Shownotes Transcript
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Last week, five former directors of the National Weather Service released a joint letter warning about the impact of major funding cuts.
They say we'll have less accurate weather reports and the storm warning system could break down. But it's not just meteorology that faces cuts. From NASA to the National Institutes of Health to the National Science Foundation, public research institutions have taken massive blows. We look at what the Trump administration is doing and how it could affect the future of science. It's all coming up next, right after this news.
Alexis Madrigal here. We've got a little pledge break going, so you get a little bonus on the pledge-free stream, podcast, or on our replay at night. I write these meditations on the bay, and we call this series One Good Thing.
Los Angeles has Hollywood and New York basically has the rest of the official media. But there is no alternative media tradition more interesting or powerful than the Bay Area's legacy of little magazines, radical publications, and photocopied zines. The diversity of our underground publishing world is on display right now at the San Francisco Public Library's main branch in an exhibit titled That's Rad.
And it is rad. Dozens and dozens of little publications, perhaps produced only by the few dozen or few hundred, are now displayed for you to marvel at.
Our tradition runs deep. As the exhibition says, the zine ethos was born out of publications written by poets from the San Francisco Renaissance, beat scene, and the black arts movement, in addition to artists, punks, and enthusiasts of all kinds. This is independent DIY media at its best, produced by marginalized groups and subcultures, not for an algorithm or a white or male or hetero gaze, but for the community itself.
One zine from 2001, More Than a Feeling, features an interview with Riot Grrrl hero Kathleen Hanna, and the cut lines on the cover feel like they captured something so deep it's always relevant. "Is the underground still radical? Do feminism and veganism go hand in hand? Is pop culture feminist?" Then there's Process World, an 80s temp worker zine that featured a knowing and anti-computing radicalism that's both hilarious and uncanny in our modern Bay Area.
Not everything is highbrow, though. Some of the zines feel no-brow, espousing a rousing gutter politics, drawing as much on Beavis and Butthead as any theory. Just the name of one alone, the turd-filled donut, gives the vibe. Another zine asks the eternal question, does punk suck?
The queer zines on the third floor are perhaps the most inspiring. They document the warren of Bay Area queer cultures, from the bookish lesbians of the latter to the queer tenderloin kids making Vanguard to the radical producers of Brad Attack, who promised Do It Yourself, S&M.
These publications are one reason why the Bay Area is what it is, a place where you can DIY a life, your life, the life you've always wanted to live in the body and identity you please and with the lovers of your choice. No other city has roots like this, and even in the most straight-laced bastions of the Bay, these radical scenes sent the air like trumpet flowers on a warm night. Our city's radical publishing tradition, that's your one good thing.
Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. I just want to note a couple things in this discussion here at the top, just some context for what's happening. For many decades, and I mean stretching back to World War II, the U.S. government has had a powerful impact on scientific research in this country and around the world. While current governmental R&D spending levels are nowhere near what they were back in the early 1960s,
The symbiosis between the U.S. government and scientific researchers has really remained a cornerstone of what this country is and does, and it's led to tremendous prosperity and national leadership in a wide variety of scientific fields.
For the first time, that may be at least in question. Here to talk with us about details of the budget cuts in this administration and what's at stake for everyone, regardless of party or ideology, we're joined by Joe Friday, former director of the National Weather Service. Welcome.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure being here. I hate the circumstances under which we find this conversation going on, but it is a serious issue. You raise a critical point. The National Weather Service, of course, has been around for a very long time.
But it depends on the research community, both in the academic environment as well as NOAA's own research capacity, to continue to make better improvements in our forecasting of weather and protecting life and property. You know, you wrote an open letter with the other living heads, the former heads of the National Weather Service, to really inform the public about what you think is going on. So what do you want the public to know specifically?
Well, first of all, National Weather Service, as I said, is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation all across the country that provides life-saving information.
In California, of course, we have major issues with the winter storms coming in from the Pacific Ocean. We have the fire activities that we've seen over the last few years that have been so terrifying. And the Weather Service provides information to try to help in all of those situations. The directors noted that when Doge, I guess his pronunciation, came in and started their work, the first thing they did was
was eliminate the probationary employees. Now, for those of you who are not aware of exactly what that means, in the federal government, you're on probation for two years after you accept a government position to make sure you're qualified. And at the end of those two years, you either become a permanent employee or you are removed. So that represents two years of input, of intelligent input,
intelligence into the organization. This is how we replace people that are retiring and moving on. But there's another type of probationary employee that's also in the federal government. If you compete and win a promotion, move to a higher level position, you're on probation there also to make sure that you can adequately handle that job.
So by eliminating those people, you're eliminating the best and brightest that you have. You eliminated those that were actually winning, if you would, against others in the organization. So this is the first thing that really the directors became very concerned about to see that happen. We saw a loss then.
When they offered the early outs to people, we saw quite a few people start to take advantage of that. Right now, the staffing levels in the National Weather Service is below 4,000 people. That's the lowest it has been, at least in the last 100 years.
The organization ordinarily sets with a staffing level of about 5,500 to adequately provide coverage across the entire nation. We've lost senior people that have taken advantage of the early out because of the uncertainty of what was going to happen in the future.
And as a result of that, we have 30 offices that no longer have a meteorologist in charge at those offices. And of course, we have a federal hiring freeze in place, so we can't replace them.
Equally as important, we've lost 80 electronic technicians in the National Weather Service. These are people who work on radars and other tools? Those are the people that maintain the radars, maintain the weather observing equipment and all. And they're hard to replace because, first of all, they can make a hell of a lot more money in the private sector than they can in the federal government. So what you're faced with now is...
An organization whose personnel structure looks almost like Swiss cheese. There's random holes all across the organization now. Now, I'm not at all, you know, I certainly understand that organizations can be improved. And I expect that every organization that we have, if it's looked at in detail, you can make improvements on it.
But you don't make improvements with a chainsaw or a hatchet. Yeah. You look at exactly what's going on. And what we have here is we have reductions that are just arbitrary and capricious and are seriously harming.
the capability of the National Weather Service. So, Joe, let me ask you this, Joe. Let me ask you this. So these personnel cuts are obviously difficult to deal with. Are the problems that result from that, though, going to be things that we encounter, say, in a few years? Or is there already a noticeable or quantifiable degradation in the kind of weather forecasting that the agency is able to provide now?
global degradation at present time. The computer models are already showing at least a 10% reduction as a result of the loss of weather balloons and the people, the staff that actually does the quality control on those models. So we launch 100 weather balloons
twice a day, so 200 weather balloons a day, to provide input into the computer models and also provide input into the forecasters for the type of weather activities that they may have in the local areas over the next 24 hours. Those weather balloons are absolutely, like I said, critical. It's the only way of getting the information of the temperature and the humidity and the wind feels in the atmosphere above the surface.
Satellites do a pretty good job from looking above. The surface observations do a good job for observing what's going on on the Earth's surface. But in between, the weather balloons fill in that information. We're now not able to launch weather balloons at about 20 or 30 locations. We are only able to launch one a day, and in some cases not at all because of staffing shortages.
And as I said, we're seeing already about a 10% reduction. I saw the statistics in the last 24 hours of the actual accuracy of the computer models that the National Weather Service runs. And it's not just the National Weather Service. The European Center model, which has always had a little advantage,
on us because of the bigger computers and the more extensive science that they actually use in the computer models there with those larger computers. It is also showing a reduction. Now, they don't have a staffing issue there, but they're losing the weather balloon information.
And so they're seeing a reduction there as well. And in the last month, we have seen a measurable reduction in the ability to forecast weather. Now that forecast is for winds and temperatures and moisture. And it's things that are going to affect firefighting. It's things that's going to affect aviation safety. There are things that are going to affect the routing of ships at sea. Yeah.
These are like mission critical things for our economy and safety. We're talking about the Trump administration's cuts to science and public research. We've started here with the National Weather Service with Joe Friday, former director of the National Weather Service. We also will be talking with Catherine Wu from The Atlantic and Jeff Brumfield from NPR when we get back from the break.
Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Experience the soaring highs and heartbreaking lows of bohemian life this summer in John Caird's beloved production of La Boheme. Puccini's most adored opera transports us into the heady bohemian world of 19th century Paris as we follow a circle of starving artists falling in and out of love, living for the moment. La Boheme runs June 3rd to 21st. Learn more at sfopera.com.
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Through June 23rd, new customers can get 400 megabit Xfinity Internet and get one unlimited mobile line included, all for $40 a month for one year. Visit Xfinity.com to learn more. With paperless billing and auto-pay with store bank account, restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Texas fees extra. After one year, rate increases to $110 a month. After two years, regular rates apply. Actual speeds vary.
Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about the Trump administration's cuts on science and to public research. People may want to know there is white smoke.
There in Italy, we don't know the identity of the new pope, but just so you know, that has happened. And back to science, we've got Joe Friday, former director of the National Weather Service. I want to add a couple of other voices here. Catherine Wu is a staff writer at the Atlantic Covering Science. Welcome.
Thanks so much for having me. We also have Jeff Brumfell, who's a senior editor and correspondent at NPR covering science and national security. Welcome, Jeff. Hi, Alexis. Nice to be here. So I want to start with a micro example from your reporting, Jeff, which is, you know, every weather and weather forecasts affect everybody, right? We all know about this. We'll talk about the weather.
But there's a lot of science that really only scientists know about. And that's part of an ecosystem of science that is crucial for the functioning of many different fields. So I want you to tell us about what you've learned about the cuts to the atomic spectroscopy group at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
Yeah, I mean, this is a perfect example, picking up on what Joe was talking about earlier here with this sort of idea that the National Weather Service has been shot through like Swiss cheese and
From where I sit in Washington, something very similar is happening across the federal government. And so one of the groups that sort of got targeted kind of feels almost at random was this very obscure group at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology called the Atomic Spectroscopy Group.
Now, what these folks were doing, there were, I think, about seven of them, as I recall, was that they were maintaining a catalog of atomic spectra. So, you know, every element has unique colors that it releases if light is shown on it.
And those colors are like a unique fingerprint. So this was kind of like the fingerprint database for all the different elements and such in and their various variations. So
This group's been maintaining that for over 100 years. Industry uses it every single day. Lots of scientists use it. Astronomers use it to identify compounds in distant galaxies. It's a very, very handy reference to have. And believe it or not, it's not something you could just write down and file away because it's
are improved on every day. There's new measurements and, and this group was there to, to choose, you know, what's the best measurement, what's the new standard for say iron, you know, or, or some, um, you know, uh,
isotope of iron. Anyway, long story short, they're on the chopping block. And if they go away, that absolutely will affect, you know, industry's ability to innovate. It'll affect the ability of researchers around the world to do science. This is one of those
public goods that is really quite valuable and actually doesn't cost the federal government very much. Right? It's seven people who run this system. Yeah. And they've been paying for their own coffee since the 70s. They keep a logbook of who's bought coffee that week for the group. So it's a pretty economical group. And I think this is an example of kind of
The sorts of things the government was doing that delivered real value that now it feels at times arbitrary that these things are just disappearing from the government. And as I understand it too, right, thousands of scientists have signed a letter supporting them or at least come out in support of this group, right? Because though they were small, they were mighty in terms of the kind of infrastructural impact that they had. That's right. That's right. After news of these cuts leaked, thousands of scientists, including Nobel laureates,
came out in support of preserving this group because they use the work they do every day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Katherine Wu, let's turn to something that people have probably heard more about. These are the cuts at the National Institutes of Health. And I just, you know, I follow this pretty closely. I follow individual scientists. I still am not totally sure what the scale and scope of these cuts actually is.
Yeah, it's a great question. And frankly, it's a difficult question to answer. The best way that I've been able to answer it myself is actually following trackers that independent scientists themselves have been putting together, just logging all of the terminated grants that have come out of the agency. And, you know, just for a sense of scale, like the agency awards tens of thousands of grants a year. And, you know, so far, just in the few months since the start of 2025, they've canceled
hundreds of those grants, whereas normally, you know, they might cancel maybe a couple dozen in an entire year and only under egregious circumstances. And this is like billions of dollars worth of scientific research touching areas from vaccine research, research into trans health, LGBTQ work, HIV trials, cancer, Alzheimer's. It is everywhere at this point.
You know, and this is interesting, like when obviously, as I heard you list off that set of topical areas that have had a lot of grants canceled, I think like, OK, I can match this up with some political concern of the Trump administration, but not all of them, you know. So what do you make of the nature of these cuts?
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. It is incredibly messy. I think some of this has been done with the political intention of being targeted, but certainly what I'm hearing from federal officials who are getting, I think, wrapped up in all of this mess is that a lot of the people who are pushing for these cancellations don't entirely know what they're doing. If you look at the termination letters, they're saying things like, oh, you know, we're sending out these terminations because
You know, your research no longer aligns with agency priorities and it's not a good use of taxpayer funds and it's not benefiting the health of the American people. But if you think about the topics I just listed, that just is patently untrue.
And there have been these sort of rounds of calls for research. Like ahead of these cancellations, they'll send emails to officials at the NIH and say, hey, tell me about all of your grants that have to do with topic X. Say it's vaccine hesitancy or something. And officials will send in these lists, and then someone higher up at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the department that oversees the NIH,
you know, we'll come back and say like, okay, cool, thanks for the info, but then cancel all of these grants. And those lists don't always overlap. It seems like there's this additional kind of
search function that's happening elsewhere in HHS that is including a bunch of grants that have only passing reference to some of these topics. And so you're getting cuts to research that actually isn't necessarily deemed by the administration to be problematic, but is getting swept up in this absolute chaos that is
putting lives at risk. We might call this the Enola Gay problem, when the plane that delivered one of the nuclear weapons and dropped on Japan has gay in the name, and it had its funding temporarily cut, right, because it was kind of swept up in what appears to be kind of a very messy or at least reckless kind of keyword search.
Totally. And I think this is affecting work at agencies elsewhere. You know, researchers are afraid to submit grant proposals that have even words like biodiversity in them because they're afraid that someone searching for the term diversity is going to ask their grant. It's a mess. But, you know, Alexis, if I could just jump in for a second here. I mean, I would say.
I would agree with everything Katherine just said. But I'd say there's multiple sort of motivations, I think, that are going on. And we have very little insight into what's actually happening sort of at the higher levels. But one thing this administration has been very clear on is that it wants to cut non-defense discretionary spending in the federal budget quite significantly.
And so I think, you know, it's not all accident. You know, the chaos may be part of the design, but they want to dramatically shrink the footprint of a lot of what the federal government does. And that certainly includes federally funded research. So I think it's sort of.
Just, you know, from what I've seen, it seems to me that it's not all just keyword searches and mistakes like there's there's a desire to dramatically shrink the government. And if if things get caught up in those keyword searches and they help with that goal, so be it, I think.
We're talking about the Trump administration's cut to science research in the U.S. with Jeff Brumfield, senior editor and correspondent at NPR covering science and national security. Catherine Wu, staff writer at The Atlantic covering science. And we're still joined by Joe Friday, former director of the National Weather Service. Of course, we want to hear from you. We know we have a lot of scientists who listen to the show and researchers. Have you or your work been impacted by the federal cuts? Do you rely on particular research like the atomic spacecraft?
spectroscopy work that we were hearing about earlier. What questions do you have about what's been cut? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments or questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram. We're KQED Forum.
One thing I did want to ask, but another perspective motivation and Joe, I'm going to come back to you on this. There has been a long time interest by some quarters in this in this country to privatize what the National Weather Service does right to to eliminate the agency and have that picked up by corporations for a variety of kind of ideological and maybe some practical seeming reasons.
Do you think this is part of that longtime push that has existed, but just maybe making a more effective strike at it? During the Reagan administration, there was a very strong push to privatize both the meteorological satellites and the National Weather Service.
I remember a cartoon, and I think it was the Chicago Tribune right after the discussion about privatizing the weather service, when someone was asking, "How much are we going to charge for a tornado warning?" That did not go over very well with the public, the idea of taking that to the private sector at that time. But it's one of the public good type of arguments that are made.
The privatization of the National Weather Service could work. There's absolutely no question about it. It's worked in a couple of other countries, and then they've abandoned it. But it's kind of like the Postal Service. If you're going to serve everybody in this country, you have to have an organization that can do that.
A private weather service can make a lot of money in San Francisco, but it can't make a lot of money out in the rural areas of Nebraska, in the areas that need weather information for agricultural support, that need weather information for forestry management and the like.
The Weather Service modernization that I was fortunate enough to undertake in the 80s was designed to provide good uniform service across the entire country. The Weather Service is a small organization for considering the fact that the United States has more severe weather than any other country in the world.
It's only, like I said, about 5,500 people nominally. It's now down to about 4,000.
Seems like a good, seems like it's punching above its weight. Catherine, let me ask you this on biomedical research. There are a bunch of private components already in our biomedical research system, right? I mean, we've got pharmaceutical companies kind of most prominently. Do you think that corporate and university research, or what does the evidence say about whether corporate or university research dollars could fill the holes left by government funding cuts to the NIH?
Yeah, I think if the cuts continue at this scale, the answer is absolutely not. You know, you mentioned at the top of the segment that we've had this
heavily federal government-funded model in place since basically World War II. And there's a reason that that model has grown and grown and grown and sort of turned the US into the juggernaut of research that it has become. There's no replacement at scale for government funding at this point. And I'm not sure that everyone would want that to be the model, you know, a mass privatization of American research.
that sometimes comes with strings attached, right? You know, for what sorts of research foundations are going to want to fund, what's going to happen to like really rare conditions, really rare diseases, really marginalized populations that
aren't, you know, attracting the sort of attention that others might be. And, you know, I think there's a lot of potential ethical and conflict of interest issues with that. And I think that's why a lot of people are completely panicking right now. Yeah. Is that what you're really sensing and picking up from people that you're talking to in your reporting?
I think so. I mean, several people that I've talked to have literally lost all of their federal grants and are now staring down, you know, closing their labs, firing all of their staff and leaving academic research entirely. They'll have to find a job elsewhere or maybe stop being scientists entirely. I mean, it's a really daunting prospect.
You know, Jeff Brumfell, are you hearing that from people in different realms that this is going to send early career scientists in particular, is kind of what I feel like I've been picking up just reading the leaves, that early career scientists are really going to either like leave the country or leave the field?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's still a bit early to tell, but I think that this certainly doesn't look good. You know, one of the first things to have gone and getting back to Catherine's point about, you know, keyword searches and all that, this may be part of that. But educational grants, you know, fellowships.
Early career funding at all levels is among the first things that's being slashed by the government here and some of the first grants being rescinded.
It does seem like a very daunting prospect for early career scientists or even people who haven't yet decided to become scientists, I think, to enter the field right now. So I do think that's a big problem. You know, in terms of people maybe looking to go overseas, there's certainly been a lot of talk about that. There's been several, you know, countries in Europe and the EU itself have been kind of making a bid to try to attract America's top talent. I think...
We'll see how much of that actually comes to pass. There's been shocks before to funding systems where people have made threats about this, but nothing on this scale. I think it's a little... Yeah, that was going to be my question. I mean, you've been covering science for my entire career and then maybe another half a career after that. Have you seen anything
that approaches this or do you have an analog of we could say well you know this one particular kind of science was cut really heavily and this is the impact that it had or is this kind of de novo I've got to be honest with you I've never seen anything like this um
You know, what traditionally would happen if you had a change of administration would be a shifting of priorities. So it would not be uncommon to see climate science scaled back, cut by a Republican administration and perhaps space, you know, fundamental research for planetary exploration beefed up a little bit. That's very common. You know, Congress's administrations can try and move the needle, shift priorities, but
But this sort of wholesale across the board slashing of science is really unprecedented in even my career, which you point out is longer than I might want to admit. Yeah.
We're talking about the Trump administration's cuts to science and public research here in the U.S.
in particular covers health and biomedical stuff as well. And we have Joe Friday, one of the former directors of the National Weather Service, who wrote a public letter about cuts by the Trump administration to the National Weather Service. We're going to get to a bunch more of calls and comments in the next segment of the show. Maybe you're a scientist. Maybe you rely on particular research. You can give us a
call about that. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, or the Discord, of course. We are kqedforum.com.
A couple of questions here, a couple of comments here. Cindy on Instagram just wants to note that the Bodega Marine Lab might lose funding at the end of June. Years of research, vital data, careers, and climate change are all at risk. These are dedicated scientists that make our world a better place. What will happen to all the animals that are being studied?
Chris writes, "It seems like the tech bros think that they can solve these problems with the private sector. The real issue is the legality of these actions. I'm frustrated with Congress for mutely watching our demise." We'll be back with more of your calls and comments right after the break. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Experience the soaring highs and heartbreaking lows of bohemian life this summer in John Caird's beloved production of La Boheme. Puccini's most adored opera transports us into the heady bohemian world of 19th century Paris as we follow a circle of starving artists falling in and out of love, living for the moment. La Boheme runs June 3rd to 21st. Learn more at sfopera.com.
Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! Xfinity!
Through June 23rd, new customers can get 400 megabit Xfinity Internet and get one unlimited mobile line included, all for $40 a month for one year. Visit Xfinity.com to learn more. With paperless billing and auto-pay with store bank account, restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Taxes fees extra. After one year, rate increases to $110 a month. After two years, regular rates apply. Actual speeds vary. Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about the Trump administration's cuts to scientific research in the U.S. We've got Joe Friday, former director of the National Weather Service, Atlantic's Catherine Wu, and NPR's Jeff Brumfield.
Joe, I want to ask you about an uncomfortable question, I think, in the scientific realm. You know, over the last couple of decades, scientists themselves have kind of fallen out of step with trends in the Republican Party. And you can look at physical health, life sciences. You know, we saw a recent study that said less than 5% of political donations by scientists went to Republicans. Should the political affiliation of geologists or biologists matter to the scientific funding they receive?
Well, I've personally been a conservative all my life. I disagree violently with what's going on now with this administration. Weather doesn't know whether it's operating over a red state or a blue state.
Likewise, the geology doesn't really care if it's being examined by a Republican or a Democrat. I think the sciences are one of the things that should stay totally, completely apolitical. My first boss was very liberal. We worked fine together running the weather service for eight years while he was director.
and I was deputy director. And the head of the National Weather Service is a career civil servant, not a political appointee, as it should be. It should be in all of the scientific organizations. So to answer your question, it doesn't make any sense to politicize fundamental science. That just simply doesn't make any sense. Yeah.
Let's bring in a scientist here, Catherine in Mountain View. Welcome. Hey, good morning. Yeah, so as a federal scientist, I have deep knowledge of the funding that goes on. And within the USGS, which is where I work- That's the geological survey. Yes, sorry.
that federal funding to the National Science Foundation actually affects quite a bit of the data that we collect. For example, the Earthquake Science Center sends all of their seismic data from the Northern California Seismic Network and all other networks throughout the country to an entity called Earthscope. And earlier this year,
Earthscope was at risk of losing all their funding and shutting down. And it's happening again. And if that happens, then the data that we collect from seismometers, where does it go, right? Because it's not being managed. And how do we analyze those data for earthquakes that happen, just as your previous caller, that happen anywhere? I mean, there was an earthquake in Virginia yesterday or earlier this week. So...
Not only does NSF affect universities, they also affect the federal scientists as well. So it's unfortunate and tragic because it doesn't need to happen. Yeah. Catherine, really appreciate that call. And you can hear some of the frustration there as well.
You know, Jeff, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is there does seem to be a lot of these kind of infrastructural pieces that are having these kinds of problems, Earthscope being one of them, the spectroscopy folks we talked about earlier at NIST. Seems like the kind of thing that if you were making kind of big cuts, you might not realize that you were cutting those pieces, crucial links.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to thank Catherine, the caller, for bringing this up. I mean, that's absolutely right. There is...
so much the US government does behind the scenes to maintain a network of reliable data. And in fact, my colleague Becky Herscher on our climate desk just had a story out a few days ago talking about this. And basically, a poll by the Association of Science and Technology Centers found that more than 90% of people use
federal scientific data, whether that's weather forecasts, food safety warnings, other stuff. But only 10% of respondents are concerned that cuts to federal support might impact their access to such information. So I think this goes to something Joe Friday was talking about at the very beginning, you know, that, for example, the National Weather Service is launching fewer balloons.
And, uh, that's affecting weather forecasts across the country. We are having a situation where things like Earthscope are at risk, uh,
You know, groups that maintain databases for industry are disappearing. Weather balloons are not launching. And all this isn't really visible to the public because this federal work is done quietly and reliably. And it has been for decades. You know, Catherine, I wanted to ask you about one that specifically kind of came across my radar, which were cuts to the Women's Health Initiative.
which had sort of cuts happen and then funding restored. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that particular study and the kind of data it was generating. So, you know, to be totally honest, I haven't followed that quite as closely as some of the other cuts. So I'm- Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. Well, if you've got, have you got other within say biomedical research or some of these other things, are there areas where you have seen this kind of effort to, you know, pull together data or to, you know, to kind of play that infrastructural layer kind of get, get into trouble? Yeah, well,
I'm sorry, ask your question again. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, I just kind of, it seems like one of the things that's getting cut are the ability of different organizations to kind of work with data from other places is all, you know, places that are stewarding data or kind of keeping track of things long term, things like that. Right, you know, and I think if you look at just what happened in January when, you know, a bunch of data disappeared from the CDC website, I think that's been a lot of researches.
a panic, you know, thinking, are we not going to have access to a lot of data that's been, like, collected nationwide over the course of decades? You lose these longitudinal data sets, and that's really terrifying. You know, even data that's not collected at the federal level, you know, there are these incredibly long-term studies that, you know, they lose their funding. They can't go on. And if you have, for instance, collected decades of research following people with diabetes and trying to figure out, you know, what happens with these
people as they enter old age and you have to terminate that study, you can't just start that again from scratch. There's like a hole in the, you broke the continuity. Yeah.
Exactly. And I think that's an enormous issue here. So it's not even necessarily just an issue of accessing data, but just having the integrity of datasets that have taken decades of work to put together. You know, you lose the continuity, you lose insight that you have just, it's like, you know, you've been digging a hole for
decades and you are very close to the surface, you close off that entire digging and you do have to start over. You can't just go back to where you were digging last.
And there really are so many examples of this. Jeff, I don't know if you saw any of the stuff around Arctic data and Arctic science facing these kinds of cuts, but they're just, I mean, it's almost hard to keep track of them all because they're, as it turns out, the U.S. government has been funding many, many, many types of data collection and science so that we sort of understand our world better.
Yeah, yeah, and I mean I will say I think that these sorts of very long-term longitudinal studies can probably survive, you know if they miss some short period but if these are cuts are real and they're permanent We're gonna be left in the dark on a lot of different, you know, yeah topics Let's bring in Mary in Menlo Park. Welcome Mary. Oh
Hi, thanks for taking my call. I was listening to your conversation about early career scientists and thought I'd call in as the mom of an early career scientist and say how distressing it is to watch people launch their, you know, to start their professional lives and then to be living and working in this environment.
The National Parks is where my child works, and as folks probably know, next week they're facing a RIF, a reduction in forest, that is, from what we understand, going to be targeted at the folks who do the science behind the scenes in the parks to keep the parks healthy and to understand the ecosystems there. So, yeah.
The latest news is 1,500 people are facing a rift, and they're all coming from the behind-the-scenes scientist ranks, is what we understand through rumors. So very upsetting. We'll see what happens next week. Mary, really, really appreciate your bringing attention to that. Let's go to another one of these. Mariam in Kentfield, welcome.
Hi, thank you so much. I wanted to support what the reporter from The Atlantic was just saying about and what you were asking about cuts that are to infrastructure pieces where you break that chain of data and it has impact on millions of people. So the traumatic brain injury, this is near and dear to my heart, the traumatic brain injury model system is slated to be completed.
And one of the things that the Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems does is it has a database that's been being created since 1987 to improve care and recovery for people who have traumatic brain injuries like my son. My son was hit by a car when he was riding his bike when he was 16, and he suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. He's now 18, and he's working harder than anyone could ever imagine.
ever imagine to regain his life and to regain independence and to become a functioning, productive member of society. And the model systems database is tracking longitudinally over 20,000 individuals who have traumatic brain injuries to look at what treatments work, what treatments don't work, what areas should we be researching. And brain injury is so
complex. But this kind of database, especially now when we're on the cusp of having artificial intelligence be able to look for patterns, it's just crucial. There's over 5 million people in the United States living with traumatic brain injury. So this type of thing should be completely apolitical. There's nothing political about it.
I really, for the life of me, cannot understand the reason why scientific programs like this that are not ideological in any way would
would be cut. It makes no sense at all. And the TBI model system is like impeccable science for an incredibly complex care. So anyway, I just wanted to say that. - Mariam, yeah, no, I mean, what a great call to bring home what's really at stake for some of these cuts. What might look like a line in a spreadsheet is actually people's lives and the possibility of them living a better and fuller life over time.
We're talking about the Trump administration's cuts to science and public research in the U.S. with Catherine Wu, staff writer at The Atlantic, Jeff Brumfield, senior editor and correspondent at NPR covering science and national security. And we're also joined by Joe Friday, one of the former directors of the National Weather Service, who penned an open letter to the public so that people could understand what cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are doing nationally.
To our ability to forecast the weather. This is forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal You know, I do want to get back into this question of motivation and Maybe long-term motivation Jeff like how do you see this like? at least in my mind
this type of scientific research had been part of kind of the US soft power around the world. Like we were a place that pulled in scientists from all over the world, in part because our government through the NIH or through the National Science Foundation was funding this kind of research. As someone who also covers national security, like how are people in that world kind of seeing these cuts?
Actually, Alexis, if it's all right, I want to respond to something that that our last caller Miriam just brought up and Joe as well, which is this whole idea of how why science has become political.
I think that there is something going on here and it's something that's sort of been unfolding over the course of my career and it has accelerated. And that is that science, the world is sort of at a point where science is no longer this sort of abstract thing that's taught in a classroom. And what I'm talking about is climate change and then the COVID pandemic. And I think that these two events are
have forced science into the political realm because they have shaped policy in such profound ways that they can't help but be political. And if you look at the budget that Trump has released, his proposed budget, which has very, very deep cuts for science,
you will see that there is a lot of anger about the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is a lot of frustration about the perceived sort of
severity of climate change. Obviously, the Trump administration does not believe that climate change should be a priority for our government. So I think that, you know, part of the reason we've ended up where we have is over time, you know, science has become more and more directly relevant to the policies that shape everyone's life every day. And unfortunately, that's made it political. Yeah. What do you think, Catherine?
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe a way to kind of bridge that very good point back to motivation and what we were talking about here is I think, you know, that really does create this immense target for motivation.
certain officials in the Trump administration to really want to hit. You know, I think if we're talking about an ascension of power here and wanting to sort of redistribute power throughout the federal government, they may see the institution of science as a threat at this point. You know, they may have certain notions about how aligned that is with certain political ideologies. And while science would
be apolitical. It's not at this point. And, you know, disenfranchising institutions that are able to prop up science and turn it into this incredibly powerful juggernaut that can influence behavior and, you know, spending in this country, I think that, you know, that creates this target. They want to dismantle that. They don't want to see science retain the power that it has and the influence that it has. And I think it, you know, becomes this larger, uh,
that they see as what propelled thinking around COVID to the surface for so many years, for instance. Yeah. You know,
Adele on our Discord writes, President Trump's end goals are close to mine for the country, but the steps his administration is taking as the means to those ends are causing the United States to lose its lead and sacrifice its edge. This is not America first. I had one question for you, Jeff, and maybe we could try and do it quickly. Were these cuts to science telegraphed in things like Project 2025? Or do you feel like this came after the election that a lot of these things really came to the fore?
So this is really fascinating. And actually, I've been looking at recently sort of what these cuts to science might mean economically. And if we have time, we could talk about that. But I will say the short version is that no, interestingly enough, Project 2025 does not focus sort of explicitly on cutting scientific funding. In fact, the NSF
National Science Foundation isn't mentioned once, as far as I can tell. Where NSF does come up and where big cuts are shown is in a proposed shadow budget that the current head of the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which sets the president's budget, Russell Vogt,
He put out a shadow budget in, I think it was 2023, which had deep cuts to these scientific agencies. So I think, you know, and several of my sources have told me that they believe, you know, Russ Vogt and the White House OMB are really driving this. I don't think it's, you know, conservatives are unified on the idea of cutting science by any means, as your listener just pointed out. Yeah.
We have been talking about the Trump administration cuts to scientific research in the United States. We've been joined by Jeff Brumfield, senior editor and correspondent at NPR covering science and national security. Thanks for joining us, Jeff. Thank you. We've been joined by Joe Friday, former director of the National Weather Service. Thank you so much, Joe. Delighted. Thank you. And we've been joined by Catherine Wu, a staff writer at The Atlantic covering science. Thank you so much, Catherine.
Thank you so much for having me. Always good to talk with you. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.
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