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Via the False Claims Act, NIH puts universities on edge

NIH grants, Science, scientific grants, syndication, University of Michigan / Kris Guyer / June 19, 2025

Funding pause at U. Michigan illustrates uncertainty around new language in NIH grants.

University of Michigan students walk on the UM campus next to signage displaying the University’s “Core Values” on April 3, 2025 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Credit: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Earlier this year, a biomedical researcher at the University of Michigan received an update from the National Institutes of Health. The federal agency, which funds a large swath of the country’s medical science, had given the green light to begin releasing funding for the upcoming year on the researcher’s multi-year grant.

Not long after, the researcher learned that the university had placed the grant on hold. The school’s lawyers, it turned out, were wrestling with a difficult question: whether to accept new terms in the Notice of Award, a legal document that outlines the grant’s terms and conditions.

Other researchers at the university were having the same experience. Indeed, Undark’s reporting suggests that the University of Michigan—among the top three university recipients of NIH funding in 2024, with more than $750 million in grants—had quietly frozen some, perhaps all, of its incoming NIH funding dating back to at least the second half of April.

The university’s director of public affairs, Kay Jarvis, declined to comment for this article or answer a list of questions from Undark, instead pointing to the institution’s research website.

In conversations with Michigan scientists, and in internal communications obtained by Undark, administrators explained the reason for the delays: University officials were concerned about new language in NIH grant notices. That language said that universities will be subject to liability under a Civil War-era statute called the False Claims Act if they fail to abide by civil rights laws and a January 20 executive order related to gender.

For the most part, public attention to NIH funding has focused on what the new Trump administration is doing on its end, including freezing and terminating grants at elite institutions for alleged Title VI and IX violations, and slashing funding for newly disfavored areas of research. The events in Ann Arbor show how universities themselves are struggling to cope with a wave of recent directives from the federal government.

The new terms may expose universities to significant legal risk, according to several experts. “The Trump administration is using the False Claims Act as a massive threat to the bottom lines of research institutions,” said Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan, who served as general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. (Bagenstos said he has not advised the university’s lawyers on this issue.) That law entitles the government to collect up to three times the financial damage. “So potentially you could imagine the Trump administration seeking all the federal funds times three that an institution has received if they find a violation of the False Claims Act.”

Such an action, Bagenstos and another legal expert said, would be unlikely to hold up in court. But the possibility, he said, is enough to cause concern for risk-averse institutions.

The grant pauses unsettled the affected researchers. One of them noted that the university had put a hold on a grant that supported a large chunk of their research program. “I don’t have a lot of money left,” they said.

The researcher worried that if funds weren’t released soon, personnel would have to be fired and medical research halted. “There’s a feeling in the air that somebody’s out to get scientists,” said the researcher, reflecting on the impact of all the changes at the federal level. “And it could be your turn tomorrow for no clear reason.” (The researcher, like other Michigan scientists interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.)

Bagenstos said some other universities had also halted funding—a claim Undark was unable to confirm. At Michigan, at least, money is now flowing: On Wednesday, June 11, just hours after Undark sent a list of questions to the university’s public affairs office, some researchers began receiving emails saying their funding would be released. And research administrators received a message stating that the university would begin releasing the more than 270 awards that it had placed on hold.

The federal government distributes tens of billions of dollars each year to universities through NIH funding. In the past, the terms of those grants have required universities to comply with civil rights laws. More recently, though, the scope of those expectations has expanded. Multiple recent award notices viewed by Undark now contain language referring to a January 20 executive order that states the administration “will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” The notices also contain four bullet points, one of which asks the grant recipient—meaning the researcher’s institution—to acknowledge that “a knowing false statement” regarding compliance is subject to liability under the False Claims Act.

Read an NIH Notice of Award

Alongside this change, on April 21, the agency issued a policy requiring universities to certify that they will not participate in discriminatory DEI activities or boycotts of Israel, noting that false statements would be subject to penalties under the False Claims Act. (That measure was rescinded in early June, reinstated, and then rescinded again while the agency awaits further White House guidance.) Additionally, in May, an announcement from the Department of Justice encouraged use of the False Claims Act in civil rights enforcement.

Some experts said that signing onto FCA terms could put universities in a vulnerable position, not because they aren’t following civil rights laws, but because the new grant language is vague and seemingly ripe for abuse.

The False Claims Act says someone who knowingly submits a false claim to the government can be held liable for triple damages. In the case of a major research institution like the University of Michigan, worst-case scenarios could range into the billions of dollars.

It’s not just the dollar amount that may cause schools to act in a risk-averse way, said Bagenstos. The False Claims Act also contains what’s known as a “qui tam” provision, which allows private entities to file a lawsuit on behalf of the United States and then potentially take a piece of the recovery money. “The government does not have the resources to identify and pursue all cases of legitimate fraud” in the country, said Bagenstos, so generally the provision is a useful one. But it can be weaponized when “yoked to a pernicious agenda of trying to suppress speech by institutions of higher learning, or simply to try to intimidate them.”

Avoiding the worst-case scenario might seem straightforward enough: Just follow civil rights laws. But in reality, it’s not entirely clear where a university’s responsibility starts and stops. For example, an institution might officially adopt policies that align with the new executive orders. But if, say, a student group, or a sociology department, steps out of bounds, then the university might be understood to not be in compliance—particularly by a less-than-friendly federal administration.

University attorneys may also balk at the ambiguity and vagueness of terms like “gender ideology” and “DEI,” said Andrew Twinamatsiko, a director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown Law. Litigation-averse universities may end up rolling back their programming, he said, because they don’t want to run afoul of the government’s overly broad directives.

“I think this is a time that calls for some courage,” said Bagenstos. If every university decides the risks are too great, then the current policies will prevail without challenge, he said, even though some are legally unsound. And the bar for False Claims Act liability is actually quite high, he pointed out: There’s a requirement that the person knowingly made a false statement or deliberately ignored facts. Universities are actually well-positioned to prevail in court, said Bagenstos and other legal experts. The issue is that they don’t want to engage in drawn-out and potentially costly litigation.

One possibility might be for a trade group, such as the Association of American Universities, to mount the legal challenge, said Richard Epstein, a libertarian legal scholar. In his view, the new NIH terms are unconstitutional because such conditions on spending, which he characterized as “unrelated to scientific endeavors,” need to be authorized by Congress.

The NIH did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Some people expressed surprise at the insertion of the False Claims Act language.

Michael Yassa, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, said that he wasn’t aware of the new terms until Undark contacted him. The NIH-supported researcher and study-section chair started reading from a recent Notice of Award during the interview. “I can’t give you a straight answer on this one,” he said, and after further consideration, added, “Let me run this by a legal team.”

Andrew Miltenberg, an attorney in New York City who’s nationally known for his work on Title IX litigation, was more pointed. “I don’t actually understand why it’s in there,” he said, referring to the new grant language. “I don’t think it belongs in there. I don’t think it’s legal, and I think it’s going to take some lawsuits to have courts interpret the fact that there’s no real place for it.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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How Tesla Takedown got its start

Cars, doge, elon musk, syndication, Tesla / Rejus Almole / June 17, 2025

America’s most vulnerable Billionaire?

It’s an unlikely coalition that’s been hyping Tesla’s stock slide since its launch.

On a sunny April afternoon in Seattle, around 40 activists gathered at the Pine Box, a beer and pizza bar in the sometimes scruffy Capitol Hill neighborhood. The group had reserved a side room attached to the outside patio; before remarks began, attendees flowed in and out, enjoying the warm day. Someone set up a sound system. Then the activists settled in, straining their ears as the streamed call crackled through less-than-perfect speakers.

In more than a decade of climate organizing, it was the first time Emily Johnston, one of the group’s leaders, had attended a happy hour to listen to a company’s quarterly earnings call. Also the first time a local TV station showed up to cover such a happy hour. “This whole campaign has been just a magnet for attention,” she says.

The group, officially called the Troublemakers, was rewarded right away. TeslaCEO Elon Musk started the investors’ call for the first quarter of 2025 with a sideways acknowledgement of exactly the work the group had been doing for the past two months. He called out the nationwide backlash to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an effort to cut government spending staffed by young tech enthusiasts and Musk company alumni, named—with typical Muskian Internet-brained flourish—for an early 2010s meme.

“Now, the protests you’ll see out there, they’re very organized, they’re paid for,” Musk told listeners. For weeks, thousands of people—including the Troublemakers—had camped outside Tesla showrooms, service centers, and charging stations. Musk suggested that not only were they paid for their time, they were only interested in his work because they had once received “wasteful largesse” from the federal government. Musk had presented the theory and sharpened it on his social media platform X for weeks. Now, he argued, the protesters were off the dole—and furious.

Musk offered no proof of his assertions; to a person, every protester who spoke to WIRED insisted that they are not being paid and are exactly what they appear to be: people who are angry at Elon Musk. They call their movement the “Tesla Takedown.”

Before Musk got on the call to speak to investors, Tesla, which arguably kicked off a now multitrillion-dollar effort to transition global autos to electricity, had presented them with one of the company’s worst quarterly financial reports in years. Net income was down 71 percent year over year; revenue fell more than $2 billion short of Wall Street’s expectations.

Now, in Seattle, just the first few minutes of Musk’s remarks left the partygoers, many veterans of the climate movement, giddy. Someone close to the staticky speakers repeated the best parts to the small crowd: “I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said. Under a spinning disco ball, people whooped and clapped. Someone held up a snapshot of Tesla’s stock performance over the past year, a jagged but falling black line.

“If you ever wanted to know that protest matters, here’s your proof,” Johnston recalled weeks later.

The Tesla Takedown, an effort to hit back at Musk and his wealth where it hurts, seems to have appeared at just the right time. Tesla skeptics have argued for years that the company, which has the highest market capitalization of any automaker, is overvalued. They contend that the company’s CEO has been able to distract from flawed fundamentals—an aging vehicle lineup, a Cybertruck sales flop, the much-delayed introduction of self-driving technology—with bluster and showmanship.

Musk’s interest in politics, which kicked into a new and more expensive gear when he went all in for Donald Trump during the 2024 election, was always going to invite more scrutiny for his business empire. But the grassroots movement, which began as a post on Bluesky, has become a boisterous, ragtag, and visible locus of, sorry to use the word, resistance against Musk and Trump. It’s hard to pin market moves on any one thing, but Tesla’s stock price is down some 33 percent since its end-of-2024 high.

Tesla Takedown points to a uniquely screwed-up moment in American politics. Down is up; up is down. A man who made a fortune sounding the alarm about the evils of the fossil fuel industry joined with it to spend hundreds of millions in support of a right-wing presidential candidate and became embedded in an administration with a slash-and-burn approach to environmental regulation. (This isn’t good for electric cars.) The same guy, once extolled as the real-life Tony Stark—he made a cameo in Iron Man 2!—has become for some a real-life comic book villain, his skulduggery enough to bring together a coalition of climate activists, freaked-out and laid-off federal workers, immigrant rights champions, union groups, PhDs deeply concerned about the future of American science, Ukraine partisans, liberal retirees sick of watching cable news, progressive parents hoping to show their kids how to stick up for their values, LGBTQ+ rights advocates, despondent veterans, and car and tech nerds who have been crying foul on Musk’s fantastical technology claims for years now.

To meet the moment, then, the Takedown uses a unique form of protest logic: Boycott and protest the electric car company not because the movement disagrees with its logic or mission—quite the opposite, even!—but because it might be the only way to materially affect the unelected, un-beholden-to-the-public guy at its head. And then hope the oft-irrational stock market catches on.

So for weeks, across cities like New York; Berkeley and Palo Alto, California; Meridian, Idaho; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; South Salt Lake, Utah; and Austin, Texas, the thousands of people who make up the Takedown movement have been stationed outside of Tesla showrooms, making it a little bit uncomfortable to test drive one of Musk’s electric rides, or even just drive past in one.

Change in the air

When Shua Sanchez graduated from college in 2013, there was about a week, he remembers, when he was convinced that the most important thing he could do was work for Tesla. He had a degree in physics; he knew all about climate change and what was at stake. He felt called to causes, had been protesting since George W. Bush invaded Iraq when he was in middle school. Maybe his life’s work would be helping the world’s premier electric carmaker convince drivers that there was a cleaner and more beautiful life after fossil fuel.

In the end, though, Sanchez opted for a doctorate program focusing on the quantum properties of super-conducting and magnetic materials. (“I shoot frozen magnets with lasers all day,” he jokes.) So he felt thankful for his choice a few years later when he read media reports about Tesla’s efforts to tamp down unionizing efforts at its factories. He felt more thankful when, in 2017, Musk signed on to two of Trump’s presidential advisory councils. (The CEO publicly departed them months later, after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.) Even more thankful in 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter with the near-express purpose of opening it up to extreme right-wing speech. More thankful still by the summer of 2024, after Musk officially endorsed Trump’s presidential bid.

By the time Musk appeared onstage at a rally following Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and threw out what appeared to be a Nazi salute—Musk has denied that was what it was—Sanchez, now in a postdoctorate fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was ready to do something about it besides not taking a job at Tesla. A few days later, as reports of DOGE’s work began to leak out of Washington, a friend sent him a February 8 Bluesky post from a Boston-based disinformation scholar named Joan Donovan.

“If Musk thinks he can speed run through DC downloading personal data, we can certainly bang some pots and pans on the sidewalks in front of Tesla dealerships,” Donovan posted on the platform, already an online refuge for those looking for an alternative to Musk’s X. “Bring your friends and make a little noise. Organize locally, act globally.” She added a link to a list of Tesla locations, and a GIF of the Swedish Chef playing the drums on some vegetables with wooden spoons. Crucially, she appended the hashtag #TeslaTakeover. Later, the Internet would coalesce around a different rallying cry: #TeslaTakedown.

Baltimore-area residents protest the Trump administration and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a Tesla car dealership as part of a boycott of Tesla vehicles. Saturday, March 29, 2025. Credit: Dominic Gwinn/Getty

The post did not go viral. To date, it has only 175 likes. But it did catch the attention of actor and filmmaker Alex Winter. Winter shot to prominence in 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—he was Bill—and has more recently produced multiple documentaries focusing on online culture, piracy, and the power of social media. He and Donovan had bonded a few years earlier over activism and punk rock, and the actor, who has a larger social media following, asked the scholar if he could create a website to centralize the burgeoning movement. “I do think we’re at a point where people need to stick their necks up out of the foxhole en masse, or we’re simply not going to get through,” he tells WIRED. In the website’s first 12 hours of existence, he says, thousands of people registered to take part in the Takedown.

Donovan’s Bluesky post brought Sanchez to the Boston Back Bay Tesla showroom on Boylston Street the next Saturday, where 30 people had gathered with signs. For Sanchez, the whole thing felt personal. “Elon Musk started a PhD at Stanford in my field. He quit after two days and then went and became a tech bro, but he presents that he’s one of us,” he says. With Musk’s new visibility—and plans to slash government research dollars while promoting right-wing ideology—Sanchez was ready to push back.

Sanchez has been outside the showroom during weekly protests throughout the Boston winter, megaphone in hand, leading chants: “It ain’t fun. It ain’t funny. Elon Musk is stealing your money.” “We don’t want your Nazi cars. Take a one-way trip to Mars.”

“We make it fun, so a lot of people come back,” Sanchez says. Someone slapped Musk’s face on one of the inflatable tube guys you often see outside of car dealerships; he whipped around at several protests. A popular bubble-themed routine—“Tesla is a bubble”—saw protesters toss around a giant, transparent ball as others blew bubbles around it. Then the ball popped, loudly, during a protest—a sign? At some of Boston’s biggest actions, hundreds of people have shown up to demonstrate against Tesla, Musk, and Trump, Sanchez says.

Donovan envisioned the protests as potent visible responses to Musk’s slashing of government programs and jobs. But she also knew that social movements are a critical release valve in times of upheaval. “People need to relieve the pressure that they feel when the government is not doing the right thing,” she tells WIRED. “If you let that pressure build up too much, obviously it can turn very dangerous.”

In some ways, she’s right. In at least four incidents across four states, people have been charged by the federal government with various crimes including defacing, shooting at, throwing Molotov cocktails toward, and setting fire to Tesla showrooms and charging stations. In a move that has worried civil liberties experts, the Trump administration has treated these attacks against the president’s richest backer’s car company as “domestic terrorism,” granting federal authorities greater latitude and resources to track down alleged perpetrators and threatening them with up to 20 years in prison.

In posts on X and in public appearances, Musk and other federal officials have seemed to conflate the actions of a few allegedly violent people with the wider protests against Tesla, implying that both are funded by shadowy “generals.” “Firing bullets into showrooms and burning down cars is unacceptable,” Musk said at an event last month in which he appeared remotely on video, his face looming over the stage. “Those people will go to prison, and the people that funded them and organized them will also go to prison. Don’t worry.” He looked into the camera and pointed his finger at the audience. “We’re coming for you.”

Tesla Takedown participants and leaders have repeatedly said that the movement is nonviolent. “Authoritarian regimes have a long history of equating peaceful protest with violence. The #TeslaTakedown movement has always been and will remain nonviolent,” Dallas volunteer Stephanie Frizzell wrote in an email. What violence has occurred at protests themselves seems limited to on-site spats that mostly target protesters.

Donovan herself skipped some protests after receiving death threats and hearing a rumor that she was on a government list targeting disinformation researchers. On X, prominent right-wing accounts harassed her and other Takedown leaders; she says people have contacted her colleagues to try to get her fired.

Then, on the afternoon of March 6, Boston University ecology professor Nathan Phillips was in his office on campus when he received a panicked message from his wife. She said that two people claiming to represent the FBI visited their home. “I was just stunned,” Phillips says. “We both had a feeling of disbelief, that this must be some kind of hoax or a joke or something like that.”

Phillips had attended a Tesla Takedown event weeks earlier, but he wasn’t sure whether the visit was related to the protests or his previous climate activism. So after sitting shocked in his office for an hour, he called his local FBI field office. Someone picked up and asked for his information, he remembers, and then asked why he was calling. Phillips explained what had happened. “They just abruptly hung up on me,” he says.

Phillips never had additional contact from the FBI, but he knows of at least five other climate activists who were visited by men claiming to be from the agency on March 6.

The FBI tells WIRED that it “cannot confirm or deny the allegations” that two agents visited Phillips’ home. Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the Tesla Takedown movement or Musk’s allegations of coordinated violence against the company.

After the incident, Phillips began searching online for mentions of his name, and he found posts on X from an account that also tagged Joan Donovan and FBI director Kash Patel.

Phillips says that the FBI visit has had the opposite of a chilling effect. “If anything, it’s further radicalized me,” he says. “People having my back and the expression of support makes me feel very confident that it was the right thing to do to speak out about this.”

Organizing for the first time

Mike had attended a few protests in the past but didn’t know how to organize one. He has a wife, three small kids, a house in the suburbs, and a health issue that can sometimes make it hard to think. So by his own admission, his first attempt in February was a mixed bag. It was the San Francisco Bay Area-based Department of Labor employee’s first day back in the office after the Trump administration, spurred by DOGE, had demanded all workers return full-time. He was horrified by the fast-moving job cuts, program changes, and straight-up animus he had already seen flow from the White House down to his small corner of the federal government.

“Attacks on federal workers are an attack on the Constitution,” Mike says. Maybe, he figured, if he could keep people from buying Teslas, that would hurt Elon Musk’s bottom line, and the CEO would lay off DOGE altogether.

Mike, who WIRED is referring to using a pseudonym because he fears retaliation, saw that a Tesla showroom was just a 20-minute walk from his office, and he hoped to convince some coworkers to convene there, a symbolic stand against DOGE and Musk. So he taped a few flyers on light poles. He didn’t have social media, but he posted on Reddit. “I was really worried,” he says, “about the Hatch Act,” a law that limits the political activities of federal employees.

In the end, three federal workers—the person sitting next to him at the office and a US Department of Veterans Affairs nurse they ran into on the street—posted up outside of the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco holding “Save Federal Workers” signs.

Then Mike discovered the #TeslaTakedown website that Alex Winter had built. (Because of a quirk in the sign-up process, the site was putatively operated for a time by the Seattle Troublemakers.) It turned out a bunch of other people had thought that Tesla showrooms were the right places to air their grievances with Trump, Musk, and DOGE. Mike posted his event there. Now the SF Save Federal Workers protest, which happens every Monday afternoon, draws 20 to 40 people.

Through the weekly convening, Mike has met volunteers from the Federal Unionists Network, who represent public unions; the San Francisco Labor Council, a local affiliate of the national AFL-CIO; and the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. As in any amicable custody arrangement, Mike’s group shares the strip of sidewalk outside of the San Francisco Tesla showroom with a local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible, which holds bigger protests on Saturdays. “I’m trying to build connections, meet other community groups,” Mike says. “My next step is broadening the coalition.”

About half of the people coordinating Takedown protests are like Mike, says Evan Sutton, who is part of the national team: They haven’t organized a protest before. “I’ve been in politics professionally for almost 20 years,” Sutton says. “It is genuinely the most grassroots thing that I’ve seen.”

Well into the spring, Tesla Takedown organizers nationwide had held hundreds of events across the US and even the globe, and the movement has gained a patina of professionalism. Tesla Takedown sends press releases to reporters. The movement has buy-in from Indivisible, a progressive network that dates back to the first Trump administration, with local chapters hosting their own protests. At least one Democratic congressional campaign has promoted a local #TeslaTakedown event.

Beyond the showrooms, Tesla sales are down by half in Europe compared to last year and have taken a hit in California, the US’s biggest EV market. Celebrities including Sheryl Crow and Jason Bateman have publicly ditched their Teslas. A Hawaii-based artist named Matthew Hiller started selling “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy” car decals in 2023; he estimates he has sold 70,000 anti-Musk and anti-Tesla stickers since then. (There was a “Space X-size explosion of sales after his infamous salute,” Hiller says.) In Seattle, the Troublemakers regularly hold “de-badging” events, where small handfuls of sheepish owners come by to have the T emblems drilled off their cars.

In Portland, Oregon, on a recent May Saturday, Ed Niedermeyer was once again sweating through his shark costume as he hopped along the sidewalk in front of the local Tesla showroom. His sign exhibited the DOGE meme, an alert Shiba Inu, with the caption “Heckin’ fascism.” (You’d get it if you spent too much time on the Internet in 2013.) Honks rang out. The shark tends to get a good reaction from drivers going by, he said. About 100 people had shown up to this Takedown protest, in front of a Tesla showroom that sits kitty-corner to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Niedermeyer is a car writer and has spent a lot of time thinking about Elon Musk since 2015, when he discovered that Tesla wasn’t actually operating a battery swapping station like it said it did. Since then, he has written a book, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and documented many of what he claims to be Musk’s and the automaker’s half-truths on their way to the top.

Niedermeyer acknowledges that Musk and Tesla have proven difficult to touch, even by nationwide protests literally outside their doors.

Despite the Seattle cheers during Tesla’s last quarterly earnings call, the automaker’s stock price gained steam through the spring and rose on the news that its CEO would no longer officially work for the federal government. Musk has said investors should value Tesla not as a carmaker but as an AI and robotics company. At the end of this month, after years of delays, Tesla says it will launch a robotaxi service. According to Wall Street analysts’ research notes, they believe him.

Even a public fight with the president—one that devolved into name-calling on Musk’s and Trump’s respective social platforms—was not enough to pop the Tesla bubble.

“For me, watching Musk and watching our inability to stop him and create consequences for this snowballing hype and power has really reinforced that we need a stronger government to protect people from people like him,” says Niedermeyer.

Still, Tesla Takedown organizers take credit for the cracks in the Musk-Trump alliance—and say the protests will continue. The movement has also incorporated a more cerebral strategy, organizing local efforts to convince cities, states, and municipalities to divest from Musk’s companies. They already had a breakthrough in May, when Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, became the first US public pension fund to say it wouldn’t purchase new Tesla stocks for its managed investment accounts.

The movement’s goals may be lofty, but Niedermeyer argues that despite Tesla’s apparent resilience, Musk is still America’s most vulnerable billionaire. And sure, Musk, the CEO of an electric car company, the guy who made himself the figurehead for his automaker and fired his PR team to make sure it would stick, the one who alienated the electric car company’s customer base through a headlong plunge not only into political spending but the delicate mechanics of government itself—he did a lot of it on his own.

Now Niedermeyer, and everyone involved in Tesla Takedown, and probably everyone in the whole world, really, can only do what they can. So here he is, in a shark costume on the side of the road, maintaining the legally mandated distance from the car showroom behind him.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

How Tesla Takedown got its start Read More »

Founder of 23andMe buys back company out of bankruptcy auction

23andme, 23andme bankruptcy, genetic testing, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / June 16, 2025

TTAM’s winning offer requires judicial approval, and a court hearing to approve the bid is set for next week.

Several US states have filed objections or lawsuits with the court expressing concerns about the transfer of customers’ genetic data to a new company, though those may now be moot because of Wojcicki’s continued involvement.

An expert hired by the court to review data privacy concerns over a sale of 23andMe submitted a report on Wednesday that noted Wojcicki had been chief executive when a 2023 data breach compromised 7 million customer accounts. Litigation over the breach continues, although that liability remains with the bankruptcy estate to be paid off with the proceeds from the winning bid.

Wojcicki was once married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. 23andMe went public in 2021 through a merger with a blank cheque vehicle sponsored by Richard Branson, quickly reaching a market cap of nearly $6 billion.

The company has been plagued by years of falling revenue as it was unable to grow beyond its genetic testing business, in which customers sent saliva samples in to be analyzed for medical conditions and family genealogy.

Wojcicki had bid 40 cents a share to acquire the company prior to the bankruptcy filing.

Shares of 23andMe, which now trade over the counter, have rocketed to $5.49 on the belief the company will stage a recovery after settling the litigation.

Founder of 23andMe buys back company out of bankruptcy auction Read More »

Biofuels policy has been a failure for the climate, new report claims

biofuel, climate policy, Policy, Science, syndication / Kris Guyer / June 14, 2025

The new report concludes that not only will the expansion of ethanol increase greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also failed to provide the social and financial benefits to Midwestern communities that lawmakers and the industry say it has. (The report defines the Midwest as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.)

“The benefits from biofuels remain concentrated in the hands of a few,” Leslie-Bole said. “As subsidies flow, so may the trend of farmland consolidation, increasing inaccessibility of farmland in the Midwest, and locking out emerging or low-resource farmers. This means the benefits of biofuels production are flowing to fewer people, while more are left bearing the costs.”

New policies being considered in state legislatures and Congress, including additional tax credits and support for biofuel-based aviation fuel, could expand production, potentially causing more land conversion and greenhouse gas emissions, widening the gap between the rural communities and rich agribusinesses at a time when food demand is climbing and, critics say, land should be used to grow food instead.

President Donald Trump’s tax cut bill, passed by the House and currently being negotiated in the Senate, would not only extend tax credits for biofuels producers, it specifically excludes calculations of emissions from land conversion when determining what qualifies as a low-emission fuel.

The primary biofuels industry trade groups, including Growth Energy and the Renewable Fuels Association, did not respond to Inside Climate News requests for comment or interviews.

An employee with the Clean Fuels Alliance America, which represents biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel producers, not ethanol, said the report vastly overstates the carbon emissions from crop-based fuels by comparing the farmed land to natural landscapes, which no longer exist.

They also noted that the impact of soy-based fuels in 2024 was more than $42 billion, providing over 100,000 jobs.

“Ten percent of the value of every bushel of soybeans is linked to biomass-based fuel,” they said.

Biofuels policy has been a failure for the climate, new report claims Read More »

Meta beefs up disappointing AI division with $15 billion Scale AI investment

AI, llm, Meta, scale, syndication / Paul Patrick / June 13, 2025

Meta has invested heavily in generative AI, with the majority of its planned $72 billion in capital expenditure this year earmarked for data centers and servers. The deal underlines the high price AI companies are willing to pay for data that can be used to train AI models.

Zuckerberg pledged last year that his company’s models would outstrip rivals’ efforts in 2025, but Meta’s most recent release, Llama 4, has underperformed on various independent reasoning and coding benchmarks.

The long-term goal of researchers at Meta “has always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it,” said Yann LeCun, the company’s chief AI scientist at the VivaTech conference in Paris this week.

Building artificial “general” intelligence—AI technologies that have human-level intelligence—is a popular goal for many AI companies. An increasing number of Silicon Valley groups are also seeking to reach “superintelligence,” a hypothetical scenario where AI systems surpass human intelligence.

The core of Scale’s business has been data-labeling, a manual process of ensuring images and text are accurately labeled and categorized before they are used to train AI models.

Wang has forged relationships with Silicon Valley’s biggest investors and technologists, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Scale AI’s early customers were autonomous vehicle companies, but the bulk of its expected $2 billion in revenues this year will come from labeling the data used to train the massive AI models built by OpenAI and others.

The deal will result in a substantial payday for Scale’s early venture capital investors, including Accel, Tiger Global Management, and Index Ventures. Tiger’s $200 million investment is worth more than $1 billion at the company’s new valuation, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Additional reporting by Tabby Kinder in San Francisco

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AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, and that’s problematic

AI, Anthropic, chatgpt, deepmind, halluci, LLMs, openai, syndication / Kris Guyer / June 12, 2025

After the model has been trained, companies can set system prompts, or guidelines, for how the model should behave to minimize sycophantic behavior.

However, working out the best response means delving into the subtleties of how people communicate with one another, such as determining when a direct response is better than a more hedged one.

“[I]s it for the model to not give egregious, unsolicited compliments to the user?” Joanne Jang, head of model behavior at OpenAI, said in a Reddit post. “Or, if the user starts with a really bad writing draft, can the model still tell them it’s a good start and then follow up with constructive feedback?”

Evidence is growing that some users are becoming hooked on using AI.

A study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that a small proportion were becoming addicted. Those who perceived the chatbot as a “friend” also reported lower socialization with other people and higher levels of emotional dependence on a chatbot, as well as other problematic behavior associated with addiction.

“These things set up this perfect storm, where you have a person desperately seeking reassurance and validation paired with a model which inherently has a tendency towards agreeing with the participant,” said Nour from Oxford University.

AI start-ups such as Character.AI that offer chatbots as “companions” have faced criticism for allegedly not doing enough to protect users. Last year, a teenager killed himself after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbot. The teen’s family is suing the company for allegedly causing wrongful death, as well as for negligence and deceptive trade practices.

Character.AI said it does not comment on pending litigation, but added it has “prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a character is not a real person and that everything a character says should be treated as fiction.” The company added it has safeguards to protect under-18s and against discussions of self-harm.

Another concern for Anthropic’s Askell is that AI tools can play with perceptions of reality in subtle ways, such as when offering factually incorrect or biased information as the truth.

“If someone’s being super sycophantic, it’s just very obvious,” Askell said. “It’s more concerning if this is happening in a way that is less noticeable to us [as individual users] and it takes us too long to figure out that the advice that we were given was actually bad.”

AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, and that’s problematic Read More »

Trade war truce between US and China is back on

china, china tariffs, Policy, syndication, tariffs, trade / Rejus Almole / June 11, 2025

Both countries agreed in Geneva last month to slash their respective tariffs by 115 percentage points and provided a 90-day window to resolve the trade war.

But the ceasefire came under pressure after Washington accused Beijing of reneging on an agreement to speed up the export of rare earths, while China criticized new US export controls.

This week’s talks to resolve the impasse were held in the historic Lancaster House mansion in central London, a short walk from Buckingham Palace, which was provided by the British government as a neutral ground for the talks.

Over the two days, the US team, which included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and US trade representative Jamieson Greer, [met with] the Chinese delegation, which was led by He Lifeng, a vice-premier responsible for the economy.

The negotiations were launched to ensure Chinese exports of rare earths to the US and American technology export controls on China did not derail broader talks between the sides.

Ahead of the first round of talks in Geneva, Bessent had warned that the high level of mutual tariffs had amounted to an effective embargo on bilateral trade.

Chinese exports to the US fell more steeply in May compared with a year earlier than at any point since the pandemic in 2020.

The US had said China was not honoring its pledge in Geneva to ease restrictions on rare earths exports, which are critical to the defense, car, and tech industries, and was dragging its feet over approving licenses for shipments, affecting manufacturing supply chains in the US and Europe.

Beijing has accused the US of “seriously violating” the Geneva agreement after it announced new restrictions on sales of chip design software to Chinese companies.

It has also objected to the US issuing new warnings on the global use of Huawei chips and canceling visas for Chinese students.

Separately, a US federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed some of Trump’s broadest tariffs to remain in place while it reviews a lower-court ruling that had blocked his “liberation day” levies on US trading partners.

The ruling extended an earlier temporary reprieve and will allow Trump to enact the measures as well as separate levies targeting Mexico, Canada, and China. The president has, however, already paused the wider “reciprocal” tariffs for 90 days.

Trade war truce between US and China is back on Read More »

Ocean acidification crosses “planetary boundaries”

climate, climate change, ocean acidification, Science, syndication / Mike M. / June 10, 2025

A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points.

A study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, found that ocean acidification—the process in which the world’s oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, becoming more acidic—crossed a “planetary boundary” five years ago.

“A lot of people think it’s not so bad,” said Nina Bednaršek, one of the study’s authors and a senior researcher at Oregon State University. “But what we’re showing is that all of the changes that were projected, and even more so, are already happening—in all corners of the world, from the most pristine to the little corner you care about. We have not changed just one bay, we have changed the whole ocean on a global level.”

The new study, also authored by researchers at the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), finds that by 2020 the world’s oceans were already very close to the “danger zone” for ocean acidity, and in some regions had already crossed into it.

Scientists had determined that ocean acidification enters this danger zone or crosses this planetary boundary when the amount of calcium carbonate—which allows marine organisms to develop shells—is less than 20 percent compared to pre-industrial levels. The new report puts the figure at about 17 percent.

“Ocean acidification isn’t just an environmental crisis, it’s a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” said Steve Widdicombe, director of science at the Plymouth lab, in a press release. “As our seas increase in acidity, we’re witnessing the loss of critical habitats that countless marine species depend on and this, in turn, has major societal and economic implications.”

Scientists have determined that there are nine planetary boundaries that, once breached, risk humans’ abilities to live and thrive. One of these is climate change itself, which scientists have said is already beyond humanity’s “safe operating space” because of the continued emissions of heat-trapping gases. Another is ocean acidification, also caused by burning fossil fuels.

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Warner Bros. Discovery makes still more changes, will split streaming, TV business

CNN, syndication, Tech, Turner Sports, warner bros. discovery / Mike M. / June 9, 2025

Warner Bros. Discovery will split its business into two publicly traded companies, with one focused on its streaming and studios business and the other on its television network businesses, including CNN and Discovery.

The US media giant said the move would unlock value for shareholders as well as create opportunities for both businesses, breaking up a group created just three years ago from the merger of Warner Media and Discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery last year revealed its intent to split its business in two, a plan first reported by the Financial Times in July last year. The company intends to complete the split by the middle of next year.

The move comes on the heels of a similar move by rival Comcast, which last year announced plans to spin off its television networks, including CNBC and MSNBC, into a separate company.

US media giants are seeking to split their faster growing streaming businesses from their legacy television networks, which are facing the prospect of long-term decline as viewers turn away from traditional television.

Warner Bros. Discovery shares were more than 10 percent higher pre-market.

David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, will head the streaming and studios arm, while chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels will serve as president and chief executive of global networks. Both will continue in their present roles until the separation.

Zaslav said on Monday the split would result in a “sharper focus” and enhanced “strategic flexibility,” that would leave each company better placed to compete in “today’s evolving media landscape.”

Warner Bros. Discovery Chair Samuel A. Di Piazza Jr. said the move would “enhance shareholder value.”

The streaming and studios arm will consist of Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, and HBO Max, as well as their film and television libraries.

Global networks will include entertainment, sports, and news television brands around the world, including CNN, TNT Sports in the US, and Discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery makes still more changes, will split streaming, TV business Read More »

Cybercriminals turn to “residential proxy” services to hide malicious traffic

Bulletproof hosting, cybercriminals, proxies, Security, syndication, vpns / Tim Belzer / June 8, 2025

For years, gray market services known as “bulletproof” hosts have been a key tool for cybercriminals looking to anonymously maintain web infrastructure with no questions asked. But as global law enforcement scrambles to crack down on digital threats, they have developed strategies for getting customer information from these hosts and have increasingly targeted the people behind the services with indictments. At the cybercrime-focused conference Sleuthcon in in Arlington, Virginia on Friday, researcher Thibault Seret outlined how this shift has pushed both bulletproof hosting companies and criminal customers toward an alternative approach.

Rather than relying on web hosts to find ways of operating outside law enforcement’s reach, some service providers have turned to offering purpose-built VPNs and other proxy services as a way of rotating and masking customer IP addresses and offering infrastructure that either intentionally doesn’t log traffic or mixes traffic from many sources together. And while the technology isn’t new, Seret and other researchers emphasized to WIRED that the transition to using proxies among cybercrminals over the last couple of years is significant.

“The issue is, you cannot technically distinguish which traffic in a node is bad and which traffic is good,” Seret, a researcher at the threat intelligence firm Team Cymru, told WIRED ahead of his talk. “That’s the magic of a proxy service—you cannot tell who’s who. It’s good in terms of internet freedom, but it’s super, super tough to analyze what’s happening and identify bad activity.”

The core challenge of addressing cybercriminal activity hidden by proxies is that the services may also, even primarily, be facilitating legitimate, benign traffic. Criminals and companies that don’t want to lose them as clients have particularly been leaning on what are known as “residential proxies,” or an array of decentralized nodes that can run on consumer devices—even old Android phones or low end laptops—offering real, rotating IP addresses assigned to homes and offices. Such services offer anonymity and privacy, but can also shield malicious traffic.

Cybercriminals turn to “residential proxy” services to hide malicious traffic Read More »

Estate of woman who died in 2021 heat dome sues Big Oil for wrongful death

climate lawsuit, heat dome, pacific northwest, Policy, syndication / Rejus Almole / June 7, 2025

At least 100 heat-related deaths in Washington state came during the unprecedented heat wave.

Everett Clayton looks at a digital thermometer on a nearby building that reads 116 degrees while walking to his apartment on June 27, 2021 in Vancouver, Washington. Credit: Nathan Howard/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The daughter of a woman who was killed by extreme heat during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against major oil companies claiming they should be held responsible for her death.

The civil lawsuit, filed on May 29 in King County Superior Court in Seattle, is the first wrongful death case brought against Big Oil in the US in the context of climate change. It attempts to hold some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies liable for the death of Juliana Leon, who perished from overheating during the heat dome event, which scientists have determined would have been virtually impossible absent human-caused climate change.

“The extreme heat that killed Julie was directly linked to fossil fuel-driven alteration of the climate,” the lawsuit asserts. It argues that fossil fuel defendants concealed and misrepresented the climate change risks of their products and worked to delay a transition to cleaner energy alternatives. Furthermore, oil companies knew decades ago that their conduct would have dangerous and deadly consequences, the case alleges.

“Defendants have known for all of Julie’s life that their affirmative misrepresentations and omissions would claim lives,” the complaint claims. Leon’s daughter, Misti, filed the suit on behalf of her mother’s estate.

At 65, Juliana Leon was driving home from a medical appointment in Seattle on June 28, 2021, a day when the temperature peaked at 108° Fahrenheit (42.2° Celsius). She had the windows rolled down since the air conditioner in her car wasn’t working, but with the oven-like outdoor temperatures she quickly succumbed to the stifling heat. A passerby found her unresponsive in her car, which was pulled over on a residential street. Emergency responders were unable to revive her. The official cause of death was determined to be hyperthermia, or overheating.

There were at least 100 heat-related deaths in the state from June 26 to July 2, 2021, according to the Washington State Department of Health. That unprecedented stretch of scorching high temperatures was the deadliest weather-related event in Washington’s history. Climate change linked to the burning of fossil fuels intensified this extreme heat event, scientists say.

Misti Leon’s complaint argues that big oil companies “are responsible” for her mother’s climate change-related death. “Through their failure to warn, marketing, distribution, extraction, refinement, transport, and sale of fossil fuels, defendants each bear responsibility for the spike in atmospheric CO₂ levels that have resulted in climate change, and thus the occurrence of a virtually impossible weather event and the extreme temperatures of the Heat Dome,” the suit alleges.

Defendants include ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66. Phillips 66 declined to comment; the rest of the companies did not respond to requests for comment.

The plaintiff is represented by the Bechtold Law Firm, based in Missoula, Montana. The lawsuit brings state tort law claims of wrongful death, failure to warn, and public nuisance, and seeks relief in the form of damages as well as a public education campaign to “rectify defendants’ decades of misinformation.”

Major oil and gas companies are currently facing more than two dozen climate damages and deception cases brought by municipal, state, and tribal governments, including a case filed in 2023 by Multnomah County, Oregon, centered around the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. The Leon case, however, is the first climate liability lawsuit filed by an individual against the fossil fuel industry.

“This is the first case that is directly making the connection between the misconduct and lies of big oil companies and a specific, personalized tragedy, the death of Julie Leon,” said Aaron Regunberg, accountability director for Public Citizen’s climate program.

“It puts a human face on it,” Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Inside Climate News.

Climate accountability advocates say the lawsuit could open up a new front for individuals suffering from climate change-related harms to pursue justice against corporate polluters who allegedly lied about the risks of their products.

“Big Oil companies have known for decades that their products would cause catastrophic climate disasters that would become more deadly and destructive if they didn’t change their business model. But instead of warning the public and taking steps to save lives, Big Oil lied and deliberately accelerated the problem,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement. “This latest case—the first filed on behalf of an individual climate victim—is another step toward accountability.”

“It’s a model for victims of climate disasters all across the country,” said Regunberg. “Anywhere there’s an extreme weather event with strong attribution science connecting it to climate change, families experiencing a tragedy can file a very similar case.”

Regunberg and several other legal experts have argued that Big Oil could face criminal prosecution for crimes such as homicide and reckless endangerment in the context of climate change, particularly given evidence of internal industry documents suggesting companies like Exxon knew that unabated fossil fuel use could result in “catastrophic” consequences and deaths. A 1996 presentation from an Exxon scientist, for example, outlines projected human health impacts stemming from climate change, including “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.”

The Leon case could “help lay the groundwork” for potential climate homicide cases, Regunberg said. “Wrongful death suits are important. They provide a private remedy to victims of wrongful conduct that causes a death. But we also think there’s a need for public justice, and that’s the role that criminal prosecution is supposed to have,” he told Inside Climate News.

The lawsuit is likely to face a long uphill battle in the courts. Other climate liability cases against these companies brought by government entities have been tied up in procedural skirmishes, some for years, and no case has yet made it to trial.

“In this case we have a grieving woman going up against some of the most powerful corporations in the world, and we’ve seen all the legal firepower they are bringing to bear on these cases,” Regunberg said.

But if the case does eventually make it to trial, it could be a game-changer. “That’s going to be a jury in King County, Washington, of people who probably experienced and remember the Pacific heat dome event, and maybe they know folks who were impacted. I think that’s going to be a compelling case that has a good chance of getting an outcome that provides some justice to this family,” Regunberg said.

Even if it doesn’t get that far, the lawsuit still “marks a significant development in climate liability,” according to Donald Braman, an associate professor of criminal law at Georgetown University and co-author of a paper explaining the case for prosecuting Big Oil for climate homicide.

“As climate attribution science advances, linking specific extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change with greater confidence, the legal arguments for liability are strengthening. This lawsuit, being the first of its kind for wrongful death in this context, will be closely watched and could set important precedents, regardless of its ultimate outcome,” he said. “It reflects a growing societal demand for accountability for climate-related harms.”

Estate of woman who died in 2021 heat dome sues Big Oil for wrongful death Read More »

Science PhDs face a challenging and uncertain future

education, PhD, post-graduate education, Science, syndication / Mike M. / June 4, 2025

Smaller post-grad classes are likely due to research budget cuts.

Credit: Thomas Barwick/Stone via Getty Images

Since the National Science Foundation first started collecting postgraduation data nearly 70 years ago, the number of PhDs awarded in the United States has consistently risen. Last year, more than 45,000 students earned doctorates in science and engineering, about an eight-fold increase compared to 1958.

But this level of production of science and engineering PhD students is now in question. Facing significant cuts to federal science funding, some universities have reduced or paused their PhD admissions for the upcoming academic year. In response, experts are beginning to wonder about the short and long-term effects those shifts will have on the number of doctorates awarded and the consequent impact on science if PhD production does drop.

Such questions touch on longstanding debates about academic labor. PhD training is a crucial part of nurturing scientific expertise. At the same time, some analysts have worried about an oversupply of PhDs in some fields, while students have suggested that universities are exploiting them as low-cost labor.

Many budding scientists go into graduate school with the goal of staying in academia and ultimately establishing their own labs. For at least 30 years, there has been talk of a mismatch between the number of doctorates and the limited academic job openings. According to an analysis conducted in 2013, only 3,000 faculty positions in science and engineering are added each year—even though more than 35,000 PhDs are produced in these fields annually.

Decades of this asymmetrical dynamic has created a hypercompetitive and high-pressure environment in the academic world, said Siddhartha Roy, an environmental engineer at Rutgers University who co-authored a recent study on tenure-track positions in engineering. “If we look strictly at academic positions, we have a huge oversupply, and it’s not sustainable,” he said.

But while the academic job market remains challenging, experts point out that PhD training also prepares individuals for career paths in industry, government, and other science and technology fields. If fewer doctorates are awarded and funding continues to be cut, some argue, American science will weaken.

“The immediate impact is there’s going to be less science,” said Donna Ginther, a social researcher who studies scientific labor markets at the University of Kansas. In the long run, that could mean scientific innovations, such as new drugs or technological advances, will stall, she said: “We’re leaving that scientific discovery on the table.”

Historically, one of the main goals of training PhD students has been to retain those scientists as future researchers in their respective fields. “Academia has a tendency to want to produce itself, reproduce itself,” said Ginther. “Our training is geared towards creating lots of mini-mes.”

But it is no secret in the academic world that tenure-track faculty positions are scarce, and the road to obtaining tenure is difficult. Although it varies across different STEM fields, the number of doctorates granted each year consistently surpass the number of tenure-track positions available. A survey gathering data from the 2022-2023 academic year, conducted by the Computing Research Association, found that around 11 percent of PhD graduates in computational science (for which employment data was reported) moved on to tenure-track faculty positions.

Roy found a similar figure for engineering: Around one out of every eight individuals who obtain their doctorate—12.5 percent—will eventually land a tenure-track faculty position, a trend that remained stable between 2014 and 2021, the last year for which his team analyzed data. The bottleneck in faculty positions, according to one recent study, leads about 40 percent of postdoctoral researchers to leave academia.

However, in recent years, researchers who advise graduate students have begun to acknowledge careers beyond academia, including positions in industry, nonprofits, government, consulting, science communication, and policy. “We need, as academics, need to take a broader perspective on what and how we prepare our students,” said Ginther.

As opposed to faculty positions, some of these labor markets can be more robust and provide plenty of opportunities for those with a doctorate, said Daniel Larremore, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies academic labor markets, among other topics. Whether there is a mismatch between the number of PhDs and employment opportunities will depend on the subject of study and which fields are growing or shrinking, he added. For example, he pointed out that there is currently a boom in machine learning and artificial intelligence, so there is a lot of demand from industry for computer science graduates. In fact, commitments to industry jobs after graduation seem to be at a 30-year high.

But not all newly minted PhDs immediately find work. According to the latest NSF data, students in biological and biomedical sciences experienced a decline in job offers in the past 20 years, with 68 percent having definite commitments after graduating in 2023, compared to 72 percent in 2003. “The dynamics in the labor market for PhDs depends very much on what subject the PhD is in,” said Larremore.

Still, employment rates reflect that postgraduates benefit from greater opportunities compared to the general population. In 2024, the unemployment rate for college graduates with a doctoral degree in the US was 1.2 percent, less than half the national average at the time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In NSF’s recent survey, 74 percent of science and engineering graduating doctorates had definite commitments for employment or postdoctoral study or training positions, three points higher than it was in 2003.

“Overproducing for the number of academic jobs available? Absolutely,” said Larremore. “But overproducing for the economy in general? I don’t think so.”

The experts who spoke with Undark described science PhDs as a benefit for society: Ultimately, scientists with PhDs contribute to the economy of a nation, be it through academia or alternative careers. Many are now concerned about the impact that cuts to scientific research may have on that contribution. Already, there are reports of universities scaling back graduate student admissions in light of funding uncertainties, worried that they might not be able to cover students’ education and training costs. Those changes could result in smaller graduating classes in future years.

Smaller classes of PhD students might not be a bad thing for academia, given the limited faculty positions, said Roy. And for most non-academic jobs, Roy said, a master’s degree is more than sufficient. However, people with doctorates do contribute to other sectors like industry, government labs, and entrepreneurship, he added.

In Ginther’s view, fewer scientists with doctoral training could deal a devastating blow for the broader scientific enterprise. “Science is a long game, and the discoveries now take a decade or two to really hit the market, so it’s going to impinge on future economic growth.”

These long-term impacts of reductions in funding might be hard to reverse and could lead to the withering of the scientific endeavor in the United States, Larremore said: “If you have a thriving ecosystem and you suddenly halve the sunlight coming into it, it simply cannot thrive in the way that it was.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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