In October 2015, an underground gas storage well at the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility in southern California failed. Over the course of four months, it released more than 100,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere, setting the record for the nation’s largest known methane emissions event. 

In the days following, people in Porter Ranch began to experience bloody noses, headaches, nausea, rashes, and respiratory problems. The leak forced the closure of two schools for the remainder of the school year, and the evacuation of 10,000 people living in Porter Ranch, a community one mile downwind.

Aliso Canyon put methane super-emitters, events with emissions of over 100 kilograms per hour of methane, in the spotlight and raised a simple but critical question: Since methane, the primary component of natural gas, is non-toxic, why were people getting sick? What else was in the gas?

Some state regulatory agencies require oil and gas producers to report what is in their product to help the agency assess the environmental and health risks of oil and gas emissions. These documents are technically discoverable by the public, but often hard to access.

PSE Healthy Energy, and authors here, combed through tens of thousands of records and found that 99% of the natural gas sampled near the point of extraction across the country contains hazardous air pollutants— chemicals that the EPA has identified for their potential to cause serious health problems. For example, benzene, a known human carcinogen, was in more than 97% of the gas samples.

Even as federal methane regulations are being delayed or rolled back, states and local governments can still have many options for protecting human health from methane super-emitters. Regulatory options include strengthening air permitting disclosure requirements, expanding oil and gas infrastructure setback distances, broadening the types of infrastructure covered by setbacks, requiring leak detection and monitoring, strengthening emissions control requirements, investing in risk assessment and modeling of super-emitter events, and adopting short-term health benchmarks that reflect the acute risks posed by methane emissions. 

Operators can implement many of these protective measures voluntarily to protect human health and limit their own legal and regulatory risks.

Challenge and Opportunity  

The Health Risks of Methane Emissions

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. At this moment, more than two dozen satellites orbit Earth to detect and measure methane emissions, offering governments and citizens the opportunity to monitor methane emissions, and responsible parties to mitigate them. Recent advances in satellite monitoring have revealed that methane super-emitter events occur frequently across the United States and other countries around the world. Reducing the frequency and duration of these events will not only help slow climate change but will also benefit air quality and health.  

PSE applied the gas composition data we gathered from regulatory documents to methane emissions events recorded via satellite, and modeled the air quality impacts and health risks of 1,490+ methane emissions events across the United States. More than 98% of the events exceeded state-based short-term health risk benchmarks, posing human health risks. These results are documented on our publicly available Methane Risk Map (MRM). The air quality impacts and human health risks of methane super-emitters are not systematically captured in air permitting and regulatory processes. The Methane Risk Map provides regulators, lawyers, and policymakers with science-backed data to establish health-protective policies such as gas infrastructure setback distances, stronger monitoring requirements, and leak prevention, detection, and mitigation measures.

Our research found that different types of equipment have notable differences in the concentration of hazardous air pollutant emissions. For example, gas samples from liquid storage tanks—which hold crude oil, gas condensate, or produced water—contained benzene concentrations 59 times higher than those at wells or gathering pipelines, which collect and transport natural gas. This is because the stored liquid contains high levels of hazardous air pollutants, and emissions of working losses, breathing losses, and flash gas, which is formed due to changes in temperature or pressure, such as when a valve opens, take with them these hazardous air pollutants that were present in the liquid. Understanding how concentrations of hazardous air pollutants change and the causes of methane super-emitter events at different points in the gas supply chain can help regulators set policies that protect human health.   

Policy State of Play

The U.S. EPA’s Methane Super Emitter Program (SEP) was established in the New Source Performance Standards and Emissions Guidelines in 2024 as part of a federal effort to improve detection, reporting, and mitigation of large, unscheduled, and intermittent methane emissions events. The SEP partnered with certified third-party remote sensing companies to identify and report methane super-emitter events. Oil and gas operators were required to investigate any detected methane super-emitter events within five days and report findings within 15 days. However, the SEP is constrained by 40 C.F.R. part 60 subparts OOOO, OOOOa, OOOOb, and OOOOC regarding which events are considered super-emitter events. Specifically, the code defines a super-emitter event as an emission event at or near an oil and natural gas facility (e.g., an individual well site, centralized production facility, natural gas processing plant, or compressor station), which excludes emissions from other sources (e.g., landfills, refineries, and other methane sources). In July 2025, future implementation of the SEP was extended until January 22, 2027. This delayed implementation affects enforceability at the federal level. While there may be state-level reporting requirements, there is little federal accountability for operators who are repeat offenders or fail to adequately mitigate events. Additionally, PSE’s research shows that these events almost always release hazardous air pollutants that pose acute health risks, indicating that mitigating methane emissions could provide health benefits. 

The federal government is also taking steps to limit the ability of states to regulate the exposure of communities to harmful emissions. In January 2026, the federal government filed a lawsuit against the State of California related to SB1137, a state law passed in 2022 that requires new oil wells to be set back at least 3,200 feet from homes, schools, community centers, parks and playgrounds, healthcare facilities, or public buildings. 

Despite these challenges, there are opportunities at the state and local levels to use the science-backed data on PSE’s Methane Risk Map to inform health-protective energy policies closer to home.  

Oil and gas companies seeking to build new infrastructure must evaluate the air quality impacts that their proposed operations might have on the local community before they are given permission to expand. This makes air permitting processes for proposed natural gas infrastructure a key opportunity to advance health-protective energy policies. Oil and gas companies control the start and end of any short-term planned maintenance events—even ones that meet or exceed super-emitter emissions rates—and in doing so can account for any related blowdown events in annual emissions inventory reporting. However, non-routine methane super-emitter events—the kind that PSE has shown can have far-reaching air quality impacts—are not systematically accounted for in these permitting processes. Because super-emitters have historically been difficult to predict and detect, states do not include these events in their reporting requirements for oil and gas companies, leaving the health risks of such events unaccounted for.

Regulatory requirements and enforcement vary widely across states. Some states have regulatory requirements that help mitigate health risks from gas infrastructure. For example, California established setback distances for wells or gas production facilities and established the California Satellite Methane Project (CalSMP). CalSMP expands on the initial federal SEP work by mapping more methane sources, including landfills. Additionally, some states have health protections that are focused on chronic exposure to hazardous air pollutants, but ignore acute or short-term risks. For example, Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission held hearings in September 2025 to set new chronic health-based standards for five-priority air toxics, including benzene. PSE’s Methane Risk Map demonstrates that hazardous air pollutants emitted with methane during super-emitter events can produce ambient air concentrations high enough to pose health risks for people living near these emissions. Rules that only consider chronic exposures do not account for these risks.

Plan of Action

Human health risks of methane super-emitter events can be mitigated through evidence-based interventions. Even as federal air quality and human health protections are being constrained, both voluntary actions by operators and regulatory actions at the state, local, and tribal level can provide solutions.  

Recommendation 1. Increase gas composition transparency through air permitting. 

Generally, state regulators require companies to estimate emissions from routine gas leaks (also known as fugitive emissions) using gas composition data from the site, from a representative site, regional data, or a composition profile that is not site-specific. But these data are often unavailable to the public, may require a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to access, or are in formats that are difficult to utilize. Furthermore, how regulators and operators define a representative site, or sample, is not always disclosed.

In the process of building its national gas composition database, PSE learned that disclosure requirements and operator practices vary widely from state to state. Some states, such as Texas, New Mexico, and North Dakota, require gas composition analyses from accredited independent labs as part of permit applications, and make the full applications available to the public via web portals. However, other states, like California, lack gas composition lab reports or detailed data in publicly available documents, even though, in some cases, companies are required to perform these analyses. In California, public access barriers to gas composition data often come in the form of documents with extensive redactions, long and burdensome California Public Records Act processes, and fees. 

To help regulators, researchers, and impacted community members determine the health risks of hazardous air pollutants released during methane super-emitter events, states can require disclosure of gas composition data in publicly available databases. Since leaks occur throughout the supply chain, the best practice would be for every oil and gas facility operator to publicly disclose the composition of its gas and flash gas from multiple types of infrastructure, analyzed by accredited independent laboratories. Furthermore, when operators use representative samples (such as for facilities that are not yet built), best practice is to explain why the sample is representative of the facility.  Currently, states take an à la carte approach to disclosure, with many only checking some of these boxes, creating an inadequate patchwork of data to support health risk assessment and policymaking.

Recommendation 2. Establish greater setback distances for oil and gas infrastructure. 

Currently, only some states require setback distances for oil and gas infrastructure (Table 1). This setback means that wells or other equipment must be a minimum distance—usually on the order of hundreds to thousands of feet—from a home, school, or other sensitive facility. However, our findings show that typical setback distances are insufficient. First, setback regulations often overlook storage tanks, whose flash gas emissions can contain much higher benzene concentrations than well leaks. Furthermore, across the 1,490+ events currently on the Methane Risk Map, we found that modeled benzene concentrations typically exceeded short-term, state-based regulatory benchmarks on average out to two miles from the source of emissions. Differentiating setback requirements by equipment category and gas composition would improve safeguards against the most hazardous air pollutant emissions.

Recommendation 3. Prioritize flash gas emissions because of their health risks.

While some regulatory requirements for flash gas and storage tanks exist, PSE’s research shows that when flash gas is emitted from tanks, it can pose significant health risks due to the potential for high benzene concentrations in the released gas. Given these risks, regulators should prioritize flash gas sources for enhanced leak detection and repair requirements and compliance oversight, even though these types of events may not always have the highest methane emissions rates. When leaks occur, regulators can require operators to monitor, report, and address air quality impacts. These data would improve tracking of methane super-emitter events, inform maintenance practices, and help protect nearby communities and onsite workers.

Recommendation 4. Invest in modeling air quality impacts of gas leaks to inform risk management and emergency planning.

Regulatory approaches typically rely on routine emissions data, which do not capture the scale or reach of pollution from events such as tank failures, well leaks, or pipeline ruptures, which, as demonstrated by PSE’s Methane Risk Map, can generate short-term concentrations of health-harming pollutants that far exceed safe levels and extend far beyond facility boundaries. Without air quality modeling that incorporates gas composition and site-specific conditions, regulators and operators cannot assess the full scope of potential health risks or design effective mitigation and response strategies. Establishing transparent standardized air quality impact modeling, especially around residential areas and sensitive receptors like schools and childcare facilities, that accounts for methane super-emitter scenarios as part of permitting and risk management processes would provide data to support informed decisions by both operators and regulators.

Recommendation 5. Expand air quality monitoring in fenceline communities.

Equipping regulators with optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras and initiating targeted mobile or stationary air monitoring in fenceline communities and at facilities with repeated emissions events would enable independent detection of emission events and verification of mitigation attempts. These measures would focus oversight where risks are highest. Furthermore, site-specific information, including the cause and estimated duration of the leak, can improve health risk assessments and modeling. Indeed, PSE is already incorporating new, site-specific data provided by regulators into the Methane Risk Map to improve its modeling of tank emissions. 

Recommendation 6. Adopt short-term health benchmarks for hazardous air pollutants.

Effective air quality modeling of methane super-emitters requires establishing short-term (hourly) health-based concentration thresholds for the hazardous air pollutants that are found in natural gas, such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes, and hexane. While some states, such as California and Texas, establish such benchmarks, some do not. As shown by PSE’s Methane Risk Map, methane emissions events at natural gas facilities can lead to short-term spikes in hazardous air pollutant concentrations. Adopting and requiring short-term health benchmarks, combined with air quality modeling of non-routine event scenarios, to inform permitting, monitoring, and emergency response decisions ensures that health protections reflect real-world risks and prioritize fenceline communities.

Conclusion

Our research reveals that methane super-emitter events not only impact climate, but also impact air quality and pose human health risks. The Methane Risk Map shows that hazardous air pollutants are routinely released alongside methane during upstream natural gas leaks, often at concentrations that degrade air quality and pose acute health risks to nearby communities. Risks from these types of events remain largely invisible under current regulatory frameworks.

The Methane Risk Map can help both operators and regulators characterize health risks from methane emission events and target voluntary measures and regulatory oversight where they are most needed. By strengthening control requirements, data coverage, availability and transparency, updating and effectively implementing health benchmarks, improving siting, and expanding monitoring and risk modeling, policymakers can close regulatory gaps that leave people’s health vulnerable, and develop energy policy that protects human health. Through voluntary actions and transparent cooperation with regulators, operators can proactively mitigate health risks and manage the potential risks posed by independent detection and monitoring technologies.

FAQs

How was the database underpinning the MRM developed?

PSE collected and analyzed gas composition samples from federal and state agencies across major oil- and gas-producing basins. Using this information, we assembled the most comprehensive speciated database of gas composition covering a substantial share of reported upstream methane emissions nationwide. This database enables PSE scientists to estimate site-specific hazardous air pollutant concentrations in surrounding communities for each methane emissions event on the MRM.

read more

Why are all the emissions events on the MRM clustered in a few states? Does this mean that methane emissions do not pose health risks in other states?

The MRM only includes methane emissions events for which we have sufficient information to estimate source-specific gas composition; however, this only accounts for a small fraction of all the methane emissions events in the United States. The MRM is regularly being updated with new events as methane emissions and gas composition data become available. In the future, we plan to model methane emissions events from other parts of the gas supply chain, as well as from other U.S. states and countries.

read more

Why does the MRM only look at acute or short-term health risks and not chronic or long-term health risks?

The emissions rate for each event is derived from available satellite and aircraft measurements. These observations typically only provide emissions rates at a snapshot in time. Therefore, to be conservative, we compare one-hour average concentrations to acute or short-term health benchmarks.

read more

The MRM shows that where I live is an area at risk. Should I be worried? What kinds of action can I take?

If the MRM shows exceedances of health or safety benchmarks near your location, it suggests that there was a human health risk during those events. Prolonged or repeated exceedances—especially from the same site—can point to a concern. If you’re seeing risk indicators, it may be worth reaching out to local environmental groups or contacting your local health or environmental agencies for more information.

read more

America’s energy innovation ambitions are only as strong as the federal workforce responsible for delivering them. Yet, over the past year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has suffered massive losses of staff capacity and skills, largely due to the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), which slashed headcounts across the federal government. Occupations with skills essential to making and managing awards were among the hardest hit. As a result, many energy innovation programs ground to a halt in 2025. Although DOE activity began to rebound in 2026 without an increased and targeted hiring strategy, the department risks falling short just as the demand for energy innovation is accelerating.

The EFI Foundation (EFIF) and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) analyzed changes in DOE’s workforce and spending trends using EFIF’s updated Energy Innovation Project database. The following analysis identifies the workforce needed to restore DOE’s capacity to deliver on its energy innovation mission.

In 2025, DOE Lost Staff Critical to Program Execution

Under the Trump administration, DOE has lost over 2700 federal staff, a majority of whom departed through the agencywide DRP in 2025. Nearly any federal employee could opt-in to the DRP, meaning DOE had very little control over what expertise left the department. 

Of all staff that have departed DOE since February 2025, EFIF estimates over one third were in occupations with essential skills for making and managing award programs. Individuals in these roles are hired for experience managing budgets, personnel, and resources critical to executing the goals of specific programs. The occupations most impacted include management and program analysis (40% reduction), grants management (47% reduction), and loan specialists (42% reduction). Nearly every occupation type with skills essential to award management experienced a higher-than-average proportional decrease in headcount at DOE over the past year and a half. 

Figure 1. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: Data are from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and represent the percent difference in total headcount by occupation type across all DOE offices except the National Nuclear Security Administration and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Occupations are listed as occupational series, which are job categories defined by OPM as the description that an employee’s position falls under based on the duties and required qualifications of the position. EFIF identified 18 occupational series critical to managing DOE’s awards which saw significant changes across 2025 and 2026. Some categories are combined here for simplicity. See our approach section for details. 

Without rebuilding the loss of essential skill sets, DOE will struggle to translate congressionally appropriated funding into real-word energy innovation outcomes.

The massive reduction in federal staff has a compounding impact on DOE capacity due to the loss of institutional knowledge. In total, the thousands of federal workers who have departed DOE under the second Trump administration took with them a combined 29,792 years of service. Nearly 90% of departing staff were career employees, over half of whom had more than five years of service, with tenure likely spanning multiple administrations. In contrast, over one third of hires over the same period were political staff, who serve limited terms and are often new to the federal workforce. 

Figure 2. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: Data are from U.S. Office of Personnel Management and represent hires and departures across all DOE offices except the National Nuclear Security Administration and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Appointment types are defined by OPM as the type of appointment an employee is serving under in terms of permanence and competitiveness. EFIF separated OPM appointment types into career and political roles based on review of OPM appointment type descriptions. See the approach section for a detailed methodology.

Federal career staff are critical to ensuring agency function and smooth transition across presidential administrations. Career staff carry an understanding of department-specific administrative processes, lessons learned from prior programs, and relationships with private-sector partners—knowledge critical to executing and maintaining awards. While political staff often bring much-needed new perspectives and ideas into the fold, they are, by definition, more focused on overall policy direction than day-to-day functions. Increased political staff capacity cannot replace the role of seasoned career staff at the department. Energy innovation at DOE, which often operates on multi-administration timelines, depends on the health of its entire workforce. 

DOE is Ramping Up Activity, But Execution Requires the Right Staff Levels and Expertise

In the first quarter (Q1) of 2026, DOE outpaced all of 2025 in funding announcements and project selections across its science and energy innovation offices. The department announced the same number of awards (14) in Q1 2026 as it did in all of 2025, but the dollar value of the 2026 awards was four times greater. In addition to an increase in new program funding, on April 15, 2026, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the unpausing of nearly 2,000 awards. 

However, new spending activities in the second quarter of 2026 have dropped drastically. Is the agency experiencing the implications of an ongoing staffing shortage? 

Figure 3. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: Data are from Grants.gov, DOE’s press releases, and USAspending.gov from February 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026 and were last updated on July 6, 2026. Solicitations without funding, such as requests for information (RFIs), are excluded. Data reflect DOE science and energy innovation offices, excluding the Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF), which was formerly known as the Loan Programs Office. See the approach section for a full list of offices tracked.

In addition to issuing new funding opportunities, DOE science and energy innovation offices actively manage over 5,000 awards worth $41.1 billion, according to EFIF’s Energy Innovation Project database. Yet, these offices were the hardest hit by the DRP. According to data obtained by FAS, an estimated 1,190 of DOE’s DRP participants were from its science and energy innovation offices. As of October 2025, these offices had lost an estimated 43% of their federal employees.

To rebuild a workforce that can drive forward American energy innovation, DOE must not only make up for the skills and expertise it lost in 2025, but also identify the workforce capacity and capabilities needed to achieve its priorities.

Although the department can shift staff capacity and programs around to increase headcount in priority offices, this does not replace the program-level expertise lost with the departure of seasoned staff. For example, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) lost 85% of its staff by June 2025, leaving an estimated 40 employees to manage about 100 projects and a $27 billion portfolio. While the department can move OCED programs and limited remaining staff to other offices with higher headcounts, this does not replace the awardee relationships and commercial-scale project expertise former staff built while managing OCED’s portfolio.

Figure 4. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: “Total budgetary resources” include DOE’s full obligational authority in a given fiscal year, including appropriations, unobligated carryover balances, and authority from offsetting collections. For the purposes of this analysis, off-budget financing accounts are excluded. Data are from USAspending.gov and reflect DOE science and energy innovation offices, excluding EDF.  “FTE” is used throughout to mean full-time equivalents for federal employees, as measured by OMB. FTE data are from OMB’s Presidential Budget Request Technical Supplement for fiscal year 2027.

In addition to achieving the capacity needed to manage existing programs, the department should also acquire the workforce skills required to realize its new ambitions. For example, DOE’s new funding opportunities include increases in nontraditional other transaction agreements (OTAs). To execute OTAs, DOE needs expertise in both federal cost accounting—a narrow specialization—and the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles used by the private sector. The demand for new skills extends to DOE’s contracting capabilities as well. Due to their lack of a standard structure, OTAs require highly specialized contracts. As stated by a Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) program awardee, there exists “a disconnect between developers who know how to deliver projects and bureaucrats trying to write a contract.” DOE must carefully evaluate whether its remaining contracting workforce can accommodate burgeoning demand for OTAs and commercial-style agreements.

Without the right expertise, DOE will be unable to spend federal dollars responsibly, manage existing awards, and strategically impact the energy sector. Every award requires staff to evaluate applications, negotiate terms, obligate funds, and monitor performance over the life of a project. The pace of new and restarted awards appears to be building faster than DOE’s current workforce can absorb. 

DOE Increased Hiring But Still Saw a Net Loss of Employees in 2026

In 2025, the Trump administration assumed that it could achieve its priorities with substantially fewer career staff by relying more on political staff. Yet, a year after the DRP, it is increasingly clear that a new workforce strategy is needed. Mass departures under the DRP have crippled federal agencies. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has recognized the negative impacts of staff losses and is looking to reverse cuts to critical positions. As stated by OPM director Scott Kupor, “we probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly.” 

In April 2026, OPM launched a governmentwide hiring initiative focused on project management and data science, aiming to hire 250 professionals across the federal workforce. While a start, this is far from sufficient to fill existing gaps. DOE alone has experienced a net decrease of 140 program managers under the Trump administration. Larger hiring efforts will be needed to recover workforce capacity.

Hiring has increased slightly at DOE in 2026. From January to May 2026, DOE hired 193 federal employees, more than in nearly all of 2025 (129, excluding January). Despite the uptick, however, DOE continues to experience a net loss of federal staff in 2026.

Figure 5. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: Data are from U.S. Office of Personnel Management and represent hirings and departures across all DOE offices except the National Nuclear Security Administration and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Average monthly separations and hires in 2025 exclude data from January 2025.

The 2027 president’s budget request (PBR) calls for increasing staff in select science and energy innovation offices, specifically the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Office of Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy (HGEO), and the Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF). However, in several science and energy innovation offices, requested staff size in the PBR still fall below pre-2025 levels. It is unclear if increased staff capacity in favored offices will come from new hires or a transfer of existing staff from other offices. Given current—and growing—workloads among science and energy innovation offices, it is unlikely that many offices have excess capacity to redistribute. 

Figure 6. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: “FTE” is used throughout to mean full-time equivalents for federal employees, as measured by OMB. Data are from OMB’s Presidential Budget Request Technical Supplement for FY 2027. “Office of Energy Dominance Financing” represents all Loan Programs Office accounts; “Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office (HEGO)” represents both Fossil Energy and HGEO accounts.

It is unclear if and when DOE intends to hire new staff in key offices and replace the loss of essential award management skills. The pipeline to hire federal staff is long and narrow. As of July 22, 2026, there are 25 publicly open positions at DOE listed on USAJobs.gov but only two were in science and energy innovation offices. To achieve the administration’s energy innovation goals, DOE needs to up its hiring.

In the past, DOE has filled gaps in federal workforce capacity through contracting. However, combined staff pay and contractor spending in fiscal year 2026 is currently at pre-BIL levels, when the department had less than one third of its current science and energy innovation budget. 

Figure 7. Source: EFI Foundation.

Notes: Data are from USAspending.gov, accessed July 2026. Obligations to contractors are calculated using the “advisory and assistance services” object class. Staff pay obligations are calculated by summing four object classes: civilian personnel benefits, full-time permanent, other personnel compensation, and other than full-time permanent.

Moreover, increasing contractor capacity does not fully replace the function of federal employees. Contractors are not allowed to fulfill some critical award-making functions reserved for federal employees including awarding grants, obligating funds, and executing loan commitments. These occupations are fundamental to project deployment, and increasing contractors is a temporary, far-from-optimal solution for a strained federal workforce.

Staffing DOE to Execute Its Mission

Rebuilding DOE’s workforce goes beyond simply replacing the employees the agency has lost. DOE first needs a holistic view of its goals as an agency to identify the workforce capacity needed to carry out that mission.

DOE has expanded in recent years into commercial-scale project deployment and has undergone changes to its priorities and internal operations during the second Trump administration. This means that the department’s workforce needs are likely different today than they have been in the past. Because of this, DOE must look to align hiring with current and expected future workload demands and organizational needs rather than simply restoring previous staffing levels one-to-one.

DOE faces an uphill battle. Executing ambitious energy priorities requires an equally ambitious workforce strategy. Yet, hiring trends in 2026 thus far are still insufficient to maintain—let alone build—workforce capacity. While targeted OPM hiring efforts across federal agencies for project management skill sets are a start, they must be expanded to meaningfully restore the loss of key workforce capabilities. Further, the Trump administration’s tumultuous start to its relationship with the federal workforce will likely have long-term effects on its ability to attract new or returning talent to federal agencies. Nevertheless, DOE needs to rebuild a workforce that can deliver on its energy priorities because any energy strategy is only as strong as the workforce responsible for implementing it. 

Our Approach

All data used in report figures, with the exception of project selections, are available in EFIF’s Energy Innovation Project public database. For a full methodology on data gathering and cleaning, as well as offices included in EFIF’s science and energy innovation offices, please refer to the website’s methodology page.

DOE-wide staffing data were downloaded from OPM on July 6, 2026. Employment (headcount) figures are benchmarked to the end of the fiscal year on September 30th of each year with the exception of fiscal year 2026 which is benchmarked to May 30^th 2026 due to data availability. Hires and separations are cumulative totals across all months within each fiscal year. The data set includes all DOE employees, limited to full-time employees by work schedule, employees whose sub-agency element is Department of Energy, and excludes employees under National Nuclear Security Administration pay plans. Office-specific staffing data are from the 2027 president’s budget request and DOE data obtained by FAS through the Freedom of Information Act which included staffing numbers for OCED; Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains; Grid Deployment Office; EDF (formerly known as LPO); Office of Federal Energy Management Programs; Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E); Office of Technology Commercialization; Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs; Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Energy Responsibility; Office of Electricity; Office of Science; Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management; and Office of Nuclear Energy. Funding and awards data are from USAspending.gov, grants.gov, and EFIF review of DOE press releases. 

For simplicity, EFIF combined multiple OPM-defined occupational series into single categories. “Management and program analysis/assistance” represents series 0344 and 0343, “miscellaneous administration and program” represents series 0301, “contracting and procurement” represents series 1102 and 1106, “program management” represents series 0340, “financial support and accounting” represents series 0501, 0505, and 0510, “grants management” represents series 1109, “loan specialists” represents series 1165, and “legal and patents” represents series 0901, 0905, 0950, 0963, 0986, 1221, and 1222. “Technical experts” were identified by their classification as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) occupations, omitting those occupational series related to technology support or operations.

To distinguish career from political employees, EFIF combined OPM appointment types in the following way. “Career” includes career (competitive service permanent), career (senior executive service permanent), career-conditional (competitive service permanent), executive (excepted service permanent), nonpermanent (competitive service nonpermanent), and Schedule B (excepted service permanent). “Political” includes executive (excepted service nonpermanent), limited term (senior executive service nonpermanent), noncareer (senior executive service permanent),, and Schedule C (excepted service nonpermanent). “Other” includes other (excepted service nonpermanent), other (excepted service permanent), Schedule D (excepted service nonpermanent), Schedule A (excepted service nonpermanent), Schedule A (excepted service permanent, Schedule D (excepted service permanent), and invalid.

Despite most people not being able to name a single one, critical minerals are fundamental to the advanced technologies that underpin U.S. economic competitiveness and national security. Think microchips, electric vehicles, and life-saving medical devices. However, as well-documented by FAS, the United States remains dependent on exports from a limited number of countries that mine and process them. This is despite efforts to onshore and diversify supply chains through major initiatives like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and targeted trade policies. The consequences of failing to meet this domestic demand, and meet it promptly, will be passed onto American consumers: inflationary risks, supply chain disruptions, and the possibility of the U.S. being “exposed to the leverage of resource-rich countries or market incumbents abroad.” That’s flowery speak for the U.S. being held hostage by our reliance on rocks. 

We’re not the only country dealing with this. And given the scale of this challenge, no single nation will be able to address it solely through domestic policy. Rather, it will require significant collaboration and cooperation amongst allied nations through vehicles of international science and technology engagement. 

Since late last year, we have seen the Trump administration’s willingness to address export promotion, supply chain security, and technology leadership for other national priorities through a flurry of bilateral technology prosperity deals:

• In October 2025, the U.S. signed a technology prosperity deal with Japan focused on AI, quantum, 6G telecommunications, fusion energy, and space exploration. 
• That same month, the U.S. formalized a technology prosperity deal with Korea, focused on AI, 65 telecommunications, quantum, pharmaceutical supply chains, space exploration, and basic research and STEM exchange. 
• In September 2025, the U.S. announced a technology prosperity deal with the United Kingdom focused on AI, civil nuclear energy, quantum, 6G telecommunications, and research security; however, just a short time later, in December, implementation was suspended over frustration over a lack of progress, but restarted back in February 2026 with a more narrow focus on nuclear energy. 
• Most recently, in May 2026, the U.S. signed a technology prosperity deal with Sweden focused on AI, 5G/6G connectivity, biomedical research, advanced manufacturing, nuclear energy, space exploration, quantum, and research security.

These technology prosperity deals reflect the administration’s approach to science diplomacy as focused on economic and security returns for the United States, first and foremost. But more importantly, while signaling intent to cooperate on shared interests, all these agreements explicitly state that they do not create legally binding obligations, and that nothing commits the participants to the expenditure of funds, thus rendering them effectively toothless. Rather than attempting to tackle critical minerals through bilateral technology prosperity deals that commit nothing and bind no one, the U.S. needs a dedicated, properly resourced device for international science and technology cooperation with real authority, funding, and accountability.

The Strategic Technology and Resilient Alliances Act of 2026 (STRATA Act) would do exactly that. This new bipartisan bill by Representatives Young Kim (R-CA-40) and Ami Bera (D-CA-06) would establish a Critical Minerals Innovation Partnership program within the Department of State, to be led by a Senate-confirmed director reporting to the Under Secretary of Economic Affairs. Unlike the toothless technology prosperity deals, the STRATA Act would create real mechanisms for cooperation: binding partnership agreements with specific objectives, quantitative benchmarks, multiyear funding plans, and intellectual property protections. The Director would be empowered to issue joint solicitations with partner countries, coordinate demand aggregation across allied governments and the private sector, and establish International Centers of Excellence for innovative extraction and processing technologies in partner nations. A public-facing digital platform would connect U.S. startups, universities, and research institutions to funding opportunities and collaborative projects. Crucially, the bill also amends the Foreign Assistance Act to explicitly authorize financing for critical minerals S&T cooperation, giving the program the legal and budgetary backbone that bilateral deals have lacked. The program would sunset after ten years, providing a built-in accountability horizon while allowing existing agreements to run their course. There are historical and contemporary analogous efforts that can serve as models of success. 

The Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 established and authorized the Cooperative Threat Reduction program to facilitate “cooperation between the United States, the Soviet Union, its republics, and any successor entities to (1) destroy nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and other weapons, (2) transport, store, disable, and safeguard weapons in connection with their destruction, and (3) establish verifiable safeguards against the proliferation of such weapons.” 25 years into the program, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) documented the program’s significant accomplishments, including the destruction of 2,532 missiles, the decommissioning of 1,300 delivery systems, the destruction of over 4,700 tons of chemical weapons agents, and the employment of 22,000 former WMD scientists.

More recently, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 authorized the International Technology Security and Innovation Fund (ITSI). It provided the Department of State $100 million per year over five years “to promote the development and adoption of secure and trustworthy telecommunications networks and ensure semiconductor supply chain security and diversification.” ISTI awards have included a $13.8 million cooperative agreement in 2024 with Arizona State University to expand semiconductor workforce capacity and strengthen supply chain infrastructure across partner countries in the Americas and Indo-Pacific. That same year, through the ITSI Fund, the State Department collaborated with the Inter-American Development Bank to launch the CHIPS ISTI Western Hemisphere Semiconductor Initiative, to enhance “semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) capabilities in key partner countries, beginning with Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica.” Additionally, the fund enabled a partnership between the State Department and the India Semiconductor Mission, Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India, focused on assessing India’s semiconductor ecosystem, including its regulatory framework, workforce, and infrastructure needs, to inform potential future joint initiatives. 

When Congress provides dedicated authority and real funding, the State Department can serve as an effective vehicle for technology-focused international partnerships. The same model should be applied to critical minerals. As Congress considers broader packages to advance critical minerals production and supply chain resilience, science diplomacy vehicles must be part of that conversation. It cannot be an afterthought; rather, it must be an intentional pillar of any strategy.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” – President John F. Kennedy, announcing the original moonshot in 1962

This piece developed in concert with the Moonshots and Metascience event made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

In 1945, the Federation of American Scientists was founded by a group of physicists that helped to develop the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. FAS was born at a critical juncture – the creation of the atomic bomb was the first time the world had seen a coordinated, interdisciplinary effort to harness science for an ambitious goal. FAS’s founders had just witnessed the power and potential impact of transformative science initiatives. Deeply concerned about the potential for harnessing this impact for malice, they came together to ensure that science and technology would promote societal benefit rather than harm.

Eighty years later, we find ourselves at yet another pivotal moment for the scientific enterprise. Americans are asking critical questions about whether publicly funded research is delivering for them, their families, and their communities. To respond to that challenge, we can learn from FAS’s roots by asking: what does it take to design initiatives centered on big, challenging goals that lead us to better science and a better world? After all, whenever the government spearheads such ambitious initiatives, it can lead to tremendous public benefit in terms of completely new technologies and capabilities that serve critical public needs.

Critical to launching such initiatives is understanding the components that make them so successful. To this end, FAS organized a recent event “Moonshots for Metascience and Metascience for Moonshots” to ask hard questions about what has made prior ambitious efforts work, and why some of those efforts failed – building toward a conversation about the types of moonshot-style initiatives needed today. You can get an inside look at one of those conversations, featuring renowned scientist Lee Hood, here.

From those conversations, we’ve identified the key ingredients of successful moonshots that meet the moment, and developed recommendations about what future efforts can and should look like. 

Defining the term “moonshot”

The word moonshot was described by a number of attendees as tired, overused, and overhyped. It has evolved into a marketing term for ambitious science, rather than a specific term used to describe a program with discrete structure and objective. 

Other, similar terms might get closer to more generalized ambitious science: entrepreneur and founder of the X-Prize Peter Diamandis uses the term “moonshot mindset” for what he calls “10x thinking”; in other words, the type of approach that treats every problem as solvable and aims for an improvement of 1000% over the current state. Economist Mariana Mazzucato centers her work around “mission-oriented innovation”, an approach that leverages frontier knowledge to help solve big challenges. And philanthropy increasingly uses the term “big bet” to describe these types of projects. 

Ultimately, whatever you want to call it, our goal is to better understand and promulgate the essential elements of both moonshots and their close cousins: initiatives that set audacious and transformative goals, how those initiatives chart a clear path toward achieving those goals, and the roadmap for stretching beyond the limits and mechanisms of the traditional scientific R&D enterprise. 

It’s not enough to know what your “moon” is – you need to know the trajectory of the “shot”, too.

Successful moonshots involve both a clear what and a clear how. If you think about prior moonshot efforts, there are probably a select few that jump to mind: the Apollo Program, the Manhattan Project, and the Human Genome Project are the most notable efforts. What’s something these all have in common?: A “moon”, a goal that anyone can clearly define. This is a critical element of successful moonshots.

But other similar efforts have been tried before to less avail. As an example, consider the Human Brain Project. This project had a clear goal: to simulate the entire human brain on a computer. It concluded in 2023 after 10 years and €1 billion spent. The effort did lead to significant advances in neuroscience, but it failed to accomplish its stated goal. From the jump, scientists were highly critical of this initiative because they did not believe the requisite technology existed, or was even close to existing. In other words, the how was unclear. 

This is common for many such initiatives. For example, when the Human Genome Project was launched, we did not have the technology capable of meeting the mission. The project was highly criticized by many in the research community because the traditional method of DNA sequencing could not possibly be scaled to meet the goal. They needed a new way to sequence DNA faster, with longer reads, and for less money. Therefore, the first goal was to drive investment in the development of technology that could answer the how question. 

A successful moonshot is one where it’s clear that we are on the precipice of achieving a once-unimaginable goal, if only we make a significant investment toward that end. Think of the original moonshot: when JFK announced this initiative, we had seen a man orbit the Earth. And we knew that putting a man on the moon was challenging, but far from impossible – we just needed to devote the appropriate time, resources, and organization around that goal. 

Organizational structure and governance matter

The history of major scientific initiatives suggests that organizational structure and governance are not merely administrative details. They are often the deciding factor between transformational success and expensive stagnation. 

The Human Genome Project illustrates this directly. Years of planning preceded the project’s formal launch in 1990. The project was organized using a joint agency structure, partnering the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy (DOE), with the two agencies signing a memorandum of understanding to coordinate their efforts. NIH instituted a university grant-based program funding multiple genome centers for five-year periods, a deliberate choice to distribute the work across institutions while maintaining central coordination. In this example and others, structure was not the container for science – it shaped what science is possible in the first place and funneled efforts towards a central goal.

Governance matters for a related but distinct reason: it determines who has the authority to make bets and whether an initiative can maintain its ambition as it encounters institutional and technological barriers. The Human Genome Project’s governance was tested early on. Its inaugural director resigned in 1992. Its new director took over nearly a year later, bringing a revised five-year plan. The ability to absorb that leadership transition without losing momentum was itself a governance achievement; it depended on the project having clear enough goals and distributed enough institutional ownership that no single departure could derail it. 

Evidence from other successful models like DARPA similarly suggests that concentrated decision-making authority combined with clear accountability to a defined endpoint is strongly associated with the risk tolerance that transformational work demands. Governance structures send signals that shape who joins and how they behave: a structure that punishes failure will produce risk-averse science regardless of how bold the original mandate was. In this sense the organizational choices made at founding are not just operational. They are a statement of values that propagate through every subsequent decision made to drive the initiative forward.

Today’s moonshots can, and should be, informed by metascience

Sometimes it’s more obvious that we are ready for a moonshot. Again, thinking back to the Apollo program: if we can send someone into orbit around the Earth, we can almost certainly find a way to get to the moon. But in many scientific fields, it’s less clear that we are on the verge of a breakthrough. However, new technological advances and a wealth of available data are starting to make it possible to identify signals that we might be on that verge. In a pre-print published in 2025, Davis et al describe an approach using the PubMed database to detect when breakthroughs are on the horizon in biomedical research; Kristine Willis describes how we can apply that framework to science funding in general. This is an example of how we can directly leverage evidence to inform future ambitious efforts, and will be especially useful for moonshots where understanding where science will likely be in 4-5 years can help direct ambitious investments.

The field of academic study that Davis, Willis, and many others contribute to is called metascience, also referred to as the science of science or research on research, which uses the scientific method to study science itself; it seeks to build an understanding of how research is funded, conducted, and published. 

Metascience can help us understand not just what topics might be ripe for a moonshot, but also how to best run those initiatives. There is a limited amount of existing evidence on moonshots specifically, but metascientists can offer useful insights. For example, Dashun Wang’s work on the different types of innovations produced by different size teams or his finding that interdisciplinary teams produce research that is more widely-cited can inform the structure of projects funded under a moonshot effort. Or we can look to Pierre Azoulay’s work on funding people vs. projects, or where grant funding is most useful to spur scientific progress to inform when and how government takes the lead in developing moonshots. These insights, all generated in the past 15 years, help us build new moonshot initiatives that are more efficient, allowing us to make the case that we are better positioned to launch ambitious moonshots because we have a strong evidence base for what works.

Metascience expertise should also be embedded within moonshot efforts to help us understand if we’re making the progress that we hope for and to set achievable timelines. Learning from similar efforts in the UK, there have been recent calls to embed metascience teams within U.S. federal agencies to evaluate the effectiveness of their funding approaches. A metascience team, funded as part of a moonshot initiative, can build evidence along the way so we can learn from any successes and failures and adjust strategy to improve output and efficiency.

In short, metascience can help us understand when we’re ready for a moonshot, how to structure it, and evaluate its effectiveness as it proceeds.

What are the next moonshots?

We have the ingredients for successful moonshots and other transformative scientific efforts, a mandate from the public to engage in scientific discovery that will have a positive impact on their lives, and ambitious national priorities that require significant investment in R&D. 

At our event, participants imagined a set of possible moonshot efforts that might meet the moment:

Goal	Fly a zero-emission passenger plane from Washington to London within 10 years.	Make all federally-funded science AI legible and publicly accessible in 10 years.	Build a national initiative to increase healthspan by 5% over 10 years.
Why now?	Rising fuel prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have made a visible impact on the airline industry. Clean energy-powered planes have the potential to be more resistant to price shocks and reduce dependence on foreign oil sources.	AI for science is a priority for the current administration, which has launched the Genesis Mission. As the use of AI proliferates across the research enterprise, ensuring that AI is trained using high-quality data and evidence will make it most useful and reliable.	The ever-increasing costs of healthcare, particularly for the elderly and those with chronic health conditions, are under a microscope as ACA subsidies expire and concerns about Social Security insolvency escalate. Health and wellbeing are elevated as administration priorities via the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
Why a moonshot?	This requires multidisciplinary coordination and collaboration: a well-designed effort on this topic would require the Departments of Energy and Transportation to work with private industry, including energy companies and airplane manufacturers.	This is an effort that seeks to transform R&D across government; it would likely require a central coordinating force within OSTP or another center-of-government agency.	Conducting R&D about “what works” to increase healthspan cuts across multiple federal agencies’ remits and private industry (for example, wearable technology companies would have a stake in this effort).

These are not just thought experiments. Each proposal represents a domain where we have clear signals that we are on the verge of something transformational, where the public interest is clear, and where the missing ingredient is a coordinated, well-designed effort to close the gap between what we know and what we could achieve. In other words, each has a clear “moon”. The work ahead is designing the “shot.”

Eighty years ago, FAS’s founders emerged from the Manhattan Project having witnessed what science could accomplish when organized around a bold goal, and committed themselves to ensuring that power was directed toward human benefit. Today, we face a different but parallel challenge: not just identifying the right goals for science, but building the institutional capacity to pursue them effectively. The Human Phenome Project, which our Q&A with Lee Hood describes in detail, is one example of what that could look like – an initiative designed from the start with the organizational structure, governance model, and embedded metascience capacity that transformative efforts require.

FAS was founded on the conviction that scientists have a responsibility not just to do science, but to think carefully about how science is organized and to whose benefit. That conviction is as relevant now as it was in 1945. The moonshots we need are within reach. The question is whether we are willing to be as rigorous about how we pursue them as we are about the science itself.

This piece developed in concert with the Moonshots and Metascience event made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Algae is making plenty of headlines lately with the recent drama at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. But this is far from the first time that algae has seized the spotlight. When I was a graduate student at the University of Washington (UW) in the late 1990s, I biked daily along the Burke-Gilman trail from my house in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood to campus. As a recent transplant from New York City, the blue waters of Lake Washington on sunny days never failed to amaze me. But the stories of Lake Washington’s not-so-distant “Lake Stinko” past were the stuff of legend. A few decades prior Lake Washington had a giant pollution problem — cloudy, dirty, and smelly, fouled with 20 million gallons of wastewater pumped into it each day, which prompted algae outbreaks and then algae die-offs.

At UW I was inspired by professors Tommy and Yvette Edmondson, then emeriti faculty and local heroes whose work on ecological tipping point theory and Lake Washington offered living proof that systems could rapidly undergo dramatic transitions between different ecological states. And sometimes, they could snap back to a pre-transition state. Their research led directly to the creation of Metro, the Seattle agency that diverted sewage effluent away from the lake, enabling Lake Washington’s dramatic recovery. 

This history is top of mind because complex systems – from ecological to political to socio-technical – rarely change the way we expect. They can absorb pressure for years, even decades, then bifurcate, reorganizing rapidly around a new equilibrium that can look nothing like the old one. What happens after the transition has a lot to do with how resilient the system is to begin with.

It is perhaps unsurprising then, that this current moment of disruption and transition in the U.S. scientific enterprise is making me think deeply again about tipping points and state changes, beginning with the question of how resilient was this system to begin with? Even prior to this current moment of acute disruption, the U.S. scientific enterprise has been showing early warning signs of instability for years — research becoming measurably less disruptive, grant success rates falling, administrative burden consuming nearly half of researcher time, alternative funding models proliferating at the margins (e.g. FROs, Fast Grants, etc), because the core systems were not sufficiently responsive. 

Many of our research institutions were built for a scientific, technological, and geopolitical environment that no longer exists. That environment was the one Vannevar Bush designed for in 1945: a single Cold War rival, science conducted by individual investigators in small academic labs, and a public trust in science near its historical peak. Eighty years later, the competition spans AI, biotech, and advanced manufacturing at once; research is large-scale and computational; and that trust is being actively renegotiated. The architecture hasn’t kept pace.They were optimized for incentives and stakeholders that have changed and have lacked the flexibility to adapt. 

The acute perturbation over the past year, massive cuts to federal grants and large-scale erosion of the federal workforce, has rapidly exacerbated an instability that was already there, and is forcing the system into a rapid and uncertain transition. Though Congress ultimately rejected the administration’s deepest proposed cuts to NIH and NSF, the agencies tasked with running the system never recovered the staff needed to operate it: as of April 2026, NSF had awarded only about a fifth of its typical grant volume for the fiscal year, and NIH about half. 

Metascience Separates Progress from Noise

Meanwhile, the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) applied to science is layering rapid, untested acceleration on top of institutional turbulence, with promises of massive scientific breakthroughs with fewer guardrails. For example, in October 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company is internally tracking toward an intern-level AI research assistant by September 2026 and a fully autonomous “legitimate AI researcher” by 2028, on the same day OpenAI completed its shift away from nonprofit governance constraints. The institutional capacity to evaluate, govern, and correct what such systems produce is not advancing on anything close to that timeline. Acceleration without the institutional capacity to evaluate what is working, course-correct when necessary, and build knowledge that outlasts any single initiative will create noise, not progress. What we do next needs to be grounded in evidence. This is where metascience (the science of science) is poised to play an outsized role – by actively treating this moment of disruption as a large-scale systems-level experiment and learning as we go. This will only work though, if we can grow the field of metascience and position it for success. 

In our recent FAS workshop, “Metascience for Moonshots and Moonshots for Metascience” we grappled with two distinct questions. The first proved more tractable than the second. It proved relatively straightforward to contend with the idea that metascientific approaches should be applied to help drive and evaluate progress toward ambitious goals with clear finish lines; for example, a climate-related goal to fly a zero-emission passenger plane from Washington to London within 10 years and health-related goal to build a national initiative to increase healthspan by 5% over 10 years – these are goals that can be formally constructed by working backward from a defined outcome. Metascience expertise embedded within moonshot efforts can help us assess the progress and to set achievable timelines, as well as build evidence along the way to enable learning and adjust strategy to improve output and efficiency.

But unlike curing cancer, sequencing the human genome, or landing on the moon, defining a moonshot for metascience resists a clearly defined finish line. Through the course of the workshop, the group came to a consensus  that the specific moonshot framing did not hold well. There was no argument that the field of metascience needs to grow and should play a role in meeting this moment of transition in the scientific enterprise, but it proved difficult to define a “moonshot for metascience.” Rather, metascience lends itself to a different kind of ambitious mission. 

Accelerator versus Transformer Missions

Economist Mariana Mazucatto distinguishes between “accelerator missions” that are hard, expensive, and coordinated, but can ultimately be defined by a single verifiable achievement. These are traditional moonshots. In contrast, she outlines a different class of “transformer missions,” which lack a specific finish line, but succeed by changing what the system itself is capable of doing. Her prime example of a transformer mission is Germany’s Energiewende, the country’s decades-long commitment to shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Framed around a clear political direction but designed to stimulate bottom-up innovation across multiple sectors, it had no single endpoint, no moment at which Germany could declare the transition complete. Instead, the investment built the regulatory, market, and institutional infrastructure that made the direction of travel self-sustaining across governments, industries, and generations. The goal was transformation, not achievement. By this articulation, metascience is a transformer mission. Its aim is not to solve a single problem but to build the capacity that makes the entire science system better at learning from evidence — and to embed that capacity inside the accelerator missions already underway. 

Over the waning weeks of 2025, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued an ambitious Request for Information (RFI), asking for public input on how to “Accelerate the American Scientific Enterprise.” The RFI called for a comprehensive assessment of how the federal government prioritizes and structures scientific research, including a specific question on the role of metascience. FAS submitted a comprehensive response. Many organizations called for evidence-based reform of federal grantmaking, with near-universal agreement on the need to reduce administrative burden, reform peer review, and build metascience capacity inside federal agencies. But notably absent is any proposal to build metascience as a discipline in its own right and equip it to measure and evaluate this scientific enterprise in transition. 

Metascience Will Be Central to Transformative Change

Metascience cannot stop the rapid disruption and changes in the scientific enterprise underway, but it can help decide where it ends up. That means doing a few concrete things now, while the system is still in motion, before it settles into a new normal. 

• Treat what’s already happening now as THE experiment. The Genesis Mission, NSF’s new X-Labs, and other major initiatives launching right now are, in effect, live tests of new ways to fund and organize science, whether or not anyone designed them that way. Metascience doesn’t need to wait for a dedicated initiative of its own; it can study what’s already underway and feed lessons back before these efforts harden into permanent practice. But that only works with real rigor and intention, building in the comparisons and honest evaluation needed to learn and generate evidence.
  
• Build the basic data and record-keeping first. Before you can run real experiments on what works in funding science, agencies need to publish their data in usable, machine-readable form, with consistent standards so grants can be compared across agencies, and pre-registration so results can’t be quietly reshaped after the fact.This will be the only honest way to tell whether any reform actually worked.
  
• Build the field, starting with the people. Right now, a growing number of people want metascience’s findings, but almost nobody is funding what it takes for the field to actually exist over time — training programs, places to publish, a professional community. Training a researcher takes years, so anyone who wants to be doing serious metascience work by 2035 needs to start now, in the next year or two, whether through a Ph.D. or another path into the field.
  
• Give the people doing this work real say, not just a seat at the table. If metascience teams inside agencies like NSF, NIH, and DOE can only offer advice, their work tends to get quietly absorbed into business as usual. They need a direct line to the people who decide what gets funded, real ability to change how grants are evaluated, protection from being slowly watered down over time, and enough independence to report findings honestly even when those findings are unflattering to the agency that funds them.

Complex systems in transition do not suddenly pause. And unlike Lake Washington, the transition of the U.S. scientific enterprise will almost certainly not restore to a prior equilibrium once acute pressures are removed. We need the field of metascience to be ready to guide the system into a state that is more responsive, more trustworthy, and fit for purpose in a world that looks nothing like the one the current system was built for. That is metascience’s “moonshot.”

Federal data play an essential – and mostly invisible – role in supporting the more than 7 million Americans with Alzheimer’s and their nearly 12 million unpaid caregivers.

Too often, we think of federal data as limited to high-profile datasets like jobs, weather, and the census. But beneath that surface is a diverse ecosystem with well over 500,000 datasets – including those tackling Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). 

We recently published the Federal Data Field Guide to highlight the different species of federal data that benefit everyday Americans. In this post, we use the Field Guide’s framework of eight categories (Statistical, Administrative, Geospatial, Scientific, Accountability, Evaluation, Navigation, and Reference data) to scout for federal datasets that are improving the lives of Americans affected by ADRD.

Federal Data Improving Our Understanding of ADRD

Here’s a quick look at the valuable federal data underpinning our understanding Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD):

How prevalent is Alzheimer’s Disease in the U.S.?

Statistical Data measure population level characteristics. The National Center for Health Statistics’s National Health Interview Survey estimates that about 4% of the non-institutionalized population over 65 has been diagnosed with dementia, while mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) track deaths from Alzheimer’s. NVSS also fits in the Administrative data category from the Field Guide, because it draws information from death certificates processed by state governments.

What are the genetic, social, and environmental determinants of Alzheimer’s disease?

Geospatial Data describe location and environmental information about the world. Evidence links air pollution to increased Alzheimer’s risk. The EPA’s Particulate Matter Pollution data–collected through a network of monitors operated by state, local, and tribal agencies–are vital for enforcing clean air regulations and, by extension, reducing risk for ADRD.

Scientific Data advance knowledge through federal or federally-funded research. The Veterans Administration’s Million Veteran Program (MVP) has identified key variables associated with ADRD in veterans, such as traumatic brain injury, depression, and military environmental exposures, offering critical insights for both prevention and intervention. And, the NIH’s GenBank hosts a trove of genetic data that researchers use to develop screening tools, treatments, and medications for ADRD.

How do federal data help caregivers and patients?

Navigation Data help citizens find and access services. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Nursing Home Care Compare Database helps caregivers assess facilities for their loved ones. This dataset also fits into the Accountability category, as it includes critical quality metrics. NIH’s ClinicalTrials.gov dataset helps families identify the clinical trials that might be a match for their loved one. Another important navigation dataset from NIH is PubMed, which houses over 40 million citations to the biomedical literature, enabling scientists, clinicians, and families to stay up on the latest Alzheimer’s research.

Reference Data provide standardization across systems. How can this type of data help people with ADRD? The Social Security Administration maintains a reference dataset on medical conditions qualifying for Compassionate Allowances. This in turn enables a 45-year-old diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s to fast-track her disability benefits because the condition is officially recognized in the dataset. 

Evaluation Data assess how effective different programs are. For example, HHS has funded data collection on millions of telehealth appointments to evaluate access, quality, and utilization. These data are used to improve telehealth services, which can be a game changer for ADRD caregivers – especially those with mobility impairments that make it hard to make in-person medical appointments.

These are just 10 of the many federal datasets related to ADRD that span the eight categories of federal data. Without understanding the different categories of federal data, it is easy to overlook datasets like these that are essential for improving the lives of people impacted by Alzheimer’s disease. 

It is more urgent to appreciate the interplays of data brought to bear on just one health issue at a time when administrative actions, budget cuts, and destaffing, threaten the capacity of agencies to collect, maintain, and publish them.

Mapping out a broad range of federal datasets in a specific domain like ADRD is a useful exercise for two reasons. One, most federal data are underutilized or taken for granted. We’ve already paid for these data as taxpayers and we should make good use of them; every reuse of a federal dataset is value-added to its return on investment. And two, the federal data ecosystem will be more resilient when more people know about, care about, and advocate for the datasets on which they depend. Identifying and talking about the value of federal data is the first step to protecting their continued flow.

Take action

Do you want to get a better understanding of the federal data that make your life, or your life’s work, better? And do you want to get the tools to help keep those essential data flowing?

Here are some concrete steps you can take:

1. Use the data categories in the federaldatafieldguide.us to map out the federal datasets you might be taking for granted, whether you work on issues around housing, climate, veterans, children, small businesses, agriculture, or whatever.
   
2. Sign up for the newsletter at dataindex.us to be up to speed on opportunities to give feedback to federal agencies on specific datasets or data policies.
   
3. Visit the Data Checkup at dataindex.us to see which of your datasets have been assessed for risk – and let us know what datasets you value and want prioritized.
   
4. Check out essentialdata.us to see if the datasets you’ve identified are represented in our collection of use cases about how federal data benefit everyday Americans. If not, submit a dataset, or reach out to schedule a workshop to create use cases that cover your domain.

---

The Federal Data Field Guide is a free, plain-language resource developed by Denice Ross and Christopher Marcum as part of an Executive Fellowship in Applied Technology Policy at UC Berkeley. Learn more at federaldatafieldguide.us.

The FAS Data Policy Institute is a catalyst for advancing the field of data policy to build better outcomes for the American people, by building the civic infrastructure to monitor changes to federal datasets; mobilize data stakeholders to engage with government officials; advance policies to protect and improve essential public data; and design America’s future data ecosystem.

Photo: Histopathogic image of senile plaques seen in the cerebral cortex in a patient with Alzheimer disease of presenile onset, CC-BY KGH.

A tumultuous period for federal research funding would seem like precisely the wrong moment to experiment with new funding models. But that’s wrong.

Federal research funding is a cornerstone of U.S. competitiveness and national security – and one that is facing an unprecedented moment of uncertainty. Navigating this uncertainty will require experimentation with new models that can accelerate scientific progress. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new X-Labs program, which encompasses roughly just two percent of the funding institution’s overall research budget, is exactly that. 

X-Labs build on promising early results from a recent proliferation of philanthropically-supported independent lab models, and in particular, Focused Research Organizations (FROs) that catalyze capital and harness team science to unlock entirely new fields of scientific inquiry. These ambitious and high-leverage research infrastructure investments have already delivered tremendous breakthroughs: the largest map of drug-target interactions ever built, a global atlas of ocean alkalinity enhancement to aid in carbon dioxide removal, and reductions in the cost of proteomics twenty-seven-fold that can accelerate biomedical research. 

As impressive as early FRO results have been, they just scratch the surface of the model’s potential. There are many more possible breakthroughs, significantly beyond the capacity of philanthropic resources to support. Yet team-based, goal-oriented science has always been a difficult fit for the dominant federal funding models organized around research project grants. That’s why what’s truly novel about X-Labs is that NSF has found a way to achieve scale: up to $1.5 billion in funding structured around milestones, giving teams an opportunity to work on problems that lend themselves to a different set of incentives than academia typically requires.

Not everyone is excited. In a recent essay in Science, Pierre Azoulay of MIT makes a careful case for skepticism that government funding is the right model for scaling independent labs. Others have highlighted the potential zero sum funding dynamics facing academic institutions, based on recent Science reporting, though the perception that NSF is diverting resources from academic research funding to X-Labs is inaccurate. Still others have expressed concerns about public accountability, given X-Labs’ substantial operational independence at a moment when the Trump administration seeks to assert greater political control of grantmaking.

The harsh reality is that academic institutions are at a crossroads; the modern research university runs on a fraying cross-subsidy model that has hidden the real price of doing research. With simultaneous pressure on federal grants, indirect cost recovery, tuition and endowment returns, the path forward will require experimentation with alternative models at the institutional level.

NSF has explicitly framed X-Labs as an opportunity for academic institutions, giving them the license to create a platform for their researchers to engage in goal-oriented team science with less internal administrative burden and absent the proposal and publishing treadmills. For some institutions, this opportunity will prove a golden one. And in the spirit of a true experiment, some of what works in this sandbox – intellectual property, team structure, novel metrics – may be worth broader adoption as institutions find their way past the crossroads. 

I see X-Labs as the culmination of two significant developments in how research is conducted.

The first is the bipartisan mandate handed to NSF by Congress when it created the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate through the CHIPS and Science Act. Some architects of this legislation, and the Endless Frontier Act on which it was based, were explicit that formidable and growing competition from China meant that our research institutions would need to evolve, and their intent was to provide NSF the latitude to fund targeted priorities differently. As always, diagnosing unified Congressional intent is difficult, but what Congress codified was the creation of the first new NSF directorate in over 30 years, one with the flexibility to deploy flexible “Other Transactions Authority” for nontraditional grantmaking – not as a substitute, but as a supplement and translational accelerant to NSF’s core research funding mission. 

This bet is already delivering unexpected results. In 2022, few thought NSF was well-suited or capable of successfully driving the regional impact of translational research. But four years later, patience is paying off: $135M of TIP investment in nine regional hubs through the Regional Innovation Engines program has catalyzed more than $2B in matching commitments – an impressive 15x multiplier on taxpayer dollars. 

Like the Engines program, X-Labs is an experiment being undertaken with TIP’s own budget, not with funds siphoned from other directorates that would otherwise be used for research project grants, as recent reporting has suggested. And X-Labs’ initial focus on scientific instrumentation directly feeds discovery science across NSF’s core research domains. For the community that championed CHIPS and Science, these kinds of experiments are exactly what we had hoped to see.

Second, X-Labs follow strong, decades-long precedent for the federal research enterprise to embrace and scale models that philanthropy has de-risked. Examples abound. 

For years, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has provided stable, investigator-centered institutional funding as a means to enable transformative research by insulating extraordinarily promising PIs from the constraints of grant-based funding. Azoulay’s own pioneering research on the HHMI model — which funded ‘people not projects’ — found this model had a significant role in generating novel research. Inspired by the example, the National Institutes of Health has since added pathways to its funding portfolio – such as the Transformative Research Award – to bet on extraordinary people rather than their projects.

In 2003, philanthropist Paul Allen put $100 million into a new brain science institute built on the premise that a tightly coordinated team focused on an ambitious goal – creating an atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain – could deliver success where a series of traditional research grants wouldn’t. This team-based model succeeded, delivering the foundational infrastructure on which significant subsequent federal efforts such as the BRAIN Initiative ultimately relied to scale. 

Recent years have lent the philanthropically-supported independent lab model more significant momentum. Since 2021, the Arc Institute in Palo Alto – a university-affiliated biomedical research organization – has organized researchers into teams in pursuit of breakthrough research outside of a traditional academic structure. And in 2020, I helped champion Adam Marblestone’s and Sam Rodriques’ original FRO concept for independent, team-based and time-bound nonprofits aimed at problems that sit in the gap between what academia rewards and what industry will fund. The original proposal targeted federal research agencies, but I saw firsthand that these institutions weren’t ready for the experiment without some fundamental questions answered through philanthropic de-risking. That day has come: Convergent Research, with hundreds of millions in philanthropic support, has since launched ten FROs in domains as distinct as brain mapping, ocean carbon modeling, and software for mathematics, with significant proof points.

Now, nudged by some sharp policy thinking from Caleb Watney at Institute for Progress on how the government can scale the approach, X-Labs seek to expand on what FROs have shown is possible: the generation of foundational infrastructure for entire new fields of research science. The vision for X-Labs is appropriately as a tool of portfolio diversification – as announced, just two percent of NSF budget – rather than a means to replace or indirectly reform the dominant funding model of research program grants. And as with any true experiment that pushes scientific boundaries, there will be learning and evolution along the way. X-Labs funding will be time-bound, and as institutions they should wind down when they’ve reached their goals. Some will surely fail altogether, and some will unlock whole new fields of scientific inquiry, and with that economic competitiveness and growth.

On this path forward, NSF will also need to strike a difficult balance between autonomy and accountability. Its decision to fund X-Labs through TIP’s Other Transaction Authority – a flexible contracting mechanism simply defined by what it’s not – should not mean an absence of accountability. But accountability mechanisms must be fit for purpose – lightweight, public-facing, and outcome-oriented (i.e., does the public know what was funded and what it produced?) -– rather than process-heavy and approval-based. The initial X-Labs solicitation offers encouraging indications of results-oriented accountability (milestone payments) and IP management plans, but the details are very much in execution to come. 

I’m bullish. At a tumultuous moment for research, we need more experiments like X-Labs, not fewer.

When I ran for city council in Boulder, Colorado in 2023, everyone talked about climate change. Forum after forum, all ten candidates spoke up for the climate. 

And cities saying climate change matters is typical. The number of US cities with adopted climate action plans is in the hundreds. 

That’s what we need, since cities drive the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions and are on the front lines of climate havoc. 

More specifically, for large-scale climate solutions to work, cities have to really stretch. That’s according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says cities need to rapidly become compact, efficient, electrified, and nature‑rich urban ecosystems where we take better care of each other and avoid locking in more sprawl and fossil‑fuel dependence. 

Yet, big-picture progress in the United States is critically insufficient. Those are the words of Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis evaluating climate commitments. The US has pledged to reduce 2030 GHG emissions levels by 50–52% below 2005, yet the latest projections show we are on track to achieve at best only 29–39%—assuming no further backsliding.

And earlier this month, the Trump administration withdrew our federal government from the international climate agreement process.

So when local governments say “we’re on it,” what is a concerned citizen to think?

What local government climate solutions look like 

Climate advocates are used to talking about climate action. But for local governments, the measuring stick for climate progress isn’t simply action. What counts is measurable progress towards specific, substantive transitions.

Transitions to walkable, compact neighborhoods where abundant, space-efficient middle housing near jobs and services let most residents meet daily needs within a short walk or bike ride, reducing trip lengths and housing and transport costs.

To transit-rich, highly bikeable towns where frequent, accessible service and a connected, protected network allow seniors and youth travel independently and where per-capita car dependence falls.

To fully-electrified communities in which homes and transportation run on clean, distributed power, working efficiently, that delivers lower bills, healthier indoor air, and outage resilience, with benefits accruing equitably to residents.

To enhanced landscapes of bioswales, permeable streets, restored wetlands, and drought- and fire-resilient shade trees that cool neighborhoods, absorb stormwater, and buffer heat, flood, and smoke risks.

To resilient local food systems that blend urban agriculture with regional producers, food hubs, cold storage, and compost-to-soil loops to deliver reliable, affordable, nutritious food even during heat, drought, or supply disruptions.

There is good news: The transitions we need, and the solutions and capacity we need to implement them, are showing new signs of life. That’s evident in two trends. 

One trend is local governments playing a bigger role in climate solutions. The number of U.S. cities reporting to the CDP, a global system for disclosing climate progress, has grown to over 150. Now more than 200 US cities have committed to 100 percent clean electricity. And cities’ climate action plans are showing a visible shift from a focus on municipal operations to community‑wide impacts of buildings, transportation, and waste, and more sophisticated thinking about resilience.

As the federal government has retreated, advocates are increasingly realizing cities and counties have tools to lead. Local governments manage streets, land use, buildings, public fleets, transit, and major service contracts. They can strongly influence state-level actors, like energy utilities and air quality programs, and be providers of those services directly.

There is proof of this awakening in the large numbers of people suddenly running for local office on climate. Political organizing coalitions such as Run on Climate and Climate Cabinet helped elect more than 50 local leaders running on climate in 2025. One of the year’s most high-profile candidates, Zohran Mamdani, won with “fast and free” buses–one of the measures IPCC has highlighted as a meaningful mitigation measure that saves more money than it costs–as a centerpiece of his campaign.

The other trend is a greater focus on wellbeing. Research included in the latest IPCC report shows demand-side measures can cut end-use emissions by roughly 40 to 70 percent by 2050 while improving daily life and making communities stronger. And wellbeing is the currency of local governments and local politics. Concrete quality of life issues dominate local elections and policymaking, which is where climate action takes root—or doesn’t.

Climate action prompted by a desire for healthier, happier, and less expensive lives is happening. People are adopting electric cars, e-bikes, heat pumps, and induction stoves because they work better, are cheaper to operate, and healthier. The intersection of climate solutions and wellbeing is central to a 2025 bestseller Abundance  and to the national conversation it kicked off about defining and achieving “abundance.” The topic of wellbeing was a bright spot at the COP30 climate talks via the World Health Organization’s report, “Delivering the Belém Health Action Plan.”

These two trends reinforce each other. Local governments oversee the services where wellbeing, decarbonization, and resilience meet. When those services are designed as a system, investments can compound to create more value for more people, who then have a stake in continuing the transition. And the importance of rallying around local governments to carry climate solutions forward is becoming clearer as U.S. national policy looks structurally less reliable than most experts used to think.

Difficult conditions for change 

But local governments face headwinds. Existing policies and markets, like those that have created widespread car dependence and extensive natural gas systems, create momentum that favors the status quo and encourages continued investments that lock us in further. Simply put, it’s easiest to keep doing it the way we’ve done it before, and then we dig ourselves in deeper.

Local governments purposefully design systems to keep things stable. Most likely, whatever your town or county is doing is based on the direction of long-term plans, from departmental plans to bigger comprehensive plans. Those plans often come up for renewal only every few years or longer, and if you miss that window or fail to follow procedures, making big change is nearly impossible. Related, local governments tend to have policies and practices for conducting community engagement that deliberately create a high bar for making major turns.

On top of all that, local governments in the U.S. are suffering a long-term decline in investment that leaves them with significant and growing cash flow constraints, heavy workloads, limited time to deliberate, and pressure to deliver. The pandemic and recent national political forces reduce their maneuverability even more.

Political will necessary but not sufficient—concrete transitions are needed

In order to drive climate transitions under such tough conditions, political will is necessary but it is not sufficient. For local governments to scale up climate solutions, they need to take tangible, visible steps to change systems, consistent with evidence-based recommendations, outlined by institutions like the IPCC. 

Here is what that can look like – and what advocates can look to encourage:

1. Transition plans  

Climate issues touch everything, so all local governments can point to doing climate things. But the difference between lists of activities and high-reward strategic commitments that make good use of time is everything. The latter requires a clear plan to make transitions happen, with defined outcomes and milestones, and dogged pursuit.

Ambitious climate action at the local government level means being clear about the transition(s) the community is focused on, which could include the previously mentioned examples, along with what successful completions looks like and by when. This involves working on at least two tracks concurrently—both integrating ambitious transformations into long-term planning exercises, for which adopting changes may or may not be available right away, and taking whatever more tactical action is possible now to support such planning and concrete action to the fullest extent possible.

• Transition plans might consider: What needs to be different? Who are the elected officials and partners needed to make the transition work? What barriers could inhibit progress, and what is the strategy for overcoming them? What are the key inflection points in behavior adoption, and what is the change model to reach them? 

2. User experience  

Cities often add a bike lane in one place or restore a bus line in another. What truly changes behavior is a complete experience that makes the pro-climate option the intuitive choice. Kids can bike around town without parents fearing they could be hit by a driver. You can count on bringing a large electric bike anywhere and park it safely. Buses are within a 10-minute walk of home and arrive every 10 minutes. Utility investments in electrification actually lower monthly bills. To make climate transitions attractive and sticky, we have to confront gaps that get in the way of people’s experience from their vantage point.

A practical opportunity for local governments is to use the tools of user experience (“UX”) and be responsible for how the ecosystem works and feels from the immersive standpoint of users. UX is an interdisciplinary field that uses research, psychology, and design to remove friction and ensure a seamless journey for users.

• Some questions for managing the user experience: Who is/are the transition(s) for—who are the “users” involved that will experience change? What do they need to do and stick with to make the transition work? What performance measures are needed to constitute progress, and how do we get elected officials and executives to care about them? Where are there persistent, hard-to-reach gaps that can be spotlighted as “known issues” for partners and other jurisdictions to see and possibly be helpful with? What are the gaps between our intent and reality, and how can we overcome them?

3. Public service delivery  

One of the core jobs of local government is to provide public services like zoning, safe transportation, building standards, air quality protections, and emergency management. Providing services is also generally the justification for spending public money. And services are where the planning activities that local governments tend to be so careful about materialize in the real world. So if local governments are going to be engines of climate action, then day-to-day service delivery—their core product—is where most of that action will show up. Climate action will appear in what gets approved, funded, built, maintained, enforced, measured, and improved.

Local governments already deliver public services. So the opportunity is to evaluate how core local government services can or should be tuned and/or reorganized to drive climate and resilience outcomes. This includes formal adoption in comprehensive plans, capital improvement programs, and strategic plans, and clear alignment with budget priorities. When leaders routinely report on progress and adjust course publicly, it signals that climate transitions are a core organizational responsibility rather than a side project.

• An evaluation of services might consider: How is climate action aligned with where money is actually spent?  What changes in standards, contracts, and operations are needed to lock in better outcomes? How can the thinking and tools of service development improve user experiences?

4. High-level ownership 

Plans only come to life when people who have the right level of power and accountability own delivery. Inside local government, that means both the elected body (mayor, city council, and/or their equivalents) and executives (city manager, their deputies, and in the case of a “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor) adopt the initiative as their own. Roles and accountability are defined and gaps are addressed. Resources are allocated through direct investments and through partnerships that expand capacity.

High-level ownership of climate solutions in local government happens when transitions are included in the agency’s highest-level plans and strategies.This includes formal adoption in comprehensive plans, capital improvement programs, and strategic plans, and clear alignment with budget priorities. It also looks like leaders routinely communicating to the public about the transitions under way, the progress against them, and how community members can help support the journey.

• Some ways to gauge high level ownership: Do staffing, partnerships, procurement, budgets, and intergovernmental advocacy support transition intent?  Is change management happening as needed, with a clear vision and ongoing communication expressed to the public? Is the work of transitions integrated into core functions and the day-to-day responsibilities of staff necessary for success? How are electeds supporting and leading?

5. Playbook of procedures

Local government commitments are heavily shaped and constrained by procedure, like protocols for what gets a hearing and when, annual or biennial work plans, and comprehensive plans that may come around only every few years or longer. Communications between elected officials and staff may be limited by city ordinance, and communications among elected officials may be very limited by state law. There are also often arcane, highly-localized meeting customs. Getting things done requires working through these procedures and often landing decisions in small windows that are easy to miss. 

A playbook for how climate transitions are going to make their way into staff proposals, planning processes,and budgeting is fundamental to turning a good idea into something real. Such a playbook is needed to spell out who does what, when, and through which formal channels, so that key decisions do not depend on heroic one-off efforts. It also helps new staff and elected officials quickly understand how to use existing procedures to advance climate goals, rather than be derailed by them.

• Some questions to ask: What are the relevant scheduled planning processes and upcoming meetings, and who is required to fully elevate the work there and how? What learning systems or listening structures exist, and how are they being used to surface discrepancies and continuously drive improvement?

Conclusion

To scale up climate solutions through local government, we need at least two things. First, political will, which is familiar to most advocates. Looking into 2026 and beyond, climate advocates have great opportunities to continue increasing the proportions of elected local bodies who are led by politicians serious about climate solutions. Everyone has a role to play: run for local office, support local climate candidates, use whatever powers of creativity and persuasion you have–from writing to speaking to organizing and beyond–to help make climate action a core election issue in your community. 

The second—and where we need greater shared focus—is to make local governments responsible for specific, strategic commitments to systems change. To do that, help build transition plans that commit to providing great user experiences, an approach to public service delivery that is aligned with those objectives, ownership by city council and the city manager or mayor, and a clear playbook for how strategic climate commitments are going to be adopted and rolled out.

Not everything is going right for the climate movement. But there are some fantastic bright spots, and one of those is big new local government innovations that are starting to unfold.  

Looking into 2026, I’m excited to be a part of the movement to help local governments drive the next generation of climate progress. And a big hat tip to FAS with its regulatory rethink and government capacity work as well as ICLEI USA, both partnering with local officials like me to map out how cities can translate ambitious climate goals into durable systems change. 

There are great things ahead, and so much room to work together.

From January 2024 to July 2024, the Federation of American Scientists interviewed 30 current and former Advisory Committee (AdComm) members. Based on these discussions, we were able to source potential policy recommendations for the executive level, for the executive level, that may assist with enhancing the FDA’s ability to obtain valuable advice for evidence-based decision-making. In this toolkit, we build off of those discussions by providing you with actionable policy reform recommendations. We hope that these recommendations catapult the Advisory Committee structure into one best suited to equip all AdComms with the necessary tools needed to continue providing the government with the best advice.

Download a PDF version of these recommendations on the left.

Recommendations and Best Practices for Actionable Policy Implementation

Voting for FDA Advisory Committees

Update Type: Process

• Maintain voting as an integral function, allowing FDA Advisory Committee members to convey their collective expertise and advice, aiding the FDA in informed decision-making on scientific and regulatory matters. 
• Revise the guidance for FDA Advisory Committee Members and FDA Staff to explicitly define circumstances for which voting should occur and eliminate sequential voting

Best Practices for Implementation 

The United States Food and Drug Administration can uphold their voting mechanism by updating their document entitled, “Guidance for FDA Advisory Committee members and FDA staff: Voting Procedures for Advisory Committee Meetings” to include language that clearly states a vote should be taken at all Advisory Committee meetings where a medical product is being reviewed. This guidance should also indicate that the absence of voting should only occur if an Advisory Committee meeting has been convened to discuss issues of policy. Further, this guidance should be considered a level 2 guidance as it falls into the category of addressing a “controversial issue”. To effectuate these changes, a notice of availability (NOA) may be submitted to the Federal Register for public input (public input is not a requirement before implementation). 

Potential Language to be Utilized for Guidance 

In an effort to continue to allow Advisory Committee members to provide unbiased, evidence-based feedback and uphold such an integral part of the Advisory Committee process, voting is hereby mandatory for all Advisory Committee meetings that are convened where the purpose is to review and assess the safety and efficacy of medical products. 

Involved Stakeholders

In order for this process to successfully occur, the FDA will need to amend their guidance with the aforementioned updates. Consideration should be given to incurred costs for personnel required to complete these updates. Personnel needed for these amendments may include, but are not limited to, the (a) Office of the Commissioner, Office of Clinical Policy and Programs, Office of Clinical Policy, (b) Center for Devices and Radiological Health, (c) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and (d) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

---

FDA Staff, Leadership, and AdComm Disagreements

Update Type: Process

• Ensure that all FDA staff and leadership are fully cognizant of the existence and details of the Scientific Dispute Resolution at FDA guidance and the process for submitting disputes for review.
• Develop guidance that clearly explains a transparent process to communicate effectively with AdComm members regarding decision making when parties have opposing viewpoints

Best Practices for Implementation 

Implementing these recommendations will improve conflict resolution internally and between the Agency and Advisory Committee members. Best practices for implementation include (a) building the Scientific Dispute Resolution at FDA guidance into the official FDA onboarding process for new hires to raise awareness, (b) provide annual employee trainings in an effort to stay up-to-date with dispute resolution processes and procedures, and (c) develop a guidance that delineates the process for resolving conflicts between the Agency and Advisory Committees when there are differing opinions. 

Note: Guidance for resolving disputes between the Agency and Advisory Committees should be submitted to the Federal Register for public comment. Guidance should also include plain language that designates the avenue to be used for official decision notifications, the timeliness of these notifications after convenings have concluded, and circumstances in which the FDA cannot notify Advisory Committees that their decision is in direct opposition of the Committee’s vote (e.g., – if this notification would breach a confidentiality agreement with the applicant). Implementing a transparent process to communicate with AdComm members regarding differences between the Agency and the AdComm will assist in improving morale between both parties, but also encourage continued support of the AdComm.

Involved Stakeholders 

Successful implementation of these recommendations will require the capacity of human resources personnel and individual center leadership. 

Update Type: Regulatory

• Incorporate the Scientific Dispute Resolution at FDA guidance into FDA regulations
• Amend the Scientific Dispute Resolution at FDA guidance to dictate the mandatory execution of best practices within the dispute resolution process
  • This guidance should identify additional non-biased parties (that may not be government-affiliated) to provide impartial guidance on complex scientific matters affecting public safety. 

Best Practices for Implementation

Center leadership can assign FDA staff to make the necessary guidance amendments which should include the requirements for inclusion in the onboarding of all FDA employees. Staff should also be responsible for obtaining feedback on amendments from all necessary internal parties and submitting proposed amendments to OMB for review and addition to the Federal Register. Federal register comments will then be reviewed by FDA staff, guidance will be updated accordingly, and a final draft submitted to OMB for review. If approved, the final regulation will be published in the Code of Federal Regulations. Congressional involvement should not be necessary.

FDA Center leadership should delegate the task of creating an annual mandatory training program for all FDA employees to review this guidance in an effort to stay abreast of the procedures for dispute resolution. 

Involved Stakeholders 

FDA Center leadership, FDA staff, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) are the intended stakeholders for implementation of these recommendations. To incorporate this guidance into FDA regulations, Center leadership will need to assign FDA staff to amend guidance and submit to OMB.

---

Leveraging AdComm Membership

Update Type: Process

Expanding Committee Representation

• If there is flexibility and committee composition is not bound by law, include a patient representative and pharmacist and/or pharmacologist on each Committee
  • Patient representatives provide a needed perspective due to lived experiences and understanding of how specific drugs and devices affect their day-to-day life
  • Drugs and devices will usually pass through the hands of pharmacists and pharmacologists. Therefore, they should have the opportunity to serve on these Committees and provide feedback. Pharmacologists also understand the clinical application of drugs. 
  • Have a roster of temporary members that can be used when additional expertise is needed for Committee meetings or when there is a conflict of interest (COI)

Amplifying the Role of the Chair

• Expand the role of the Committee chair that will encompass the task of recruiting both standing and ad hoc members, as well as identifying prominent issues and products for Committee consideration, thereby allowing for specialized input from their Committee  

Establishing Training and Regulatory Procedures for Incoming Members

• Institute a basic 101 training for all newly appointed Advisory Committee members that covers statistical analysis, clinical trial design, and elucidates the partnership between the FDA and AdComm 
• Include an overview of the regulatory process and how the FDA’s decision-making process is performed

Best Practices for Implementation

With respect to Committee composition, the FDA should consider adding patient representatives to all Committees that review medical products. The addition of a patient representative will ensure that the voice of the population who the medical product affects is heard. The FDA can select individuals best suited to fill these roles through connecting with patient advocacy organizations. If patient representatives are selected, the FDA should develop an onboarding program to familiarize the patient representative with basic knowledge of the federal regulation process. This program should educate the patient representative on (a) the types of questions presented to Advisory Committees, (b) how the FDA views the role of the patient representative in the process, (c) the internal review process for data that is submitted, and (d) other pertinent topics related to medical product regulation.

Leveraging the role of the Advisory Committee Chair can help the FDA fully optimize the use of their Committee. “Chairs possess extensive networks that could support the identification of permanent or temporary expert participants for AdComms” (Banks, 2024). Allowing Chairs the ability to identify relevant issues or products for their respective committees to review can provide an additional layer for the FDA to keep abreast of critical public concerns via appropriate committee evaluation (Banks, 2024).

Finally, while Committee members may be experts in their own right, training should be provided for all. The FDA should provide basic 101 training courses that can cater to the needs of members with various knowledge bases. Training should include information on the relationship between the FDA and Advisory Committee members, best practices for understanding statistical analysis, and the different types of clinical trial designs. Training should provide real-world examples of statistical analysis and trial design in use (this can be done by providing examples from prior medical product review). 

Involved Stakeholders

FDA Center staff (including statisticians and scientists for the development of training programs).

---

Conflict of Interest (COI) Auditing

UPDATE TYPE: PROCESS 

• Develop a process that can quickly replace individuals who have a known conflict of interest
• Clearly delineate criteria for committee service acceptance regarding individuals with potential or actualconflicts of interest

Best Practices for Implementation

To prevent recurring COIs, the FDA should develop a database of experts for various categories of expertise that can be selected to replace those with known COIs. This database should include names, contact information, credentials, all areas of expertise for each expert, and should link to public financial interest databases that can serve as a source for identifying conflicts (e.g., Open Payments, Dollars for Docs).

To prevent public confusion, the FDA should amend their Guidance for the Public, FDA Advisory Committee Members, and FDA Staff: Public Availability of Advisory Committee Members’ Financial Interest Information and Waivers to specify circumstances that warrant a COI waiver being administered. This will increase transparency and help Advisory Committee members and the public understand the reasoning in allowing members with conflicts to participate in meetings. This guidance can then be submitted to the Federal Register for public comment

UPDATE TYPE: PROCESS | REGULATORY

• Streamline the COI process to prevent duplicative work that may act as a deterrent to experts volunteering to serve on the AdComm (work with GSA on this matter if necessary)

Best Practices for Implementation

Streamlining the COI process will assist the FDA with retention efforts for Advisory Committees while maintaining compliance with conflict of interest regulations. A digital system should be developed that allows Advisory Committee members to select whether their financial information has changed through the use of a dropdown or check box. This will prevent duplicative work and also contribute to a sustainable (green) process.

Involved Stakeholders

The Office of the Commissioner, Office of Clinical Policy and Programs, Office of Clinical Policy would be the interested stakeholder to issue updates to the COI policy and would work with the General Services Administration if necessary. 

---

The Role of Patient Advocacy in the AdComm Process

Update Type: Process

• Dedicate staff to identifying crucial public comments from patient advocates that should be considered for regulatory decision-making
• Include a patient representative on all committees that are reviewing medical products
  • If possible, ensure that patient representatives selected have basic knowledge of the federal regulation process 
• Establish criteria for which all public comments must abide by
  • This can be done by creating a checklist for the public to review and consider before forming their comment and that clearly delineates the mandatory criteria that a medical product must meet to be considered for approval
  • A disclaimer can also be added to state that there is a specific threshold or sample size of a population who must benefit from the medical product
• Promote patient focused medical product development through the use of incorporating patient perspectives into the life cycle of the regulatory process
  • This can be done through hosting patient town hall discussions for areas such as rare diseases and expanding initiatives such as the Patient Focused Drug Development (PFDD) public meetings
  • Make patient engagement ongoing, rather than only allowing patient engagement quarterly or annually as done with most FDA-led programs and initiatives

Best Practices for Implementation

Public comments are a crucial part of the regulatory process. The FDA should focus on increasing participation in this process, as well as notifying participants of what should be expected from the public comment period. By law, the FDA must allow a public comment period for all Advisory Committee convenings. To increase participation, the FDA should allow public comments to be vocalized in-person and virtually, in addition to the submission of public comments to the docket. 

Regarding Committee composition, please refer to Best Practices for Implementation under Leveraging AdComm Membership for information on the addition of patient representatives to Advisory Committees (see prior section above).

Patient engagement in the regulatory process is necessary to inform evidence-based decisions. While the FDA currently has ways to engage these communities through the use of public comment and initiatives such as Patient Focused Drug Development (PFDD), engagement should be an ongoing process. As mentioned, the FDA can develop and leverage existing relationships with public health agencies and advocacy organizations who can then serve as the liaison of feedback to the FDA. The FDA can also consider expanding their current initiatives and programs to engage communities twice a quarter instead of quarterly or annually. Consistent engagement in this form will help to establish trust between the FDA and the public who they serve, as well as give them the needed information from the communities who are most impacted from their decisions.  

Involved Stakeholders

Implementation of these recommendations and expansion of current initiatives will require the involvement of FDA Center leadership and Center staff.

---

Improving Public Awareness and Understanding of Advisory Committees

Update Type: Process

• FDA can leverage social media platforms to increase awareness and understanding of AdComms through the use of disseminating information (engagement, ads, etc.)
• FDA should include a disclaimer on all communications and marketing materials regarding AdComms
  • These disclaimers should also be made at all public meetings
  • Disclaimers should emphasize the purpose of AdComm votes (disclaimer should state that votes allow AdComm members to provide an official stance to the FDA as experts, but those votes are also non-binding)
• Develop a webpage that allows people to be placed on listserv regarding upcoming meetings
• Partner w/state and local public health agencies and advocacy organizations to spread awareness

Best Practices for Implementation

The FDA should develop a monthly content plan to utilize its current interactive and social media outlets and disseminate information related to the role of Advisory Committees and their convenings, while also maintaining compliance with the FDA’s social media policy. The social media content plan should be centered around (a) what an Advisory Committee is, (b) how members are selected, (c) information regarding votes of Advisory Committees and how they are specific to safety and efficacy, but are not voting on the approval of a medical product, (d) discussing upcoming Advisory Committee meetings, their location, and inviting the public to participate via public comment, (e) sharing information about what a public comment is, requirements for making public comments, and how the FDA reviews them, and (f) sharing a webpage where the general public can input their personal email to be notified of upcoming Advisory Committee meetings.

FDA staff should develop a plain language disclaimer to be placed on all social media posts, meeting materials, and websites related to Advisory Committees. This disclaimer should illustrate that Advisory Committee members will provide unbiased expertise to assist the FDA with their decision. However, while the Committee’s vote is included in consideration for the decision, their vote is non-binding which leaves the FDA as the final decision maker for approval.

Finally, the FDA should identify state/local public health agencies, as well as advocacy organizations that they can potentially partner with to disseminate information more broadly. These agencies and advocacy organizations have strong relationships with various communities who should be engaged in the regulatory process. Developing a relationship with these agencies and organizations in an attempt to engage the community will assist the FDA with building connections and trust, as well as mutual understanding of Advisory Committee roles. Potential partners can be identified using the linked list under involved stakeholders. 

Involved Stakeholders

Implementation of these recommendations and expansion of current initiatives will require the involvement of FDA Center leadership, Center staff, Office of External Affairs (OEA) Web and Digital Media staff, Office of Information Management and Technology (OIMT), state/local public health departments, and advocacy organizations.

Note: These listings of state/local public health departments and advocacy organizations are intended to be used as a starting point in the identification of potential partners and not to be considered an exhaustive list.

---

For questions related to this toolkit, please contact

Cheri Banks
Health Regulatory Specialist
cbanks@fas.org

Grace Wickerson
Health Equity Policy Manager
gwickerson@fas.org

Surveillance has been used on civil rights activists, organizations, and protesters for decades by federal and local law enforcement. Some past victims of government spying include Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, American Indian Movement, United Farm Workers, and the National Lawyers Guild. These activists and organizations were subjected to traditional surveillance tactics such as wiretapping and infiltration.

Today, surveillance looks different as technological advances have made it increasingly easy to track someone’s whereabouts, communications, and inner thoughts based on browser history, all without leaving an office. This level of digital surveillance has a chilling effect on people’s First Amendment rights, because a person may choose to censor themselves online or be reluctant to engage in political expression, such as attending a protest, due to their fear of being watched and retaliated against.

This report is the result of research that tries to answer the fundamental question: what can civil society do to fight back against the growing trend of widespread digital surveillance, particularly in the state of New York? New York is the focus of this research project because of the state’s widespread use of surveillance technology, particularly in New York City, and the strong activism within the state that works to improve the lives of marginalized communities.

Social justice organizations play an instrumental role in society through their organizing and fighting for civil rights. This report provides these organizations information on current surveillance practices and how these practices may impact the communities that they serve. The first section of the report provides a short roadmap on the recent history of digital surveillance in different contexts such as immigration, environmental justice, criminal legal system, housing, and the workplace. The next section will speak on pending and finalized legislation that could be helpful or harmful towards achieving the obliteration of surveillance. The third section will describe strategies organizations can take to help combat surveillance in their communities. Lastly, the report provides a list of legal organizations that are well versed in this arena and attuned to technological advances.

A Current History of Digital Surveillance

Before diving into action, it’s important to provide an overview of the types of  surveillance that many communities may be subjected to. This section will demonstrate how widespread surveillance is and provide background stories on the surveillance activist communities face within the immigration, environmental rights, criminal legal system, housing, and workplace context.

Immigration

There have been a growing number of surveillance tactics used against activists, migrants, journalists, and attorneys in the immigration space. In 2019, NBC 7 San Diego reported that federal agencies were keeping and sharing a secret database of an attorney, journalists, organizers, and “instigators” who had previously  worked at the U.S.-Mexico border.  The database contained photos of each person, obtained from the person’s passport or social media accounts.  It also included personal information such as the person’s work and travel history, names of their family members, and the kind of vehicle they drive. Some of these individuals reported that while traveling across the border, they were targeted for secondary screening. Border agents took their electronic devices and some individuals believed that the agents performed a warrantless search of their device, though they were unable to verify this. Journalists reported that these invasive actions affected their ability to protect their confidential sources. It’s easy to imagine that this unfounded suspicion and investigation could deter activists and journalists from continuing their work.

This isn’t the only incident of ICE keeping an eye on activists. In July 2021, The Intercept reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been surveilling activists and advocacy groups, such as Project South and Georgia Detention Watch, online and in person. This was done under the guise of safety and security as an ICE spokesperson stated “[l]ike all other law enforcement agencies, ICE follows planned protests to ensure the safety and security of its infrastructure, personnel, officers and all those involved.” Internal emails revealed that ICE officials were using Facebook to follow advocacy groups and ICE was tracking the attendees of their events.

Migrants have also been subjected to government surveillance. Over the last several years, ICE has increased its use of electronic monitoring as an alternative to holding migrants in detention centers. Since March 2024,183,935 people have been subjected to electronic monitoring by ICE, with 18,518 of those required to wear GPS ankle monitors. In 2018, ICE launched SmartLINK, an app that allows the agency to track a migrant’s whereabouts. Since April 2024, ICE has monitored over 700,000 people through the app. The agency requires migrants to do periodic check-ins using SmartLINK to confirm the user’s identity through voice recognition, geolocation, and facial recognition technology (FRT). The app has access to the user’s phone camera and has the ability to record audio. If a migrant complies with their check-ins for around 14 to 18 months, ICE may remove the person from the app to make room for new migrants who have just arrived in the country. Users of the app have expressed concern about the app’s location tracking, as it may put their undocumented family members at risk. Users have also stated that the app feels just as restrictive and invasive as an ankle monitor. Thirteen immigrant rights organizations found that electronic monitoring is not only harmful to the user’s livelihood but also hampers their personal relationships and their ability to organize in their community. 

Surveillance in the immigration space interferes with the ability of migrants to organize and affects journalistic reporting. It also has the tendency to make migrants afraid of being a part of a community or spending time with their undocumented family members because they are aware that they are being watched. This kind of surveillance puts everyone in their circle at risk.

Criminal Legal System

Surveillance has been used in the criminal legal system for decades, as police often use various spying tools to investigate suspects. However, whereas before police would use agents to track a suspect’s movements, today, law enforcement is able to track a suspect from their desk. Law enforcement has been able to use private companies to obtain a person’s personal data such as their cell phone records, location data, web browsing history, and more. This tracking is not limited to suspects, as law enforcement agencies have been reported to subject activists to this level of surveillance as well. 

In 2018, Memphis police were accused of spying on Black activists from 2016 until 2017. Memphis Police Department’s Office of Homeland Security (MPD) was accused of creating a Facebook profile to monitor activists in the area. There was one incident in which a community organizer posted a book on their page, and MPD collected the names of everyone who liked the post. With that list, they created a dossier of those individuals and called it “Blue Suede Shoes”. MPD is far from the only law enforcement agency that has collected a list of organizers, but it is unclear what happens with these lists after they’ve been created.

During the 2020 protests, the world experienced a new level of surveillance at the hands of local law enforcement and federal agencies. In 2021, it was reported that six federal agencies used FRT during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the United States. The agencies admitted that they did use this technology to identify individuals but they stated it was used to identify those who they suspected had violated laws. In one instance, police officers were able to arrest a protester after using FRT and receiving a match. NYPD has also been accused of using the technology to identify protesters after the event and charge them with crimes.

Environmental Justice

Surveillance has also been found in the environmental justice space, from both law enforcement and private companies. Shanai Matteson is an artist and climate activist based in Palisade, Minnesota. In 2021, Matteson spoke at the “Rally for the Rivers” event which was organized around protesting a pipeline construction. At the conclusion of the rally, 200 people left and went to the construction site to protest. At some point, the police arrested a number of protestors although Matteson was not one. However, five months later, law enforcement officials found livestream videos of the event, identified who was at the rally, and charged Matteson with a misdemeanor accusing her of conspiring trespass.

During the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, we saw a private company conducting mass surveillance on individuals, in an unprecedented way. In 2016, private security firm, TigerSwan was hired by Energy Transfer Partners to surveil Dakota Access Pipeline protesters. TigerSwan monitored protesters’ social media posts, utilized aerial surveillance, employed informants, and used radio eavesdropping to spy on activists. TigerSwan used this information to make lists of “persons of interests” and pressure law enforcement to be more aggressive against the protesters. The firm also shared their intel with local law enforcement agencies and provided evidence to prosecutors to help them build cases against the protesters. After learning that Lee County, Iowa increased bail for protesters, TigerSwan stated in one of their documents that they needed to work closer with other counties to make sure protesters would be fined or arrested in order to deter them. Because TigerSwan is a private company, it was able to conduct this level of mass surveillance on protesters without much government or judicial oversight.

Housing

One of the areas people may least expect surveillance is within their housing, however those in private and public housing may deal with this issue in the near future.  Between 2018 and 2019, residents of a Brooklyn apartment complex organized and resisted their landlord’s attempts to install facial recognition cameras within the building.  In retaliation, the landlord threatened the organizers with loitering fines and told them, wrongfully so, that handing out flyers to fellow residents was unlawful behavior. The apartment complex justified their actions by stating that this technology would provide safety and security for their residents.

Public housing facilities have also been accused of installing surveillance systems in their communities without the consent of residents. Some of these systems contain FRT or other forms of artificial intelligence. In Scott County, Virginia, cameras at a public housing facility have FRT that searches for people barred from the facility. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a surveillance system searches through hours of recordings to locate movement near the doorways in order to identify residents who violate overnight guest rules. The footage has been used to punish and evict residents, who may have a difficult time securing housing in the future as a result of their eviction. While the cameras are only installed in public spaces within these facilities, they still violate people’s privacy rights as residents and their guests are tracked walking to and from their homes, a place that many people consider sacred. 

Workplace Surveillance

Workers have been subjected to increasing surveillance over the last few years and one of the most infamous infringers is Amazon. The company has been accused of deploying many tactics in order to stop union organizing such as monitoring employee message boards and private Facebook groups. Amazon has also been accused of posting a job for an intelligence analyst who would be in charge of monitoring labor organizing threats. 

Amazon has several resources within their facilities to monitor their employees such as employee ID badges which can be used to track an employee’s location and can allow the company to discover which of their employees are participating in organizing. Amazon facilities have surveillance cameras that are capable of allowing supervisors to track their workers and human monitors who walk around the facilities in order to keep an eye on the workers. Amazon has been accused of identifying union organizers and rotating them throughout the workplace, to prevent the organizers from having prolonged contact with the same employees. One source stated that workers were not allowed to socialize with each other as a manager would come and break them up. 

Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, has also been accused of using surveillance to track union organizing. It was reported in 2020 that Whole Foods was using a heat map to track stores that could be at risk of unionization based on the distance from the store to the closest union, diversity within the store, team member sentiment, and additional factors.

Digital Surveillance: Where we are now

There have been a few promising federal and state bills introduced in the last few years that would provide vast protections for activists and journalists. On the other hand, there are also recent bills that have been passed that would increase government surveillance and cause more harm to these communities. This section provides a brief overview on where things currently stand. 

Federal Legislation

In April 2021, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), and 18 additional senators introduced the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act. For years, data brokers have been able to sell people’s personal information, such as their location data, to law enforcement and intelligence agencies without judicial oversight. Federal law fails to protect people’s data from being sold in this matter, so this bill would work to close this legal loophole and require the government to obtain a court order in order to buy a person’s data. This bill would prohibit law enforcement agencies from purchasing a person’s information from a third party, prohibit government agencies from sharing a person’s records with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and require the agencies to obtain a court order before obtaining someone’s records. This bill was passed in the House and received by the Senate in April 2024 with little movement since then.

Another promising bill is the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act, which was introduced in June 2023 by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Richard Durbin (D-IL). Law enforcement agencies have been secretly obtaining subpoenas for reporters’ emails and phone records in order to determine their confidential sources. The bill would protect a reporter’s data that is held by a third party from being secretly obtained from the government without having an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. As of now, this bill has passed the House and has been received in the Senate and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there has been legislation passed that expands surveillance such as the National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act bill, which was introduced in February 2024 and passed in April 2024. The bill provides $204 million to the FBI for DNA collection at the border. $170 million goes towards autonomous surveillance towers, mobile video surveillance systems, and drones at the border.

Digital Surveillance in New York State

Turning to New York specifically, there has been some positive movement towards obtaining information on the prevalence of government surveillance and curtailing the recent overreach as well. Recently, the NYPD was ordered by the New York Supreme Court to disclose 2,700 documents and emails related to its surveillance of the 2020 BLM protests between March and September 2020. This information can provide some clarity into the mystery around what surveillance tools were used during this time period, since much of the information known about this time period has come from FOIA requests instead of the NYPD voluntarily disclosing their surveillance practices.

In 2020, the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act passed. This act required the NYPD to disclose the surveillance tools it uses and publish the impact of those technologies. NYPD is required to publish reports on these surveillance tools, informing the public about how it plans to use these tools and the potential impacts on New Yorkers’ civil liberties and rights. The Brennan Center has written about the shortcomings of the law, largely due to the NYPD failing to adhere to the provisions. In February 2024, a bill adding provisions to the POST Act was introduced to the New York City Council. The provisions would require NYPD to provide the Department of Investigation a list of all surveillance technologies currently in use and provide their retention policies for the information they collected from the technologies. This bill was referred to the Committee on Public Safety in February 2024.

How to Take Action Against Surveillance

There are numerous ways organizations can take action in order to combat the use of mass surveillance in their communities. This section will provide  a few examples of actions that organizations can undertake in protecting their community right now, such as legislative action, forming working groups, sharing protest safety procedures, conducting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and spreading the word. 

Legislation

As demonstrated above, legislation can provide a promising avenue towards ending the overreach of widespread government surveillance of vulnerable communities. It’s important for organizations to have journalists who are willing to report on the issues their community may be facing, such as in the immigration space. The PRESS Act can help journalists who travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to report on issues affecting migrants and humanitarian organizations. Unfortunately, these journalists have been subjected to intimidation tactics while working on their stories which may prevent them from continuing their work. The PRESS Act would prevent government agencies from secretly obtaining subpoenas for reporters’ sources, but there is additional legislation needed to prevent law enforcement agencies from targeting journalists, activists, and attorneys who are providing assistance to migrants. Law enforcement should be prevented from performing warrantless searches, interrogating these individuals about their work without just cause, and creating dossiers of these individuals with illegitimately obtained personal information.

Legislation would also immensely benefit future protesters exercising their rights to free speech and assembly, and could have prevented many harms that occurred during the BLM protests. Since those protests, a few states and around 18 cities, such as Boston and Portland, have passed legislation banning government agencies from using FRT or layed out restrictions on how the technology can be used. But years later, some of these governments would roll back this legislation and allow law enforcement to utilize the technology to investigate crimes, such as New Orleans and Virginia which initially banned local police from using the tool. Vermont, a state that previously had a near complete ban on police use of FRT, passed legislation that would allow the police to use it for investigations in certain instances. Pushes can be made in New York and elsewhere to persuade legislators to care about privacy concerns as much as they care about crime. 

Legislation can also be pushed to prevent government agencies from surveilling residents in public housing while they are at their homes. Additionally, legislation can prevent law enforcement agencies from making dossiers of individuals based on the content the person follows or likes on social media. There is a lot of room for growth in this arena since the law has failed to keep up with technological advances. Advocacy organizations can propose or draft bill text with other organizations, meet with legislators, or sign onto letters in support or opposition of pending bills related to digital surveillance and data privacy rights.

Form a local working group to review proposed technology

In 2020, Syracuse mayor Ben Walsh formed the Syracuse Surveillance Technology Working Group, which provides residents an opportunity to comment on proposed uses of surveillance technology by city departments. The group is composed of 12-15 individuals from different community groups in Syracuse, as well as some City of Syracuse employees that are selected by the mayor.

When a city department is interested in utilizing a technology, they submit the request to the working group for review. The group advertises to the public through social media and local news channels to get widespread input. The group obtains comments from the public about their opinion and concerns about the technology and the group conducts their own research as well. The group then produces a report for the city with recommendations and explains how the technology may affect the Syracuse community. The mayor then approves or disapproves of the technology based on the report. Thus far, the group has reviewed automated license plate readers, body-worn cameras, street cameras, and more.

This working group provides the public an opportunity to conduct their own research on the proposed technologies and voice their opinions in a public forum. With many local government agencies wanting to explore the use of technologies like facial recognition, this could give activists a chance to have their opinions heard on these issues before they are implemented. This working group concept could be incorporated in other cities and provide some oversight and input into surveillance technologies that local agencies are utilizing on their residents.

Share protest safety procedures  

There are a few measures organizations can recommend to help individuals protect their privacy while they are at a protest. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project has done a wonderful job creating a safety guide for protesters who wish to protect their digital privacy while organizing. The guide provides information on protecting location data, DNA, and cell phone data. Some of the tips include turning one’s cell phone on airplane mode so that location cannot be tracked, considering what information one posts and shares on social media since it can be observed, and consider what transportation one takes to the protest as vehicles could be tracked via automated license plate readers. This information could be shared by organizations within their communities to ensure activists are doing what they can to protect their information as well as their fellow co-activists. Following these recommendations could prevent activists from being unjustly targeted by law enforcement, such as in the case of Shanai Matteson, the climate activist and artist in Minnesota referenced earlier.

FOIA requests

Another avenue organizations may want to explore is FOIA requests, which can help an organization and the public understand what kind of surveillance their community is being subjected to. There is a cloud of secrecy surrounding which tools government agencies use to surveil people, largely because agencies refuse to share this information with the public without legal force. As stated above, the NYPD was recently ordered to turn over records that would reveal how they used FRT against BLM protesters. It is essential to have this kind of information as it will help organizations discover how law enforcement utilized this tool and help organizations fight against future use. Almost all of the stories featured above were derived from an organization submitting a FOIA request and obtaining internal documents that revealed how communities were being harmed by a government agency. 

Sometimes, a party may refuse to comply with a FOIA request and the situation will escalate to legal action. As an example, in 2024, Just Futures Law, Mijente Support Group, and the Samuelson Clinic filed a lawsuit to force ICE to comply with a 2021 FOIA request that ICE failed to respond to. Because these situations can turn contentious, it’s important to have legal support when pursuing a FOIA, which can come from an attorney, a law firm, or law school clinic.

Spread the word

In order to combat these issues, people have to be informed about the mass surveillance that they are subjected to on a daily basis. Many people have expressed the sentiment “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide”; however, they may not be fully versed on the implications of surveillance on vulnerable communities who have done nothing to warrant this invasion into their privacy. Some ways to spread the word can include holding public meetings on various surveillance topics with speakers, organizing against local surveillance tactics and publicizing the action, speaking with community members to see if they’ve noticed any surveillance tactics in their neighborhood, and working with other social justice, tech, or legal organizations. As stated above, a legal organization or clinic can help social justice organizations litigate FOIA requests that are not complied with as well as provide assistance with other kinds of litigation as needed. Social justice organizations can also work with think tank organizations to produce reports on civil rights violations and inform the public of rising issues. After the report is released, organizations can sign onto a letter calling on the government to stop an action or support an action. 

Conclusion

There is much work to be done in the digital privacy space as the law has failed to keep up with the advancement of technology and rising surveillance concerns. However, everyone is capable of becoming well-versed in these issues, pushing for change on the state and federal level, and spreading the word throughout their communities. Privacy can be nearly impossible to achieve on an individual level, but together we can fight against efforts that degrade, dehumanize, and obstruct freedoms in our society.

---

Appendix 1. Legal Organizations to Know

Legal organizations in the privacy space are well versed on surveillance issues and could help social justice organizations know where to turn when individuals they serve come under surveillance. The following organizations are prominent in the privacy rights space and are performing groundbreaking work to combat government overreach.

ACLU

The ACLU has a Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology department that focuses on the right to privacy, ensuring individuals have control of their personal information, and protecting individual’s civil liberties as new advances are made in science and technology. The project focuses on consumer privacy, internet privacy, location tracking, medical and genetic privacy, national ID, privacy at borders and checkpoints, surveillance technologies, and workplace privacy.

S.T.O.P

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project fights government surveillance through advocacy and litigation and hopes to transform New York into a pro privacy state. S.T.O.P. organized over 100 organizations to get the POST Act approved in the state, has sued city and state agencies for records pertaining to a variety of issues such as NYPD’s use of FRT, and also publishes research papers on different surveillance technologies. 

Brennan Center for Justice

The Brennan Center for Justice is a nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to defend democracy and justice. One of their initiatives is privacy and free expression. Through that project, the Brennan Center works to challenge mass surveillance policies that are overreaching and works to inform the public about these issues. The Brennan Center has been a leader in challenging the structure of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the fact that the court only hears from the government when government agencies seek to obtain people’s data. 

Center on Privacy and Technology

The Center on Privacy and Technology is a think tank focused on privacy and surveillance law and policy. The Center fights back against surveillance by conducting long-term investigations, research, and publishing reports with their findings. Their most recent report, Raiding the Genome: How the United States is abusing its immigration powers to amass DNA for Future Policing, discusses migrants having their privacy rights invaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS  is taking DNA samples from detainees, which is later stored in the FBI’s database, CODIS. 

Just Futures Law

Just Futures Law works alongside activists, organizers, and community groups to dismantle mass surveillance, incarceration, and deportation via advocacy and legal support. They have worked on ending ICE digital prisons, stopping data brokers from selling people’s data to ICE which could lead to deportation, ending the digital border wall, protecting driver data from being turned over to ICE, amongst many other projects. 

The typical science grantmaker seeks to maximize their (positive) impact with a limited amount of money. The decision-making process for how to allocate that funding requires them to consider the different dimensions of risk and uncertainty involved in science proposals, as described in foundational work by economists Chiara Franzoni and Paula Stephan. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem implies that there exists for the grantmaker — or the peer reviewer(s) assessing proposals on their behalf — a utility function whose expected value they will seek to maximize. 

Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively. Empirical work has suggested that such an approach may lead to biases, resulting in funding decisions that deviate from grantmakers’ ultimate goals. An expected utility approach to reviewing science proposals aims to make that implicit decision-making process explicit, and thus reduce biases, by asking reviewers to directly predict the probability and value of different potential outcomes occurring. Implementing this approach through forecasting brings the added benefits of providing (1) a resolution and scoring process that could help incentivize reviewers to make better, more accurate predictions over time and (2) empirical estimates of reviewers’ accuracy and tendency to over or underestimate the value and probability of success of proposals.

At the Federation of American Scientists, we are currently piloting this approach on a series of proposals in the life sciences that we have collected for Focused Research Organizations (FROs), a new type of non-profit research organization designed to tackle challenges that neither academia or industry is incentivized to work on. The pilot study was developed in collaboration with Metaculus, a forecasting platform and aggregator, and is hosted on their website. In this paper, we provide the detailed methodology for the approach that we have developed, which builds upon Franzoni and Stephan’s work, so that interested grantmakers may adapt it for their own purposes. The motivation for developing this approach and how we believe it may help address biases against risk in traditional peer review processes is discussed in our article “Risk and Reward in Peer Review”.

Defining Outcomes

To illustrate how an expected utility forecasting approach could be applied to scientific proposal evaluation, let us first imagine a research project consisting of multiple possible outcomes or milestones. In the most straightforward case, the outcomes that could arise are mutually exclusive (i.e., only a single one will be observed). Indexing each outcome with the letter 𝑖, we can define the expected value of each as the product of its value (or utility; 𝓊_𝑖) and the probability of it occurring, 𝑃(𝑚_𝑖). Because the outcomes in this example are mutually exclusive, the total expected utility (TEU) of the proposed project is the sum of the expected value of each outcome¹:

𝑇𝐸𝑈 = 𝛴_𝑖𝓊_𝑖𝑃(𝑚_𝑖).

However, in most cases, it is easier and more accurate to define the range of outcomes of a research project as a set of primary and secondary outcomes or research milestones that are not mutually exclusive, and can instead occur in various combinations.

For instance, science proposals usually highlight the primary outcome(s) that they aim to achieve, but may also involve important secondary outcome(s) that can be achieved in addition to or instead of the primary goals. Secondary outcomes can be a research method, tool, or dataset produced for the purpose of achieving the primary outcome; a discovery made in the process of pursuing the primary outcome; or an outcome that researchers pivot to pursuing as they obtain new information from the research process. As such, primary and secondary outcomes are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the simplest scenario with just two outcomes (either two primary or one primary and one secondary), the total expected utility becomes

𝑇𝐸𝑈 = 𝓊₁𝑃(𝑚₁⋂ not 𝑚₂) + 𝓊₂𝑃(𝑚₂⋂ not 𝑚₁) + (𝓊₁ + 𝓊₂)𝑃(𝑚₁⋂𝑚₂),

𝑇𝐸𝑈 = 𝓊₁𝑃(𝑚₁) – (𝑚₁⋂ 𝑚₂)) + 𝓊₂𝑃(𝑚₂) – 𝑃(𝑚₁⋂ 𝑚₂)) + (𝓊₁ + 𝓊₂)𝑃(𝑚₁⋂𝑚₂)

𝑇𝐸𝑈 = 𝓊₁𝑃(𝑚₁) + 𝓊₂𝑃(𝑚₂) – (𝓊₁ + 𝓊₂)𝑃(𝑚₁⋂𝑚₂).

As the number of outcomes increases, the number of joint probability terms increases as well. Assuming the outcomes are independent though, they can be reduced to the product of the probabilities of individual outcomes. For example,

𝑃(𝑚₁⋂𝑚₂) = 𝑃(𝑚₁) * 𝑃(𝑚₂)

On the other hand, milestones are typically designed to build upon one another, such that achieving later milestones necessitates the achievement of prior milestones. In these cases, the value of later milestones typically includes the value of prior milestones: for example, the value of demonstrating a complete pilot of a technology is inclusive of the value of demonstrating individual components of that technology. The total expected utility can thus be defined as the sum of the product of the marginal utility of each additional milestone and its probability of success:

𝑇𝐸𝑈 = 𝛴_𝑖(𝓊_𝑖 + 𝓊_𝑖-1)𝑃(𝑚_𝑖),
where 𝓊₀ = 0.

Depending on the science proposal, either of these approaches — or a combination — may make the most sense for determining the set of outcomes to evaluate.

In our FRO Forecasting pilot, we worked with proposal authors to define two outcomes for each of their proposals. Depending on what made the most sense for each proposal, the two outcomes reflected either relatively independent primary and secondary goals, or sequential milestone outcomes that directly built upon one another (though for simplicity, we called all of the outcomes milestones).

Defining Probability of Success

Once the set of potential outcomes have been defined, the next step is to determine the probability of success between 0% and 100% for each outcome if the proposal is funded. A prediction of 50% would indicate the highest level of uncertainty about the outcome, whereas the closer the predicted probability of success is to 0% or 100%, the more certainty there is that the outcome will be one over the other. 
Furthermore, Franzoni and Stephan decompose probability of success into two components: the probability that the outcome can actually occur in nature or reality and the probability that the proposed methodology will succeed in obtaining the outcome (conditional on it being possible in nature). The total probability is then the product of these two components:

𝑃(𝑚_𝑖) = 𝑃_nature(𝑚_𝑖) * 𝑃_proposal(𝑚_𝑖)

Depending on the nature of the proposal (e.g., more technology-driven, or more theoretical/discovery driven), each component may be more or less relevant. For example, our forecasting pilot includes a proposal to perform knockout validation of renewable antibodies for 10,000 to 15,000 human proteins; for this project, 𝑃_nature(𝑚_𝑖) approaches 1 and 𝑃_proposal(𝑚_𝑖) drives the overall probability of success.

Defining Utility

Similarly, the value of an outcome can be separated into its impact on the scientific field and its impact on society at large. Scientific impact aims to capture the extent to which a project advances the frontiers of knowledge, enables new discoveries or innovations, or enhances scientific capabilities or methods. Social impact aims to capture the extent to which a project contributes to solving important societal problems, improving well-being, or advancing social goals. 

In both of these cases, determining the value of an outcome entails some subjective preferences, so there is no “correct” choice, at least mathematically speaking. However, proxy metrics may be helpful in considering impact. Though each is imperfect, one could consider citations of papers, patents on tools or methods, or users of method, tools, and datasets as proxies of scientific impact. For social impact, some proxy metrics that one might consider are the value of lives saved, the cost of illness prevented, the number of job-years of employment generated, economic output in terms of GDP, or the social return on investment.

The approach outlined by Franzoni and Stephan asks reviewers to assess scientific and social impact on a linear scale (0-100), after which the values can be averaged to determine the overall impact of an outcome. However, we believe that an exponential scale better captures the tendency in science for a small number of research projects to have an outsized impact and provides more room at the top end of the scale for reviewers to increase the rating of the proposals that they believe will have an exceptional impact.

As such, for our FRO Forecasting pilot, we chose to use a framework in which a simple 1–10 score corresponds to real-world impact via a base 2 exponential scale. In this case, the overall impact score of an outcome can be calculated according to

𝓊_𝑖 = log[2^{science impact of 𝑖} + 2^{social impact of 𝑖}] – 1.

For an exponential scale with a different base, one would substitute that base for two in the above equation. Depending on each funder’s specific understanding of impact and the type(s) of proposals they are evaluating, different relationships between scores and utility could be more appropriate.

In order to capture reviewers’ assessment of uncertainty in their evaluations, we asked them to provide median, 25th, and 75th percentile predictions for impact instead of a single prediction. High uncertainty would be indicated by a narrow confidence interval, while low uncertainty would be indicated by a wide confidence interval.

Determining the “But For” Effect of Funding

The above approach aims to identify the highest impact proposals. However, a grantmaker may not want to simply fund the highest impact proposals; rather, they may be most interested in understanding where their funding would make the highest impact — i.e., their “but for” effect. In this case, the grantmaker would want to fund proposals with the maximum difference between the total expected utility of the research proposal if they chose to funded it versus if they chose not to:

“But For” Impact = 𝑇𝐸𝑈(funding) – 𝑇𝐸𝑈(no funding).

For TEU(funding), the probability of the outcome occurring with this specific grantmaker’s funding using the proposed approach would still be defined as above

𝑃(𝑚_𝑖 | funding) = 𝑃_nature(𝑚_𝑖) * 𝑃_proposal(𝑚_𝑖),

but for 𝑇𝐸𝑈(no funding),  reviewers would need to consider the likelihood of the outcome being achieved through other means. This could involve the outcome being realized by other sources of funding, other researchers, other approaches, etc. Here, the probability of success without this specific grantmaker’s funding could be described as

𝑃(𝑚_𝑖 | no funding) = 𝑃_nature(𝑚_𝑖) * 𝑃_{other mechanism}(𝑚_𝑖).

In our FRO Forecasting pilot, we assumed that 𝑃_{other mechanism}(𝑚_𝑖) ≈ 0. The theory of change for FROs is that there exists a set of research problems at the boundary of scientific research and engineering that are not adequately supported by traditional research and development models and are unlikely to be pursued by academia or industry. Thus, in these cases it is plausible to assume that,

𝑃(𝑚_𝑖 | no funding) ≈ 0
𝑇𝐸𝑈(no funding) ≈ 0
“But For” Impact ≈ 𝑇𝐸𝑈(funding).

This assumption, while not generalizable to all contexts, can help reduce the number of questions that reviewers have to consider — a dynamic which we explore further in the next section.

Designing Forecasting Questions

Once one has determined the total expected utility equation(s) relevant for the proposal(s) that they are trying to evaluate, the parameters of the equation(s) must be translated into forecasting questions for reviewers to respond to. In general, for each outcome, reviewers will need to answer the following four questions:

1. If this proposal is funded, what is the probability that this outcome will occur?
2. If this proposal is not funded, what is the probability that this outcome will still occur? 
3. What will be the scientific impact of this outcome occurring?
4. What will be the social impact of this outcome occurring?

For the probability questions, one could alternatively ask reviewers about the different probability components (𝑃_nature(𝑚_𝑖), 𝑃_proposal(𝑚_𝑖), 𝑃_{other mechanism}(𝑚_𝑖), etc.), but in most cases it will be sufficient — and simpler for the reviewer — to focus on the top-level probabilities that feed into the TEU calculation.

In order for the above questions to tap into the benefits of the forecasting framework, they must be resolvable. Resolving the forecasting questions means that at a set time in the future, reviewers’ predictions will be compared to a ground truth based on the actual events that have occurred (i.e., was the outcome actually achieved and, if so, what was its actual impact?). Consequently, reviewers will need to be provided with the resolution date and the resolution criteria for their forecasts. 

Resolution of the probability-based questions hinges mostly on a careful and objective definition of the potential outcomes, and is otherwise straightforward — though note that only one of the probability questions will be resolved, since they are mutually exclusive. The optimal resolution of the scientific and social impact questions may depend on the context of the project and the chosen approach to defining utility. A widely applicable approach is to resolve the utility forecasts by having either program managers or subject matter experts evaluate the results of the completed project and score its impact at the resolution date.

For our pilot, we asked forecasting questions only about the probability of success given funding (question 1 above) and the scientific and social impact of each outcome (questions 3 and 4); since we assumed that the probability of success without funding was zero, we did not ask question 2. Because outcomes for the FRO proposals were designed to be either independent or sequential, we did not have to ask additional questions on the joint probability of multiple outcomes being achieved. We chose to resolve our impact questions with a post-project panel of subject matter experts.

Additional Considerations

In general, there is a tradeoff in implementing this approach between simplicity and thoroughness, efficiency and accuracy. Here are some additional considerations on that tradeoff for those looking to use this approach:

1. The responsibility of determining the range of potential outcomes for a proposal could be assigned to three different parties: the proposal author, the proposal reviewers, or the program manager. First, grantmakers could ask proposal authors to comprehensively define within their proposal the potential primary and secondary outcomes and/or project milestones. Alternatively, reviewers could be allowed to individually — or collectively — determine what they see as the full range of potential outcomes. The third option would be for program managers to define the potential outcomes based on each proposal, with or without input from proposal authors. In our pilot, we chose to use the third approach with input from proposal authors, since it simplified the process for reviewers and allowed us to limit the number of outcomes under consideration to a manageable amount.

2. In many cases, a “failed” or null outcome may still provide meaningful value by informing other scientists that the research method doesn’t work or that the hypothesis is unlikely to be true. Considering the replication crises in multiple fields, this could be an important and unaddressed aspect of peer review. Grantmakers could choose to ask reviewers to consider the value of these null outcomes alongside other outcomes to obtain a more complete picture of the project’s utility. We chose not to address this consideration in our pilot for the sake of limiting the evaluation burden on reviewers.

3. If grant recipients’ are permitted greater flexibility in their research agendas, this expected value approach could become more difficult to implement, since reviewers would have to consider a wider and more uncertain range of potential outcomes. This was not the case for our FRO Forecasting pilot, since FROs are designed to have specific and well-defined research goals.

Other Similar Efforts

Currently, forecasting is an approach rarely used in grantmaking. Open Philanthropy is the only grantmaking organization we know of that has publicized their use of internal forecasts about grant-related outcomes, though their forecasts do not directly influence funding decisions and are not specifically of expected value. Franzoni and Stephan are also currently piloting their Subjective Expected Utility approach with Novo Nordisk.

Conclusion

Our goal in publishing this methodology is for interested grantmakers to freely adapt it to their own needs and iterate upon our approach. We hope that this paper will help start a conversation in the science research and funding communities that leads to further experimentation. A follow up report will be published at the end of the FRO Forecasting pilot sharing the results and learnings from the project.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Peter Mühlbacher, former research scientist at Metaculus, for his meticulous feedback as we developed this approach and for his guidance in designing resolvable forecasting questions. We’d also like to thank the rest of the Metaculus team for being open to our ideas and working with us on piloting this approach, the process of which has helped refine our ideas to their current state. Any mistakes here are of course our own.

Charlotte Yeung is a Purdue student and New Voices in Nuclear Weapons fellow at FAS. Her multimedia show, Culture Blast, opens this week at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis.

Best known for his anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut’s experience serving in World War II informed his work and his life. He acted as a powerful spokesman for the preservation of our Constitutional freedoms, for nuclear arms control, and for the protection of the earth’s fragile biosphere throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He remained engaged in these issues throughout his life. 

FAS: Tell us about this project and its goals…

Charlotte: My exhibit, Culture Blast, weaves Kurt Vonnegut’s stance on nuclear weapons with current issues we face today. It serves as a space for preservation and linkage, asking the viewer to connect Vonnegut’s concerns to the modern day. It is also a place of artistic protest and education, meant to inform the viewer of the often ignored complexity of nuclear weapons and how they affect many different parts of society. I worked with Lovely Umayam and the team at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to ideate and research what underpins this exhibit. 

Why this medium?

I explore nuclear history and literary protest through blackout poetry, free verse, and digital illustration – contemporary forms of written and visual art that carries on Vonnegut’s artistic protest into the modern day.

In particular, I wanted to create art that can be accessible to everyone and not just people who go to the museum. Seeing a photo of a pencil drawing or a statue online is experiencing just the surface-level nature of a work of art. It lacks the other sensory components like seeing how the art fits with the wider space and how others react to it. A similar issue comes up if my poems were spoken word. That art form lives off of a crowd. My digital art and poetry is meant to be seen in both a museum setting and online setting. Viewers can watch a time lapse of my art and see the process of creating this work. The poetry is meant to be read rather than performed. 

Can you share some of the backstory on a few of the multimedia pieces? How did the concept evolve as you worked on them?

My favorite pair in the collection is Sketch 1 (the typewriter) and the blackout poem Protection in the name of public interest. I drew Vonnegut on his typewriter because I felt this to be  the most symbolic image of his artistic protest. Though he wrote and sketched on countless personal notebooks, his work commenting on nuclear weapons can be found in some of his published stories. Vonnegut turned to his literary creativity to reflect on nuclear weapons, in particular scientists’ indifference to the suffering caused by the atom bomb, as seen in works such as Cat’s Cradle and Report on The Barnhouse Effect. 

The uncensored version of my poem (Protection in the name of public interest) meditates on the bomb’s harm and also the long association between science and violence. I chose to create a blackout poem because in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the American government censored many of the photos and stories about what happened to the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in effect erasing the lived experience of these people. It wasn’t until writer John Hersey’s account of the U.S. nuclear attacks, titled Hiroshima, was published in The New Yorker in 1946 that the American public had an uncensored understanding of what had happened in Japan.

In terms of the process, I began this thinking that I would draw a hand and a pencil but Vonnegut is strongly associated with his typewriter so I felt that it wouldn’t be as accurate to draw something else. I knew I would write a blackout poem and link it to censorship but I wasn’t sure what it would be called or what it would say. I ultimately wrote how I felt about the exhibit and what I’ve learned so far in the FAS fellowship and what I wanted to convey. I started blacking out the poem and left the main themes I wanted viewers to have from this exhibit.

Still from Typewritertimerelapse, Charlotte Yeung, 2023

I am very fond of Sketch 2 (the cat’s cradle with the mushroom cloud inside) and the poem Labels. Labels was inspired by a lunch I had last year with a hibakusha, Yoshiko Kajimoto. She was 14 when the bomb fell and she spoke of the following days in vivid detail. I believe it was her testimony in particular that started me on this path towards researching the societal implications of nuclear weapons. 

I drew an artistic interpretation of a cat’s cradle seeking to capture a mushroom cloud to communicate the concept of hyperobjects. According to Timothy Morton, a hyperobject is a real event or phenomenon so vast that it is beyond human comprehension. Nuclear weapons are an example of a hyperobject – its existence and use has had devastating ramifications touching different aspects of life that may be hard to fully comprehend all at once. 

Nuclear weapons are both deeply present and hidden. On one hand, nuclear weapons are a constant security threat and have left deep scars on cities and bodies ranging from people in Japan to Utah downwinders. On the other hand, some of the information around them is clouded in mystery, and censored by different governments. Nuclear and fallout shelters built for nuclear warfare are considered to be Cold War relics; in the United States, they are largely abandoned or hidden, tucked in the  basements of homes and schools, or located far out in the countryside away from cities. Some nuclear bunkers are parking lots in New York City and rumored rooms in DC. Secrecy and hidden locality are reasons why there isn’t as much widespread public knowledge or understanding of nuclear weapons.

Still from Wintertimerelapse, Charlotte Yeung, 2023

Why is nuclear weapon risk a conversation we’re still having today? Where can people new to this issue learn more? 

As a young person, I encounter many people my age who ask me why I care about nuclear weapons and why they matter in this day and age. It is, in a sense, meaningless to them. The violence of the bomb cannot be completely understood without hearing about the pain it wrought on people who experienced it firsthand. From burning skin and bodies to radiation poisoning, nuclear weapons have left permanent physical and psychological scars that are rarely spoken about, but have affected generations of families and communities. 

I suggest reading more about what happened to individual A-bomb survivors to truly understand the effects of nuclear weapons. Humanizing those affected by war combats the practice of minimizing lives and experience to death counts. Great works to look at include Barefoot Gen (a manga on the Hiroshima bombings inspired by the hibakusha author’s experience), Grave of the Fireflies (a film about children grappling with the effects of the bombing), and the poem Bringing Forth New Life (生ましめんかな) by hibakusha poet Sadako Kurihara (which is about a woman giving birth in the ruins while the midwife dies from injuries in the middle of the process). 

I knew the design from the beginning. It had to be a cat’s cradle because Vonnegut equates scientific irreverence to the bomb’s humanitarian effects to a cat’s cradle (an essentially useless game of moving strings with your fingers). The poem centers around hyperobjects, a term I grappled with in a university seminar with Dr. Brite from Purdue’s Honors College. I had never heard of the term before that class but I thought it was fitting for something like nuclear weapons. My research is interdisciplinary in nature and it seeks to analyze the cultural aspects of nuclear weapons that aren’t traditionally used by the political science community.

Still from Cat’s Cradle, Charlotte Yeung, 2023

The third piece I’ll discuss is Sketch 5 and Rebuilding. This sketch of a rose is reminiscent of the Duftwolke roses sent from Germany to Hiroshima after the war as a symbol of rebuilding. It is also symbolic of Vonnegut’s experiences in World War II. He was caught in the firestorm that engulfed Dresden and he sheltered in a slaughterhouse. As one of the remaining survivors, he was forced to burn dead bodies in the aftermath. Vonnegut became an anti-war activist as a result of this experience. He also wrote Slaughterhouse-Five a book that grapples with trauma and PTSD after war. His writing was his way of finding closure and rebuilding, hence the title of the poem.

I wanted to end this collection on an optimistic note because, as dark and grim as war and nuclear weapons can be, there is great resilience in humanity. It takes monumental courage and hope to rebuild a city or mind or soul after facing the devastation of an all-consuming weapon.

Still from Broken Arrow, Charlotte Yeung, 2023

I actually drew this while talking with FAS fellows and FAS advisors. I often draw to pay attention to important conversations (so all of my notebooks are filled with drawings). I thought the deep, complex observations about nuclear weapons and ethics and misinformation and other fields was so fascinating and I think as a result, I created my favorite drawing. I felt very hopeful during the conversation, because I saw so many people who were invested in this topic and were actively researching and discussing the implication of nuclear weapons. 

Where can people see your show/contact you?

The showcase can be seen at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, Indiana. If someone wants to speak about this topic with me, they can reach me at X or Instagram at @cmyeungg.