Briefing: State of the project + updates
Our little collective of public-information enthusiasts has now been active for almost a year and a half, and we are 1) learning a lot about how to keep this work sustainable and useful, 2) quite tired, and 3) not stopping.
If you’ve ever been part of an intense new project, you’ve likely heard the cliché “building the plane while we fly it.” We’ve been doing just that, and it’s clear that to keep this up, we need to let our volunteers recoup energy and get a bit more of the plane built.
As Unbreaking has evolved, we’ve ended up producing two quite different things: rigorously edited, issue-specific, durable timelines of events, and (also rigorously edited) weekly briefings and social threads that synthesize what our issue teams learn in a given update. Both are important, but doing both stretches us thin and leaves our foundational work less supported than we like. We’re pulling back to bare-bones briefings and socials for a while — and to none during our regular quarterly downtime — so we can roll out more topic tags, train new folks, and give our teams space to catch up and try some new things. Though our emails will be even briefer, we’re still updating. Details for every issue we track will always be a single click away.
This week:
- Immigration added 26 events to the timeline, including increases in third-country removals and ongoing fallout from the Supreme Court’s Mullin v. Doe decision, which allowed the administration to end temporary protected status.
- Medical Research Funding added 4 entries to the timeline, highlighting recent NIH policy changes that appear tailor-made to enable partisan political manipulation of grant funding.
- Food Safety added 2 entries to the timeline, both concerning the FDA: The agency has a new nominee for commissioner — Dr. Heidi Overton — and is still struggling to catch up with Cyclospora.
How to help
Unbreaking is run in the spirit of a mutual aid cooperative, with researchers, writers, editors, and community organizers working collaboratively to create and maintain our timelines and explainers. We welcome both experts in government and curious, interested observers. You can learn more about our work, make a contribution, or apply to join us.