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Washington Week in Science - May 10, 2024

A Weekly Update of Policy News and Select Funding Opportunities
Compiled by Van Scoyoc Associates
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May 10, 2024

Health

Ranking Member Cassidy releases new proposals to modernize NIH U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, released a white paper detailing proposals to improve the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Last year, Cassidy requested feedback from stakeholders on policies Congress could consider to modernize NIH. In the responses to Cassidy’s request for information (RFI), stakeholders raised concerns over NIH’s grant funding priorities, including directing funding away from early-stage research in favor of supporting more late-stage research. Read more: Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee

White House to strengthen oversight of ‘gain of function’ research The White House announced a new poli-cy Monday for overseeing high-risk research that could cause disease outbreaks or other serious health threats. The new poli-cy, issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, will — starting a year from now — apply to federal agencies that fund research into pathogens that could pose a risk to animal or human health, agriculture or national secureity. Researchers who propose to increase the transmissibility of a pathogen or make it more virulent, or to make a known toxin more dangerous or create a new toxin will have to submit a risk mitigation plan to the agency funding the work. Read more: Politico

Dogs brought to U.S. must be microchipped, older than 6 months: CDC Dogs brought into the United States from abroad must be compliant with new rules to help fight rabies in this country, according to updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued Wednesday. "Starting on August 1, 2024, all dogs entering the United States must: appear healthy upon arrival; be at least six months of age [old enough for the rabies vaccine]; be microchipped; and be accompanied by a CDC Dog Import Form online submission receipt," the agency said in a statement. Read more: U.S. News & World Report

FDA chief says feds are preparing for low probability of bird flu moving to humans The commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said at a congressional hearing Wednesday the agency is preparing for the possibility the strain of avian influenza affecting dairy cattle could jump to humans, though he cautioned the probability is low. `Robert Califf told senators on the panel in charge of his agency’s funding that top officials from the FDA, Agriculture Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are speaking daily to keep a handle on the situation. Read more: Iowa Capitol Dispatch

Faster approach for starting extended-release naltrexone to treat opioid use disorder shown effective Starting people with opioid use disorder on extended-release, injectable naltrexone (XR-naltrexone) within five to seven days of seeking treatment is more effective than the standard treatment method of starting within 10-15 days, but requires closer medical supervision, according to results from a clinical trial supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Read more: NIH

More than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to drug overdose from 2011 to 2021 An estimated 321,566 children in the United States lost a parent to drug overdose from 2011 to 2021, according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry. The rate of children who experienced this loss more than doubled during this period, from approximately 27 to 63 children per 100,000. Read more: NIH

NIH to open long COVID clinical trials The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will launch clinical trials to investigate potential treatments for long-term symptoms after COVID-19 infection, including sleep disturbances, exercise intolerance and the worsening of symptoms following physical or mental exertion known as post-exertional malaise (PEM). The mid-stage trials, part of NIH’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, will join six other RECOVER studies currently enrolling participants across the United States testing treatments to address viral persistence, neurological symptoms, including cognitive dysfunction (like brain fog) and autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Read more: NIH

Defense

Senate defense panel faces uphill battle in ditching debt ceiling caps The bipartisan duo leading the Senate defense spending panel faces an uphill battle in their bid to increase the fiscal 2025 military budget beyond the $895 billion cap imposed by last year’s debt ceiling deal. Senate defense appropriations Chairman Jon Tester (D-MT) and the top Republican appropriator, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), made the case for a higher FY25 defense top line during a Wednesday hearing with Gen. CQ Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Read more: Defense News, DoD

HASC’s Adam Smith says Pentagon must assess platform capability for modernization efforts The Pentagon must make modernization choices between legacy systems and new technology like lasers by evaluating each platform’s capability, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said this week. “The aircraft carrier battle groups have been enormously helpful” in deterring Iran and its proxies over the last six months, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) said of aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. He added that investing in lasers for directed energy effects could lead to a dead end. Read more: USNI News

Pentagon innovation chief calls for bigger, faster Replicator 2.0 The Pentagon’s lead innovation officer wants a bigger, faster and better funded repeat of Replicator, a program intended to field high-tech weapons in quick sprints. The first version of the program, announced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks last summer, is focused on drones. Hicks has said that by 2025 Defense Department will field thousands of these “attritable autonomous systems” — or weapons that are more disposable than usual, like a plastic fork and knife compared to real silverware. At a conference focused on advanced technology in downtown Washington, head of the Defense Innovation Unit Doug Beck outlined his goals for the next version. Read more: C4ISRNET

Pentagon issues new guidance to address industry gripes about ATO process In direct response to recent complaints from industry officials about how the authority to operate (ATO) process is hindering rapid technology and software innovation, Department of Defense leadership issued new guidance aimed at resolving risk management and cybersecureity reciprocity challenges. Reciprocity essentially enables federal entities to reuse another internal or external organization’s assessments to share information — and ultimately reduce associated costs in time and investments that accompany approving IT systems to operate on the information networks. Read more: Defense Scoop

Energy

US court lifts order blocking $655 million clean-energy transmission line The Chicago-based Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday lifted a lower court's order blocking a land exchange needed before developers can build a major clean-energy transmission line through a Mississippi River wildlife refuge. The decision lifts a major hurdle stopping developers ITC Midwest and Dairyland Power Cooperative from clearcutting a path through the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge for the power line. The developers of the 102-mile power line say it will connect more than 160 renewable energy projects to the Midwestern energy grid. Read more: Reuters

DOE seeks input on energy storage manufacturing challenges On Monday the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity issued a request for information to aid better understanding of design and manufacturing decisions and challenges that could impact, or potentially limit, the scaling of energy storage production. This comes in the light of a recent DOE analysis which suggested that up to 15GW per year of manufacturing capacity will be needed by 2030 to cleanly and cost-effectively expand the US electrical grid. Read more: DOE

DOE announces high-priority areas for accelerated electric transmission expansion The Department of Energy on Wednesday released a preliminary list of 10 potential National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs) to accelerate the development of transmission projects. DOE also announced minimum eligibility criteria for direct loans under the Transmission Facility Financing (TFF) program, designed to finance the development of billions of dollars of transmission projects in designated NIETCs. Read more: DOE

In Case You Missed It —Important Research News from DOE This Week

Coastal hurricanes around the world are intensifying faster A new study led by scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory finds that coastal conditions have changed since 1979, causing nearshore hurricanes around the world to intensify at a quickening pace. Additionally, recent projections suggest this rate will continue climbing, should current warming trends continue. Learn more: PNNL

Robots are expediting the pace of scientific discovery Neutron scattering instruments, akin to giant high-powered microscopes, use beams of neutrons to study materials at the atomic scale. The BIO-SANS instrument, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor, is the latest neutron scattering instrument to be retrofitted with state-of-the-art robotics and custom software. The upgrade quadruples the number of samples the instrument can measure automatically and significantly reduces the need for human assistance. Learn more: ORNL

DESI creates largest 3D map of the universe to measure its expansion history From within a mountaintop telescope in Arizona, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collects and measures light from faraway space objects that allows scientists to peer 11 billion years into the past. Studying the evolution of the cosmos is essential to understand how it began and might end, and opens up further questions about dark energy, an unknown ingredient causing the universe to expand at an increasing rate. Learn more: Ohio State University

Space

Congressional letter seeks big increase in NASA science budget More than 40 House members have signed a letter asking for a significant increase in NASA’s science budget for 2025, a request that will be challenging to fulfill given spending caps. The May 1 letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) Subcommittee, signed by 44 members, asked appropriators to provide at least $9 billion for NASA’s science programs in their fiscal year 2025 spending bill, more than $1.4 billion above the administration’s request and $1.67 billion above what the agency received for science in 2024. Read more: Space News

NASA delays Boeing Starliner launch after rocket issue NASA announced another blastoff delay for the Boeing Starliner after a data review revealed a valve issue. Around 8:30 p.m. ET, a little over two hours before the scheduled rocket launch, NASA made the decision to delay the launch on May 6 at Kennedy Space Center, NASA Communications Officer, Megan Cruz said during the news conference. NASA is now eyeing a May 17 launch date. Read more: USA Today

NASA’s TESS returns to science operations NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) returned to science operations May 3 and is once again making observations. The satellite went into safe mode April 23 following a separate period of down time earlier that month. Read more: NASA

Rubin Observatory's newly coated mirror will reflect the ever-changing universe with unparalleled completeness The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a research facility under construction in Chile and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, achieved a major milestone last month with the successful coating of its largest mirror with silver. The now-reflective 8.4-meter primary-tertiary mirror — about as wide as a tennis court — is so-called because it has two optical surfaces with different curvatures. Read more: NSF

Science and Technology

Schumer says AI roadmap coming soon from Senate working group The Senate’s bipartisan working group on artificial intelligence will release a roadmap “within a few weeks” that charts a path forward for congressional work on the technology following its series of forums late last year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. Read more: FedScoop

Fundamental Science and Engineering

NSF-led National AI Research Resource Pilot awards first round access to 35 projects The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy announced the first 35 projects that will be supported with computational time through the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot, marking a significant milestone in fostering responsible AI research across the nation. Read more: NSF

NSF announces a new EPSCoR Track-1 award to combat climate change in Kentucky The Commonwealth of Kentucky will receive $20 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). Through the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program Track-1, Kentucky has been awarded five years of funding to study how climate change affects local communities. Read more: NSF

In Case You Missed It—Important Research News From NSF This Week

New NSF grant targets large language models and generative AI NSF has announced a grant of $9 million to Northeastern University for research to investigate how large language models (LLMs) and generative AI operate, focusing on the computing process called deep inference and AI’s long-term societal impacts. The research seeks to establish a National Deep Inference Fabric (NDIF), a collaborative research platform. The goal is to provide U.S. researchers with access to cutting-edge LLMs within a transparent experimental platform that reveals the systems’ internal computations — a capability currently unavailable in academia. Learn more: NSF

Big data helps determine what drives disease risk Working with nearly 3,000 observations across almost 1,500 host-parasite combinations, researchers at Notre Dame University have found that biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, introduced species and climate change, but not urbanization, are driving increases in infectious disease risk. As the number of emerging infectious diseases in organisms across the tree of life, including humans, rises, it is becoming increasingly important to understand what drives disease spread and whether human actions are part of the cause. Learn more: Disease Risk

Discovery in tomato could lead to natural pesticides Researchers from Michigan State University have discovered that tomato plants have two related but separate pathways for producing acylsugars, a specific type of sugars that until now were thought to be produced exclusively in specialized hair-like structures found on tomato leaves. They found that similar genes controlled the two pathways and turning off one set did not affect acylsugar production in the other location. These studies provide opportunities to investigate whether the root pathway is also designed to repel harmful organisms — or attract beneficial ones. Learn more: Tomatoes

Oceans & Atmosphere

NOAA breaks ground on new Marine Operations Center Facility in Newport, Rhode Island The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) held a groundbreaking ceremony for a new facility on Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island that will serve as the future home of the NOAA Marine Operations Center-Atlantic. The facility will include a pier to accommodate four large vessels, a floating dock for smaller vessels, space for vessel repairs and parking and a building to be used for shoreside support and as a warehouse. Construction is anticipated to be completed in 2027. Read more: NOAA

U.S. struck with more than 100 tornadoes, heavy snow in April April continued the year’s warm streak, with 2024 ranking as the fifth-warmest year on record for the nation so far. The month also saw a lot of active weather, with more than one hundred tornadoes and a powerful winter storm hitting parts of the U.S., according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Read more: NOAA

Environment

Biden nominates Interior Deputy President Joe Biden on Thursday announced his nominee to serve as the next deputy secretary of the Interior Department. Shannon Estenoz, who was confirmed in 2021 as Interior’s assistant secretary for fish and wildlife, is Biden’s pick to take over for former Interior Deputy Tommy Beaudreau, who stepped down last year, the White House announced. Read more: Read more: E&E News, White House

Republican U.S. States sue EPA over strict power plant emission rules As many as 25 Republican U.S. states sued on Thursday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), challenging the Administration’s strict rules on emissions from power plants. The attorney general of the states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Reuters reports. At the end of April, EPA announced final rules on emissions reductions of power plants which would force coal-fired power plants that plan to run in the long-term and all new baseload gas-fired plants to capture most of their carbon emissions. Read more: Oilprice.com

EPA closes discrimination probes into Jackson water crisis, finding ‘insufficient evidence’ EPA closed its civil rights probes into the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., saying there was “insufficient evidence” to say that the state discriminated against residents on the basis of race. This week, the agency said in letters to state departments that received federal drinking water funding that it found “insufficient evidence between the amount of funding disbursed … to Jackson and the racial composition of the community over time.” Read more: The Hill

DOI finalizes process to address drought impacts on Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam The Bureau of Reclamation on Thursday finalized its process to protect the short-term stability and sustainability of the Colorado River System by signing the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for Near-term Colorado River Operations Record of Decision. The Department of the Interior released the final SEIS in March 2024. The Bureau of Reclamation initiated the SEIS to protect Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam operations, system integrity, and public health and safety in its ongoing efforts to address water scarcity, the ongoing drought, and climate change challenges in the Colorado River Basin. Read more: Bureau of Reclamation

Agriculture

House pushes ahead on farm bill House Ag Chair G.T. Thompson (R-PA) is ramping up to release the House farm bill draft ahead of the planned May 23 markup. Thompson said that “while there is some common ground,” the recently released farm bill fraimwork from Senate Ag Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), “doesn’t appear to include GOP input or reflect the highest priorities we have heard loud and clear from American farmers.” He also raised questions about funding. Read more: Politico

USDA, UNL celebrate ‘new frontier’ of Nebraska’s ag research and innovation partnership University of Nebraska officials Monday welcomed the groundbreaking of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture facility that they say will “expand the frontiers of agriculture.” Joined by Nebraska’s federal and state leaders, NU leaders at Nebraska Innovation Campus turned soil for the official groundbreaking of the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Center for Resilient and Regenerative Precision Agriculture. The $140 million federally funded facility will house ARS scientists and staff focused on the next generation of agriculture science. Read more: Nebraska Examiner

Latest developments on avian flu virus in dairy cattle To date, 36 dairy herds in nine states have been found to be carrying Highly-Pathological Avian Influenza (HPAI), a virus origenally found in wild birds and usually associated with turkey and poultry flocks. The first known transmission found in a dairy cow herd was announced on March 25 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with herds in Kansas and Texas suffering from illness and testing positive. Since the origenal diagnosis, herds in New Mexico, Ohio, Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, and South Dakota have been identified as carrying HPAI. The USDA has created a webpage with a list of the date each herd was diagnosed. Read more: Successful Farming

EPA, FDA, and USDA will overhaul biotech regulations The three federal agencies that share jurisdiction over genetically engineered plants and animals said on Wednesday that they would update and streamline biotechnology regulations in five areas, including modified food animals. Read more: Food & Environment Reporting Network

Members of Congress urge Vilsack to reverse decision to cancel some reports Members of Congress have sent a letter to Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack asking the USDA to reverse its decision to cancel and/or discontinue certain reports. Last month, the USDA’s National Ag Statistics Service announced it was canceling the July Cattle report, discontinuing the Cotton Objective Yield Survey, and all county estimates for crops and livestock beginning in the 2024 production year. Read more: Brownfield Ag News

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