Science is under attack and the consequences could be deadly.
Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration and DOGE have ordered budget freezes and cuts, layoffs and firings, and communication bans for federally funded scientific agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as international agencies that monitor and address diseases worldwide.
These agencies are critical if the United States is to remain a global scientific leader. They are critical to the health of Americans and people around the world. Moreover, the directives have been poorly communicated, resulting in confusion and chaos.
The NIH is the primary funding agency for STEM professors at major universities which require science professors to secure funding. This funding covers salaries (their own as well as their graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and lab technicians), supplies (pipettes, petri dishes, beakers, media, equipment, chemicals, gloves, etc.), costs to publish their work (scientific journals charge scientists $500 to more than $10,000 to publish their research), and travel to scientific meetings. These costs are categorized as direct costs and are funded by grants. Grants also cover indirect costs. Universities take 40-50% of grant funds for indirect costs to cover laboratory space, heat, electricity, cleaning, administration costs, dishwashing, waste disposal, and core facilities (electron microscopy, DNA sequencing, etc.).
This system, while imperfect, has many advantages. It means that universities are motivated to support scientists and their research. It safeguards the ability of faculty to function independently and autonomously, offering some protection against undue political influences on science and scientific research.
However, those undue political influences are part of the attack on science. Scientists are being asked to scrub their grants and publications for terms such as underrepresented, community, socioeconomic, gender, and pregnant person in a clear attempt to undermine science’s independence and autonomy.
Furthermore, while it is a good thing to take a careful look at costs, the cap of 15% for indirect costs imposed by DOGE has left universities reeling. Some universities have halted admissions of PhD students and some have even withdrawn offers of admission to their PhD programs. Summer internship programs for undergraduate students have been cancelled due to fear that there will be no funding for these students.
The NIH itself, which employs more than 18,000 people and includes agencies and research centers like the National Cancer Institute, has been the target of cuts in staffing and budget freezes meaning many scientists are going without paychecks. Starting new projects has been forbidden and all communication has been banned, including publishing papers reporting on scientific findings. Grant review boards have been ordered to stop reviewing grants, leaving scientists at the NIH and those depending on NIH funding in a sea of uncertainty.
The NSF has experienced similar budget cuts and layoffs with threats to eliminate half of NSF’s budget soon. Many of the scientists who have lost their jobs are newly minted PhDs, categorized as probationary because they are in their first years of employment. Losing young talent is particularly concerning because they are typically full of the newest ideas, lots of energy, and are the future of American science.
The Trump administration has threatened to cut staff at NOAA by up to half and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by up to 65%, putting our ability to monitor climate change, predict weather disasters, and protect our environment at risk.
Cuts at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have halted studies on agricultural pests and helpful pollinators. These cuts put the security of the US food supply at risk.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and ICDDR,B, (an international health research organization located in Dhaka, Bangladesh) both of which have had US funding cut, are struggling to address current global health crises including cholera in Bangladesh and Ebola in Uganda. Clinical trials for treating and preventing HIV (BRILLIANT Consortium), malaria, tuberculosis, and surveillance for fungal diseases and spillover viruses have been interrupted because US funding was halted.
In the United States, we are experiencing a large and spreading outbreak of measles (Texas, New Mexico, New Jersey), tuberculosis (Kansas), and bird flu is knocking on our door, yet the CDC has been hamstrung in their ability to report on the spread of these potentially deadly diseases. Government leaders are spreading misinformation, and much of the federal health data from the CDC (also a target of cuts and firings) and other agencies has been taken offline.
The cuts are not contributing to efficiency. Rather than do the work of identifying inefficiency and addressing real problems, DOGE is imposing arbitrary cuts sending these agencies into inefficient chaos and confusion. There has been no effort to learn what these agencies do, the benefits they provide, and how they work.
Furthermore, the cuts represent a minute fraction of the federal budget. Only 9% of the Department of Health and Human Services $1.7 trillion dollar budget funds agencies like NIH and CDC. Rather than address efficiency, the cuts seem vindictive—targeted at the truth science spoke into the COVID19 pandemic and what the Republicans have called a woke bureaucracy.
What is at risk? We risk losing our position as a global leader in science. Other countries, China especially, have been making great scientific progress. Innovation, especially scientific innovation, is a thread that weaves through the history of our country. Several of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were scientists. The scientific agencies formed after both world wars helped the United States emerge as a world leader. Science in the United States remains the envy of much of the world today.
Science has been critical in making America great so stepping back in science leadership seems counterproductive to the stated goals of the Trump administration.
If you or someone you love has avoided polio, been successfully treated with antibiotics, surgery, or chemotherapy, if you are well-fed and have clean water, or depend on weather predictions to plan your travels, you can thank scientists. Their research, and the funds that enabled it. The cuts to science risk the health and safety of Americans and people around the world—especially the marginalized and underrepresented.
The assault on science is an assault on truth. Science values evidence-based truth and does a pretty good job at getting closer to truth with each experiment. This kind of truth is constrained when the sorts of studies science can do and the range of results science can report are hamstrung by arbitrary funding cuts, political suppression, and chaos.
As a Reformed Christian who sees all truth as God’s truth, this may be the most troubling consequence of all.
19 Responses
Thank you for speaking the truth. Feeling helpless.
The king has decreed it; so let it be written, so let it be done.
Rome is burning. Again. This time it is the UUSA (ununited).
Lord help us.
Thank you for sharing this troubling information with us and helping us to know the consequences of these decisions.
Thank you for giving us the true facts and possible results.
Will buyers remorse set in before it is all destroyed?
Your specifics and truth is so appreciated this morning. Thanks
Sara, thanks for speaking the truth about the actions of the present administration in its deliberate actions in dismantling important government functions that contribute so much to a healthy society and a healthy environment not only for the United States, but the entire world.
The departure of people like Francis Collins and the vilifying of people like Anthony Fauci are signs of our times. Trump and the far right’s response to COVID, social distancing, masking, and even the vaccines the first Trump Administration deserves enormous credit for creating at what really was warp speed: well, all of it fits the patterns you trace here so well. We are being led by what M. Scott Peck once called people of the lie. And when lies and falsehoods are your go-to posture, nothing is so threatening as the truth. Truth as reported on by a reliable press corps and the truth represented by science–both under attack since January 20. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, as Paul often reminded us. It’s against the principalities and powers and that is a good bit of what is behind everything you so tellingly related here, Sara.
Yes, yes, yes, to all of this. Thank you Sara! We are dealing with it all, in various areas, here at UW-M.
As a son of a science teacher, and the beneficiary of cancer research, I lament what’s going on. The current governmental war on science is disturbing.
I personally feel the angst of my daughter who is an assistant to the dean of nursing at a major University, as she reported first hand what you stated so well regarding the dismantling of the NIH. Keep telling the truth; it’s supposed to set us free. Hopefully in my and especially my daughters and generations to come lifetime.
PS thank you for giving the full name of acronyms you used in your blog. It seems to be becoming a lost part of English.
Luddites of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your lives!
Thank you Sara for writing this. As a climate scientist, I am compelled to add that what we are seeing in this administration is an escalation of what we climate scientists have experienced from the Republican party (cult?) for the past 25 years. Our research has been continually ridiculed and maligned by Republican members of congress and our personal integrity has been challenged as well. Republicans at the state and federal level have been and are engaged in removing “climate change” from the lexicon of government, despite the solidification of our understanding of climate change and its consequences. The right-wing media propaganda machine, masquerading as news, continues to manufacture lies in support of this agenda. The current administration has in a month destroyed even the feeble progress that our nation has made to address the problem of climate change in the last two decades. I do not understand how anyone who believes that this is God’s world can continue to support the Republican party which is hell-bent on destroying it.
Thank you Sara,
And for everyone else, if you see funding cuts for what appears to be some odd study that from our perspective would lead to absolutely nothing helpful or necessary, keep in mind this interesting bit of information:
“The key experiment that led to the development of Ozempic involved studying the venom of the Gila monster lizard, which contains a hormone-like molecule called exendin-4 that mimics the body’s natural GLP-1 hormone, leading to the discovery of a potential treatment for diabetes by regulating blood sugar levels; this research eventually paved the way for the creation of Ozempic, a GLP-1 based drug used to manage type 2 diabetes and promote weight loss.”
Who knows where GLP-1 drugs will eventually lead, but for now they almost seem miraculous for any number of treatments for people.
The foundational research for this drug was done by John Eng, who was building off from other government funded research. “In Eng’s case, the research was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some of the research he built on was funded by the National Institutes of Health.”
Who knew? Lizard venom led to tremendous help to diabetics and people struggling with weight loss and health issues due to too much body mass.
Scientists didn’t know, but they had an idea and a hope and got funding that led to something we might never have dreamed of.
THIS is what we are cutting when we stop doing research that seems “wasteful” or to correct the dear leader, work going on for “transgenic” mice not “transgender” mice.
Anyway, thanks Sara
There’s a March For Science rally in Lansing, MI from 12 – 4 PM tomorrow, Friday, March 7. Just learned of it and hence this last minute notice. My wife and I are planning to be there. Hoping for a good turnout. Thank you, Sara!
Additional info: rally is at the Capitol.
Spot on, Sara. Thank you.
Well said
Well penned Sara. With the science infrastructure decimated, I hate to think of how long an effective response to the next pandemic will take. And that’s only one consequence.
Very well described. Thank You, Sara! I worry about the exponentially inevitable, unintended consequences of the reckless budget slashing. But I worry even more about the intended ones. The combination of chaos, lies, and brain-drain remove the safeguards necessary for reclaiming democracy (and disease control). This is the Putin and Hitler playbook.
Thank you Dr. Sara T for this critical examination of the assault on science. Thank you for shedding light on on the “dark” actions of those elected and appointed to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty…” Thank you for writing truth to power, for acting with integrity, and for analyzing the systems of power and privilege. It is interesting that the Luke 4:1-13 Lenten scripture this week speaks to the temptations of possession power, and privilege. Thank you for being secure enough in your relationship with our God to avoid the fear of keeping silent when so many on the margins are being disenfranchised.