Senate Democrats seek to restore, strengthen PMF program with new legislation

Two Senate Democrats hope to reinstate the recently eliminated Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program and permanently secure the nearly 50-year-old effort for recruiting and retaining federal talent. The Training Aspiring Leaders Emerging Now to Serve, or TALENTS Act, which Sens. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced Thursday, would reestablish the PMF program. The bill comes in response to President Donald Trump eliminating the PMF program by executive order in February. Under the TALENTS Act, the PMF program would not only be restored, but also codified in federal regulations, effectively…

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Return of the Shaman

Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market. It’s a panoramic survey:…

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On Education, Mississippi Shows the Way

Mississippi leads the nation. That’s not a typographical error. And it’s not just a gotcha phrase, preparing the reader for learning that Mississippi leads the nation on all sorts of negative things. Once upon a time, that was true, and in some respects it still is. Mississippi has the lowest or nearly the lowest income levels of any state. It’s been lagging in population growth over the last decade and in the longer term. Mississippi topped the 2-million mark in 1930, and it got within 18,000 of the 3-million mark…

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SBIR/STTR awards remain vulnerable to foreign influence

Of the 12 agencies running the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs, only one has made significant progress to prevent or limit foreign adversaries from taking advantage of the research and development funding. New data from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chairwoman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, shows that the National Institutes of Health both flagged and denied all applications that included companies or people from places like China and Russia. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is the chairwoman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee.…

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