I had a plan for neuroscience funding. It meant redirecting money Congress had already promised to someone else. My deputy had a plan too.

I did have a plan for neuroscience funding. It was a piggy bank which had $150M in it dedicated to studying the molecular biology of plants. I coveted a big chunk of that money for the neuroscience programs that I had been brought in to curate and grow. There were two small problems. The first was Congress had created the Plant Genome Program. The second slightly more personal: my deputy at NSF Biological Sciences was its champion. Discounting both problems, I instructed our budget people to move the money for next year’s spend. I expected resistance. I did not expect what I got.

Let’s be clear. I had been recruited specifically to grow neuroscience at NSF BIO as part of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative. The mandate came from the NSF Director herself and indirectly through OSTP. My own background at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (part of NIH in Bethesda), was part of the value-proposition from my recruitment that would yield coordination and synergies with NIH’s own ambitious BRAIN plans across all of its Institutes and Centers. The budget move wasn’t freelancing. It was part of my mission.

The Plant Genome program, as I saw it then, was a roughly $150M quasi-congressional earmark with its own community (including some of very close colleagues and friends) and infrastructure. From my standpoint, as incoming neuroscience champion, it looked like an entrenched incumbency in a directorate that needed to better align with the President’s priorities.

This type of budget move wasn’t at all unusual at NSF. Program officers and Directorate executives move money across accounts routinely (an activity that’s getting a lot of attention these days). So, what I was doing wasn’t structurally unprecedented. But it was extremely politically naive.

I told the budget people to move the money and then I waited.

The budget cycle rolled forward, and the reallocation simply hadn’t taken place. There was no memo paper trail explaining why. There was no pushback at all from my deputy. It’s just that the numbers were the same as before.

I felt like I was living in an episode of Black Mirror. I wasn’t angry. There was no feeling of being upset at all. It was much more disorienting. When a direct instruction doesn’t produce a result, before you know why, there’s a strange administrative vertigo. You gave an directive. It produced no effect. That doesn’t happen often at the NSF directorate-head level.

I started asking some questions. Not just in my own front office, but throughout the Agency and of my colleagues and friends at universities across the country. And that’s when a fuller picture emerged.

My Deputy had moved on three fronts. First, she didn’t execute the instruction. I knew this of course, but it became clear that it wasn’t an oversight or a delay. It was her decision. She had decided to play her hand.

Second, she had notified the plant genome community. The scientific community had been alerted that their pet program was under threat. Letters were already moving, calls had been made, informal networks activated. By the time I found out about this second move, the external mobilization was already complete. The fight had left the building without me knowing that there was one.

Her third move was notifying Congress. This move changed the stakes entirely. Going to Congress—even informally, even as a heads up to a staffer—is a move of a different order. It signals that she was willing to invite external oversight of an internal decision that was still nominally mine to make.

What does this mean structurally? Congress created the Plant Genome Program. Alerting them to a threat to it is not merely informational — it is, functionally, an appeal to the program’s founding authority over the head of its current steward. I learned of this, not a via confrontation, but through the budget process and third parties. The absence of a face-to-face reckoning is notable. She didn’t come to me and say I did this. I assembled the picture from pieces.

So, this was indeed the case of the dog that didn’t bark. Here is why that matters:

There was no showdown at the OK Corral. No meeting where I dressed her down or she defended herself. The outcome simply became a fact: the money hadn’t moved, the community was mobilized, Congress had been notified, and the reallocation was effectively dead.

That absence of confrontation became a long-term thing because I chose not to push it once I’d understood that this was a fait accompli. The external moves made confrontation pointless. This wasn’t a policy battle anymore. It was a political bullfight and I’d been gored badly. I’d already lost the plant genome community and with other issues facing the Directorate (like NEON), I couldn’t afford further attrition of my biological community base.

Truthfully, there was an unspoken acknowledgement between the two of us, that the matter had been settled. We both moved on.

I did manage to find a plus up path for neuroscience. The NeuroNex program ended up funding roughly $50M worth of innovative projects aimed to produce accelerative tools for the neuroscience field to move forward within the larger context of BRAIN.

But it didn’t all work out either. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that the massive brain science investments have paid off. Certainly, they haven’t to the degree we promised our stakeholders at the beginning.

I’m still sitting with this whole story. There is the chain-of-command question. She went around me, not through me. She didn’t argue with me, file a grievance or resign in protest. She acted unilaterally and externally. And was that so different in kind from what I did—acting unilaterally to redirect a congressionally created program?

And then there is the institutional design question. NSF has checks for exactly this kind of situation—Congress, the scientific community, the budget process itself. My deputy didn’t invent those levers. She used the ones that already existed. So, was that insubordination?

NSF had anticipated me. I had not anticipated it.

A decade later, and long after I have left government, the piggy bank balance is a shadow of what it was. But the bank itself stayed where it was. The plant genome community kept its money. Congress kept its program. And my deputy kept her silence, leaving me to figure out what happened on my own.

The piggy bank is there, unbroken, sitting exactly where I found it.

Dan’s spot on, as always, here. I remember one time, the bunch of us had fun making ChatGPT (early version) write NSF non-technical summaries as Sonnets and Haiku. Those were the days. Now, it’s eating the agency budget with its buddy Quantum.

Three weeks into a new job, I got blamed for a sustainability plan I didn’t write. It turned out the Board was right to be angry

I’d been in this room quite a few times. It was on the 12^th floor of the old Arlington NSF headquarters and housed a 15-meter-long conference table and chairs for an audience of perhaps fifty. But on this November day in 2014, it was my first time in the hot seat. I was giving a report to the US National Science Board on progress with the troubled iPlant Cooperative—a large cyberinfrastructure investment of my directorate at the University of Arizona to serve the plant biology community.

Before I was more than a couple of paragraphs into my presentation, there was trouble. There was something called a ‘sustainability plan,’ and apparently, the iPlant people had not taken it seriously. As far as they were concerned, the money would keep flowing (from NSF or somewhere) forever. It got heated. I was three weeks into my new job as the head of biological sciences and had no clue that the Board took its oversight role seriously. I’d spent the previous 16 years as a university institute director (with decanal rank) and had absolutely zero experience with either large cyberinfrastructure projects or sustainability plans.

Under direct questioning, my lack of experience and preparation became obvious. A board member was so angry that she told me to my face, in front of the assembly, that my responses were “personally offensive to her.” I apologized, calmly, but she didn’t look appeased.

It turned out that the Board was incensed not only because the plan was bad—there was no credible revenue model, no institutional home identified, and no transition timeline. The Board was furious because it was clear that the plan wasn’t serious. Rather, it was a cynical box-checking. If it had been in the present day, there would have been accusations of using ChatGPT. So, it wasn’t a communication failure. It was a substance failure. The iPlant team hadn’t taken the instructions seriously.

It took two more years, but the story does have a happy ending. The iPlant team at Arizona took the feedback seriously and reorganized the project, rebranding it as CyVerse to serve a much larger scientific community beyond plant biology. Crucially, the team brought in leadership beyond Arizona and rethought the value proposition. The expanded team added science-education expertise from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and HPC capacity from TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The NSF remains the key investor, but the funding base has broadened beyond the Biological Sciences Directorate. The focus these days is on democratizing high-performance computing, providing access to US researchers who need compute power but lack it at their home institution. The box-checking exercise from 2014 eventually became a real institutional commitment. And even while I was still at NSF, the results became clearly visible, not only to those of us in NSF leadership, but also to the community.

The iPlant case wasn’t an anomaly. I’ve watched the same scene play out at two other $50M+ projects since.

How does this happen? Why spend months working on a grant renewal only to deliver a package with a fundamental scale mismatch? What produced the delusion that $10M+/year operations can land softly without years of serious groundwork?

It turns out that most academic scientists don’t plan for endings. At the psychological level, sustainability planning feels like admitting defeat. From a cultural standpoint, the grant cycle rewards acquisition rather than stewardship. And there’s always the deferral pattern: “We’ll figure that out in year 8.”

All of this results from a fundamental skills gap: excellence in STEM grant writing (what we commonly call ‘grantsmanship’) differs from business case writing. In fact, none of these domains— institutional negotiation, stakeholder development, or revenue modeling—are present in the science training pipeline. PIs face what Donald Rumsfeld would have called the unknown unknown: they don’t know what they don’t know.

So, what would good look like here? First, on projects like iPlant, with a typical ten-year lifespan, sustainability should be a priority for a dedicated team in year 3, not year 8. That team should include a named senior transition role with real authority — someone whose job is explicitly to plan for the project’s end, not its continuation — analogous to a Chief Risk Officer. In the NSF ecosystem, a midpoint review should have real teeth — a required external review panel with a go/no-go funding decision — long before things reach the National Science Board for oversight. Finally, there are models worth borrowing from: the nonprofit sector and major research infrastructure projects like CERN and the Vera Rubin Telescope have learned, sometimes painfully, how to plan for institutional continuity at scale.

The Board member who chastised me wasn’t wrong — even if she came very close to ending my tenure at NSF three weeks after it began. She was angered by cynicism born of ignorance — and that sequence matters. The box-checking comes second. The failure to understand why the box exists comes first. It’s part of why I took the Chief Risk Officer role on my current NSF-funded project seriously.

The problem is very real. All current large-project PIs should be asking themselves what happens to their project when the federal funding ends — and they should have a real answer, not a paragraph of verbiage.

The Board was watching then. Someone always is.

The Vietnam era sent some of America’s best young scientists to Canada. It’s happening again.

Kyoto, Japan, 2016. There was a break between sessions, and I was out on the patio of the conference center venue talking with the President of York University in Ontario. We were both at the STS forum, one of the premier global science policy events, held each October in Japan.

“You know, most of my most senior neuroscience faculty immigrated from the United States,” he said.

I was pretty skeptical. With brain science powerhouses like Toronto, McGill, and the University of British Columbia, that didn’t make sense.

“Surely, that’s not the case,” I responded. “Canada is historically a leader in brain research. Look at McGill, alone.”

“I’m not talking about all my faculty,” he responded. “Just the most senior ones. They came over during Vietnam to avoid the draft.”

That conversation was ten years ago. Now it’s resurfaced in my memory for obvious reasons. Every time I visit an embassy here in D.C., the question comes up about my views on who should be on a list of up-and-coming young American neuroscientists open to emigrating.

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I was a teenager in Pasadena when the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the draft sent a remarkable cohort of American scientists to Canada. Among them were people I knew well: Harvard classmates of my older sister, trainees in my Dad’s Caltech lab, teachers at my school. Many of them weren’t marginal figures. They were disproportionately elites in the STEM labor pipeline, self-selected for their willingness to leave the familiar behind for a principle. Canada didn’t just absorb them; it built around them. McGill, Toronto, UBC, and, yes, York, became genuine centers of excellence in part because of this infusion of talent. And most importantly, many did not come back. After President Carter provided amnesty, analysis from the 1986 Canadian census suggests that of the 30-50 thousand individuals who migrated to Canada to avoid the draft, roughly one-half stayed on. Careers, families, and institutions had taken root. The lesson from this era is important today: a brain drain isn’t a temporary loan. It’s a transfer of capital—human, intellectual, and institutional.

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How does what’s happening now connect to what happened in the 1960s and 70s? Then, a single acute shock — the draft — produced a discrete, visible cohort exodus. The border helped: a U.S. driver’s license and a few cursory questions got you across. Physical migration was nearly frictionless, which is why the movement happened quickly and in plain sight.

Today, the mechanism is almost entirely different. There’s no single precipitating event — instead, a slow-motion but accelerating pressure system. NIH and NSF funding cuts and organizational disruption to grant infrastructure. Indirect cost cap threats destabilizing university research budgets. Uncertainty around F-1 and J-1 visas is choking the graduate student pipeline. Political targeting of specific institutions and research areas. None of these is like the Vietnam-era draft. But, together, they are changing the calculus.

Also, there is considerably more friction than in the Vietnam era. A lot of it is in the decision itself. Scientists considering a move are embedded in a complex institutional infrastructure: active grants, dependent trainees, and long-standing collaborations. Leaving requires dismantling all of that. But that same complexity means that those who do make the move are deeply committed to staying on after they move.

The cumulative effect is that the expected value of an American academic science career has declined sharply, especially for early- and mid-career researchers. This isn’t a single push — it’s a dozen smaller ones, which makes it harder to see as a pattern, but no less real.

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I should be precise about what I mean when I describe my embassy visits. These aren’t casual social calls. Over the past year, I have been contacted by representatives of several foreign governments — European countries foremost among them, but not alone — with a request that has become almost formulaic: could I identify promising young American neuroscientists who might be open to conversations about positions abroad?

The request is always framed diplomatically. No one uses the word recruit. But that is precisely what it is — organized, deliberate, and sophisticated. These aren’t opportunistic conversations at conferences. They are structured efforts, backed by government resources, to identify and cultivate specific individuals at a specific moment of American institutional vulnerability.

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Canada isn’t simply waiting for Americans to show up. It has been actively building the infrastructure to receive them. The Canada 150 Research Chairs program, launched in 2017, was explicitly designed to recruit exceptional researchers from around the world and drew heavily on talent from the United States. The Canada First Research Excellence Fund has made major institutional infrastructure investments that give Canadian universities genuine competitive standing. These created an ecosystem in which the positions are not consolation prizes for Americans who couldn’t land a U.S. position but are first-choice destinations.

There is also a factor that rarely surfaces in policy discussions but matters enormously at the individual level: healthcare. American researchers who leave academia lose employer-tied health insurance. Canadian researchers face no such risk when moving between institutions. In a country where a family health crisis can be financially catastrophic, this is not a minor consideration.

The result is that Canada is playing a long game while the United States is, at the moment, folding its poker hand.

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The temptation is to imagine today’s American scientific emigrants as the disaffected — unhappy postdocs, marginal researchers, people who were already looking for the exit. That is not who I am being asked about, and it is not who is going.

The concerning cohort is mid-career: people with established labs, active grants, graduate students, and reputations built over a decade or more of productive work. When they move, they don’t move alone. They take their entire ecosystem — trainees, collaborators, years of accumulated institutional relationships. One full professor emigrating may represent fifteen or twenty years of American scientific investment walking out the door. And the trainees they bring with them, or recruit once they arrive, will become foreign scientists. The pipeline reorients.

The Vietnam parallel holds here with uncomfortable precision. It wasn’t the marginal figures who left and stayed. It was the most able.

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This brings me back to the York president’s implicit lesson — the one he wasn’t even trying to teach. Many of the Vietnam cohort didn’t come back.

After Carter’s amnesty, some did return. But roughly half had built lives, careers, and families in Canada, and they stayed. The institutions that had grown around them stayed too.

Why would the current cohort be different? If you have rebuilt your lab in Toronto, enrolled your children in Canadian schools, secured stable funding through one of the Canadian funding agencies, and watched from a distance as American science policy lurches from disruption to disruption — what exactly are you returning to?

Political conditions in the United States may eventually stabilize. But institutional damage takes a generation to repair. The graduate students being trained in Canadian labs today will become Canadian faculty. The networks being built now will be Canadian networks. The scientific culture that is quietly relocating will not quietly relocate back.

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The United States has long treated its research enterprise as a fixed asset — something that could be drawn down, disrupted, and defunded without permanent consequence. Brain drain is the market’s verdict on that assumption. Scientists, like capital, move toward expected returns. When the expected return on an American academic science career declines — through funding uncertainty, political interference, and institutional instability — talent moves elsewhere. This is not a political statement. It is an observation about how labor markets work.

What would reverse it? Restored and predictable federal research funding. Visa stability for international students and researchers. A federal posture toward universities that treats them as assets rather than adversaries. None of that is imminent.

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I think about the York president on that Kyoto patio, reporting what he had observed without alarm, almost as a casual aside. He wasn’t issuing a warning. He was describing the outcome of a natural experiment that had played out over decades, visible only in retrospect.

I am watching a second such experiment begin, in real time, from an unusual vantage point. And unlike the York president, I’m not describing it in retrospect.

The current cadre of science policy folks in this country worries about research security—stolen intellectual property, occult foreign funding, and the like. They’re not seeing the tsunami: when the human talent isn’t there, research security is airtight. But there aren’t any discoveries, because there aren’t any discoverers.

How a global roadshow built the political cover for America’s brain initiative

It had been a long haul from Newark — eighteen hours plus, but something is clarifying about the final approach into Changi. The city materializes out of the South China Sea, improbably ordered, all reclaimed land and green corridors, a small nation that has collectively decided to simply will itself into a planned, successful future. I took a photograph out the window with my 2009-era iPhone, a gesture that now looks hilariously lo-fi in my photo archive. It was my first return to Singapore since a childhood trip with my parents, and I was arriving this time not as a tourist, but as a science entrepreneur.

The goal: pitch the Decade of the Mind as a global neuroscience initiative. The thesis — which I hadn’t yet fully articulated to myself — was that the road to funding success in Washington ran through foreign capitals first.

I demonstrated the limits of that thesis approximately twelve hours later when I showed up for my appointment at the Prime Minister’s office in a business suit.

“Lose the jacket and tie,” said the science liaison officer, not unkindly, when I arrived. Equatorial Singapore is always the same: very hot, very humid, approximately the temperature of a sauna with better architecture and excellent mass transit. The boss was in short sleeves when we walked in. The suit, I realized, was doing exactly what American assumptions often do in foreign capitals — arriving with confidence about what the situation requires and getting it wrong.

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Why go abroad first?

The state of play in Washington at the end of the 21^st century’s first decade was this: our Big Neuroscience concept had genuine champions — neuroscientists such as Mort Mishkin and Jay McClelland, and even celebrities like Oprah Winfrey — but it lacked political traction. The idea that we should mount a coordinated national effort to understand how human brains produced the thing we call “mind” was scientifically compelling and strategically murky. Who would lead it? Which agencies would own it? What would it cost? These were questions that tended to produce long meetings rather than commitments.

The insight — and I’m not sure whose it was originally, though I’m happy to take credit if no one objects — was that American science initiatives gain real leverage when they can claim global momentum. This is not cynical; it’s accurate. Policymakers respond to the sense that history is moving. A proposal that arrives as “we should do this” is a harder sell than one that arrives as “this is happening, and here’s where America stands.”

We’d seen versions of this playbook before. The Human Genome Project was in many ways a response to international competitive pressure — the fear that if the United States didn’t lead, someone else would. The framing of a race, even a friendly one, is extraordinarily useful when you’re trying to move bureaucracies. We see this most recently in the context of AI and quantum computing.

The decision, then, was to build genuine international excitement before making the full domestic ask. Not to manufacture enthusiasm — you can’t fake that for long, and scientists especially see through it — but to find the real partners, have the real conversations, and come back to Washington with something tangible.

Singapore was the first stop, and not by accident.

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The roadshow

Singapore made sense for several reasons simultaneously. The scientific capacity was real — DSO and A*Star — and the government’s receptivity to big science concepts was well-established. Singapore had been making deliberate bets on research infrastructure for years; they understood the genre. There was also a strategic symbolism to starting in Asia. This wasn’t going to be a European initiative with Asian endorsement bolted on afterward.

The pitch itself was a particular kind of performance art. You’re asking for commitment before you have anything to commit to. You’re offering a partnership in something that doesn’t yet fully exist. The skill is making that feel exciting rather than embarrassing.

What I was asking for varied by stop. In some capitals, it was matching funding, or at least a signal of funding intent. In others, it was scientific leadership — names attached to something, which is its own form of currency. In others, frankly, it was the meeting itself: a photograph, a letter, a line in a future proposal that said officials in Singapore, Sydney, and Seoul have expressed strong interest.

You learn quickly on a trip like this to tell the difference between genuine excitement and polite diplomatic interest. Both can look identical in the room — the nodding, the questions, the expressions of enthusiasm. Genuine excitement has a different texture: people start proposing things. They say, ” What if we involved Professor X?” or “There’s a funding mechanism that might work for this”. Polite diplomatic interest stays at the level of the concept. It’s warm, and it goes nowhere.

I got both. The ratio varied by city.

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The cultural translation problem

The suit was a metaphor, but, like most metaphors, it pointed to something real.

Americans arrive at international science meetings with American assumptions baked in. We assume that “global initiative” means something that America conceived and now invites others to join. This is understandable — we have historically been the largest funder of basic research, and the model has usually worked — but it lands poorly in rooms where the people across the table are sophisticated enough to recognize the structure.

What we had to learn, stop by stop, was that genuine partnership required genuine co-creation. Not of the science — the science could be international on its merits — but of the meaning of the enterprise. Why did this matter to Singapore specifically? To South Korea? The answer couldn’t just be that it mattered to the United States.

Later that same year, in Berlin, I heard about a nascent competitive European idea: the Human Brain Project, which was being put forward entirely independently of our own efforts. Folks were happy to hear about our ideas, but they had their own. The European effort would be, in some ways, more ambitious than what we were proposing: simulating the human brain in silico using computational neuroscience models.

In Japan, we heard about a different idea that would take advantage of sophisticated animal models in neurobiology, going beyond the then-dominant American view that a mouse is just like a small human being. The Japanese also had an advantage in using advanced spectroscopy techniques, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.

I left some of those meetings having said things I would not have said, at the time, in Washington. More accurately: I left certain meetings having heard things that changed what I said in subsequent meetings in D.C. This is how science diplomacy works — not as the export of American ideas, but as a genuinely iterative process that changes the ideas themselves.

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The leverage moment

Returning to Washington with something tangible is a different experience from returning with nothing but optimism. I had letters. I had commitments, or near-commitments. I had names attached to the concept — serious names, from serious places.

And this, I found, changed the domestic conversation in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated.

When I got back, it was at a dinner with NSF’s leadership that I found real resonance: the host invited us to submit a two-page white paper that eventually made its way throughout the US government. Importantly, the paper had no author. It practically invited any decision maker to adopt it as their own. And, the framing was the global moment.

Part of what international buy-in provides is cover — a way for cautious domestic actors to justify enthusiasm that they might otherwise suppress. The political logic runs something like: if Asia and Europe are interested, we can’t afford not to be. This is not a beautiful logic, but it is an operational one.

The other thing it provides is a proof of concept for the pitch itself. If you can walk into a room in Singapore and make a compelling case, you can probably walk into a room on the Hill and do the same. The roadshow is, among other things, practice.

The Decade of the Mind didn’t become the BRAIN Initiative instantly or cleanly. The Obama administration recast the idea, initially as something called the Brain Activity Map Project. But the international groundwork was part of what made the domestic momentum possible. When the BRAIN initiative finally had its launch moment three years later. it arrived with the credibility that only genuine global interest can provide.

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What this tells us about how big science gets done

The official history of a science initiative tends to emphasize the science: breakthrough papers, visionary proposals, legislative milestones. The unofficial history involves an enormous amount of what I’d call pre-political work — the meetings that don’t appear in any record, the relationships built on conference sidelines, the carefully calibrated sequence of who gets approached in what order.

The international roadshow is one piece of this. It is, at its core, an exercise in creating the conditions for a political decision that hasn’t been made yet. You can’t force that decision. You can make it progressively easier to say yes.

Science diplomacy as a practice is genuinely undervalued and undertheorized. We train scientists to do science and administrators to administer, but the hybrid skill — understanding both the science and the diplomatic register well enough to move between them — tends to be developed ad hoc, by people who find themselves in rooms they weren’t fully prepared for. That ad hoc aspect is certainly how I found my sea legs.

Looking back on the Singapore trip — my suit, their short sleeves, the PM’s office, the iPhone photograph — what strikes me is how little I understood about what I was doing while I was doing it. I had an intuition that the path ran through international buy-in. I didn’t have a theory of why. The theory came later, assembled from the specific failures and specific successes of the trip itself.

Which is, I suppose, how most things that work work. You do the thing imperfectly, and then you understand the thing.

They are buying the label on the bottle

“This is not my wine,” announced the billionaire as he sipped from the elongated crystal goblet that our university president had just poured. It was his wine. I had pressed my local distributor, a 30-something Virginian with a name straight out of Gone With The Wind, hard to find a case of his stuff. The plan had been to celebrate his promised big check in support of the Institute with a dinner at the President’s house, and his red wine would be the guest of honor.

We were all horrified. Our university president presented him the bottle, with his label, X Vinyards, prominently displayed.

“Of course it is,” the President said.

“No, this is fraud. This is not my wine.”

I focused intensely on my shoelaces. In my mind, I wasn’t at the President’s house. I was 500 miles to the north at my Woods Hole lab bench, working out the role of protein kinase C in sea urchin development. I wondered how fundraising for science had come to this.

“Mr. X,” let’s try some white, no? That’ll go with the first course, I think.” Distracting him with Chardonnay was my plan.

Disaster, right? Actually no. The check cleared three weeks later. A big one. And it was unrestricted.

What had just happened in that dining room wasn’t a near-disaster. It was, in retrospect, a perfectly normal evening — just with the subtext briefly visible.

Here is what I think major donors are really buying. Not the science. Not the graduate students who will spend five years chasing a result that may never arrive. Not the state-of-the-art equipment, the postdocs, the administrative overhead that your development office will explain in careful detail. They are buying the label on the bottle. They are buying the wing with their name on it, the lecture series, the endowed chair, the wall plaque that they think will outlast everyone in that dining room. The Institute exists, in their imagination, as an extension of themselves — a form of biological immortality dressed in the language of public good.

Your job, as Institute Director, is to make that narcissism feel like generosity. To them, and honestly, to yourself.

This is not cynicism. The science is real. The graduate students are real. The results — when they come — are real. In neuroscience, my field, some of those results can save lives. But the transaction at the center of scientific philanthropy is a negotiation between two kinds of legacy hunger: the donor’s need to be remembered, and the researchers’ need to do work that matters. An Institute Directorship is, among other things, the art of holding both of those needs in the room simultaneously without letting either reveal the reality of the other too clearly.

Nobody teaches you this. There is no course in graduate school called Asking Rich People for Money in the Service of Science. Your thesis advisor taught you to think carefully, to doubt your results, to follow the data wherever it went. That person, your mentor, had no idea what an Institute Director does on a Tuesday afternoon.

What you learn, slowly and mostly by humiliation, is that federal funding and philanthropic funding are different games with different rules and different currencies. There were many times when the audacity of asking for a lot of money in a personal, one-on-one context led me to disaster. On one occasion, the donor started laughing at the ask. It was two orders of magnitude too small. On another occasion, the donor glared at me and remarked that they had thought we were just having a friendly conversation about science, not money.

At NSF and the NIH, the currency of the realm has been peer review — you are accountable to your scientific community, and the process, whatever its flaws, is fundamentally about the work. In the world of major donors, the currency is relationship. The science is the framing context; the relationship is the product. You are not making a case to a peer review panel. You are making a person feel that their money will become part of something larger than themselves — and that you, specifically, are the right steward of that transformation.

This requires a particular kind of split attention. The version of me that spent years at a lab bench, working out how molecular signal transduction works in a living cell, had to be held in reserve — not abandoned, but kept somewhere safe. In contrast, the other version of me learned to read a room, manage an ego, and pivot to some white wine when necessary. The bench scientist and the Institute Director are not antagonists. But they are not quite the same person either.

The BRAIN Initiative taught me this at scale. Billions of dollars, multiple agencies, the White House, and, somewhere underneath it all, the actual neuroscience. Keeping those things in productive tension — that’s the job. The wine dinner, Mr. X, was just a smaller version of the same problem.

So, what do you do with all of this?

The honest answer is that you get good at it, and getting good at it changes you in ways that are hard to fully inventory. You learn to pick up social cues in the first seconds of a conversation. You learn that silence from a major donor is not the same as a no. You learn that the ask, when it finally comes, should feel inevitable — the natural conclusion of a relationship that both parties have been carefully tending, even if only one of them knew that’s what was happening.

And you learn, eventually, to make peace with the transaction. The donor gets their label, their legacy, their wall plaque. The Institute gets the unrestricted funds that quietly multiply into something a directed gift never could. The graduate students get their five years at the bench. Some of them produce results that matter. A few of those results, in a field like neuroscience, find their way into treatments and into lives that are measurably better because the science has been done.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

But I still think about that dining room sometimes. The crystal goblet. The bottle with his label on it, the wine he grew on his own land, and his absolute certainty — in the face of all evidence — that it was not his. What he was really saying, I think, is that the label was never enough. That what he wanted was something no check could buy: the certainty that the thing bearing his name was genuinely, irreducibly his.

Scientists understand this feeling better than donors know. Every result we ever cared about felt that way — earned, irreplaceable, ours in a way that had nothing to do with money.

We just learned, some of us, to work with people who express it differently.

Blogpost On the Way

I will be publishing a blogpost later this week about the mass firing.

But rearranging the deck chairs can work

The call came from Jo Handelsman.

She was the White House microbiome czar — formally, Associate Director for Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy — and one of the most respected microbiologists in the country. That mattered to me. This wasn’t a communications staffer working a headline. It was a scientist, operating inside the executive branch machinery, doing what that machinery required of her.

I was the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences at NSF — the head of a directorate called BIO, which meant I was the person she needed to talk to. About a minute in, she let me know the President was looking for about $140 million from our directorate. I was already mentally recoding program money across four related BIO program areas to hit that target. They were seeking a similar amount from colleagues at the National Institutes of Health. I figured they were aiming for around $1 billion.

I was annoyed. Not at Jo — she was doing her job with characteristic seriousness. I was annoyed by the situation itself — by the structural position we both occupied and by what the exercise revealed about how presidential science policy functions.

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The constitutional problem hiding in plain sight

Here’s what never appears in White House press releases about presidential science initiatives: only Congress has the power to appropriate taxpayer money. This isn’t a technicality — it’s the foundational architecture of federal spending. When NSF receives its annual budget, those funds have been appropriated by Congress for specific purposes under statutory authority. Program officers and directorate heads are stewards of a congressional trust, ultimately answerable to the legislative branch, not the executive.

And yet the White House’s actual influence over that budget is, in practice, more limited than it appears. There’s an old saying in Washington: the President proposes, the Congress disposes. The President’s budget request is largely a messaging document — Congress typically starts over, setting topline numbers and leaving agencies to determine specific research directions from there. The Obama White House, for all its scientific vision, understood this. The bully pulpit was the real instrument, not the budget pen.

Which makes Jo’s phone call more interesting, not less. She wasn’t calling to redirect taxpayer funds — Congress would have the final say on that. She was calling to build a message. What she wanted from me was not new money but a credible number: existing programs that could be rebranded under the new initiative’s banner and counted toward a headline figure. The $140 million from NSF BIO wasn’t $140 million in new microbiome research — it was $140 million in ongoing biological research that could be plausibly connected to the microbiome, renamed, reframed, and counted.

This is a meaningful distinction. The White House wasn’t telling me where to spend money. It was asking me to redescribe how I was already spending it. That’s a subtler thing to object to — and I want to be precise about my objection, because I’ve had the chance to think it through more carefully in the years since, including in conversation with Jo herself.

I could have said no. Francis Collins, then the NIH Director, did exactly that, and the request was accepted. These were genuinely requests, not commands. The annoyance I felt on that call was partly at the exercise — the gap between the headline and the reality — and partly at myself, for how quickly I complied when I could have pushed back.

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The science, though

Here is where I must complicate my own annoyance. I believed in the Microbiome Initiative. I still do — and the decade since its announcement has only deepened that conviction.

The microbiome is not a niche subject. The human body contains roughly as many microbial cells as human cells, and the collective genome of those microorganisms dwarfs our own in complexity and metabolic diversity. We are, in a very real sense, superorganisms: our health, our immune function, our neurological development, even our susceptibility to depression and anxiety, are all shaped in ways we are only beginning to understand by the trillions of organisms living inside us. The gut-brain axis — the bidirectional signaling pathway between the enteric and central nervous systems, mediated in part by the microbiome — may ultimately transform how we think about psychiatric disease. The relationship between the microbiome and cancer immunotherapy is already reshaping oncology: the composition of a patient’s gut microbiome can predict whether they will respond to checkpoint inhibitors, one of the most significant advances in cancer treatment in a generation.

Agriculture stands to be transformed just as profoundly. The soil microbiome — the invisible ecosystem beneath every field and forest — drives nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, and plant immunity. Manipulating soil microbial communities offers a plausible path to reducing synthetic fertilizer use, improving crop drought resilience, and sequestering atmospheric carbon at scale. These are not speculative futures. They are active research programs producing results.

In 2016, this frontier was real, large, and seriously underexplored. The research questions weren’t manufactured for a press release. This wasn’t a vanity project. The science was — and is — among the most consequential in biology.

And the presidential megaphone, despite its distortions, is a real instrument in ways that go beyond simple optics. Industry investment follows demonstrated government commitment — companies want to see federal support before putting their own dollars in. The Initiative generated buzz that translated into real new resources from non-federal sources. It also had a genuine scientific ambition at its core: to get researchers working across systems — comparing, for instance, the recovery of the Gulf microbiome after the Deepwater Horizon disaster with the recovery of the human gut microbiome after a course of antibiotics — to develop broad ecological principles that no single-system study could reveal. The goal was comparative microbiome science at scale. That was, and remains, a serious idea.

So, the question I kept returning to during that call and afterward wasn’t whether the Microbiome Initiative was good science policy. It was whether the way we announced and funded it was honest — and whether I had been honest with myself about my own role in it.

I don’t think I had been entirely. Jo has since reminded me that I had a choice. Collins made a different one. The pressure to participate is real, but it isn’t irresistible. The annoyance I felt on that call was legitimate — the gap between the headline figure and the new money was real, and the public deserved to understand that distinction. But the annoyance I should have felt, and didn’t quite feel until later, was at my own compliance.

And I was not alone in the complexity of that position. Jo was navigating her own version of it — a scientist of very high distinction, channeling her expertise into a process that was as much political theater as scientific strategy, trying to leverage the bully pulpit for science she genuinely believed in. We were both serving the machine. That’s what made the call feel the way it did.

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A later chapter

I left government in 2018 and returned to George Mason, where I had been a professor for many years before my time at NSF. I came back to teaching and research with a different perspective — more impatient, perhaps, but also more aware of which scientific questions mattered to people outside the academy.

One of those questions turned out to involve the microbiome.

In 2020, I published a paper in PLOS ONE with Kyle Brumfield, Anwar Huq, Menu Leddy, and Rita Colwell—a comparative analysis of whole-genome shotgun and 16S amplicon sequencing methods using publicly available data from the National Ecological Observatory Network. Rita Colwell is one of the foundational figures in environmental microbiology and a former Director of NSF. The fact that I ended up doing microbiome science alongside her is the kind of irony the federal science system occasionally produces and almost never acknowledges.

The NEON connection deserves a moment. Readers of this newsletter may recall an earlier piece — “Nothing But Tundra” — about how I flew to Alaska during my NSF tenure to inspect a NEON construction site that the paperwork said was progressing on schedule and found nothing but primeval tundra stretching to the horizon. What followed was one of the hardest decisions of my time in government: firing the managing organization and bringing in Battelle to rescue the project. NEON eventually came online in 2019, fully operational, producing open ecological data across nearly two hundred data products.

The data in our 2020 paper came from NEON.

I don’t say that to take credit for the paper’s existence — the science belongs far more to my collaborators, and NEON’s data is freely available to anyone. I say that because it illustrates how federal science infrastructure works on timescales longer than any administration or initiative. The NEON I helped rescue produced the data that underpinned microbiome research I did after leaving government — research that sat within a scientific ecosystem the National Microbiome Initiative had helped legitimize and accelerate. These threads connect in ways that no press release captures and no budget line reflects.

I thought about that call with Dr. Handelsman more than once while we were working. She had done her job. I had done mine. The arithmetic had added up. And somewhere downstream of that transaction — through the relabeled dollars, through the rescued observatory, through the open data and the collaboration with Colwell — there was a team of scientists doing the work the headline had promised.

That team included me.

The money wasn’t new. But the science was.