please stay in touch. For regular updates on my work in Washington, D.C., I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter by clicking here.

Two resolutions to stop the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) overreach and stand up for everyday Americans. These measures by protecting access to overdraft programs, encouraging fintech innovation, preserving banking options, and stopping new costs from hitting consumers.

Hi, my name is Emily Dolson, and I'm a constituent from East Lansing,
zip code 48823. I am calling to make representative Barret aware of
an announcment that the Department of Energy just made, in which
they are planning to immediately cut their indirect cost rate to 15%.
This will hurt our district, because the Department of Energy is MSU's
largest source of federal research funding. By my calculations, these
cuts would represent a sudden and unexpected loss of approximately $42
million to our district. This money is critical to supporting our local
economy. Without it, people will lose their jobs and MSU will not be able
to maintain the facilities necessary to conduct world class research.

For perspective, I am a professor at MSU with a small Department of Energy grant
for $200k. With MSU's current negotatiated indirect rate of 57%, that means
about $133k goes directly to my lab, where it provides a job for a PhD student
for two years, provides a job for me for two summers, and covers the costs
of sharing our research with the broader scientific community. The remaining
$66k goes to support building maintenance, utilities, administrative support
for all of the grant compliance and budgeting paperwork, high performance
computing resources and more. This is an incredibly efficient arrangement. If I
were forced to do research as a business rather than through a university,
the cost of office space and high performance computing alone would cost more
than three times that amount. Cutting these funds means less innovation in
our district, period.

Please introduce legislation to stop these cuts and support science.

DOE’s action, announced at 5 pm on Friday (see policy flash below), is expected to elicit similar criticism from research advocates. “This 15% cap is ill informed,” says Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the top Democrat on the science committee for the U.S. House of Representatives. “It will kneecap research universities' ability to conduct critical research on behalf of the federal government. This Administration seems to be assuming that ‘indirect’ means ‘unnecessary’ – that’s just not true.”

DOE’s directive does contain one new—and puzzling—element. It declares that it will “terminate all grant awards to [academic institutions] that do not conform with this updated policy,” which is effective immediately. “Recipients subject to termination will receive separate notice and guidance,” it adds.

Science lobbyists say they are baffled by that language. DOE awards the indirect costs along with the research grant, so institutions have no control over how much they receive—and therefore no power to violate the new policy, noted one senior administrator, who requested anonymity because they hadn’t had time to fully analyze the policy.

Angry goose meme with goose asking "Safe from what?" (the implication being that the only threat to Greenland is the US)

2 signs saying "Public data = Public Good" and "Every $1 the NIH spends= $2.48 to the economy"

An email with the subject line: Re: Preliminary Injunction Order- Washington v. Trump

Text of the email:

On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, a Federal Court issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting certain actions related to Executive Orders 14187 and 14168, which is effective immediately. You can review the court’s order and the Executive Orders at https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Washington-v-Trump-NoticeOfCourtOrder-3-5-2025.pdf.

The Order prevents NSF employees from withholding federal funding because a health care entity or health professional provides gender-affirming care.

The Court’s Order also prevents NSF from implementing the requirements contained in Sections 3(e) and 3(g) of Executive Order 14,168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

Pursuant to the Court’s directive this notice is being provided “to all Defendants, and agencies and their employees, contractors and grantees.”

Sethuraman Panchanathan

Director

A graph showing that the vast majority of Americans (including 79% of Republicans!) say that Trump should abide by court rulings

Hi, My name is Emily Dolson and I'm a constituent from East Lansing.

If they answer: Funding for scientific research is really important to our district's economy and the executive branch of the government has threatened it in a myriad of ways at this point. Some of them, like the attempts to unilaterally reduce indirect costs or refuse to disburse funds obligated by federal contracts, have been temporarily stopped. Others, like the decimation of the workforce needed to award and administer these grants, the halting of grant review, and the censorship of what words government scientists are allow to use in papers is ongoing.

I've previously called to make Representative Barrett aware of these issues. What I want to know now is: does he have a plan to support the continuation of scientific research in our district?

If they don't answer: I have some serious concerns about the cybersecurity of nation's most central infrastructure. Elon Musk and his team are accessing very sensitive data and making rapid modifications to critical code and infrastructure. As a computer scientist, it is clear to me that they are not following the good software development practices necessary for operating on such important systems. They seem to not understand the systems they are working with (see, for example, Elon Musks' tweets that make it clear he doesn't understand how dates work in the COBOL programming language). Worse, I'm worried they are using sloppy generative AI tools that further exacerbate the risk of making mistakes and the danger of our data being compromised. I am legitimately scared for all of us. I would like to urge representative Barrett to take legislative action to add guardrails to this situation ASAP

Telly monster from Sesame Street

Hi, my name is Emily Dolson, and I'm a constituent from East Lansing. I am calling to make representative Barret aware that the NIH has announced it will cut indirect rates on grants to 15% starting Monday. For context, MSU currently uses an indirect rate of 57% and that money enables them to maintain the buildings and facilities that make scientific research possible. This is a gigantic cut with no notice - MSU is suddenly not going to have tens of millions of dollars that it was promised. It's hard to even comprehend the amount of harm this will do to the MSU community and the local economy. I would like to remind Representative Barrett that MSU students, faculty, and staff represent around 8% of his constituents. He was elected to represent us. I urge him to do so! Representative Barrett may not have the power to set the NIH's indirect rate, but it is absolutely in his power to introduce legislation to stop this power grab by the executive branch of the government. I'm sure his democratic colleagues would be happy to support it.

Hi, my name is Emily Dolson and I'm a contituent from East Lasning.
I am calling to express my concern about the deletion of
multiple very useful, taxpayer-funded datasets from the CDC website.
As a scientist, this sudden loss of information makes it harder to
do research that will help us all be healthier. As a citizen, I am upset because these datasets are useful for making informed decisions.
I urge representative Barret to consider introducing legislation
to bring back these datasets. I don't understand why this should be
controversial.

Hi, my name is Emily Dolson, and I'm a constitutent calling from East Lansing
to express my concern about the federal government's actions in pausing the distribution
of federal grants

As I hope Representative Barret is aware, the federal government has paused distributing
all grants.
We should all be able to agree that one of the core things that makes our country
great is the checks and balances that ensure everyone has a voice in our government.
Under that system, congress, not the president, decides how to spend our federal funds.
A unilateral action by the executive branch like this to impound our tax dollars
is almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional, and it's hurting people in our
district. I employ 6 people doing federally funded research and I'm worried I'm not
going to be able to keep paying them if this continues.
It's congress's responsibility to assert its rights here, and I urge Representative
Barret to make doing so a top priority.

Gif from Arrested Development scene where Micheal opens a bag labelled "Dead dove, do not open", finds a dead dove, and then says "I don't know what I expected."

A note saying:

Hi, my name is Emily Dolson, and I'm a constituent from East Lansing calling to make Representative Barret aware of concerns I have about what's currently happening at the NIH. As an NIH-supported researcher, this issue directly affects me and the people I employ.

Are you familiar with the current situation? Due to the actions of the federal government, the NIH currently isn't allowed to do it's daily business or interact with the public. This is creating a lot of chaos, and even if it gets fixed soon it's already going to hurt our ability to research (because a lot of medical research requires consistent, and this is going to introduce delays).

Since our district is home to MSU, NIH funding matters for our local economy. Last year alone, our district received $113 million dollars from the NIH. I personally am currently working on an application for a grant that would bring 1 million dollars to our district, employ three people for five years, and help develop new techniques for fighting cancer. However, it's due in under two weeks and right now it's not even clear if I can ask my program officer questions. Assuming I'm able to get it submitted, I now have no idea when I'll hear back about whether it is funded. This is a hard climate to do research in.

I recognize that there isn't currently a bill in congress for Representative Barret to vote for to fix this, and the chaotic nature of the situation makes it hard for him to introduce one to fix it, but I wanted to ask for two things: 1) that he try to exert pressure on his colleagues to fix this situation, and 2) that he consider in the future introducing legislation to prevent the NIH from being used as a political pawn in the way it currently is, because it really hurts our district.

Two frames from the end of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. In the first, Aragorn says "I swore to protect you". In the second, Frodo asks "Can you protect me from yourself?"

A two panel figure showing the distribution of proportions of CGP controllers. Both panels show distributions for two different conditions: 1) 100% of the tasks were the one the CGP controller is best at, and 2) 75% of the tasks were the one the CGP controller is best at. One panel shows this information for swarms that have access to Markov Brains and CGP representations. The other shows it for swarms that have access to RNN and CGP representations. In all cases, the swarm pretty consistently evolved to have the optimal number of each controller.

A pair of graphs showing the performance of RNN, CGP, and Markov brains, as well as swarms with access to two different brain types. For one-brain swarms, CGP and Markov brains outperform RNNs. For two-type brains, Markov/CGP perform best, but swarms with two different CGP brains are close behind. Swarms with an RNN and a CGP also do okay. Everything else does fairly badly.

A jack-o-lantern showing the Michigan "I Voted" sticker featuring a werewolf