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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
We’re 18 days into the second Trump administration, and when it comes to the president’s impact on health and science, things have been pretty chaotic. There’s been sweeping confusion around a plan to freeze federal funding, much of health agencies’ communications with the public have been put on hold, and the president has signed a blur of executive orders.
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So what comes next?
Here to help us understand some of the implications is Max Kozlov. He’s a reporter at Nature covering biomedical science.
Max, thanks so much for joining us to chat today.
Max Kozlov: Of course.
Feltman: So a lot has been going on in Washington. The president signed a ton of executive orders in his initial days. There’ve been potential funding freezes. For folks who haven’t been paying attention, what would you say the sort of major headlines are about how science and health are being impacted by this administration right now?
Kozlov: Yeah, that’s a good question. There has been quite a lot going on, and so I don’t blame anyone for not following every single thing that’s happened because it is a lot and it’s been very confusing even for the people who work in each of these agencies and work in each of these fields.
So I think the biggest things have been this funding freeze that you mentioned. Because of the barrage of executive orders, each agency has wanted to sift through each of their grants to make sure that they comply with these orders—so I’m talking about orders stripping or scrubbing the use of language such as “diversity, equity and inclusion” or language that the administration says is “discriminatory” or “woke” in some way.
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Kozlov: And so each agency has been trying to comply as best they can by taking down web pages, going through and looking at all of the money that’s going out of the agency to see if it’s funding research or initiatives that touch on some of these keywords that the administration has targeted. And it’s led to a lot of confusion and chaos because, you know, entire websites have gone down, and these websites are important because these are resources for the public and for scientists. They include important datasets on infection rates or polling the scientific workforce—I mean, you name it. It—it’s just been kind of whole-scale how impactful this has all been.
Feltman: Yeah, well, and we had one question from a listener: Brandon wrote in to us saying that, you know, in the lead-up to the first Trump administration, we saw people engaged in archiving federal datasets to protect them from purging. Are we seeing similar archiving efforts like that right now?
Kozlov: We certainly are. I’ve seen a lot of reports of people coming together, banding together on social media in an effort to try to archive every single website, every single dataset, and then sharing it with the community. That’s especially been true for [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] data because they maintain so many critical datasets that it’s really important to public health researchers to be able to go about their work.
I think it’s very abstract to think about data being taken down, but one tangible example that I’ve heard that really resonated with me is—so I’ve done a lot of reporting on mpox, or people might know it as monkeypox. This is an infectious disease that has caused a global outbreak in 2022 and continues to infect people all over the world. Well, the reason that we were able to stop that outbreak so quickly in the United States was: we were able to identify the specific communities that were most at risk.
Feltman: Mm-hmm.
Kozlov: And that had to do with some of the same keywords that are being stripped right now …
Feltman: Right.
Kozlov: And so it would have been much more difficult to get that outbreak under control had we not been able to tailor our energy and resources and messaging to those specific communities, and I think that’s an example of, I think, why so many public health researchers specifically are concerned right now.
Feltman: Sure, yeah. And, you know, I think some of our listeners might also be surprised at the breadth of keywords, you know, we’re seeing agencies go after. Could you tell us a little bit about, you know, what kinds of words and phrases are getting flagged as potentially problematic?
Kozlov: Sure, I just published a story this week about this—looking at, specifically, at the National Science Foundation. And some of the keywords that I’ve seen being used include “foreign assistance”; “climate science”; “diversity, equity, inclusion”; “women”; “people of color”; “race”—any of these seem to be keywords that the administration is looking through, and it’s still unclear exactly what they want to do with these grants, whether it’s modify them so they don’t include these words anymore or cancel them.
What we do know is: the funding freeze efforts have been paused at the moment because federal judges have temporarily halted them because they might be in overreach of executive power. It’s still unclear how those will play out, but for the meantime the NSF has reopened its payment portal so people can continue to get paid and receive money on active grants, but whether these grants will be funded in the future or whether there will be new grants with any of these keywords remains to be seen.
Feltman: And there was some question in the past few weeks about whether government agencies were going to be able to communicate with the public. What’s going on there?
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Kozlov: So, yeah, what you’re referring to is: there was a communications freeze on all health agencies that was enacted as soon as the Trump administration came into office. And what I’ve heard is: some kind of freeze is typical when the administrations change. For example, you know, if there was a new policy that was about to come out, it makes sense that the new administration would want to review that.
However, what we’ve seen so far has been unprecedented in terms of the breadth of the pause. I’ve talked to scientists at [National Institutes of Health], and they have said that they have not been able to attend any kind of meeting, in person or virtual, that interfaces with anybody outside of the agency—even submitting preprints. A lot of travel was canceled. And the biggest thing was canceling grant-review sessions.
So I think some of these have started back up again as of the beginning of February. But for the most part the agency’s scientists are not interfacing with the public, and so conferences are still on pause the last I heard. And in general there’s a much stricter kind of review process for approval for any of these kinds of external-facing communications.
Feltman: Yeah, and what are experts saying about that, you know, with regard to potential public health issues like the ongoing bird flu outbreak?
Kozlov: Right, I’m glad you brought up the bird flu outbreak. The CDC publishes this digest that they’ve published every week for the last [60-plus] years, and two weeks ago, when the Trump administration came into office, that was the first time that digest had not been published at the scheduled time. And I know people were especially concerned because there were several papers in that digest that had to do with the ongoing bird flu outbreak in cows and birds across the United States, and that’s something that researchers have been concerned about for the last 10 months potentially spilling over into humans and sparking an outbreak. And so to have that digest be suppressed or to have that kind of data not available to scientists and to the public is concerning.
Feltman: Right, and meanwhile, you know, one of those executive orders that we talked about briefly at the top of the show has the U.S. withdrawing from the World Health Organization.
Kozlov: Yes, that is a big one. So that withdrawal process takes some time, but the Trump administration has already ordered CDC researchers not to communicate with the WHO. So it’s already having direct impacts now, and that’s a big deal because many scientists at the CDC sit on advisory groups at the WHO. And so the WHO is missing out because it’s not getting that expertise, and the CDC and the American people are missing out because it’s not getting critical updates and data from the WHO.
Feltman: So obviously all of these executive orders and funding freezes, communication freezes have caused a lot of confusion. What do you think these actions can tell us about what the next four years have in store with this administration?
Kozlov: I think it shows that there will be a lot of uncertainty moving forward. A researcher I spoke with who is a postdoc funded by the National Science Foundation said to me, quote, unquote, “The United States [is not] a stable place to be a scientist right now.”
Feltman: Hmm.
Kozlov: And I thought that really resonated with me because, you know, she’s an early career researcher and she’s getting mixed messages about if her expertise, if her research is needed right now or wanted. Science is funded on a year-by-year basis, you know, with money from Congress—at least in the U.S.—but science, of course, takes place on a much longer term than that, and so to hear about funding freezing and unfreezing and freezing and unfreezing, and these grants are canceled and these grants are okay, I think everybody’s kind of on a tightrope right now …
Feltman: Sure.
Kozlov: And nobody knows what will happen, and so I think that’s already having a visible impact on researchers.
Feltman: Yeah, so at the very least we’re probably looking at a real talent drain in, in the health and science world.
Kozlov: Yeah, there was some research that we included in the article that we published about the National Science Foundation chaos that found that when there’s a delay in funding that has real consequences. A lot of the foreign-born researchers that were included in that study decided to take their labs elsewhere because it’s not sustainable to be a scientist when funding is uncertain. And so we might expect to see more of those kinds of anecdotes coming out over the next few years.
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Feltman: Max, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. This has been really helpful.
Kozlov: Of course.
Feltman: Speaking of the talent drain we might see in health and science, Scientific American associate health editor Lauren Young has been covering that issue and is here to tell us more.
Lauren, thanks for joining us.
Lauren Young: No, thank you for having me.
Feltman: So I know that you put out a call to researchers who are being impacted by funding freezes and, you know, these other upheavals. What have you been hearing back from them?
Young: Yeah, it was honestly a really incredible response; I’m very thankful for everyone who responded. We put out this call on Reddit, and there are over, like, 70 comments now in this discussion, and I’ve been personally still getting DMs from these folks.
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Young: The general feeling I’ve been getting is just uncertainty, a lot of frustration, a lot of fear. That particular Reddit group is mostly early career scientists, a lot of Ph.D. candidates, a lot of postdocs. So these are folks who are just getting into their research careers, eager and excited but, you know, just feeling very uncertain about next steps. There’s been a lot of miscommunication and lack of communication about, like, future support for some of these Ph.D. candidates and some of these teaching assistants in graduate-student labs and everything.
Feltman: Yeah, and you’re also hearing, you know, like Max alluded to with us earlier, that folks who have the option are starting to think about taking their talent elsewhere.
Young: Yeah, I was really struck by the sort of magnitude: that people are seriously weighing leaving the U.S. to pursue their academia elsewhere, their research elsewhere. I spoke to someone at Oklahoma State University who is a Ph.D. candidate there, and he was expressing concerns about basically just the stability—like, “What is it gonna be like in the future for my research, you know, in the next five years or so?” And he was, you know, wanting to stay within academia—like, dream job would have been, you know, professor running his own lab, teaching, doing a combo of both—and that seems a little bit precarious right now.
I spoke to another researcher who’s an early career scientist who works at one of the wastewater-monitoring projects, which is supported by the CDC, and these are projects that are obviously very essential; they’re tracking things like COVID and, you know, flu. But something that struck me that she said was that, you know, we might not see immediate effects right away when we have these funding freezes or, you know, these cuts, but, you know, this is something that later on—like, in a year, two years, three years—that will have, like, major consequences in terms of interruptions to clinical trials or, you know, a potential loss in talent to other places. So I found that really striking: that, like, you know, we might not see the ramifications instantly, but they could come, you know, and they could be very drastic.
Feltman: Yeah, well, and other than, you know, potentially losing talented scientists who are passionate about research that we really need here in the U.S., what concrete issues are researchers worried about when it comes to not just losing funding but all of this uncertainty around funding?
Young: Yeah, so I spoke to Megan Ranney, who is the dean of Yale’s School of Public Health, and she was talking to me about just the kind of sheer amount of data that gets lost or interrupted during any sort of, like, mid-grant cycle freezes or interruptions. So for clinical trials, for instance, you know, we have human participants are—usually, obviously, join studies at certain periods of time. You collect, you know, whether it’s blood samples or urine samples or whatever, other biological samples, you need to store them and then process them. And if, you know, you’re running an experiment and that gets cut off in the middle, that’s potentially, you know, I don’t know how many thousands, but, you know, money lost if you can’t continue processing those samples in a timely manner.
It’s similar, too, with a lot of animal studies. Another person I talked to, another early career scientist who works on vaccinology and vaccines, she works a lot with mouse models, and she was like, “I don’t know whether or not to start this mouse experiment because my experiments last 70 days. I don’t know if I can continue or, you know, if it makes sense to do this experiment if this project or this experiment is gonna be yanked away from me, essentially.” So I think that, you know, is—those are a few examples of how these interruptions can have consequences on data and the research and, ultimately, whether or not you publish a study or publish a finding.
Feltman: Well, and we’ve talked a lot about funding freezes and, you know, these sort of subject-matter audits, but there’s also just been a lot of talk in general about DEI and sort of, like, undoing a bunch of diversity efforts, which I imagine is also very troubling for a lot of scientists, especially early career. Have you been hearing anything from folks on that?
Young: Oh, definitely, by multiple folks, particularly early career scientists who either directly received funding from some of these DEI initiatives or have just generally been supported by that type of inclusive environment. So I spoke to, actually, an NIH early career researcher who told me that she, as a mixed-race woman who’s Black and white, had really benefited from, you know, a lot of DEI approaches at the NIH, and she actually, you know, did a fellowship where she got to kind of try what it’s like to be in a lab and to run your own lab. And she expressed, she was like, I don’t know how else she would have …
Feltman: Yeah.
Young: Gotten, you know, the ability to try that out without that type of environment. So I think it is crucial, these types of programs and just fostering that type of environment of support for all people. I think it’s really critical, especially for early career scientists.
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Feltman: Lauren, thanks so much for hopping on to chat. We’ll definitely be following up as you continue to sift through your DMs [laughs] ’cause it sounds like you’re, you’re talking to a lot of people and we definitely wanna hear more from them.
Young: Yes, thank you so much. And we’ll continue to be reporting on this, so thank you.
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back on Monday with our usual science news roundup. If you have any questions we didn’t hit today, let us know via email at ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. We’ll do our best to answer them in a future episode.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Special thanks to Max Kozlov and Lauren Young for contributing their reporting to today’s episode. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend.
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