Follow COGR on LinkedIn4/14/26GAO-26-108283
Grants Management: Efforts to Address Challenges Through Government-wide Collaboration
To design and administer federal grant programs, agencies must navigate a variety of requirements and guidance. While there are certain standard requirements, each grant program has different authorizing legislation and may also be subject to agency-specific regulations and guidance. For some aspects of grant design and administration, agencies also have more discretion to make decisions. As a result of these factors, there is substantial variation in the design and administration of grant programs across federal agencies.
4/14/26The Dispatch
Higher Education Blinked. What Comes Next?
College leaders have faced a firehose of threats, investigations, and funding freezes over the past year, far more than they did during Trump’s first term. Which raises the question: What accounts for this shift?
4/14/26APS News
NSF lags in grant awards and Trump again proposes deep cuts to science
he National Science Foundation has awarded just 613 grants this fiscal year, at about 20% the level at this time in the year in each of fiscal years 2021 through 2024, according to the group Grant Witness. The amount of funding awarded is at similarly low levels, about one-third that of previous years. The trend is visible across each of NSF’s directorates. New and competitive award renewals, which undergo full peer review, are particularly low compared to previous years.
4/14/26Nature
Boycott of major AI conference exposes a growing US–China divide
A key Chinese research organization is set to boycott the prestigious NeurIPS conference, which is run by a US-based non-profit organization, after a row over a policy that initially seemed to exclude many Chinese researchers. NeurIPS later apologized and watered down the policy. But the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) is standing by its decision to no longer pay for researchers to attend the conference and to discount NeurIPS papers in crucial researcher evaluations.
4/13/26Washington Post, Opinion
A deserved defeat on NIH funding cuts
The Trump administration quietly conceded defeat last week on its misguided push to slash research funding from the National Institutes of Health. That’s a relief to researchers, but all Americans benefit from the basic and applied research that would have been disrupted by permanent cuts.
Science
4/13/26 : NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen a record number of students this year to receive its prestigious graduate fellowship, rebounding from last year’s unusually small cohort. The size of this year’s class, announced today , together with a more traditional distribution across fields, could ease fears that NSF, under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, had decided to shrink and alter the nature of a program that has supported 50 future Nobel laureates since it began in 1952.