Chris Marcum 📖

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/

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

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/

Here's the 13-year-history of 2 CFR 200 public comments. Y'all did great.

https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034

🍝 🤠 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

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)

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/writing-data-management-and-sharing-plan

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

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/

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

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

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/

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

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

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

RE: @scimag@flipboard.com

Entity resolution is a major data governance challenge.

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-disagreement

It would be so #metal if John Heyn and Jeff Krulik deposited their legendary documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot in the @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org Happy 40th! 🤘

https://wamu.org/story/26/06/02/dc-filmmakers-40th-anniversary-documentary-heavy-metal-parking-lot

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

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

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

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/how-funding-cuts-to-usaid-are-impacting-the-ebola-outbreak-in-dr-congo

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

Alison Mudditt and @eschares@scholar.social 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

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

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

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/

"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/

"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

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

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/

Abigail Haddad just made the #UFO files data dump much more accessible. You can search the text here 🛸 :

https://ufo-releases.vercel.app/

Listening live to Chris Bourg on the 25th Anniversary celebration of MIT OpenCourseWare and she gave a great shout out of support to the 2022 OSTP Public Access Policy. She said that more than 60% of MIT scholars are in compliance with federal public access policies, which is incredible :)

https://www.youtube.com/live/BwTAavpUeW0

I submitted my 500th birding list to eBird last week. Here's more about my birding journey - including some fun birding facts from my time at the White House (thanks to Michael David Thomas for his amazing contributions).

https://www.chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/2026/04/05/Birds-Are-Totally-Real.html

There are certainly corporeal, albeit mysterious, ways to end up unexpectedly at a Waffle House. this is some fantastic reporting:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/us/fema-gregg-phillips-waffle-house-teleportation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YFA.tYFU.ipFtOwiwLz3w&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The "government-wide" ban on journal subscription and article processing charges in the President's Budget Request is wild - there's lots of weasel words so we'll have to wait to see what this means in practice :

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christopher-steven-marcum-15b88249_the-presidents-budget-request-includes-a-activity-7445842941769670656-3SiR

Here is some excellent reporting by Jeffrey Brainard on the SCORE work by Brian Nosek et al. in Science Magazine: https://www.science.org/content/article/across-social-sciences-half-research-doesn-t-replicate

I agree with Brian: the failure to replicate is not an indictment of the original result, it's just new data that facilitates the self-correcting nature of science and opens up new areas of exploration. Why did the result fail to replicate? There are myriad reasons - most of which do not involve malfeasance or integrity issues.

Meghan Stuessy and Taylor Knoedl weave together all the major policies and statutes that make up the fabric of the Federal data ecosystem in their new report titled: "Availability of Federal Data: Policy Considerations for Disclosure, Preservation, and Governance." I am grateful to Congressional Research Service and to the authors for this incredible new resource.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48889

Aside from the inappropriate use of personal data collected by the US Government for enforcement purposes, law enforcement and surveillance agencies purchasing the data American's willfully give to companies from data brokers represents the most significant data risk of our time:

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillance-data-brokers-congress-anthropic

Note, under the Open Government Data Act of 2018, metadata about these datasets need to be disclosed to the public in the agencies' comprehensive data inventories. How many have? Almost none.

We need to fix the inequities in scholarly communication (sci-com): the prestige tax of for-profit publishing and the publish-or-perish culture in the academy has arbitrarily limited the reach of much research around the globe. UNESCO Open Science Toolkit and the United Nations DHL are seeking ways to correct these inequities: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/launch-global-consultation-equitable-scholarly-communication-implementation-open-science

I'm endlessly grateful to the #InternetArchive for the opportunity to speak about information policy this week with such brilliant and passionate colleagues. IA is a treasure and they are always in need of donations and support: https://archive.org/donate/

Publishers are opting-out of archiving their Internet content.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/blocking-internet-archive-wont-stop-ai-it-will-erase-webs-historical-record

I pushed a longer version of my AI Companion reply to JB Branch in Issues---now with more robots---to this version on my blog: https://www.chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/2026/03/11/AI-Companion-Risks-in-Older-Adults.html

It's been a long while since I put on my gerontologist's hat. Amplifying the risks of AI companionship was a good reason to do so for this letter to Issues in Science and Technology in response to J.B. Branch : 

https://issues.org/reducing-potential-harms-ai-companions-branch-forum/#christopher-steven-marcum

Philip Bourne , your memory will be a blessing. Thank you for your service and for all that you've done for the open science movement. This is very sad news and my condolences to his family and to the UVA and NIH colleagues that shared in my pleasure of working with him.

https://news.virginia.edu/content/memoriam-philip-bourne-founding-dean-school-data-science

The National Institute of Mental Health is requesting comments on a new information collection regarding deletion of controlled access data from local machines at a project's conclusion. Given the high potential for this Administration to remove data assets from the NDA (see the disclosure on the website) - I urge the community to submit comments supporting institutional retention of all data.

https://nda.nih.gov/

https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewICR?ref_nbr=202602-0925-003#section10_anchor

There's lots to celebrate with the release of the new U.S. Department of Labor Open Data Portal. However, I'm still waiting for their evaluation program data website to be restored with planned updates that were supposed to be completed this fall: https://clear.dol.gov/2025update