New in Metascience and Good Government

A few items of note:

1. Today, in partnership with the Paragon Institute, I published a 35-page piece on reforming NIH. It’s available here. This was many months in the making, and I am grateful to the Paragon Institute both for the opportunity and for their many helpful comments along the way.

2. My friend James Heathers just started up the Medical Evidence Project, which aims to unearth significant errors/fraud in the medical literature. James has done this sort of thing many times before (see this article on “data thugs”), and is uniquely able to write about research quality problems with flair and humor (see his article on the “Carthorse Child”). His new effort has already been covered by Nature, and for more on the idea, see his announcement as well as his initial idea from a year ago. James and I have talked about this idea for years, and it is gratifying to see it become a reality, thanks to Open Philanthropy’s sponsorship.

3. I was in DC for some meetings earlier this week. A highly-placed person at HHS had the following to say about DOGE:

   1. “Thanks to the $1 credit card limit, if I want to buy pens for my office, I have to write 3 memos and wait for months.”

   2. “DOGE has demanded to approve all NOFOs [notices of funding opportunities, which is how HHS does a great deal of its work], even though NOFOs already have multiple layers of political review. DOGE has only gotten around to approving TWO of them.”

      1. PS: This isn’t a secret; it has been publicly reported. The point is that insiders confirm the public reports are true.

   3. Hilariously, all of this is consistent with Elon Musk’s own quip that “any government institution is most likely to be the opposite of its name.” Thanks to DOGE’s obsession with rooting out waste and abuse (whether it exists or not), DOGE has made many areas of government more inefficient than anyone thought possible.