Pentagon Culls Social Science Research, deletes 91 funded projects
Today the Pentagon announced that “The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) is scrapping its social science research portfolio as part of a broader effort to ensure fiscal responsibility and prioritize mission-critical activities.”
Examples of cancelled research include:
- The Climate-Food-Urbanization Nexus and the Precursors of Instability in Africa
- Social and Institutional Determinants of Vulnerability and Resilience to Climate Hazards in the African Sahel
- Anticipating Costal Population Mobility: Path to Maladaptation or Sociopolitical Stability
- Comparing Underlying Drivers of South-North Migration in Central America and West Africa
- Democracy Quest (couldn’t find this project in minerva)
- The Language of Parasocial Influence and the Emergence of Extremism
- Weaponized Conspiracies
- Beyond the Clock: Understanding Cross-Cultural Temporal Orientation of Military Officers
- Food Fights: War Narratives and Identity Reproduction in Evolving Conflicts
- Future Fish Wars: Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth
Luckily the End of Term Archive and the Wayback Machine have snapshots of the “Minerva Research Initiative”. Maybe it’s just me, but I would think that funding social science research on global migration patterns, climate change impacts, and social trends is extremely important for long-term planning for the “future battlefield.”
JCP and JCL house members
House Resolution 190, introduced on March 5, 2025, names Mike Carey (R, OH:15), Joseph Morelle (D, NY:25), and Julie Johnson (D, TX:32) to the the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library and Joseph Morelle (D, NY:25), Gregory Murphy (R, NC:3), Terri Sewell (D, AL:7), and Mary Miller (R, IL:15) to the Joint Committee on Printing.
PEGI Project Urges Preservation of Public Federal Data
[Editor’s note: This was originally posted on the PEGI Project blog, of which jrj is a member. In the interest of increasing the reach of PEGI’s important message, we re-post here w permission from PEGI.]
Rapid political events have led to an upheaval in access to data and other information resources produced by the U.S. government, particularly content associated with Executive Orders (EOs) seeking to upend prior federal government activity associated with diversity and inclusion, gender identity, immigration, the climate crisis, public health, consumer safety, and a host of related topics. Within just the past four weeks, federal agencies that are impacted by these EOs have removed access to content or substituted modified content.
While we at the PEGI Project have been aware of the potential for a crisis like this since the start of our project in 2017, both the pace and extent of the removals and changes have been astonishing to witness. What has also been astonishing (and heartening!) is the willingness of a broad community to join together in quick action to save content, particularly data that cannot be easily captured as part of the End of Term Archive. The Public Environmental Data Partners, a project launched by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), has been working on collecting and preserving hard-to-crawl environmental data for the past couple of months. In the past two weeks, a coalition has formed to launch the Data Rescue Project, which then debuted its Data Rescue Tracker. They also have a helpful (and well-vetted!) list of Resources that can guide individuals and organizations wanting to contribute to this work.
There is still an urgent need to act right now, particularly as court challenges are being filed to the EOs, which have led to some pauses in content removal or modification. See the Data Rescue Project’s list of Current Efforts or connect with them directly if you are able to help. And keep an eye on updates from Free Government Information for more on how access to government information is changing and what you can do to help. Recent posts of particular interest include:
The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is
Times of crisis and change bring many challenges, and each of us has an opportunity to decide how our priorities, skills, and bandwidth guide us in acting. There are many activities out there, and this Data Rescue Need to Know Bluesky starter pack can connect you with them. We are here to help you navigate what’s happening. Reach out to us at info AT pegiproject DOT org.
Public letter re the firing of the Archivist of the United States
[Patrice McDermott sent the following to GOVDOC-L. In the interest of time, I’m pasting her message below with just a touch of editing of the email addresses.]
As you may know, Trump has fired the Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan. Even though it is extremely unlikely Trump will reconsider firing Dr. Shogan, we should not let this moment pass without comment.
We’re hoping to get this out today – so please let Lauren Harper (leharper AT gmail DOT com or Lauren AT freedom DOT press) or Daniel Schuman (Daniel AT americalabs DOT org) know if you’d like to sign on by 3 ET today. Individual and orgnanizational signatories are welcomed. Please share with deadline.
Call to arms: What government information librarians can do to help save critical federal information from being lost
What is a government information librarian to do during these times when the very public information we base our daily work around is being redacted, cleansed, and deleted? First, make yourself aware of all the work that is already being done (and has been being done since 2008 and before). Our friend and PEGI colleague Lynda Kellam has helpfully created a growing google document of the efforts currently underway to collect and preserve federal government information and data.
Then, what can each of us do, at our libraries, to make sure that government information, once published, is collected, described, preserved, and made freely and publicly available? Here are some things that EVERY government information librarian (regardless of the size of the organization they work for) can do.
1) Send in “unreported” documents to GPO. The executive branch is rife with unreported documents that should be part of the FDLP but have slipped through the ever-growing cracks. We should be absolutely flooding GPO with unreported documents for them to catalog and preserve. It’s quick and easy to do by following the directions on the FDLP website. And the form includes a space to attach a digital file so make sure to do that as well.
EVERY FDLP librarian should agree to track at least one federal agency and submit at least 10 unreported documents to GPO every week. We can’t assure long-term preservation of government information unless we ALL do this. Perhaps GPO or GODORT can help coordinate this? Maybe we can use govdoc-l to announce and update our commitments.
2) Use the Internet Archive’s “save page now” tool to save every .gov page that you visit. IA will crawl and preserve every one of these in the Wayback Machine. It’s quick and easy – and fun! – to copy/paste the url into the “save page now” tool and watch wayback do its work! And it’ll even save that page to your own personal web archive (if you’ve created a free “library card” and are logged in to the site!). You can create your own web archive of important websites. And you can install their free browser extensions to save web pages with a single click. In short, be a librarian! See something save something! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information. GPO, LC, and NARA can’t do it by themselves.
3) Donate to the Internet Archive. (we are NOT IA staff!) It’s time to put our money where our livelihoods are. The Internet Archive does yeoman’s work to preserve the web. They have long put their valuable resources, infrastructure, technology, and staff time towards making sure the End of Term Archive is successful in collecting as much of the .gov/.mil web domain as they can. And they have started a new project called Democracy’s Library to collect the world’s born-digital web based government information and digitize historic government information. So you NEED to pitch in to help their efforts. Skip one or two Starbucks coffees and send them $10 a month. Every little bit helps them be able to continue to do their valuable work.
4) If you work for a library or organization that has an institutional repository and/or digital infrastructure, then advocate with your administration to put that repository and infrastructure toward the common good of hosting local copies of documents and mirroring important data sets.
5) And if your institution has some budgetary and infrastructure wherewithal (and especially if your institution is already a LOCKSS member!), please consider joining the LOCKSS-USDOCS project. The project just had its 16th birthday of distributed preservation of all content on GOVINFO (and FDsys and GPOaccess before that!).
In short, be a librarian! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information.
These are short-term strategies for things that all of us can do RIGHT NOW and we still need to use this current historical moment as an opportunity to develop a long term strategy for building a Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.
Finally: GPO, if you’re listening, please store a copy of EVERY document you catalog and provide a link to your stored copy. Whole websites are being deleted from the web and the only way to assure long-term access is to store a copy. Don’t POINT to a document when you should be COLLECTING every document which is your legal and statutory purview.
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