Diversity statements should not be required for federal STEMM grant funding

 Federally funded research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) is a crown jewel of American higher education that confers enormous benefits upon the U.S. and the world. The integrity of the processes by which funding decisions are made is critically important to the success of the enterprise and its support by the public who pay for this research. As documented in a recent commentary that I and several colleague published in the journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have been introduced into federal science funding decisions. I believe these threaten serious damage to this important ecosystem and require critical analysis before they are routinely implemented.

STEMM funding by federal agencies has fueled the great success of U.S. science, advancing knowledge production and improving the human condition worldwide. Each of the major U.S. funding agencies — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Defense has a distinct mission, and in 2024 they will together distribute more than $90 billion dollars in research grants.

Funding decisions to support the research goals of each agency require assessment of the scientific merit of submitted proposals, along with the track records of the proposed research teams and their potential to achieve their stated goals. These decisions require a process of peer review by which reviewers with appropriate expertise who are free of personal or professional conflicts of interest rank proposals based on clear guidelines for assessment. Though peer review is hardly perfect, its success is reflected in outstanding research outcomes and the stellar reputation of the U.S. research enterprise.

Inserting DEI considerations into scientific peer review and funding decisions arose from worthy goals: to avoid bias and promote equal and fair treatment for all. But as has occurred in other domains involving DEI bureaucracy, such as mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring decisions, DEI has gradually morphed from supporting worthy and broadly accepted goals to promoting increasingly ideological and politicized goals that include participation and outcomes for groups based on criteria such as racial and sexual identity that are proportional to their representation in the population. This approach is neither morally justified nor legal under existing civil rights employment law.

The details of DEI requirements for research funding proposals vary across agencies and programs. But common features include vaguely described goals and lack of relevant outcome assessments, along with an implicit expectation of expressed allegiance to a politicized litmus test that is, in effect, compelled speech on a controversial issue in violation of academic freedom.

To quote a recent editorial opposing mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring: “By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself.” The same can be said about DEI requirements in proposals for federal funding for science grants.

Everyone should demand that a STEMM research ecosystem be free of bigotry and actively seek to engage, welcome, and develop a scientific workforce open to all individuals on a fair and equitable basis. Strengthening K-12 education and supporting merit-based practices is a far more effective path toward equal opportunity, fair distribution of resources, and the best science than are DEI-influenced changes to grant proposals and projects. In fact, rather than advancing these worthy goals, requiring DEI plans in grant proposals will likely undermine them by promoting dissembling and cynicism by applicants, reducing the quality of funded research, threatening academic freedom through compelled speech, and ultimately, increasing public mistrust of science that will threaten the entire enterprise.

The Academic Freedom Alliance has recently issued a statement on this matter urging federal agencies that fund STEMM research to desist from demanding plans to advance DEI in their grant proposals.

The rapid and widespread requirement for DEI plans in STEMM grant proposals has proceeded with little or no attention to their potential adverse effects on the quality and impact of funded research and the threat these interventions represent to academic freedom. DEI requirements should be suspended pending objective assessment of their benefits and risks, clarification of how they are actually being employed in funding decisions, and development of safeguards to prevent their misuse.

Jeffrey S. Flier is an endocrinologist, professor of medicine, and former dean of Harvard Medical School.

https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/05/stemm-funding-diversity-and-inclusion/

Republicans needs to run hard on Trump policy agenda

 It’s the Trump policy agenda, stupid. That’s how to beat Vice President Kamala Harris — with policy arguments, not gratuitous personal attacks.

Over 90% of voters have made up their minds. The 2024 presidential election will be determined in a handful of battleground states by a few hundred thousand votes, and Ms. Harris’ best chance of winning will be to consolidate Democratic women, successfully woo independent women and peel off a fraction of Republican women.

Republican politicians, TV commentators and radio talk show hosts who play the Willie Brown card ridicule the Harris cackle or demean Ms. Harris as a diversity, equity and inclusion hire, which will only advance her strategy. Such personal attacks build a misplaced sympathy for Ms. Harris, particularly when the invective comes from men — like it or not, it’s a Mars vs. Venus world.

To successfully woo swing women voters — along with independents up for grabs and the traditional Black, brown and blue-collar portions of the Democratic base — the best Republican strategy is to run hard on the Trump policy agenda. Polls tell us that on the top salient issues likely to move undecided voters, the Trump policy agenda provides huge leads.

Inflation tops pollsters’ list. “Bidenomics” is behind it, and Ms. Harris has given it a full-throated endorsement. Former President Donald Trump runs away with the election on this issue alone — voters vividly remember that in Trump’s America, you didn’t have to choose between food on the table, prescriptions you need and a roof over your head.

The border chaos is in a dead heat with inflation. Despite the efforts of the mainstream media to scrub this fact, President Biden did assign Ms. Harris in 2021 to serve as border czar. Yet a dangerous crew of murderers, rapists, drug cartels, human traffickers, terrorists and Chinese spies have swarmed into our country.

Across the Rio Grande, millions of illiterate illegal aliens have also flooded our labor markets, stealing jobs and depressing the wages of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans. As Mr. Biden’s missing-in-action border czar, Ms. Harris owns this border chaos, and polls here give Donald Trump a double-digit lead.

On the crime issue, Ms. Harris helped lead the “defund the police” movement even as she cheered on violent protests in American cities by radical groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. In contrast, Mr. Trump has the endorsement of every major law enforcement organization and enjoys double-digit leads in the polls.

On foreign policy, voters likewise remember Mr. Trump had four years in the White House free of conflict with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran because their leaders both fear and respect him. And Mr. Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in a show of support for Israel.

In contrast, Ms. Harris has ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket with the least foreign policy experience of any major party presidential candidate in the last 100 years. Under Biden-Harris, Russia invaded Ukraine, Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel, China is threatening Taiwan and North Korea has resumed its missile and nuclear weapons testing.

The one foreign policy issue Ms. Harris has infamously distinguished herself on is that of the war in the Gaza Strip, where she has sided with “river to the sea” Palestinian activists while all but snubbing Israel’s president. The American electorate is watching, and it does not like what it sees from Ms. Harris.

Beyond Mr. Trump’s polling advantage on issues including the economy and inflation, illegal immigration, crime and foreign policy, there is also Ms. Harris’ “woke” agenda. It runs strongly against the grain of Middle Americans, including many men and women in the traditional Democratic Party base.

Here, parents are uncomfortable with (and often outraged by) K-12 “woke” indoctrination at the expense of reading, writing and arithmetic. There is equal outrage at the participation of men in women’s sports. There is also widespread bewilderment (and equal outrage) across America at how and why the Biden-Harris regime is facilitating gender surgery on children.

As a further twist, in what can only be described as a twisted version of “prison reform,” Ms. Harris is also on record fervently supporting gender reassignment operations for men in federal prisons. No wonder Ms. Harris garnered the most liberal voting record in the Senate during her tenure there.

The one polling issue where Ms. Harris leads is abortion. This issue, however, runs significantly behind inflation and the economy, the border chaos, foreign policy and crime as salient to most swing voters.

Of note, Ms. Harris’ view on abortion is far more extreme than that of Mr. Biden. If Republicans more effectively message that extremism, Ms. Harris’ polling advantage should narrow or even disappear. Here, even mainstream Democrats oppose the ate-term abortions supported by Ms. Harris.

Given this polling chessboard, it is indeed the Trump policy agenda, stupid. If Republicans are smart, they will follow this advice. To lose this election is to lose this country.

• Peter Navarro served for four years in the Trump White House and is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to the Trump 2024 Platform.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/aug/6/how-gop-can-beat-kamala-harris/

A Minnesotan Sizes Up Tim Walz

 Tim Walz has such a bad record as Minnesota’s governor that I was astonished when he landed on Vice President Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential shortlist. As Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment has documented, under Mr. Walz Minnesota has become a high-crime state. Student achievement has tumbled as spending on schools has skyrocketed. Per capita gross domestic product has fallen below the national average. Minnesotans have joined residents of New York, California and Illinois in fleeing their home state.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—also on Ms. Harris’s shortlist—made sense to me. Pennsylvania is a key state. Mr. Shapiro seems to be a man of substance and would give liberal Jews a reason to vote for Ms. Harris without a guilty conscience. As a Jewish supporter of Israel, I worried that Mr. Shapiro would give the animus throbbing in the heart of the Democratic Party cover. Indeed, that animus drove a nasty intraparty campaign against him.

But Tim Walz? I’m a conservative Republican. I don’t completely understand Democrats’ ways. As an observer of Minnesota politics, however, I understand how Mr. Walz became governor. Having served six terms in Congress from a rural district, he challenged the endorsed DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) candidate—a liberal metro-area state senator, Erin Murphy—in the 2018 DFL primary. Ms. Murphy was also challenged by another metro-area liberal, Lori Swanson, then state attorney general. With Ms. Murphy and Ms. Swanson dividing the liberal urban vote, Mr. Walz and his far-left running mate, former state Rep. Peggy Flanagan, won the primary with 41%.

On taking office in 2019, Gov. Walz was restrained by a one-seat Republican majority in the state Senate—until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. He declared a state of emergency on March 25, 2020, and ruled by decree for 15 months. He proclaimed the emergency on the basis of an allegedly sophisticated Minnesota Model projection of the virus’s course in the state. In fact, the projection reflected a weekend’s work by graduate students at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Relying on their research, Mr. Walz presented a scenario in which an estimated 74,000 Minnesotans would perish from the virus. The following week the Star Tribune reported that with the lockdown Mr. Walz ordered, 50,000 would die. Maybe it would have been preferable to address the virus through democratic means.

Having destroyed jobs and impeded life routines, including family get-togethers and church attendance, Mr. Walz finally let his one-man rule lapse on July 1, 2021. When the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center stopped counting in March 2023, the deaths of 14,870 Minnesotans were attributed to the virus. (In 2020 I successfully sued the administration for excluding me from Health Department press briefings on Covid.)

During the state of emergency, protests broke out in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020 following the death of George Floyd. That Thursday, rioters burned Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station to the ground. Mr. Walz didn’t deploy the National Guard until the weekend. Riots, arson and looting throughout the Twin Cities caused about $500 million in damage.

Minnesota leads the nation in Covid fraud. Under the auspices of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, its founder, Aimee Bock, allegedly recruited mostly young Somali men to seek reimbursement for millions of meals supposedly served to poor students and families. According to indictments handed up by a grand jury to U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, Ms. Bock and others allegedly defrauded the state and federal government of $250 million. Ms. Bock has pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges.

Among the 70 defendants charged to date, 18 have pleaded guilty. In April the first of the cases to go to trial had seven defendants; five were convicted. The remaining cases have yet to be tried. In all, the Minnesota Department of Education oversaw the payout of $250 million to reimburse fictitious meals. The nature and scale of the fraud are staggering. Mr. Walz tried to blame state district court judge John Guthmann, who in April 2021 handled a case regarding the department’s processing of applications for reimbursements. According to Mr. Walz, Judge Guthmann ordered the state to continue payouts to the alleged perpetrators of the fraud even after the state Education Department discovered it.

In September 2022, Judge Guthmann authorized a news release titled “Correcting media reports and statements by Gov. Tim Walz concerning orders issued by the court.” The release concluded: “As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the ‘serious deficiencies’ that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.”

In November 2022 Mr. Walz was elected to a second term, and the DFL won majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. In the preceding two years the state had accumulated an $18 billion budget surplus. With the DFL in full control, Mr. Walz and the Legislature have spent the $18 billion surplus on infrastructure, education and other programs that will burden the state for years. They have also raised taxes.

Mr. Walz and his DFL colleagues have backed measures establishing Minnesota as a mecca for abortion and a “trans refuge.” The legislation prohibits enforcing out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants and extradition requests for people from other states who seek treatment that is legal in Minnesota. It also bars complying with court orders issued in other states to remove children from their parents’ custody for authorizing hormone treatment or surgery to alter sex characteristics.

Like so many Democrats who have kept up with the demands of the progressive agenda, Mr. Walz has “grown” in office. In his second term, he has been the most left-wing Minnesota governor since the socialist Floyd B. Olson (1931-36). I doubt that Mr. Walz could be elected to Congress in his old district, which is now represented by a Republican. The idea that he can appeal to voters who don’t already support Ms. Harris seems far-fetched.

Scott W. Johnson is a retired Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-minnesotan-sizes-up-tim-walz-progressive-vice-president-crime-education-covid-e4e757ec

Emergent BioSolutions plunges on wider-than-expected Q2 loss

 ** Shares of drugmaker Emergent BioSolutions EBS.N fall 36.2% to $6.3 before the bell

** Late-Tuesday, co reported wider-than-estimated Q2 adj. loss and also widened its 2024 net loss forecast range

** Posted Q2 adj. loss of $2.32/per share vs. analysts' estimates of loss of 95 cents

** The company now sees an adjusted net loss of $115 mln to $75 mln, from $65 mln to $15 mln expected earlier

** Co, however, lifted its FY rev forecast to $1.05-$1.13 bln from $1.0-$1.10 bln

** As of last close, stock up 310.8% YTD

https://www.xm.com/research/markets/allNews/reuters/emergent-biosolutions-plunges-on-widerthanexpected-q2-loss-53900340

Nevro cut by 3 sell siders

 

oday Downgrade Wells Fargo Equal Weight → Underweight $13 → $5.50

Today Downgrade JP Morgan Neutral → Underweight

Today Downgrade JMP Securities Mkt Outperform → Mkt Perform

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=NVRO&p=d

Inogen 'meaningful progress'

 Inogen reported total revenue increased 6.1% to $88.8 million for the second quarter, primarily driven by higher demand and new customers in international and domestic business-to-business sales.  

It reported a net loss of $5.59 million vs. a net loss of $9.83 million year over year. 

“I am proud of the performance of our team in the first half of 2024,” said Kevin Smith, president and CEO. “We have made meaningful progress on our strategic initiatives, driving top-line growth and advancing the profile of the business toward profitability. We will also continue to advance our innovation pipeline and look forward to delivering best-in-class products to more respiratory patients around the world.” 

Other highlights from the quarter: 

• Total gross margin was 48.1% in the second quarter of 2024 vs. 40.7% in the second quarter of 2023. The increase was driven primarily by lower premiums paid for components and favorable adjustments to reserves, partially offset by sales channel mix. 
• Total operating expense for the quarter was $49.8 million compared to $45.8 million in the second quarter of 2023, representing an increase of 8.7%. The increase was primarily due to higher personnel-related expenses. 
• Adjusted EBITDA was a positive $1.3 million in the second quarter of 2024 compared to a negative $3.2 million in the second quarter of 2023. 
• Cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and restricted cash were $121.2 million as of June 30, 2024, and no debt outstanding. 

Inogen expects revenue for the full year 2024 to range from approximately $325 million to $330 million, which represents approximately 3% to 5% growth over the company’s prior year revenue. 

https://www.hmenews.com/article/inogen-makes-meaningful-progress

'Biden admin bolsters energy-efficient manufacturing using wartime authority'

 The Biden administration is doling out a second round of funding for energy efficient heating systems, again using its wartime authority in the fight against climate change.

The Department of Energy is putting $85 million to accelerate the production of heat pumps under the Defense Production Act, it first told The Hill.

Heat pumps are a more energy efficient alternative to air conditioners and furnaces. They work by transferring heat instead of generating it — moving heat from outside indoors during the winter and moving heat from inside during the summer.

The funds will go to five facilities in New York, Tennessee, Texas and Rhode Island. The administration said the move is expected to create more than 500 jobs, nearly half of which will be in disadvantaged communities. 

The Defense Production Act gives the president the authority to mobilize a certain industry to advance national security.

A spokesperson for the Energy Department said that the Democrats’ 2022 climate, tax and healthcare bill gave the department $500 million for use under the law, which the $85 million comes from. 

“As communities across the country continue to face down the impacts of climate-fueled extreme weather events, investing in American-made heat pump manufacturing will help keep families safe and comfortable in their homes, schools, and businesses and cut their energy cost,” said White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi in a written statement. 

“Today’s investments, levering the authorities in the Defense Production Act, harness the power of American innovation to jumpstart critical clean energy manufacturing capacity and to protect our families, our economy, and our planet.”

The investments are expected to enable the manufacture of an additional 155,000 residential heat pumps, 440,000 residential water heaters, 2,000 school heat pumps, 120 industrial water heaters and 20,000 additional heat pump components. 

The money announced Wednesday will go to facilities owned by: Daikin Comfort Technologies North America, Inc., A. O. Smith, Modine Manufacturing Company and BITZER Scroll, Inc. 

The funds are in addition to an additional $169 million that bolstered heat pump manufacturing under the Defense Production Act last year. 

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4814895-biden-administration-energy-efficient-manufacturing-wartime-authority/