Academics and scientists who work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the Trump administration’s orders have severely disrupted work – delaying projects and casting the future of research funding and jobs into doubt as chaos in the agency reigns.
An array of orders seeks to fundamentally reshape the NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research, in the Trump administration’s image. The agency’s work is the wellspring of scientific advancement in the US, and helped make the country a dominant force in health and science.
“They will have drastic effects on all of us – this is not hyperbole, this is fact,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors and an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
The orders “will kill”, Wolfson said, as advances in the treatment of diseases as diverse as cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes are delayed.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are taking a sledgehammer to the greatest biomedical infrastructure in the world to extend tax cuts,” Wolfson said.
NIH-funded basic or applied research has also contributed to 386 of the 387 drugs the Food and Drug Administration approved between 2000 and 2019, and more than 100 Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists based on NIH-funded work. NIH grants often fund basic research conducted at universities and colleges across the country, touching every state and nearly every congressional district.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued a bevy of executive orders and administrative actions that seek to fundamentally alter American health and science agencies – from appointing the nation’s foremost vaccine critic to head the Department of Health and Human Services to scrubbing websites of information the administration finds objectionable.
Trump’s executive orders prohibit grant funding containing a long list of words associated with “diversity, equity and inclusion”; attempt to cut scientific research funding by $4bn; fired thousands of employees and stopped recruitment; imposed communications blackouts; and blocked committees from meeting to evaluate new scientific research, effectively freezing funds.
Together, those orders have sown a sense of chaos and fear throughout the agency and academia, even as many are tied up in court battles.
That has left the most severe proposal, a 15% cap on “indirect costs”, hanging like the sword of Damocles over scientific research – forcing institutions to impose sweeping spending freezes and casting the future of whole labs into doubt.
“I have to decide as a professor whether to take new students into my lab, and I don’t know if I can afford them,” said Rutgers University biochemist and professor Annika Barber.
Barber added that she was supposed to spend her Thursday afternoon reviewing grant proposals for the NIH at a legally mandated review committee. The meeting was canceled with less than 24 hours notice as the Trump administration has put a hold on submissions to the Federal Register, a legal requirement for upcoming meetings.
“As of today, there are no NIH study sections going forward, which means we are not funding the grants scored last fall and not funding the grants meant to be scored this spring,” she said. “That means there is a six-month funding gap … That is going to close small labs.”
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Other researchers compared the administration’s efforts to pause funding, in violation of a court order, as effectively “pouring cement” in the science-funding pipeline.
Another tactic the administration has used to shrink the federal workforce includes mass firings of “probationary” employees. The layoffs that have been so indiscriminate that the administration accidentally fired workers on key projects such investigating the avian influenza outbreak driving up egg prices – only to attempt to rescind their terminations.
“It’s hard for me to speak about because we are scared, but we are fighting,” said Haley Chatelaine, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. “We’re coming together with our collective union power and pushing back against this.”
Chatelaine made the comments at a press conference held by a coalition of unions called Labor for Higher Education. The group has brought together unions representing professors, scientists such as Chatelaine and health workers to fight the cuts.
“We will fight them in the courts – we will talk to our elected leaders and we will fight them in the streets,” said Wolfson. “That’s a guarantee.”
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