James' World 2

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US President Donald Trump issued an expansive executive order (EO) yesterday that would centralize power and upend the process that the US government has used for decades to award research grants. If implemented, political appointees — not career civil servants, including scientists — would have control over grants, from initial funding calls to final review. This is the Trump administration’s latest move to assert control over US science.

The EO, titled ‘Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking’, orders each US agency head to designate an appointee to develop a grant-review process that will “advance the President’s policy priorities”. Those processes must not fund grants that advance “anti-American values” and instead prioritize funding for institutions committed to achieving Trump’s plan for ‘gold-standard science’. (That plan, issued in May, calls for the US government to promote “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” science, but has been criticized for its potential to increase political interference in research.)

Impacts might be felt immediately: the latest order directs US agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to halt new funding opportunities, which are calls for researchers to submit applications for grants on certain topics. They will be paused until agencies put their new review processes in place.

Trump’s EO comes after the US Senate — which, along with the House, ultimately controls US government spending — has, in recent weeks, mostly rejected his proposals to slash the federal budget for science, totalling nearly US$200 billion annually.

The White House did not respond to questions from Nature about the EO.

Negative reaction

Trump, a Republican, has previously used EOs, which can direct government agencies but cannot alter existing laws, to effect policy change. In January, on his first day in office, he signed a slew of EOs with wide-ranging effects, from pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement to cutting the federal workforce, which had included nearly 300,000 scientists before he took office.

Scientists and policy specialists have lambasted the latest EO on social media. “This is a shocking executive order that undermines the very idea of open inquiry,” Casey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, an advocacy group in Pasadena, California, posted to Bluesky.

Also on Bluesky, Jeremy Berg, a former director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, called it a “power grab”. Speaking to Nature, he said: “That power is something that has not been exercised at all in the past by political appointees.”

In a statement, Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from California, called the EO “obscene”. It could lead to political appointees “standing between you and a cutting-edge cancer-curing clinical trial”, she said.

The EO justifies the changes to the grant-awarding process by casting doubts on past choices: it accuses the US National Science Foundation (NSF) of awarding grants to educators with anti-American ideologies and to projects on diversity, equity and inclusion, which are disfavoured by the Trump team. It also points to senior researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Stanford University in California who have resigned over accusations of data falsification.

To “strengthen oversight” of grants, the EO imposes several restrictions, including prohibiting grants that promote “illegal immigration” and prohibiting grant recipients from promoting “racial preferences” in their work or denying that sex is binary. In some cases, the restrictions seem to contradict Congressional mandates. For instance, the NSF has, for decades, been required by law to broaden participation in science of people from under-represented groups — an action that takes race into consideration.

In addition to these broader restrictions, the EO directs grant approvals to prioritize certain research institutions, such as those that have “demonstrated success” in implementing the gold-standard science plan and those with lower ‘indirect costs’. As part of its campaign to downsize government spending and reduce the power of elite US universities, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cap these costs, used to pay for laboratory electricity and administrative staff, for instance. It has proposed a flat 15% rate for grants awarded by agencies such as the NSF and the US Department of Energy, but federal courts have so far blocked such policies

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In a desperate parenting moment after dinner, I told my six-year-old, who was mid-meltdown, to “use your words!” He had just started yelling and hitting his eight-year-old sister because she wasn’t sharing a stuffed animal he believed was his. Both kids froze for a moment, giving me just enough of a pause to slow my own quickly rising emotions.

Looking back, I realize I never actually explained to my kids why words can help. But putting feelings into words is how we begin to name what’s happening inside of us, and that naming can start to change the experience itself. Sometimes, as research shows, the words we choose to describe our lives can shape our mental health for months and years to come.

As a psychologist who has spent the better part of two decades studying stress and resilience in my Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, I’ve been exploring how verbalizing our feelings can transform experience. They can help manage heated moments but also support healing from life’s hardest moments. Research published over the past 40 years on expressive disclosure—literally, using your words—especially about stressful life events, shows it can lead to significant health improvements. After writing about a difficult situation, people report fewer doctor visits, reduced pain, stronger immune function, and better outcomes for conditions like asthma and arthritis.

There are some rules of thumb we’ve learned from these studies with adults. First, writing about a difficult life event three or four times in close succession (such as on consecutive days) tends to be more effective than spreading the sessions out. Second, for each writing session, the sweet spot seems to be at least 15 minutes; shorter sessions can even backfire, making health worse. Third, for those who don’t like to write, talking through one’s feelings works just as well. In fact, when one study directly compared talking and writing, talking came out ahead because we can express more in 15 minutes of speech than in writing.

One reason talk therapy can be so powerful is that it helps people put words to their experiences in a safe, structured way. In one study, psychologist Jonathan Adler followed a group of adults who wrote narratives about themselves over a period of 12 psychotherapy sessions. He found that as participants in therapy began to describe themselves with a greater sense of agency—seeing themselves as active authors of their own lives—their mental health improved.

He noticed that the change in the stories came first, followed by improvements in well-being. For parents, this is a reminder that helping kids tell their own stories with a sense of choice and authorship, whether about a playground conflict or a family move, can plant seeds of resilience.

One of the surprising findings to me is that translating our feelings into words can transform the feelings themselves. For example, neuroscience studies show that the act of naming one’s emotional experience (“angry”) activates emotion regulation circuits in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. In the scientific literature, this process is called “affect labeling,” and it has powerful clinical benefits. In one study, participants with a spider phobia who labeled their feelings during exposure therapy—while sitting next to a tarantula—had a reduced physiological stress response to spiders one week later relative to participants who used other strategies, like distraction.

While taking a hot emotion and putting it into words has the potential to blunt its immediate force, expressive disclosure can also reshape our emotional memories. When we narrate difficult experiences, whether in writing or speech, we aren’t simply recalling a memory. We are pulling it back up from long-term memory, reshaping it with our words, and then putting it back into long-term storage as a new, altered memory. This process, known as memory

reconsolidation, gives us a window of time to change how that memory is structured. By describing painful or overwhelming events, we don’t just relive them. We reorganize them. We add meaning, emotional context, and resolution. In doing so, we can reduce the distress these memories trigger and make them easier to live with.

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Hmmmmm…Donald is infatuated!

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For a city that federal law leaves vulnerable to the prerogatives of the White House, the raw rhetoric was a warning. Under the Home Rule Act of 1973, which gave residents the power to elect a mayor and a city council, Washington has a degree of self-governance, but it is limited.

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One of the best annual meteor showers, the Perseid meteor shower, is peaking now. The view this year may be slightly marred by a nearly full, waning gibbous moon—the phase that directly follows the full moon—in the sky. The Perseids, however, are often so bold and bright that the show is probably still worth checking out.

The meteors should be most visible after midnight local time and into the early morning hours before dawn from August 11 through August 13. The best times to see them will be between 2 A.M. and 3 A.M. local time. If you look in a dark patch of sky as far from the moon as possible, you should see fast streaks of light zip out from a patch of sky in the constellation Perseus, near the star Eta Persei.

The Perseids are known for being especially swift and bright, and in a good year, viewers can expect to spot between 50 and 100 meteors in an hour. This year, with moonlight hampering dark skies, fewer than half the usual number of meteors could be visible. Still, 25 shooting stars an hour is worth waking up early for.

As a bonus, Venus and Jupiter will be converging in the eastern dawn sky. The bright planets will be making their closest approach to each other between August 11 and August 13, when they will appear as a double star. This sight should be bright enough to spot even from light-polluted cities.

Meteor showers are caused when Earth passes through a trail of debris left by a comet or asteroid. As comets orbit the sun, they shed dust and small particles, which linger along their orbital path. More rarely, asteroids can create similar trails when they break into fragments following a collision with another space rock. When our planet crosses through such a path, these bits of rock and dust burn up in our atmosphere in a glorious spectacle. The Perseids and other annual meteor showers occur at the same time every year because Earth intersects with these debris trails at predictable spots along its orbit.

The Perseids originate from the particles left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The comet itself is long gone, having moved on to the far reaches of the solar system by now. Its 133-year orbit around the sun last brought it through Earth’s cosmic neighborhood in 1992. But its detritus remains, giving rise to streaks that wow sky watchers every August.

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A key measure of underlying inflation rose in July as President Trump’s tariffs intensified price pressures across a wider range of consumer goods and services, although the overall increase was likely not significant enough to deter the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates at its next meeting in September.

The Consumer Price Index stayed steady at 2.7 percent compared to the same time last year. On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.2 percent from June. But an important gauge tracking consumer prices that strips out volatile food and energy prices accelerated more rapidly.

For the markets, today’s numbers “delivered a mild relief rally,” said Gina Bolvin, president of Bolvin Wealth Management Group. “But with tariffs in play, investors should enjoy the calm while keeping an eye on the horizon.”Although prices for new vehicles rose modestly in July, prices for used cars and trucks rose 4.8 percent from a year ago. With new cars selling for an average of almost $49,000, according to Cox Automotive, many buyers have turned to the used market, pushing up prices. That trend is expected to continue if, as expected, automakers begin adding the cost of tariffs to new car prices.

Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the inflation report today shows that there is “no evidence whatsoever” that tariffs have caused a spike in prices. “It just hasn’t panned out,” he said.

Miran, who has been nominated for an open spot on the Federal Reserve, said on CNBC that he can “never rule out anything,” when asked if price increases are coming as more tariffs come online and companies work through their inventories. But he insisted that the president’s global trade war was not responsible for the categories of goods that recorded price increases last month.

Miran, however, declined to answer questions about his nomination to the Fed or how the central bank should approach interest rates in September, saying only that its independence is “of paramount importance.” He declined to say if he believed he would be confirmed before the Fed’s September rate-setting meeting.

While a key measure of underly inflation rose in July, the White House described the report as a positive on Tuesday. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that it “beat market expectations once again and remains stable, underscoring President Trump’s commitment to lower costs for American families and businesses.”

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Depending on your age, you might think I’m describing Soviet-era Russia — or Russia in the Putin era. You’d certainly think about modern-day China, where the government is an official partner in many private companies, and has unofficial but meaningful influence over most of them.

And in 2025, you might also think that’s beginning to describe America in the second Trump administration.

Last week, for instance, Donald Trump called on the CEO of Intel to resign because of his past business connections to China. In June, Trump approved Nippon Steel’s plan to buy US Steel — but only after the US government was granted a “golden share” in the company that gives Washington the ability to approve or veto some actions, like closing plants. In January, Trump floated the idea of having the US government own a portion of TikTok’s US operations.

And now Trump is requiring Nvidia and AMD to hand over 15% of revenue from high-end chip sales to China, as first reported by the Financial Times. (Nvidia has released a statement noting it “follow[s] rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets,” without addressing reports about the deal directly; AMD and the White House have yet to comment.)

You can make arguments for or against any one of these transactions — US chip sales to China have been a particularly divisive issue, even within the Trump administration. But taken together, there’s little question that in Trump 2.0, we should expect the federal government to insert itself into private business.

Call it “state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises,” Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip wrote Monday morning. It’s an exceptionally timely piece he appears to have written before the Nvidia/AMD story broke, because it doesn’t contain any reference to it.

(You can make the list of Trump’s interventions even longer if you’d like: He personally required former Paramount owner Shari Redstone to pay him $16 million to settle a seemingly specious lawsuit, for instance. And Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, has required Paramount’s new owners to promise to “root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media.” You could also include the concessions Trump is demanding from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities and law firms.)

The chip story is particularly hard to get your head around, since it inverts the premise of the tariff plans Trump has been pushing this year. Instead of taxing goods made overseas and imported into the US, the US is now taxing goods made by American companies, in America — the thing he supposedly wants to see much more of.

It’s not surprising to see Donald Trump say one thing and do another. And half a year into his second presidency, it’s no longer surprising to see the Republican-controlled Congress let him do just about anything he wants: This is the same Congress that passed a law last year requiring TikTok’s US operations to find a US buyer or shut down — and hasn’t said a word about the fact that Trump has decided to ignore that law, repeatedly.

And again, you might not care about the moves the Trump administration has made to steer companies to date. You might even like them. But the odds are increasing that he’s going to end up involving the federal government in an industry or company you do care about. Maybe one you work in. How are you going to feel about it then?

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In Donald Trump’s second term, the US government is increasingly involving itself in private business, like a reported 15% tax it has placed on some chip exports to China. Fatih Aktas /Anadolu via Getty Images

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