Each day this week, my kids' elementary school has begun the morning with events for Black History Month: On Monday, an orchestra of students on Orff instruments playing and singing jazz songs. On Tuesday, the youngest of grades reciting poems. On Wednesday and Thursday, the older grades with more elaborate presentations as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical. (The week will presumably end on Friday with the sugar high of Valentine's Day.)

This morning, my older kid and her classmates presented a poem by Amanda Gorman titled "New Day's Lyric." It's from 2022, and spoke to the lingering pandemic — reading it now, it could just as well apply to this moment as well.

After enjoying the students' performances, I stopped at a cafe on the way into work, caught up on the latest news in the transportation sector — and in reaction to that news, wrote a little resignation letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

The specific news that has now been confirmed is that the National Academies' Transportation Research Board recently canceled a targeted list of projects and reports on transportation equity. Projects with titles like:

• Tools to Integrate Equity into Active Transportation and Safety Investments
• Digitizing Bicycle and Pedestrian Treatments for Promoting Active Transportation Equity and Safety
• How to Assess and Address Equity of Access to Goods and Services
• Equity Impacts of Transportation Revenue Mechanisms and Changing Trends
• Assessing and Mitigating Racial Disparities in the Enforcement of Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Micromobility Traffic-Related Laws
• Racial Equity, Black America, and Public Transportation
• Lessons Learned from Covid-19: Strategies to Enhance Racial and Social Equity Through Public Transportation As a Community Lifeline
• Tools for Assessing the Impacts of Surface Transportation Funding Programs
• Integrating Public Transit Equity Impacts into Economic Analyses

Given the shock-and-awe unveiling of the Trump/Musk administration, it's not a surprise that these topics are under threat. This administration sure does sound like they want to re-create an America in which Black people sit at the back of the bus.

But it is disappointing that the leadership of the National Academies would submit immediately — even while courts have placed restraining orders on attempts to illegally impound funds by the executive branch, and while Congress has issued no direction.

While I'm not involved in any of the canceled projects (or have academic training or professional experience in transportation equity), I have served for some years on one of the panels that reviews and approves grants in this overall transit cooperative research program.

Once a year they offer to fly us out to D.C. for a meeting to review grant proposals — and I politely decline the offer and tell them I'll be dialing in via Zoom due to parenting duties — but this year, I won't.

If targeted political meddling can arbitrarily impact awarded research contracts, then what is the point of having outside experts volunteer our time? And even if it's just transportation equity that's being canceled this year, then what will the unexpectedly verboten topics be next year?

To be fair, many engineering-related projects will probably continue on uninterrupted on auto-pilot — research into new pavement methods and stronger train rails and whatnot. But for research that concerns actual people using actual transportation modes to reach actual destinations and access actual services, that must be defended more actively if it is to succeed in an objective manner.

I'm disappointed that by resigning this small volunteer position I won't get to keep on advising a couple of data-related projects that are quite fascinating, and I'll genuinely miss the dedicated and friendly staff who administer these programs.

Even if one little note of resignation from a volunteer position won't change much, it's already given me a chance to connect with some acquaintances who care about the rigorous study of equity in transportation.

Ideally someday the executive leadership of the TRB and National Academies will look at their own website (which lists their core values as "Independence, Objectivity, Rigor, Integrity, Inclusivity, Truth") and find their spines — or maybe they should just come and listen to the kids and the teachers right here at Alameda's public schools.