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• Post #4222253

  I was pleasantly surprised to see Congressional push-back on DOGE randomly cancelling NASS & ERS surveys in the FY27 USDA appropriations bill related to the AgCensus. USDA is required to notify Congress 30 days prior to the termination of any datasets or reports (it would have been better if Congress had required USDA to notify the public with an FRN). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr8646rh/pdf/BILLS-119hr8646rh.pdf

• Post #4222252

  Federal statistical agencies are required to do two things at once. They must protect confidential information, and they must publish useful public data. A new policy by Commerce threatens to take away a key tool those agencies use to do both. More by Meghan Maury, Beth Jarosz, and myself for dataindex.us here: https://dataindex.us/newsletter/article/5ed3272e-9a35-4f38-881b-c62ad45d6a56

• Post #4222251

  Last month U.S. Census Bureau released a really "cool" new data product on local air conditioning estimates. I played around with the data in this short blog post: https://www.chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/2026/06/12/LACE-and-Age.html

• Post #4222250

  Next week, join Merrilee Proffitt , James Jacobs, and myself in a conversation with Chris Freeland and David Hansen about the Fight for the Public Record on the Internet Archive podcast: https://blog.archive.org/event/the-fight-for-the-public-record/

• Post #4222249

  Today may be Father's Day (cheers to all those that celebrate), but it's also the 2026 start of summer! Thanks to free federal data provided by the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) , we know that summer officially started at 4:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time. Check it out: https://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/Earth_Seasons

• Post #4222248

  Today may be Father's Day (cheers to all those that celebrate), but it's also the 2026 start of summer! Thanks to free federal data provided by the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) , we know that summer officially started at 4:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time. Check it out: https://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/Earth_Seasons

• Post #4222247

  Thanks to Terry Gerton for launching the monthly Data Dish with Denice Ross and I on the Federal Drive Podcast today! As a gerontologist and data advocate, it was really rewarding to be able to discuss how the Federal Data Field Guide can be used to reveal insights relevant to Alzheimer's and Brain Health Month: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/big-data/2026/06/better-decisions-depend-on-data-but-only-if-people-can-actually-use-it/

• Post #4222246

  I reviewed the relaunch of the Standard Application Process portal by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics at the National Science Foundation. https://www.chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/2026/06/27/A-Review-of-the-Standard-Application-Process.html

• Post #4222245

  Writing your Genesis Project grant and confused about the data sharing requirements? Here is excellent guidance on how to write an effective Data Management and Sharing Plan from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that includes the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) "Research Data Framework (RDaF) 2.0" and the NSTC Guidance titled "Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research" as helpful resources: https://www.energy.gov/datamanagement...

• Post #4222244

  This was on my morning reading list today: an excellent report from USDA 's Economic Research Service (one of OMB's recognized statistical agencies) all about the complexity of access to WIC vendors and high-speed internet: https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/29314/err-365.pdf?v=78061 (sidebar - I'm super proud of Anna Shetler for her contributions to this report)

• Post #4222243

  🍝 🤠 I finally got around to submitting personal comments in response to OMB's proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance. https://doi.org/10.59350/gpk1d-kvn12

• Post #4222242

  Here's the 13-year-history of 2 CFR 200 public comments. Y'all did great. https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034

• Post #4222241

  As an elected fellow of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), I feel strongly that we need to sustain a robust Federal data ecosystem that supports essential information for aging Americans. In this article, Denice Ross and I applied the federaldatafieldguide.us to help reveal how the diversity of Federal data on Alzheimer's can be used by caregivers, policymakers, researchers, and others: https://fas.org/publication/federal-data-supporting-alzheimers-patients/

• Post #4222240

  It's (probably) Not 500,000 Comments on OMB's Proposed Regulation and here's an explanation of why: https://www.chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/2026/07/17/The-Comment-Count-is-Too-Damn-High.html

• Post #4222239

  Excellent analysis about the Office of Management and Budget 's proposed grants regulation by David Hansen from the Authors Alliance https://www.authorsalliance.org/2026/07/28/what-happens-when-omb-is-sued-over-its-new-proposed-grant-rules/

• Post #3199547

  Before today I had never read an article in Men's Health. Here, Kevin Hall lays bare his experience with scientific integrity violations at the hands of NIH and HHS leadership censoring his research: https://www.menshealth.com/health/a71178209/kevin-hall-nutrition-scientist-interview/

• Post #3199545

  Here's the study that the Trump Administration tried to suppress because it presents data on the safety of vaccines, freely available for everyone to read as a preprint on medRxiv: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.03.25319975v1.full

• Post #3199544

  "Firing the Board was essentially a middle finger to Congressional intent..." - Rep. Lofgren et al. in this scathing rebuke of the Trump Administration's illegal firing of the National Science Board: https://democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2026-05-12%20Letter%20to%20President%20Trump%20on%20NSB%20Firings.pdf

• Post #3199543

  "Not only are data about people, but I think the entire data infrastructure relies on people." More from that one time when Molly O Hardy at Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab interviewed me here: https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2026/05/14/libraries-and-public-access-to-federal-data/

• Post #3199542

  Denice Ross and I spoke with Jory Heckman about demystifying Federal data with the federaldatafieldguide.us: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/big-data/2026/05/federal-data-guide-aims-to-demystify-patchwork-of-laws-governing-data-sharing/

• Post #3199541

  So what do we do when we find out that (pretty much) all of the mouse model studies are wrong? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01534-4

• Post #3199540

  Congressional Research Service is hitting it out of the park on Federal Data these days. Here's an excellent comprehensive report by Clinton Brass and Meghan Stuessy on Data.gov: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48954#_Ref229337035

• Post #3199539

  Alison Mudditt and @eschares thoughtfully fill in the gaps that the US Government Accountability Office left in their public access report from this piece by Jeffrey Brainard in Science Magazine (I spoke with him too): https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-agencies-aren-t-ready-rising-cost-making-research-papers-free-report-warns

• Post #3199538

  This is an incredibly important read by Stuart Buck on the damaging consequences of research paradigm concentration. NIMH hasn't moved the needle on solving the mental health crisis in the US one iota by investing almost exclusively in biological pathways over the last decade. We can't biologize our way out of a fundamentally social problem. https://goodscience.substack.com/p/mental-health-at-nih

• Post #3199537

  I'm really frustrated to be reading these stories today. I spoke to several reporters last year trying to blow the whistle about how the DOGEing of USAID was impacting insights into emergent biological threats on the ground in these countries. That was over a year ago. They should have been reporting about it then. Nobody seemed interested in that angle at the time - I guess even the press needs to wait for people to die for it to matter. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/24/nx-s1-5830015/ho...

• Post #3199536

  Defend Research has an upcoming webinar (June 3rd, 11am ET) on science funding censorship with established leader Jeremy Berg and emerging leader Michael D. Green, PhD: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MVgVto7XTeiXIOsjLnLT4A#/registration

• Post #3199535

  Meghan Stuessy from Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress is on a role lately - her latest report is on the Presidential Records Act: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46129

• Post #3199534

  Molly Hardy is doing great, smart things with federal data monitoring using a combination of dataindex.us's data health check-up, real human people, and AI at Library Innovation Lab @ Harvard Law : Read more about the project here: https://dataindex.us/newsletter/article/47313b27-b90c-41fd-b30e-2e10706f7f4f

• Post #3199533

  It would be so #metal if John Heyn and Jeff Krulik deposited their legendary documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot in the @internetarchive Happy 40th! 🤘 https://wamu.org/story/26/06/02/dc-filmmakers-40th-anniversary-documentary-heavy-metal-parking-lot

• Post #3199532

  Providing reliable, repeatable, and factual information about the US Federal Statistical System from an LLM ChatBot is one the reasons I'm really excited about the work that BrightQuery is doing to support the National Science Foundation National Secure Data Service. Both training data and probabilistic models are uneven in this ecosystem and it's difficult to know what's trustworthy, especially when models disagree on basic facts: https://lenz.io/research/llm-disagreeme...