Trump's War on Scientific Research
32:58 Share

Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Want to travel like a savvy jet setter?

No, that doesn't mean a monogrammed passport case. It means making smart decisions every step of your trip, which means knowing your options. Smart travel unpacks the facts, like which booking sites actually save money, how to fly first class using points, and if that fancy travel card is a smart investment. All so you can save more on your next adventure. Stay tuned at the end of the episode to hear the smart travel trailer.

And be sure to follow Smart Travel from NerdWallet so you can start traveling like a pro. Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Want to travel like a savvy jet setter?

No, that doesn't mean a monogrammed passport case. It means making smart decisions every step of your trip, which means knowing your options. Smart Travel unpacks the facts, like which booking sites actually save money, how to fly first class using points, and if that fancy travel card is a smart investment. All so you can save more on your next adventure. Stay tuned at the end of the episode to hear the Smart Travel trailer. ♪

And be sure to follow Smart Travel from NerdWallet so you can start traveling like a pro. Two weeks ago, Professor Jace Flatt got a letter from the National Institutes of Health about his federal grant money. It said, this award no longer effectuates agency priorities. Jace Flatt is one of many researchers who had a grant terminated by the NIH agency.

That's Catherine Wu, who writes about science for The Atlantic. She spoke to Flatt. He's an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies aging and dementia in LGBTQ people. And actually, in his case, it was multiple grants. The last I heard from him, it was two grants. And it is possible that

By the time this airs, it will be three grants. He relies on those grants to hire staff to do research. Much of his research focuses on aging and how to ensure that populations are aging in a healthy way and how those populations are dealing with memory loss and dementia.

But having those grants terminated has effectively meant that he's had to halt studies. He's had to fire staff. And if this strain keeps going, he will not have a lab in a matter of potentially weeks or months. Flatt also lost a grant from the Defense Department. He's one of many researchers who's had the federal funding for his work essentially vaporized. I don't know how many people realize that grants that come from the federal government are for many scientists, they're prepaid.

primary source of salary, not just for, you know, maybe themselves, but for all the people that they hire and train and to do all of their work. You also spoke with a bunch of other people who get NIH grants. Sarah Nowak, a vaccine researcher at the University of Vermont. Tell me about her work and what happened to her.

Yeah, so she is one of many people who was hit by the round of grant terminations that focused on vaccine hesitancy and uptake for whatever reason. Those terms were flagged as problematic by the administration. The NIH informed her that her work on childhood hesitancy in Brazil would no longer be funded effective immediately. I want to be really clear here. This is not normal.

normal. If you were to receive a grant termination in what I'll call the before times, it was usually for a very, very, very specific reason, like something was going quite wrong with your work. And so generally, you would be in contact with the agency, you know, in this case, the NIH, and they'd say, hey, something's up. You know, it seems like your project is not going well, or we're worried about the participants in the study. Like,

what's up? Let's give you a chance to fix this. There might be an appeal, a lot of conversations. None of that is happening now. These researchers were given no warning whatsoever. They were basically told, we don't like the premise of your work anymore, and so we're not going to pay for it. That means firing staff, maybe telling clinical trial patients you can't help them anymore, letting grad students know there is no place for them to study.

And there is basically no opportunity to appeal here. There's no opportunity to rectify the situation. Ideologically, you don't match up with us anymore. And so it's game over. Today on the show, how the NIH grant terminations are an assault on science, medicine, and America's future. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

Adelassian.com.

Hey, Ira Flato here from Science Friday. Each episode, we give you surprising facts. There's a whole phenomenon of moths visiting eyes of mammals. Expert insights. It doesn't take a lot of brain to run a lion, actually. And we tackle the big questions. How is this going to affect the future? From space to climate to tech to medicine, get a new view on the world around you. That's Science Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

I think a lot of Americans have some vague sense of NIH, but they might not understand what it does. What do you think is the simplest and best way to describe what the NIH exists to do?

Yeah, it's a great question because I totally agree with you. But the NIH, I would say, is the primary engine behind biomedical research in the world. It is the world's single largest public funder of biomedical research. And what that means is

Every year, they get a roughly $47 billion budget. Most of that goes to research outside the agency. And that money has fueled drug discovery, heart medication, vaccine research, outbreak containment and mitigation. All of these things that we consider crucial to public health and making sure that people in this country and around the world stay healthy, all that requires research.

research, clinical trials. There's this amazing stat that something like 99% of the drugs that were FDA approved in the past decade or so had some sort of NIH funding behind them. You talked a little bit about the grant cancellation process, but when a presidential administration changes hands, is it common at all for grants at NIH to come under review or possibly be canceled?

So when power changes hands, I'd say it's typical for priorities to shift, right? Because there is going to be generally a new director. That's a political appointee. There is generally going to be, you know, a pet project that gets a little bit more attention than usual. But it's extremely unusual for the agency to reach backward in time and say, hey, this science that we thought was awesome and worthy of funding just a couple of years ago is

no longer worth our time. And you could imagine that if that were the norm, there would be these constant fits and starts. Like every four years, we're going to pull back funding we already gave out. We're going to give up on this stuff. We're going to tell these researchers, never mind. We were totally kidding when you said that was awesome work just a couple of years ago. Nothing would

ever get done. And so it makes sense that the system doesn't normally work this way. What's happening now is totally unprecedented, like ever, ever, ever, ever in the NIH's entire history. Is it even possible to know how many grants have been canceled since President Trump took office? Because this seems to be happening in waves and it's sort of hard to get a running tally.

It's a great question. No one I've spoken to has a definitive count at this point, but I'm pretty sure we're talking in the hundreds now if we include all the terminations that have happened at Columbia University where there was just a massive gutting. But there are lists that are sort of being cobbled together online by researchers. And there is technically an HHS website that is compiling some of the lists of terminated grants, but it's at least a week or two behind.

I want to talk a little bit about what's going on inside the agency. When you talk to staff who are still there, how do they describe the feeling at the NIH now? It's brutal. I have heard a lot of tears. I have heard a lot of people saying that they never thought they would be complicit in the sort of harm that is being done right now to the American public. I mean, people have resigned over what has happened at the NIH. And

I think I'm hearing now that this agency, which is primarily a funding agency, like their job is to get money out to research happening in the world, is now in a way spending more time terminating grants than it is awarding them. And it's like upside down NIH, you know, it makes absolutely no sense. With a change in administration comes a change in who runs the NIH, right?

Right now, the administration's pick, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is waiting for Senate confirmation. In the interim, the deputy director usually takes over. Many people expected Lawrence Tabak, a longtime deputy at the NIH, to fill the position temporarily, as he had in previous handovers. But instead, Matt Mammaly was appointed, and he was a flu researcher within the agency who was running a lab doing his own research there.

Very, very, very confusing. It's kind of like, you know, finding someone from an obscure little tech department at a giant Silicon Valley company to come and be CEO after like absolutely no training or precedence whatsoever. He didn't have, you know, the typical experience overseeing grants. He didn't have experience running a giant agency. It was very atypical.

And the understanding that people have told me is that they think he just had...

ideological views that aligned with the current administration. People had talked about the fact that he had sort of publicly sparred with Tony Fauci over COVID vaccines during the pandemic. They had talked about the fact that, you know, he had been complimented by Jay Bhattacharya, who was the current pick to lead NIH Next. And there was also a diversity statement that came from him that was floating around the agency, showing that he had at one point called the

the term DEI offensive and demeaning. You wrote one story that really stood out to me in late February. You talked about Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director, who at one point had said to colleagues, look, civil servants, your job is not to figure out policy, but to implement them. That is your duty as long as you're not doing something illegal or immoral.

And in your reporting, the staff were kind of walking around asking themselves, like, are we there yet? Are we at illegal or immoral? That was late February. How about now? I think that sentiment has only gotten stronger. And I think people have more or less officially resigned because they think they have

very much crossed over that line and they are done. Especially with all of these grant terminations, I think a lot of them are feeling like they're being asked to endanger the health of the American people. I mean, you think about the potential implications of these grant cancellations. You're potentially cutting people out of clinical trials that might have stood to improve their health, that maybe in some cases could have been their best chance at living a longer, healthier life.

If you are, say, the grants management officer being forced to sign a termination like that, I mean, I'm hearing of people sobbing at their desks. I'm hearing of people being yelled at because they're reluctant to sign these terminations and yet being forced to do them anyway. I can't imagine working in an environment like that. I mean, people are saying it's toxic there. People are afraid to look each other in the eye in the hallways because they're not sure who they can talk to. They're not sure who they can confide in and say, I don't feel right about this because...

They don't know who is talking to someone else who might get them fired. When we come back, will a generation of scientists simply leave America? Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick, host of Slate's legal podcast, Amicus.

On our latest episode, Kate Shaw says Elon Musk, Doge, and the Trump administration are trying, as a legal matter, to have it both ways. I like to call it Schrodinger's Doge. They are relishing saying one thing in the courts of law and another thing in the court of public opinion and essentially daring the legal system to call them on it. How do judges and the legal system handle conflicting statements by a president in and outside of the courtroom?

Listen to new episodes of Amicus with me, Dahlia Lithwick, every week. Search A-M-I-C-U-S wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex, and Money, the show from Slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. And recently on our show, we talked to listeners about masculinity, what it means to be a man in our modern world, what's expected of you, or what assumptions you feel are made about you. I wish that people would not be so afraid of me. I wish that people wouldn't hate me. I hate them for hating me.

And then I catch myself, you know, a blink of an eye later and recognize that I'm being stupid. But I do feel it.

We heard from lots of men for this episode who came at this topic in lots of different ways. And we keep hearing from men and people who love men about all the mixed messaging about manhood and masculinity in our culture. Your stories and questions are central to how we make our show, so keep them coming. Listen to this episode and more Death, Sex & Money episodes wherever you get podcasts.

Hi, I'm Courtney Martin from Slate's advice podcast, How To. Online scams seem like they're everywhere these days, and our elders are particularly vulnerable. A few months ago, my parents were the victims of a scam, and thankfully at that time, they did not lose any money, but were really scared about what could happen in the future. That's our listener, May. Check out her conversation with a fraud prevention expert on our new episode. It's physical.

filled with tips and resources that could help you and your loved ones steer clear of online scams. Listen to How To wherever you get your podcasts. We talked about how a grant might normally in the before times be terminated. Do we have any insight into who is making these termination decisions now and how they're being made?

So the general understanding is that this is all happening under intense pressure from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH. So HHS has kind of pushed through several policy changes at NIH at this point, including a memo that some people may remember that would have capped basically overhead costs at universities, which has come under severe legal challenge recently.

But the basic idea here is that this is not an internally made, internally consistent decision. It's not like folks at NIH are getting together around a roundtable and debating the scientific merits of each of these projects and saying, hey, these are no longer in compliance with how business is done here normally. This is a push from the outside. And certainly the rationale being given for these terminations, everything about pushback.

political ideology, new agency priorities, you know, what the administration considers biological reality or not. And I'm using a lot of heavy air quotes and learned a lot of these phrases. That certainly indicates that it is far more political than it is scientific, which is not typical NIH day-to-day stuff.

I looked at one of the projects that you referenced in your story, and it's a canceled grant that was about how to get a potential future HIV vaccine into different communities. And when I look at the keywords on this listing, they include things like homophobia and institutional racism and racism

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like somebody did a control F for certain terms that fit under some broad ideological bucket and decided this is how we're going to do it. It does seem that way. You know, one of the things that people are talking about is that even though there have been NIH officials tasked with putting together lists of projects that are

would sort of trip these kinds of sensors and involve the concepts that the administration is not happy with. There's an additional search going on at maybe the HHS level, and grants are sort of being added to these lists, not always appropriately. Like if you, for instance, are looking for grants that relate to vaccine hesitancy and uptake, okay, arguably you are going to hit some studies that look at, for instance,

childhood vaccine uptake in Brazil. But if you don't do that search very carefully, you might also hit some mathematical models that factor in vaccine uptake as a factor that is going to affect how quickly an infectious disease spreads through a given community, right? Oh, wow. But if you're not super careful, you might terminate

some grants that make passing mention of these concepts but aren't entirely focused on them. And so there's going to be huge collateral damage, including to the targets that you originally went for. I mean, I think of the word bias, for example, which comes up when you talk about implicit bias, but it's also a key term when you're just doing statistics. That's right. And I heard some researchers so nervous about the sort of

Sloppiness with which these searches are being done, that they're terrified to even use words like transition in their grant proposals at this point, because anyone who just quickly searches trans might accidentally hit their grant proposal. Oh, my God. Same thing with biodiversity. Because it has the word diversity in it? That's right. There's some reporting from Kaiser Health News that says some scientists were told by NIH officials to scrub mRNA references on grants. Wow.

That is the technology that brought us COVID vaccines. It is. And there's also a big concern right now that mRNA vaccines are going to be one of the next topics targeted in the next round of grant terminations.

That would be a huge, huge, huge impact. That could be maybe hundreds of grants hit. I mean, this is huge technology, right? Like this made such an impact during the worst of COVID. And because mRNA technology is so fast, it could be huge for many other types of vaccines. So lots of people have been looking into this in the past few years. That would hit a lot of researchers. And I think it would really significantly hamper vaccine research in general, because I think there'd be this big cooling effect, right?

on anyone trying to debut a new vaccine technology using any sort of molecule. There have been court orders saying that funding for grants needs to resume at the agency, but your reporting is showing that HHS officials have essentially told employees not to comply with the courts.

What is happening inside the agency? What are employees doing? I think people are doing their best to resume business as normal, but there are all these sort of logistical blocks being put into place. They've certainly been told to defy court orders. They've also come up against roadblocks like not being able to post notices about meetings that have to happen for grant proposals to be reviewed and for money to actually be awarded. So

It's basically impossible to do their normal business at this point. Some of those things have since been reversed. It's all been very much in flux. But I think the balance has shifted in the past couple of months to be doing a lot less grant making than they would like and a lot more grant terminating than they could have ever imagined. You know,

When we have conversations about government funding, inevitably people say, well, why can't private money make up for this? Is there any kind of private funding that could fill this hole?

At scale, I'd say no. I mean, public government funding is a huge, huge, huge source of support for science in this country and others. And, you know, for good reason. That is kind of by design, and it's been mostly by design since about the time of World War II. It's

It's a really powerful system. And you can imagine that if we attempted to replace it, there would be a ton of issues. I mean, one, there is not enough private funding to fill that hole. But two, even if there was, there would be a lot of strings attached to that private funding. I mean, considering who would likely be the backers behind that private funding, individual companies would have their own interests. They might be wanting to make a specific project.

The way the funding stream works is that the money often goes to universities. We have seen Columbia lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Johns Hopkins, another university, Stanford,

slated to lose its NIH money. These are some of the top medical research universities in the country. What does the loss of this funding mean for medical research? I think it's huge. And I can think of that on multiple fronts. I mean, for one, just having any studies halted means a lost opportunity to gain new knowledge. It also means participants in some of those studies, if there were human participants, you know,

could be losing out on an opportunity to improve their health. Some of them might be in danger by having a trial very abruptly halted. The researchers running those trials may have their careers imperiled. And I think longer term, it means that, you know, recruiting populations to studies like this in the future may be more difficult because now that trust has been violated, a lot of these people have been told, hey, come join this trial. We're going to interact with you, take care of you, maybe for years, maybe for decades.

decades in some of these cases. And then all of a sudden it's, you know, Tuesday morning or whatever. And I'm

oh, sorry, I have to call you and tell you that all that was for nothing. I'm so sorry. It's out of my hands. Nobody's going to want to come back to an opportunity like that. That's really difficult. And some of these studies involve vulnerable populations by definition. You know, if those are the studies that are being gone after by the federal government, those are going to be some of the very studies that are going to be most difficult to restart or reimagine in the future. So let's say that

A whole lot of appeals courts say, nope, money's got to go back, study restarts, get back to what you were doing. Can these just be restarted? Not really. I think there are a lot of things...

that have happened that have already left some permanent damage. For instance, if you decide we just can't take grad students next year, that's it for next year. Even if you take grad students the year after that, there's not going to be a grad cohort for 2025 to 2026. If you halt a study and tell participants we have had to close this and we are taking you out of the study, we're filling out the end

end-of-the-line paperwork, you don't just restart that. For other studies, even if it's not that simple, if you don't have the funds to collect, say, data the month of March 2025, even if you have April 2025 and you're able to get something in May 2025, there's going to be a hole in your data set. Like, what if something big happened in that timeframe and you no longer have

The ability to say we collected data every month for 20 years, like some studies truly do rely on that level of granularity. And it can in some cases truly mean that a decades long study is kind of ruined.

Full disclosure, and this is a bit personal, but I am in a trial, a clinical trial supported by the National Cancer Institute that compares outcomes for different kinds of lung cancer treatment. And I'm fine. But before coming in to talk to you, I looked at my study's keywords to see if they fit

in any of those, you know, sort of control F terms. I did see a women's health section. As far as I know from the researchers running my trial, it's still ongoing. But I have to say, as a patient and even as the most privileged kind of patient, it's really disorienting. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people share that sentiment right now. You know,

researchers and study participants alike, they feel like the rug can be pulled out from under them at any second. And I can't imagine what it's like to be living like that, like to have to go to work or to your next appointment and wonder, is this going to be the last day that I'm able to contribute to this? Is this going to be the last day that we actually get to advance knowledge on this subject or maybe help someone and potentially save their life?

That's a really difficult environment to be working in. That's a really difficult environment to be just surviving in. And I think

The ultimate effect here is not only are we risking watching the general health of Americans decline over the next months, years and decades, but scientists who have contributed immensely to biomedical knowledge in this country, they're going to leave. This is no longer going to be a place that people go to do research to improve their health outcomes. America may decline in that respect, and that's a terrifying prospect as well.

There's something that really stuck with me in your reporting on this. You said that the Trump administration is trying to forcibly reshape American science to match its agenda. And that's so fascinating in a couple of different ways, but fundamentally it doesn't align with the scientific process. It doesn't align with the way scientific inquiry tends to proceed.

I wonder if you've thought about what science reshaped by that agenda might look like. It's almost dystopian to imagine, right? Because you're exactly right. That's not how the best forms of scientific inquiry work.

You know, science done well has minimal bias. People love this idea of objective data and just this idea that you do need to confront what is actually happening in the world. The data you gather may not always be exactly what you want to see, but you need to acknowledge what communities exist, what disparities exist, who is going to have a more difficult time accessing care.

what is going to be more impacted by an environmental harm. All of these realities are

just part and parcel of what it means to better understand the world as a whole. You start narrowing your lens and you're going to get a skewed portrait of the world. And I think what's even more concerning is the things that you ignore, they're not just going to stay ignored. They may worsen in the absence of attention. Infectious disease is especially prone to doing that. You ignore an outbreak and it is just going to get bigger.

And I fear that that is what is going to happen on really broad scales as these lenses keep getting narrower and narrower. Katherine Wu, thank you for your reporting and for talking with me about it. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Katherine J. Wu is a staff writer at The Atlantic. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Ford. Our show was edited by Rob Gunther. Slate is led by Hilary Frye.

And TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the best way to support us is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, including this one, as well as access to The Discourse, our bonus series. Plus some other nice bonuses too, like you'll never hit a paywall on the Slate site.

And if you are looking for more Slate podcasts to binge, go check out yesterday's What Next, which is all about how the Trump administration is radically changing the economy. All right. We'll be back on Sunday with an episode about Jeff Bezos 2.0 in Trump 2.0. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.

Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. I'm Sally French. And I'm Megan Coyle. We're travel writers at NerdWallet, and we love helping you make your travel budget work smarter. Because who doesn't love more trips for less money? People who hate fun, Megan. That's who. But that's definitely not you, person who is listening to this right now. On Smart Travel, we don't just hand out travel advice. We break it down. Like, should you get that fancy airline credit card with the huge sign-up bonus? Or is that just

a shiny trap leading you to financial ruin? We have the answers.

The answer is it depends, by the way. That's why we do the research for you. We crunch the numbers, dissect the fine print, and make sense of loyalty programs so you don't accidentally spend all your hard-earned points on a sad airport hotel booked amidst a canceled flight. Each week, we tackle real travel questions like, is travel insurance worth it? How do you spot a good flight deal before it's gone? And can you actually use those random miles your aunt gave you for Christmas? Also, I want that aunt. Yeah.

Look, we don't just sit here and talk about travel. We live it. I once turned a canceled flight into a free trip to Denver, $200 in United vouchers and $45 in Starbucks gift cards. And you were so patient through it all. We've got practical tips, expert interviews, and plenty of hot takes. I call them hot takeoffs. To help you travel smarter, not harder.

So whether you're planning your next getaway or just love staying ahead of the travel game, follow Smart Travel on your favorite podcast app. Your passport will thank you and so will your wallet. Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. I'm Sally French. And I'm Megan Coyle. We're travel writers at NerdWallet and we love helping you make your travel budget work smarter.

Because who doesn't love more trips for less money? People who hate fun, Megan. That's who. But that's definitely not you, person who is listening to this right now. On Smart Travel, we don't just hand out travel advice. We break it down. Like, should you get that fancy airline credit card with the huge sign-up bonus? Or is that just a shiny trap leading you to financial ruin? We have the answers.

The answer is, it depends, by the way. That's why we do the research for you. We crunch the numbers, dissect the fine print, and make sense of loyalty programs so you don't accidentally spend all your hard-earned points on a sad airport hotel booked amidst a canceled flight. Each week, we tackle real travel questions like, is travel insurance worth it? How do you spot a good flight deal before it's gone? And can you actually use those random miles your aunt gave you for Christmas? Also, I want that aunt. Yeah.

Look, we don't just sit here and talk about travel. We live it. I once turned a canceled flight into a free trip to Denver, $200 in United vouchers and $45 in Starbucks gift cards. And you were so patient through it all. We've got practical tips, expert interviews, and plenty of hot takes. I call them hot takeoffs. To help you travel smarter, not harder.

So whether you're planning your next getaway or just love staying ahead of the travel game, follow Smart Travel on your favorite podcast app. Your passport will thank you and so will your wallet.