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More than 1,900 scientists have signed a letter warning that the Trump administration is threatening scientific independence and urging it to “cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science.” Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his team have upended the country’s scientific research apparatus — slashing funding, terminating grants and attempting to weed out ideas deemed unacceptable, according to the letter, which was shared on Monday. (Ables, 4/1)

The Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, recently formed by the administration to address complaints of discrimination on college campuses, will review the more than $255 million in contracts between the federal government, Harvard and its affiliates. And it will look at more than $8.7 billion in multiyear grant commitments to Harvard and its affiliates to ensure the school is in compliance with federal regulations, the announcement from the departments of Health and Human Services, Education, and the U.S. General Services Administration said. Harvard affiliates include local hospitals whose physicians teach at Harvard Medical School. (Svrluga and Douglas-Gabriel, 3/31)

The Trump administration in recent weeks has canceled or frozen billions of dollars in federal grants made to researchers through the National Institutes of Health, and has moved to sharply curtail funding for academic medical centers and other institutions. It has also, through the initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, tried to fire hundreds of workers at the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency. And it has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign-born students. To economists, the policies threaten to undermine U.S. competitiveness in emerging areas like artificial intelligence, and to leave Americans as a whole poorer, less healthy and less productive in the decades ahead. (Casselman, 3/31)

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary signed off on the ouster of top vaccine official Peter Marks shortly after being quietly sworn in as the agency’s new leader late last week, four people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. The forced removal was Makary’s first major act as commissioner and sent a powerful signal to a stunned Washington that was already anxious about the role vaccine skepticism would play under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department. Makary and Kennedy had previously agreed to push out Marks, who led the FDA’s vaccine division for more than eight years, as part of a broader overhaul of HHS leadership. (Cancryn and Lim, 3/31)

Vence Bonham, acting deputy director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, has been “unexpectedly” placed on administrative leave, he announced in an email to staff Monday evening. (Mast, 3/31)

In 2021, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, decoded brain signals from a man who hadn’t spoken in more than 15 years to generate words that flashed on a screen. This March, Medtronic, a medical device company, won regulatory approval for a first-of-its-kind therapy that delivers precise, adjustable pulses of electricity to the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease. (Wosen and Broderick, 4/1)

The National Institutes of Health immediately terminated projects investigating vaccine safety during pregnancy and the effectiveness of the shingles vaccine. (Lee, 3/29)