What we’re reading, March 13, 2026

New York's Abundance roadmap, Federal housing reform, and the Science funding crisis

The 14th Street Busway, Photo: Carlos Chiossone/NYC DOT

Happy Friday the 13th (again!)! Here’s what we’ve been reading:

1. Last week, Abundance NY put out The Abundance Agenda, a roadmap to, well, Abundance for New Yorkers. I’m a fan of just how concrete the document is, both in terms of the big picture and the small. On the big picture, the agenda lays out some very specific ten-year goals: reduce capital project cost overruns and schedule delays by half, build 500,000 new homes, double average bus speeds city-wide. But it also zooms in to the small details that add up to big change: challenge-based procurement, pre-approved template plans for common building types, pre-emption of local authority to de-facto ban solar projects, and so on. This Abundance Agenda is tailored to New York - it has recommendations related to scaffolding and trash pickup - but it would be great to see more local orgs put together wide ranging roadmaps to abundance, tailored to their own local needs. — Matt Clancy

2. The Senate passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89–10 on Thursday — a landmark pro-supply package that streamlines housing regulation, creates new building incentives, and modernizes federal programs. A late addition requiring institutional investors with 350+ single-family homes to sell after seven years threatened to shut down build-to-rent construction entirely--but then, shortly after the bill passed, Senate staff revealed an industrial policy exemption for innovative HUD Code construction methodologies, including newly chassis-free CrossMods unlocked by the bill’s other reforms. If you like your single family BTR, you can keep it--as a stable pipeline of demand for innovative new factory built homes. To be sure, there are costs and risks to aggressive industrial policy & “picking winners” in new technology. — Alex Armlovich

3. Meanwhile, closer to home, Governor Hochul’s EXPRESS NY initiative is accepting submissions through April 3 from anyone who can identify a state regulation or practice that adds unnecessary burden — with a focus on housing, infrastructure, and small business. If you know a bad rule flying under the radar in New York, this is a real channel to flag it. — Alex Armlovich

4. Federal permitting negotiations have re-started in the Senate, following the first steps of an apparent thaw in solar permitting. Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute has a timely piece in response, discussing the increasing partisanship of energy policy, reinforcing the importance of passing meaningful reform this Congress, and arguing that the current need for bipartisan compromise is an opportunity, not a drawback. — Willow Latham-Proenca

5. In a previous post, we noted that Congress largely preserved science budgets for FY26, rejecting large proposed cuts. Unfortunately appropriations are only step one. A few weeks ago Nature reported that OMB has been withholding authorization for agencies to spend their congressionally approved funding. As of the beginning of this month, NIH had not received approval to spend research money from the budget bill signed February 3, and was operating on leftover funds from last fall’s stopgap. As a result, they’ve issued only ~800 new and competing awards so far in FY26, versus the ~3000 that would be typical. NSF only got its funding authorized in late February, and is making grants at an even more glacial pace than NIH. — Jordan Dworkin

6. On a happier note: This week the Astera Institute announced Radial, a new division committing up to $500M over the next decade to experimenting with how life sciences research is organized, funded, and shared. Early projects include open datasets for drug discovery, new infrastructure for protein dynamics data, and a publishing platform prototype. Alongside the launch, they are running an essay competition asking working scientists to identify systemic bottlenecks in their own research and propose ways to test solutions. The judging panel includes both owner-of-the-blog Matt Clancy and friend-of-the-blog Jacob Trefethen, and we encourage you to submit your best/most ambitious ideas. — Jordan Dworkin

7. This year has seen AI agents break through in a serious way among social scientists I respect. So it was only a matter of time until social scientists designed an AI benchmark to see how good agents really are. Meysam Alizadeh, Mohsen Mosleh, Fabrizio Gilardi, and Joshua Tucker’s SocSci-Repro-Bench tested if Claude Code and Codex could reproduce 54 distinct papers. The most striking result to me is how different the models’ capabilities were: Claude could fully reproduce 78 percent of papers accurately, while Codex only got 35.8 percent. What’s more, the study found evidence the results were not memorized by the models; they were doing the work from scratch. Funny enough, OpenAI’s success rate here is similar to that of GPT 4/4o back when the Institute for Replication tested those models in 2024 (though it’s not clear to me if the replication tasks in the two papers are similarly challenging). — Dylan Matthews

8. Adam Kroetsch has a new post arguing that if we want to make trials more efficient, we need to pay attention to the boring stuff, in other words, the unglamorous work of clinical operations like setting up trials, recruiting patients, and collecting data. — Saloni Dattani

9. I’ve also been following the BioNTech announcement that co-founders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci will leave the company by year-end to start a new biotech focused on next-generation mRNA therapeutics (their third startup). The stock dropped over 20%, partly because no successors were named, and partly because BioNTech is on the cusp of multiple late-stage cancer therapy readouts. — Saloni Dattani

Finally, some updates from our team and grantees:

We’re celebrating new cohorts for two research accelerator programs we support: Speculative Technologies announced the 2026 Brains Fellows, helping scientists plan, identify funding for, and execute ambitious technical research from electronic noses to bacteriophage therapies. Renaissance Philanthropy launched the Big if True Science (BiTS) Americas cohort, training scientists to design and lead large-scale research initiatives across plasma chemistry, biosecurity, developmental neuroscience, and more.

Progress Ireland published a piece by Fergus McCullough on how Brussels can help with Galway’s housing problems, proposing that the EU use funding conditionality to reward jurisdictions that actually increase housing supply, drawing on models like Canada’s Housing Accelerator Fund and the US ROAD to Housing Act.

We also published a directory of Living Literature Reviews this week: a collection of continuously updated research syntheses by expert authors on a range of topics. If you know of a review we’ve missed, let us know - it’s a living directory!