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Letter to Congress: End the Redistricting Wars by Adopting Proportional Representation Gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it. Scholars for Redistricting Reform 2 min read · Jul 22, 2026 -- 3 Listen Share Press enter or click to view image in full size An Open Letter to Congress: The redistricting wars have thrust America’s gerrymandering problem into a new and alarming phase. However, the problem — which has endured for more than two centuries — is not new, and neither is its cause. Gerrymandering is a problem of antiquated electoral rules. The United States elects its House members through single-member districts. This electoral system makes the drawing of district lines consequential in the first place. As long as that system remains intact, distorted election outcomes will persist. We write to urge Congress to do what most democracies have already done: adopt proportional representation. Proportional representation uses multi-member districts to allocate legislative seats in rough proportion to each party’s share of the vote. If 30 percent of the electorate votes for a particular party, that party would earn roughly 30 percent of the seats. Based on recent statewide voting patterns, Democrats in Oklahoma, for example, could earn closer to two of the state’s five seats — instead of none. Meanwhile, Republicans in Massachusetts could win closer to three of that state’s nine seats — instead of none. In proportional systems, gerrymandering yields little advantage. Moving voters across district lines does not meaningfully reduce their electoral influence; they simply carry their proportional weight with them. This is why most democracies experience far lower levels of district-based manipulation than the U.S.: they use a proportional electoral system that makes manipulation prohibitively difficult. The way to end the redistricting wars is to make redistricting matter far less. The current crisis makes clear the urgency of addressing the root cause of the problem. The Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais further weakened one of the last remaining avenues for challenging aggressive redistricting plans in federal court. Following the Court’s earlier ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, which placed partisan gerrymandering beyond the reach of federal courts, both major parties are increasingly pursuing redistricting outside the traditional ten-year census cycle. These developments are serious. But they should not obscure the underlying diagnosis: gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it. The requirement to use single-member districts was passed by statute in 1967. Congress has the authority to change it, bringing its electoral system into the 21st century. There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes. We urge Congress to adopt a proportional system of representation, solving the gerrymandering problem at its source. Sincerely,

19 Scholars Respond to OMB's Proposal to Overhaul the Federal Grantmaking Process The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently proposed overhauling federal grantmaking guidelines to require that political appointees approve every federal grant, replacing the current peer review process with the discretion of the administration. The proposed regulations would also prohibit certain research topics and methods and would allow the government to cancel active grants that are deemed inconsistent with agency priorities. Seventeen scholars from the Scholars Strategy Network submitted public comments to the OMB in response to this proposal. Drawing on their research, disciplinary expertise, and professional experience, their comments explain how these regulatory changes would undermine the integrity of federal grantmaking, weaken the scientific and scholarly review processes that ensure funding decisions rest on merit, and threaten academic freedom and the United States’ capacity for independent research production. "Adopting the rule would undermine transparency, politicize oversight, create broad areas of uncertainty, and pose an enormous burden for awardees." "Over time, these changes will hinder the development of effective educational practices and diminish our nation's capacity to foster innovation, economic growth, and global competitiveness." "The nation’s literacy challenges demand more trustworthy evidence, not greater political control over which questions may be studied or which findings may be supported." "The proposed changes, however, represent a marked—and dangerous—departure from the history of federal grantmaking in the United States that will ultimately undermine stated goals and erode public trust in the government and the nonprofit sector. " "I oppose the proposed revisions because they would weaken scientific independence, undermine peer review, reduce transparency, increase administrative burdens, and harm U.S. leadership in research and innovation." "There is a better way, much of which is already in place through peer review of merit awarding, that supports OMB’s stated goals and honors the work of scientific experts justly awarded funding critical to the nation’s wellbeing." "These rules undermine the scientific foundation needed for meaningful teacher preparation and equitable classroom practices." "I am concerned for the ways in which these proposed changes will harm every aspect of our lives—from the healthcare we can receive, to the roads we drive on, to the education my own children and each of our children receive." "The proposed rule should be withdrawn in its entirety because OMB and its sister agencies lack a reasoned basis for the regulation and OMB lacks the power to make this rule." "The proposed rule would have a severe, negative impact on the quality and quantity of rigorous science produced in the United States, with lasting, harmful impacts on Americans’ quality of life." "The changes would, in short, greatly curtail faculty research and likely end entirely collaborative research efforts on campus. The results would be catastrophic for our students, and through them for our communities." "The U.S. stands in danger of losing its proud position globally, just as the Soviet Union fell further and further back until the very system collapsed." "The proposed changes represent a dangerous departure from the meritocratic system that has made American science the best in the world." "OMB should acknowledge both the unfunded mandate on state governments and conduct a more detailed economic analysis of this major change in research funding." "The proposed rule’s quixotic effort to revise the nature of science runs afoul of numerous established environmental statutes." "By politicizing decision-making, this policy change risks eroding public trust, isolating American research, and undermining scientific objectivity." "Politicizing the grant review proces is yet another dangerous step toward destabilizing the research that has driven America’s comparative advancement and on which American patients and others rely."

Expertise comes with training, experience and accreditation. And expert consensus is the best guide modern democracies have for making decisions about complicated challenges.

The Trump administration has unleashed a tsunami of budget cuts to federal science programs. Mass firings have taken place at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, part of a deliberate decimation of research staff across the federal government. Since January, the administration has systematically cut science funding to its lowest level in decades and issued a flood of budget plans and executive orders that are reshaping how the government uses and supports science. Some outcomes have been immediate and tragic, including staffing shortages that have left cancer patients stranded during experimental drug trials and delays in approving COVID-19 vaccines. The extent of these actions is unprecedented. The administration for a time froze all grant funding at the National Science Foundation and abruptly terminated thousands of the ongoing projects that it funds, as well as those of the National Institutes of Health. As scientists at leading research institutions, we have personally witnessed the effects of the administration’s policies — including colleagues relocating overseas and students leaving research altogether. Undergraduate science internship programs have been canceled, and graduate programs in many research universities paused. As a result, scientists are increasingly seeking jobs abroad. The administration claims its goals are to increase efficiency and raise the standards of scientific research. In fact, thousands of programs and projects have been cut solely on the basis of ideologically motivated keyword searches, without any concern for their performance, design or conduct. That’s not efficient. A Trump executive order issued in May underscores the purely political nature of these attacks. Titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” the order puts hand-picked presidential appointees into every agency to review and “correct” any evidence or conclusions with which they disagree. That’s not scientific. Further, many of the administration’s policies effectively punish researchers simply for asking discomfiting questions and punish institutions for teaching about unpopular ideas. Viewed together, these outline a political strategy toward science that is both systematic and dangerous: a full-scale war on the scientific community, the network of individual researchers across many institutions whose collaboration is essential for scientific progress. Despite the media stereotype of a lone genius in a lab coat, science is really a communal activity. As Isaac Newton, one of the most important scientists of all time, wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Every research project builds on foundational theory, tested methods and vetted findings created and refined through previous research. And every scientist depends on the distributed efforts of an extensive community to vet and review manuscripts for publication and proposals for new research, maintain common journals, databases and tools needed to share and build upon knowledge and educate and train the next generation of talent who help operate their labs. Institutions of higher education are the traditional hosts for the scientific community in the U.S, providing an independent forum for developing and refining ideas, an environment for training students and infrastructure for labs and shared resources. For more than 80 years, U.S. society has partnered with these institutions to foster a healthy scientific community. Federal funding enabled universities to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary for scientific research and support the most promising students. The scientific community collaborated to evaluate proposals for research across fields, ensuring resources were directed to the highest-quality projects, independent of political and institutional bias. No system is perfect, but the external scientific community has successfully partnered with the government to provide independent guidance and vetting — balancing competing interests and perspectives to evaluate proposals, advise the agencies that set funding priorities, accredit the programs that train researchers, review research findings and publish research results. Scientists within the government participate in the larger scientific community, reinforcing community standards as they move between jobs, and preserve the autonomy to ask scientific questions and share their findings. The administration’s policies represent a three-fold attack on the scientific community. First, the administration aims to directly seize control over the key community functions that support scientific independence: Administrative actions have politicized the review processes for funding at National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, suppressed scientific data and withdrawn support for students. Second, the administration aims to subdue universities that provide an independent home for the community by weaponizing institutional accreditation and student visas, threatening individual institutions and their leadership when they are slow to align with the administration’s ideology. Third, the administration is isolating scientists and scientific functions within the government. It does so by sidelining scientific expertise, firing entire independent expert advisory panels, canceling government access to scientific journals, preventing government scientists from publishing in them and, now, subjecting scientific analysis to systematic political modification and censorship. The government’s war against science is a disaster for both. Without intellectual and political independence, the scientific community can’t function effectively to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems. It’s magical thinking for politicians to expect to receive truthful answers about the world when they poll to find the most popular answer, pay to get the answers they want or ignore data they dislike. And it’s anti-democratic when political leaders dictate whether questions, data, and conclusions are appropriately scientific. Society needs science to tackle complex problems and to teach others how to do so. Science doesn’t function without a healthy scientific community. As citizens, we should debate what problems are essential. As voters, we should decide which problems deserve public research funding. As free people, we should not tolerate political attacks on science and the scientific community. Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, MIT Libraries. Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

There is a need in the community of privacy practitioners for a trustworthy, collaborative shared database of differentially private deployments, to help foster norms about best practices. We propose a shared governance resource to (1) help industry grow to consensus on best practices, (2) provide public snapshots of the privacy landscape so that regulators can judge new deployments in context and shape guidance accordingly, and (3) incentivize industry to make their choices public. We describe an initial schema to systematize this information and an editorial and governance process to ensure this information is reliable.

Join us in Washington, D.C. for the inaugural Administrative Data Research Conference (ADRCon) where together we will unlock the power of administrative data to serve the public good.

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