Mark Histed

@markhisted.org

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Lincoln liberal, 2nd inaugural enthusiast. Information processing in networks. Brains, models, lasers. Prev: media policy for democracypolicy.network. All views are my own. linktr.ee/markhisted neuro: 🧠 /🧪

EXCLUSIVE POLICY White House to Redirect Billions in Research Funds Toward Al, Away From Colleges The overhaul will reshape $200 billion in spending a year and favors individual scientists tooutpace China as a pretext using By Amrith Ramkumar July 21, 2026 at 6:00 pm ET Aa
equal justice under law
[Our plan for] "eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government, " using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors Chris Rufo, Manhattan Institute, 2023
These statements are laughable in retrospect. The leagues' supposed reverence for integrity has proven easily amenable to the greater cultural-and financial-tides, which shifted rapidly following the 2018 Supreme Court case Murphy v. dational Collegiate Athletic Association. In deciding Murphy, the court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which prohibited states from authorizing sports betting. The majority stated that the act violated the Tenth Amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine, which prevents the federal government from directly "commanding" state legislatures. "Sports betting was the substance of Murphy v.
Since the 1930s, liberalism is usually used without a qualifier in the United States to refer to modern liberalism, a variety of liberalism that accepts a government role to prevent market failures and promotes expansion of civil and political rights, with the common good considered as compatible with or superior to the absolute freedom of the individual. 5. This political philosophy was exemplified by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and later Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Other accomplishments include the Works Progress Administration and the Social Security Act in 1935, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This variety of liberalism is also known as modern liberalism to distinguish it from classical liberalism, from which it sprang out along with modern
Work/career plan If you plan to work in China after graduation, beckybao_in_china How to decide which universities is the right one ...
ISMA INSTITUTE for the STUDY of MODERN AUTHORITARIANISM INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF MODERN AUTHORITARIANISM Liberalism for the 21st Century July 16-17, 2026 The Watergate Hotel, Washington, D.C. Join leading scholars, policymakers, and advocates for two days of critical dialogue on the future of liberal democracy.
the Proposed Rule. None of the authorities cited in the Proposed Rule contains an express delegation of authority to OMB to issue these sweeping government-wide regulations on all federal funding programs.22| Moreover, the Proposed Rule is entirely silent as to the statutory authorities relied on by the ov 0 federal award-making agencies.23 The absence of any express delegation by Congress is especially glaring, as the Proposed Rule raises many "major questions" of great political and economic significance that require an express delegation by Congress. See Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. 229, 243(2026) (quoting West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697, 723-24 (2022)). "[U]nder our system of separation of powers, neither good intentions nor pressing policy problems can substitute for an agency's lack of statutory authority to act." Kaweah Delta Health Care Dist. v. Becerra, 123 F.4th 939, 944 (9th Cir. 2024). In asserting this power, OMB raises serious concerns that it arrogates for itself the powers the Constitution allocates to Congress. The Proposed Rule also raises separation of powers concerns by imposing conditions on congressionally-appropriated funds that run directly counter to express requirements and directives Congress imposed through the statutes governing the impacted federal funding programs. See, e.g., Child Trends, Inc. v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., 795 F. Supp. 3d 700, 727 (D. Md. 2025)
National Institutes of Health (NIH): Intramural Research Program (IRP) logo Chief, Unit on Neural Computation and Behavior National Institutes of Health (NIH): Intramural Research Program (IRP) · Full-time Jan 2016 - Present · 10 yrs 7 mos Washington DC-Baltimore Area · On-site University of Maryland logo Adjunct Professor University of Maryland · Part-time Jul 2020 - Present · 6 yrs 1 mo Democracy Policy Network logo News Dollars Director Democracy Policy Network · Part-time 2021 - 2024 · 3 yrs The Media and Democracy Project logo Co-Founder The Media and Democracy Project · Part-time 2020 - 2024 · 4 yrs University of Chicago logo Research Assistant Professor University of Chicago Sep 2014 - Jan 2016 · 1 yr 5 mos
[1] Aviles, Natalie and Histed, Mark “Presidentialist Governance is Incompatible with the American Science Superpower” SSRN, 2026. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6347458 [2] Aviles, Natalie and Histed, Mark. “How Congress can restore the independence of US science” Nature, 2026. PMID: 41803493. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00703-9 [3] Abbott, A “Documentary Follows Implosion of Billion-Euro Brain Project” Nature, 2020 December 1. [4] Bader, Farah, Clayton Bingham, Karen K. David, et al “The NIH BRAIN Initiative’s Impacts in Systems and Computational Neuroscience, 2014-2023” eLife, 2025 14 (April). https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.106137.1 [5] Enserink, Martin, and Kai Kupferschmidt “Updated: European Neuroscientists Revolt against the E.U.’s Human Brain Project” Science, July 11, 2024. https://www.science.org/content/article/updated-european-neuroscientists-revolt-against-eus-human-brain-project [6] Levin, Blair and Downes, Larry “The End of Independent Federal Agencies Will Change Your Business” Harvard Business Review, June 29, 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/06/the-end-of-independent-federal-agencies-will-change-your-business [7] Histed, Mark “The Unitary Executive Takes Over New Territory” The Atlantic, June 17, 2026 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/unitary-executive-scientific-research/687565/ [8] Marshall, Josh “Surveying the Criminal Conduct Terrain” Talking Points Memo, June 1, 2026 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/surveying-the-criminal-conduct-terrain
Barge
Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U.S. _ _(2020) Overview Opinions Materials the proceedings ot one man." Id., at 472. To justify and check that thority—unique in our constitutional structure-the Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government. Only the President (along with the Vice President) is elected by the entire Nation. And the President's political accountability is enhanced by the solitary nature of the Executive Branch, which provides "a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the
Arc of history
America is an idea Harris ahirt
The collapse of ad revenue for news outlets came as digital media impacted news advertising in multiple ways. First, local advertising, especially the classified advertising that was once highly profitable for local newspapers, has been largely replaced by sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. At the same time, the growth of platforms like Google and Facebook has disintermediated readers from publications, so that publications can no longer build engaged, loyal audiences that advertisers will pay a premium to reach directly. This disintermediation of ad sales has also been a major driver in the catastrophic decline in ad revenue for almost all news outlets in the United States. But it is not just the U.S's outsized
To see why, look no further than the pieces themselves. Once the posters actually get around to describing "our national legislature," they find little to like. Baumann concludes his otherwise staunchly pro-Congress piece by deceing its "myriad democratic shortfalls." Among other necessary reforms, he suggests "abandoning the Senate filibuster, "admitting new states," and "increasing the number of representatives in the House." Moyn, for his part, argues we must not only ditch the Senate, but also fold the entire administrative state into Congress, including "all of the adjudication currently relegated to executive auspices." Oh, and while we're at it, Baumann writes, we need a wholesale reform of campaign financing too. As Rahman forthrightly admits, "the Congress of today is hardly the Congress of an
Clown shoes pro-oligarchy pablum, supported by far-right billionaires — a Hoover fellow, brought in by Trump 1 to blame others for COVID, arranged doubt via billionaire-funded AIER, and now writes in the Bezos Post.
Abolishing the NIH would not create a funding vacuum. The private sector funds 78 percent of U.S. biomedical research and development. Venture capital has exploded. Investment focused on artificial intelligence in drug discovery alone surged nearly 36-fold between 2010 and 2024 - funding the overwhelming majority of innovative medical devices and building the AI revolution in biomedicine. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation and the Chan
Scott Atlas is the Robert Wesson senior fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at the Hoover Institution and was special adviser to President Donald Trump in fall 2020.
Clownshoes
Histed and Aviles working paper
Clown shoes pro-oligarchy pablum, supported by far-right billionaires — a Hoover fellow, brought in by Trump 1 to blame others for COVID, arranged doubt via billionaire-funded AIER, and now writes in the Bezos Post.
median looking guy under a Ben and Jerry’s sign, Harvard Square
There's simply no future for real democratic self-government in the United States with this corrupt Court in place. That seems like a vast statement. But it's accurate. What you have at the moment is a system somewhat — yes — on par with Iran in which you have the structure of democratic self- government but with a Guardian Council that assures that the bad people (i.e. non-Republicans) aren't actually allowed to exercise power. This is not how even a maximalist judicial review system is supposed to work, and Democrats must break the Court's corruption at the first possible moment. With some luck, that will come in January 2029.
Today's decision profoundly undermines this reliance and, as a result, undercuts one side of the balance that the political branches struck. Put simply, today the majority reshapes our Government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with responsibility for managing the Nation's energy supply, see 42 U.S. C. §7171(b)(1); the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which protects Americans against harms caused by dangerous goods, see 15 U.S. C. §2053(a); the Chemical Safety Board, tasked with investigating chemical disasters, see 42 U.S. C. §7412(r)(6)(B); the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, responsible for the regulation of nuclear power, see 42 U.S. C. 885841(a), (c), (e); and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), charged with ensuring the integrity of the civil service, see 5 U. S. C. §1202. The list of agencies entially modified by today's decision goes on. Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court's express ap-proval, that it was allowed to create a workable Govern-ment, including by granting certain agencies tasked with certain responsibilities some independence from Presidential control. In rejecting that project, after decades of prom- ising the po ical branches that structures like the FTC's were permissible, the Court creates an Executive Branch that Congress never dreamed of establishing and that it now has little hope of ever reining in. Cf. Learning Re-sources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U. S. 229, 244-245 (2026) (opin-
Crowd at center
Imprimis SIGN IN OCTOBER 2006 | VOLUME 35, ISSUE 10 Origins and Dangers of the 'Wall of Separation' Between Church and State Daniel L. Dreisbach Professor, American University DOWNLOAD PDF No metaphor in American letters has
News people hold signs that read 'protect TPS now' and 'keep families safe. keep TPS.' Politics Supreme court conservatives accused of advancing ‘white-supremacist agenda’ Lawmakers and advocates condemn ‘disastrous’ decisions that allow Trump officials to strip away migrant protections 2h ago Southern borderSupreme court lets Trump turn back asylum seekers at US-Mexico border ImmigrationSupreme court allows Trump administration to strip Haitians and Syrians of protected status Gun rightsSupreme court strikes down restrictive Hawaii gun law in major second amendment decision US politics liveSupreme court hands Trump administration big win with rulings on key immigration cases
An adequate flow of funds into new and competing RPGs is needed for peer review to function, for attracting young people into research careers, and for NIH to be responsive to new rescarch ideas. Accordingly, the model incorporated these concepts within its parameters: (i) The RPG success rate should not fall below 30%; (ii) funding should be maintained for competing RPGs at not less than 14% of the NIH budget; (ili) fluctuations in grant levels should be avoided.
As the Trump administration has reorganized U.S. science, it has justified the need for change by citing long-standing critiques. For example, critics of grant peer review, even before this administration, have noted that the practice can lead scientists to be conservative and avoid pursuing high-risk, blue-sky work —because getting a group of reviewers to agree on the value of a risky idea is hard. But I know from my own experience writing and reviewing grants—and a team including the former NIH director Harold Varmus noted as much more than a decade ago—that the factor that cuts most acutely against big ideas is low funding rates. When 30 percent of grant applications were funded, there was plenty of room for peer reviewers to have differing views, and for review panels to endorse some moonshot projects alongside safe projects. Now, because the success rate has fallen in some cases to 5 percent, near unanimity among reviewers is required, and only the projects that reviewers see as most certain of success will receive a green light. Shifting the science system to presidential control will do little to address this issue. What's more, big discoveries are less likely to come from projects chosen by political appointees, who are prone to picking flashy and well-marketed work instead of unusual-sounding but promising ideas that experienced scientists could identity. HE OMB'S PROPOSED RULE has already created outcry in the science
Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social • 4h If we are being conservative, and estimate that it takes a minimum of 8 hours to review a paper (it takes longer), and if we agree that 3 reviewers are typically required to review every submission, then reviewing this amount of manuscripts would take human experts >1 MILLION REVIEWER HOURS...
green pool. credit Jamie Dupree
olive vehicle blocking expressway exit in DC
National Mall Via Rock Creek Tr OVO 0.9 + Kennedy Center Virginia Via Roosevelt Brdg
THE / FORMING ARTS
KC plaza, looking east
I LOOK FORWARD TO AN AMERICA WHICH WILL REWARD ACHIEVEMENT IN THE ARTS AS WE REWARD ACHIEVEMENT IN BUSINESS OR STATECRAFT. I LOOK FORWARD TO AN AMERICA WHICH WILL STEADILY RAISE THE STANDARDS OF ARTISTIC ACCOMPLISHMENT AND WHICH WILL STEALLY ENLARGE CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL OF OUR CITIZENS. AND I LOOK FORWARD TO AN AMERICA WHICH COMMANDS RESPECT THROUGHOUT THE WORLD NOT ONLY FOR ITS STRENGTH BUT FOR ITS CIVILIZATION AS WELL. JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY THIS COUNTRY CANNOT AFFORD TO BE MATERIALLY RICH AND SPIRITUALLY POOR. TO FURTHER THE APPRECIATION OF CULTURE AMONG ALL THE PEOPLE. TO INCREASE RESPECT FOR THE CREATIVE INDIVIDUAL, TO WIDEN PARTICIPATION BY ALL THE PROCESSES AND FULFILLMENTS OF ART - THIS IS ONE OF THE FASCINATING CHALLENGES OF THESE DAYS. IOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY
I LOOK FORWARD TO AN AMERICA WHICH WILL NOT BE AFRAID OF GRACE AND BEAUTY. I AM CERTAIN THAT AFTER THE DUST OF CENTURIES HAS PASSED OVER OUR CITIES, WE, TOO, WILL BE REMEMBERED NOT FOR VICTORIES OR DEFEATS IN BATTLE OR IN POLITICS, BUT FOR OUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE HUMAN SPIRIT. JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY
West side with watergate in the background
From the footpath along the Potomac
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF CONDITIONS OF CONTINUED EMPLOYMENT FO EMPLOYEE MOVED TO SCHEDULE POLICY/CAREER This letter serves as notice that I received information concerning the requirements for continued employment as follows: Agency Name: Position Title: Pay Plan-Series-Grade: . I understand I will serve in an excepted service, Schedule Policy/Career position beginning June 3, 2026. I understand that movement into Schedule Policy/Career will result in me occupying an excepted service position. I understand that my service in this position will be at-will. I understand that my position does not confer appeal rights to the Merit System Protections Board (MSPB) concerning performance, discipline, or any other matter arising under chapters 23, 43, and 75 of title 5, United States Code. I understand that prohibitions on prohibited personnel practices will be enforced by the Office of General Counsel [or agency equivalent position] and not the Office of Special Counsel. I understand that the above
figure from Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
Figure 6. Many Cells Show Large Responses or No Response, While Neuropil Activation Is Homogeneous (A) Maps of activation as current is increased; ΔF/F0 was calculated on a per-pixel basis and shown for all pixels (color scale shown at right). Same experiment as shown in Figures 3B and 5. Stimulation train: 100 ms.
Performative public lying is a feature of authoritarian movements
NEW ORLEANS — A senior adviser to the leader of the National Institutes of Health opened his speech to a national gathering of diabetes researchers with a full-throated endorsement of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Then, during the fireside chat that followed, he withstood sustained cheers for criticism of deep funding cuts to the nation's biomedical research enterprise that he was asked to explain. "I could have written the MAHA agenda, Richard Woychik, who works closely with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, said Friday, recalling when he first learned last October of the policy embraced by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
With Hitler's rise to power, the persecution of Jewish faculty and students became more formalized. On April 7, 1933, the Nazi regime proclaimed the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service," which led to the forced retirement and dismissal of more than 1,300 Jewish, "non-Aryan," and politically suspect academics by the end of the year. NATIONALBIDUICTHEK Zeitschriitensaai. Reídsgefesblatt Teil 1 1933 Qußgegeben ju Berlin, den T. Mpril 1933 İnhalt: Gejeb jur Mieberberßellung beg Berufobeamtentume. Bom 7. Ppril 1933. 175 D0r. 34 G.175 Bejeb zur 2Bieberherftellung bea Berufabeamtentuma. Bom 7. Pipril 1933. Die ReidBregierung hat baB folgenbe Gejet be- idyloffen, daß biermit berfündet toird: § 1 DeB jetoeiligen Brunbgehalte ber bon ifnen zulebt befleibeten Stelle bewilligt werden; cine Radyber• fiderung nad Dłaßgabe ber reidy®gefeblidjen Gozial-berfiderung findet nidjt ftatt. (4) Die Borjdriften ber 2lbj. 2 und 3 finden auj Derjonen der im Clbj. 1 begeidyneten Plrt, Die
§ 6. To simplify administration, civil servants can be retired even if they are not yet unfit for service. If civil servants are retired for this reason, their places may not be filled again. §7. 1. Dismissal from office, transfer to another office, and retirement will be ordered by the highest Reich or federal state agency, which will render a decision that is final and not subject to appeal.
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 7, 1933) The Reich government has enacted the following law, which is hereby promulgated: § 1. 1. For the restoration of a national professional civil service and for the simplification of administration, civil servants may be discharged from office in accordance vch the following regulations, even when there are no grounds for such action under existing law.
Positions of “Principal Deputy Director” under position description number 00551682; Positions of “Deputy Director for Intramural Research” under position description number 00235547; 156 Positions of “Associate Director for Science Policy” under position description number 00545751; Positions of “Supervisory Public Health Analyst” under position description number 00450091; Positions of branch chief or division director that are responsible for (1) influencing policy-making and budgetary decisions over a portfolio of not less than in $20 million in biomedical research grants, cooperative agreements, and/or related funding mechanisms; and (2) formulating and implementing program objectives, establishing funding priorities, and exercising discretion in the allocation of federal resources to advance Institute- and National Institutes of Health-wide strategic goals.
As they look ahead to 2029 and beyond, Democrats need that kind of vision. They need, in particular, a commitment to a constitutional order centered on the power and prerogatives of Congress. And they need to begin to work through the details of what this will mean in policy and in law. It is this work that will shape how Democrats approach the major concerns of the post-Trump moment: the state of the federal bureaucracy, the scope of executive power and the problem of judicial supremacy over the political system. It is ambitious, yes. But so was Project 2025.
Synapses that change as animals learn new things - YFP-H and other Thy1 lines
Metascience!
ARTICLE | EDITOR'S COMMENTARY Pharma CEO silence is complicity in the destruction of U.S. science Why leaders of the U.S.’s biggest drug companies should use their influence to stop a ruinous proposal
Legal Information Institute # Q Menu In the case of any proposal for the National Institutes of Health to conduct or support research, the Secretary may not approve or fund any proposal that is subject to technical and scientific peer review under section 289a of this title unless the proposal has undergone such review in accordance with such section and has been recommended for approval by a majority of the members of the entity conducting such review, and unless a majority of the voting members of the appropriate advisory council under section 284a of this title, or as applicable, of the advisory council under section
Ideology to attack government What do you see as the Republican [donor] motivation? To slash government. They hate the government. They want to make it not work because then they can justify further cuts. They're dogmatic. They're driven by an Ayn Rand mentality that the government is, per se, evil and anything you do to cripple it, cut it, downsize it, is, per se, the moral and correct thing to do. They don't actually care about economic growth... - Bruce Bartlett, former senior Reagan aide (Not everyone in the party, but too many)
If there’s to be money doled out, it seems, they want to be the ones deciding exactly where it goes. This has been clear for many months now, with the administration’s orders that political appointees be given ever more power to overrule any granting committee decisions. For the people who just hate science and hate professors and hate people who seem to more than they do, this provides a convenient way to strangle a lot of it right at the start. For the ones who are more concerned about lining their pockets and those of their friends and supplicants, it gives an obvious mechanism to route the cash to the preferred destinations. And just as with the dang-furriners rules mentioned above, it gives the nativist yahoos something to crow about as well. The whole thing is incompatible with US science as the world has come to know it, and for some of these people, that's by design.
Case 8:26-cv-02110-PX Document 1 Filed 05/28/26 Page 3 of 16 Then, in late December 2025, Dr. Lane was abruptly fired. He was not given any reason for his termination, nor was he offered the opportunity to respond. Instead, he was informed of his termination in a three-sentence letter from Secretary Kennedy, who claimed to be acting "Ip]ursuant to the U.S. Constitution, Article II, § 2, cl. 2." Di: Lane's termination has deprived the world of his life-saving work and research. 8. The termination was also plainly unlawful. It violated Dr. Lane's statutory and
Trap
RNG: Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale Enrico Carlesso Luiza Popa Giacomo Bernardi Ratul Mahajan* Chinchu Merine Joseph Randy Ram C. Seshadri? Saurabh Kumar Steven Robinson Pavan Manikonda Elizabeth Tennent ABSTRACT We design and deploy in production the first flat datacenter networks. Our design, called RNG, is based on quasi-random graphs. While the cost and fault-tolerance benefits of such topologies have been long known, their practical realization has been hampered by a lack of scalable routing and cabling approaches. RNG has a new distributed routing protocol that exploits the properties of random graphs to find a large number of edge disjoint paths between pairs of endpoints. It uses a novel passive optical device that internally shuffles cables, which makes its cabling complexity similar to that of fat trees. We show that RNG matches or exceeds the performance of fat trees for a range of traffic patterns, despite being up to 45% cheaper. RNG is now the default datacenter network for most workloads at Amazon. 1 INTRODUCTION The simplicity of fat tree topologies has made them the workhorse of datacenter networks. But they offer a stark trade-off between cost and performance. Operators either build non-blocking fabrics in which any endpoint can trans-mit/receive at its full capacity; or they build oversubscribed fabrics that congest when a small, unfavorable set of end- Amazon Web Services hardware such as optical switches, steerable wireles: nas, and free-space optical devices to dynamically cha pacity between endpoints. Such hardware is not (yet) at scale. Most designs also use a centralized contro to infer fabric-wide demand and configure the ha Such control planes are difficult to realize at scale for latency-sensitive workloads such as Web services. A promising alternative that provides capacity fun is a flat topology with commodity routers connecte expander graph [25, 26, 37, 45, 49]. In addition to thei cost, such topologies are fault tolerant because th…