Pam Herd

@pamherd

Personal Account. Carol Kakalec Kohn Professor of Social Policy. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. I ❤️ surveys. I 😖Administrative Burden. My views do not represent the views of my lovely employer!

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Pam Herd@pamherd· 21d

The NYT piece notes SNAP use doubled since the early 2000s to explain cuts. But SNAP take up was artificially low. In the 90s ~80% of the eligible received benefits. This dropped to 52% by 2002. Bush admin worked on it. We were back at ~90%. We're about to see take-up among the eligible plummet.

Pam Herd@pamherd· 21d

This was predictable. And it was by design. Republicans ensured that many states will effectively cut benefits with burdens--and the states will take the political fall for it. I wrote this a year ago. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-big-be...

Pam Herd@pamherd· 22d

I’m a beach fanatic. Northern Michigan is in a league of its own.

Pam Herd@pamherd· 28d

Key point with this piece is that Mandami is pushing back against the McKinsey approach to governing. Alondra Nelson actually put this best: "How a City interacts with its people shouldn’t be outsourced. It should be local and accountable."

Done right, digital government can help millions of people save hundreds of millions of dollars, and hours and hours of time. Done wrong, it can be costly, useless, discriminatory or even dangerous. How a City interacts with its people shouldn’t be outsourced. It should be local and accountable.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jul 6

Public attention to federal funding research cuts has been on direct impacts, such as current cancer research. But as I wrote last year, the private sector won't train scientists, and universities need federal research $ to do that training. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/are-univer...

$First, training and research are intertwined. What if US universities continued to train students while the private sector conducts most of the research? This doesn’t work. At the highest level, you cannot separate training from knowledge creation. PhD students participate in the research process from start to finish—how to design and conduct experiments, how to analyze data, and how to communicate what they learn. You can’t learn these skills solely in a book or in a classroom—you have to be in a lab, collecting data, and working closely with faculty experts. Indeed, a good fraction of NSF and NIH spending includes funds for graduate and postdoctoral research training. Notably, significant amounts of this funding is now either canceled or held up, and many universities have retrenched their graduate admissions for next year. Jeremy Berg, an expert on NIH, has visualized the flow of grant data, showing that training grants have basically disappeared since Trump took office.$

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jul 1

The first time the Trump administration was able to find any judge, anywhere in America, to state that it had the ability to do away with birthright citizenship was when it got to the Supreme Court.
And then it found three of them.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jun 25

A “two lane” road in Ireland (Dingle)

It’s a single lane road. They’re mad here

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jun 19

As I wrote 9 months ago, this was entirely predictable. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-big-be...

Why will so many vulnerable Americans lose their benefits? In short, both beneficiaries and states will be overwhelmed with new administrative burdens. In addition to cuts in the value of SNAP benefits, many beneficiaries will lose coverage because of added work requirements—which have been repeatedly shown to push eligible people off the program, but not improve labor force participation.

Others, however, will lose benefits because *state administrators* are facing new administrative burdens, which will push them to reduce their SNAP caseloads. The bill, by design, is forcing state governments to take the blame for millions of Americans going hungry.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jun 10

Striking scenes of inequality. This one the hard border between Detroit and Grosse Pointe unequalscenes.com/detroit

Photo of the boundary between the two areas. Grosse Pointe shows filled neighborhoods, then the street line, Detroit with scattered homes and empty lots.
Caption:
The boundary between Grosse Pointe Park and Detroit is one of the most deliberately fortified borders between an American suburb and the city beside it. Over the years the wealthy, historically white suburb has sealed off the streets that once tied it to its majority-Black neighbour. Roads like Goethe, Brooks and Korte were walled off entirely. The main gateway at Kercheval was blockaded again and again, with heavy planters, a farmers-market shed turned to face Grosse Pointe, even piled snow.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jun 4

As we wrote, turning NIH and NSF program officers into political appointees, combined with the proposed rule to weaken peer review, will fundamentally shift the agency from science driven by knowledge and expertise to science driven by politics. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What might this mean for scientific agencies?
Agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes for Health (NIH) cannot meet their statutorily mandated scientific missions if politics, rather than scientific expertise, drive decision-mak-ing. Federally supported science has been so successful, in no small part, because agency staff are typically expert scientists beholden to ensuring that the agencies deliver world-class science. Now, many could be turned into political appointees. The proposed policy defines grantmaking positions as "policy-mak-ing," which includes "drafting of funding opportunity announcements, evaluation of grant applications, or recommending or selecting grant recipients." This definition, which neatly matches agencies' own definitions for certain career staff, would include most NIH program officers and NSF program directors.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Jun 2

Consider me skeptical. CMS guidance on how to implement Medicaid work requirements has dropped.

These provisions are expected to promote transparency, reduce administrative burden, and ensure states provide clear, actionable guidance to new applicants and Medicaid beneficiaries on how to meet the new eligibility requirement.

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 28

His conclusion here just doesn't seem to grasp the magnitude of the problem, the fundamentals of the problem, nor inherent pitfalls of his proposed restructuring of scientific funding. It's not malevolent, it just reflects lacking knowledge regarding policy and governance.

Pieces of the old architecture are falling away. But science itself is inherently resilient — that is, after all, why it’s science. It, and we, are being given the rarest of opportunities: a chance to outgrow the walls we mistook for the whole structure.

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 23

And because I am a glutton for punishment, I generated this figure from UM data. This doesn't correspond with conventional measures (esp. unemployment), but we know these general measures tend to be valid in areas like health. My instinct is that conventional measures are missing something real

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 23

One of the best parts of parenting is witnessing who your kids become. I don’t know where the interest (and ability) comes from, but so fun to see it emerge.

Pencil sketch of a girl with long hair, large eyes. She’s angled toward the viewer

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 23

In the Michigan measure they appear to be parallel trends. But my larger point (as a survey researcher), is that it’s probably a mistake to ignore what people are saying. We’re missing something.

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 20

what is this even?

NYT Wirecutter comparing Kerrygold butter to Walmart butter. I mean, what?

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 13

Marriage stories in willful text misreading. Also, dear readers, the mug is there because I am too lazy to walk it back to the house and I need room for my extra large Diet Coke in the cup holder.

Text chain.

Don. Do not put the trash out

Me. Well thankfully I did not

Don. I totally missed it. I didn’t even notice anyone had barrels out

Don. Also, I don’t know why I keep finding this mug in front of the garage. (Picture of said mug in front of the garage

Pam Herd@pamherd· May 4

Seven months ago, I wrote about how fraud frames (and HR1 punishing states for normal error) would result in massive benefit loss for SNAP recipients. ONE HALF of SNAP recipients have lost benefits in AZ b/c of new burdens, not b/c of the work requirement. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-big-be...

What is the poison pill? Weaponizing an obscure administrative metric: error rates.

States will lose billions of dollars for making mistakes processing SNAP applications. Why? John Boozman (R-AR) and U.S. House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA) argue that states lack “accountability measures hardworking taxpayers deserve” and these changes ensure states “have a real incentive to improve oversight and stop improper payments before they happen.” It’s one example of the drumbeat of fraud that Republicans have been building to rip holes in the safety net.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 26

They’re weaponizing the bureaucracy. It’s not really eligibility changes. Arizona cut *half* of its SNAP rolls between July and December b/c states are facing huge penalties for normal errors, even as the program has become impossibly complex to manage. www.propublica.org/article/ariz...

Asked about the sharp decline in SNAP participants, Gov. Katie Hobbs' press secretary, Liliana Soto, blamed Trump administration policies, which have "increased bureaucracy and red tape on states across the country, and forced DES to take difficult but necessary steps to reduce the state's payment error rate." Hobbs' administration is taking these steps "to avoid staggering fines of hundreds of millions of dollars that would further endanger food assistance for vulnerable Arizonans," Soto said
in a statement.

But interviews suggest that Arizona's efforts to comply, combined with cuts to the agency that runs the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have contributed to the decline - making it more difficult to apply and causing people who are eligible to be denied. The state's drop has exceeded previous projections.
"Arizona is just the alarm bell," said Joseph Palomino, executive director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. "This is likely going to happen in every state."

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 22

The number of NIH competitive awards is down 50% from 2025, and down ~70% from prior years. Even if they catch up by the end of the year, only wealthy institutions can bridge these huge funding gaps.They're killing science-and violating the constitution-by weaponizing the bureaucracy

figure showing the trends I detail in the tweet text

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 18

The empirical evidence from economics actually makes the opposite point. www.nber.org/system/files...

Figure showing that education research, at least in economics, is among the most rigorous.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 16

'complicated divorce' is a bizarre choice of words given he murdered his wife with their two children in the home. www.wsj.com/us-news/form...

Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax
Kills Wife and Self, Police Say
The couple was going through a complicated divorce, according to Fairfax County police.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 16

Really excellent logical discussion about the practical problem with 'viewpoint diversity' as a governing logic for universities-- if truth is the goal of scientific research. www.aaup.org/academe/issu...

In that sense, the logic of viewpoint diversity contains its own extinction, if truth really is the goal. Consider that a researcher in 1952, trying to figure out how DNA is structured, would need to survey all the theories and viewpoints on DNA structure up to that point before making an evidence-based opinion. DNA’s structure was still (just barely) a live question. But by 1954, our researcher wouldn’t need to study the theories of the triple-helix model, or the side-by-side model, at all, because by 1953 the double-helix model had been convincingly established. Our researcher could safely reject the triple-helix or side-by-side models—or simply ignore them, not even stopping to sniff at those particular diverse garden flowers—because the local question about DNA’s basic structure had been answered. Academics do this all the time because we are pursuing local truths. If we are even half-decent teachers, we are instructing our students how to do it too. On any particular topic, viewpoint diversity might be useful to initially survey competing theories, and once a consensus of the truth of that matter has been established, viewpoint diversity on that topic is rightly, habitually, dismissed.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 15

Really good example here as to how Vought (and Republicans) lie about fraud in Medicaid and SNAP, while completely ignoring $725 billion in annual tax fraud (which is ~total federal spending on Medicaid and SNAP annually).

Vought says that 100% of the people kicked off their health insurance from the "Big Beautiful Bill" are either here illegally (CBO says zero of them are) or are defrauding the system or shouldn't have been on in the first place. A profoundly extreme position.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 11

Picture of clippy saying copilot I am your father

Pam Herd@pamherd· Apr 11

But, you know, feel free to ‘do your own research’

I'm Jorts @lethaljorts.bsky.social • 1h these motherfuckers said it would splashdown at 8:07 and it splashed down at 8:07. after going to the fucking moon. fucking a man. god damn
1 I'm Jorts @lethaljorts.bsky.social • 2h it really isn't appreciated enough that we can send something to orbit the moon, which is a fucking long ways away, and still know basically exactly where it will land back on earth

Pam Herd@pamherd· Mar 28

The NYT providing news space so that teenagers can promote (with no fact checks) MAHA anti-science outright quackery. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The normal health care system has absolutely failed people. When you go into an average American home, you see so many bottles of prescription pills. In reality, all pills do is cover up a problem instead of getting to the root cause.

A couple of years ago, I started developing bad eczema. Doctors couldn't help me. A friend suggested a holistic health clinic, and after some testing, it turned out that I had severe gut problems. I had 73 food sensitivities!
Now I take about 30 supplements a day: omega-3, vitamin D, digestive enzymes, that kind of thing. I feel that they've really helped my eczema. I also use metal and glass products; I think an overuse of plastic is dangerous. I try to get in as much sun as possible in a day and eat plenty of red meat.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Mar 27

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

Figure showing NSF funding curve in 2026 compared to prior years. The line is nearly at zero as of mid February.

As Science and Nature have reported, NIH and NSF have made only a relative handful of new grants since their 2026 appropriations became law, partly because of the OMB delays. A new rumor among the U.S. academic community is that, even after OMB signs off, it will hold agencies to the levels Trump requested for them in May 2025 rather than the more generous amounts Congress approved. For NSF, which received an appropriation of $8.8 billion, a version of those rumors holds that OMB must approve any spending above the president’s request of $3.9 billion—and that any additional outlays must clearly align with the administration’s priorities.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Mar 27

Hegseth is "cleaning house," which is exactly what he said he would do. apnews.com/article/pete...

He complains in his latest book that “woke” generals and the leaders of the elite service academies have left the military dangerously weak and “effeminate” by promoting DEI. He says, “the next commander in chief will need to clean house.”

“Turns out, all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids — white kids — feel like they’re not wanted,” he said in his book.

Pam Herd@pamherd· Mar 25

Mamdani has a seemingly DOGE pitch, but is actually delivering on reducing wasteful spending. My favorite? He’s cutting all kinds of contracting out to private vendors—including, drumroll, McKinsey