From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Joe Duarte

Federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) continue to fund invalid, ideologically driven “scientific” research that subsidizes leftist activists and harms conservatives and the American people at large. There’s currently no plan to stop.

Conversely, NIH does not fund obvious research topics that would help the American people, because of institutional leftist bias.

While serving as a senior advisor at NIH, I discovered many active grants like these:

“Examining Anti-Racist Healing in Nature to Protect Telomeres of Transitional Age BIPOC for Health Equity” — Take minority teens to parks in a bid to reduce telomere erosion (the shortening of repetitive DNA sequences as we age). $3.8 million in five years and no results published – not surprising, given their absurd premise.

“Ecological Momentary Assessment of Racial/Ethnic Microaggressions and Cannabis Use among Black Adults” – This rests on an invalid leftist ideological concept – “microaggressions.” An example of a “microaggression” is a white person denying he’s racist. They can’t be validly measured since they’re simply defined into existence by Orwellian leftist ideology, with no attempt to discover the alleged aggressor’s motives.

“Influence of Social Media, Social Networks, and Misinformation on Vaccine Acceptance Among Black and Latinx Individuals” — from an activist who said the phrase “The coronavirus is genetically engineered” was “misinformation” and also conducted a bizarre, partisan study based entirely on a Trump tweet about recovering from COVID.

I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

The study claimed that people saw COVID as less “serious” after the tweet. I apologize for the flashback to when Democrats demanded everyone feel the exact level of COVID panic and anti-optimism they felt (and share their false beliefs on the efficacy of school closures, masks, and vaccines ). NIH funded this study and gave him another $651,586 in July for his new “misinformation” study, including $200,000 from the Office of the Director.

I’m a social psychologist who has focused on the harms of ideological bias in academic research. Our sensemaking institutions have been gashed by a cult political ideology that treats its conjectures and abstractions as descriptively true, without argument or even explanation, and enforces conformity with inhumane psychologizing and ostracism. This ideology – which dominates academia and NIH – poses an unprecedented threat to our connection to reality, and thus to science, by vaporizing the distinction between descriptive reality and ideological tenets.

In March, I emailed Jay Bhattacharya, Director of NIH, and pitched him on how I could build an objective framework to eliminate ideological bias in NIH-funded research.

Jay seemed to agree with my analysis. We spoke on the phone, and I started in May as a senior advisor to Jay in the Office of the Director (NIH-OD).

I never heard from Jay again beyond a couple of cursory replies.

For four months, I read tons of grants, passed a lengthy federal background check, started to build the pieces, and contacted Jay about once a week with questions, follow-up, and example grants. Dead air – he was ghosting me.

Jay also bizarrely deleted the last two months’ worth of my messages to him but kept the older ones. I’d sent him a two-page framework summary, asked if I should keep working on it, and also asked if I’d done something wrong, given his persistent lack of response. No response.

In September, the contractors working at NIH-OD, me included, were laid off. No explanation was given.

I have no idea what happened here. It’s been the strangest and most unprofessional experience of my career.

The result is that NIH is still funding ideological, scientifically invalid research and will continue to ignore major topics because of leftist bias. We have a precious opportunity for lasting reform, and that opportunity will be lost without a systematic approach to eliminating ideology in science.

What’s happened so far is that DOGE cut some grants earlier this year, after a search for DEI terms. It was a good first step but caught some false positives and missed most of the ideological research, including many grants premised on “microaggressions,” “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and other proprietary, question-begging leftist terms. Leftist academics are already adapting by changing their terminology – this meme is popular on Bluesky:

DOGE didn’t have the right search terms, and a systematic, objective anti-bias framework is necessary to do the job. It’s also more legally resilient and persuasive to reachable insiders — there’s no way to reform a huge bureaucracy without getting buy-in from some insiders (yes, you also have to fire some people). This mission requires empowered people at every funding agency who are thoroughly familiar with leftist ideology, can cleanly define “ideology,” and build robust frameworks to remove it from scientific research.

My framework identifies four areas of bias so far:

1. Ideological research
2. Rigged research
3. Ideological denial of science / suppression of data
4. Missing research – research that would happen if not for leftist bias

The missing research at NIH likely hurts the most — e.g. American men commit suicide at unusually high rates, especially white and American Indian men, yet NIH funds no research on this. But they do fund “Hypertension Self-management in Refugees Living in San Diego.”

Similarly, NIH is AWOL on the health benefits of religious observance and prayer, a promising area of research that Muslim countries are taking the lead on. These two gaping holes suggest that NIH is indifferent to the American people and even culturally and ideologically hostile them.

Joe Duarte grew up in small copper-mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find his work here, find him on X here, and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.

New passenger compensation rules under review could end up harming passengers as well as the country’s aviation sector by forcing airlines to pay for delays and cancellations beyond their control, warns a new report published this morning by the MEI.

“Air travel in Canada is already unaffordable and inaccessible,” says Gabriel Giguère, senior public policy analyst at the MEI. “New rules that force airlines to cover costs they can’t control would only make a bad situation worse.”

Introduced in 2023 by then-Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, the proposed amendment to the Air Passenger Protection Regulations would make airlines liable for compensation in all cases except those deemed “exceptional.” Under the current rules, compensation applies only when the airline is directly responsible for the disruption.

If adopted, the new framework would require Canadian airlines to pay at least $400 per passenger for any “unexceptional” cancellation or delay exceeding three hours, regardless of fault. Moreover, the definition of “exceptional circumstances” remains vague and incomplete, creating regulatory uncertainty.

“A presumed-guilty approach could upend airline operations,” notes Mr. Giguère. “Reversing the burden of proof introduces another layer of bureaucracy and litigation, which are costs that will inevitably be passed on to consumers.”

The Canadian Transportation Agency estimates that these changes would impose over $512 million in additional costs on the industry over ten years, leading to higher ticket prices and potentially reducing regional air service.

Canadians already pay some of the highest airfares in the world, largely due to government-imposed fees. Passengers directly cover the Air Travellers Security Charge—$9.94 per domestic flight and $34.42 per international flight—and indirectly pay airport rent through Airport Improvement Fees included on every ticket.

In 2024 alone, airport authorities remitted a record $494.8 million in rent to the federal government, $75.6 million more than the previous year and 68 per cent higher than a decade earlier.

“This new regulation risks being the final blow to regional air travel,” warns Mr. Giguère. “Routes connecting smaller communities will be the first to disappear as costs rise and they become less profitable.”

For instance, a three-hour and one minute delay on a Montreal–Saguenay flight with 85 passengers would cost an airline roughly $33,000 in compensation. It would take approximately 61 incident-free return flights to recoup that cost.

Regional air service has already declined by 34 per cent since 2019, and the added burden of this proposed regulation could further reduce connectivity within Canada. It would also hurt Canadian airlines’ competitiveness relative to U.S. carriers operating out of airports just south of the border, whose passengers already enjoy lower fares.

“If the federal government truly wants to make air travel more affordable,” says Mr. Giguère, “it should start by cutting its own excessive fees instead of scapegoating airlines for political gain.”

You can read the Economic Note here.

* * *

The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.