Do not be fooled. Destroying our ability to do science is not "efficient."

Innovation is a key component of the American spirit. The Trump administration's moves to defund the American scientific enterprise are very un-American.

Feb 09, 2025

Ask yourself, if you wanted to dismantle science and education in the United States, what might you do? Maybe you would freeze federal funding agencies. Maybe you would dramatically modify the grant review process and eliminate funding for research that allows us to understand how to make a more equitable society or have more equitable healthcare. Maybe you would remove important datasets from government websites and restrict access to information. Maybe you would exclude entire swathes of people from getting federal funding, thereby limiting the quality of ideas that can be pursued. Most importantly, you would probably significantly cut funding to institutions where research is done.

Thus far, the Trump administration has done all of this, and they’ve only been in power for three weeks.

They say they are doing all this to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Please do not be fooled. They don’t care about efficiency. They are trying to destroy science and higher education. Vice President Vance has been clear about his animosity toward universities, even titling his keynote address, “The Universities are the Enemy.” He has said, “professors are the enemy,” universities transmit “deceit and lies,” and we should “aggressively attack universities.” He cites prime minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian takeover of universities in Hungary as an example of how universities should be handled. He’s not the only one who wants to undermine higher education. Project 2025 not only calls for eliminating the Department of Education but also changes to the college accreditation system to give the government more control over what is taught.

For many, the conduct of science beyond K-12 science fair projects may be a mystery. As someone who has an MD, a PhD, and over 15 years of doing research under my belt, some of which has been funded by federal grants, I’m going to try to make these recent attacks on science, and their implications for higher education, easier to understand. Let’s start with the most disastrous of the moves that have been made so far.

Billions of Dollars of NIH Funding Has Been Revoked

Late in the day on Friday, February 7, 2025, the Trump administration announced massive cuts (they estimate $4 billion) to existing and future NIH (National Institutes of Health) grants that will cost individual research institutions millions of dollars a year (for my institution, it’s about $160 million per year).

The way they are doing this is through something called “indirect costs” (IDC). When a grant is funded, some portion of those funds goes to the researcher and their team to directly support research activities such as buying equipment or reagents, hiring staff, compensating participants, etc. These are called “direct costs” (DCs). IDCs, on the other hand, include everything else that is needed to support research. This includes literally keeping the lights on (paying electric bills), security, building and maintaining laboratories and animal facilities, office space, access to journals where research is published, support staff who make sure funds are spent appropriately, ethics committees that make sure research is conducted in an ethical manner, etc. (This is a helpful basic summary) The announcement on Friday said the rate of IDCs, which range currently from 20-80%, will decrease to a staggeringly low 15%, across the board. This isn’t happening in a few weeks, months, or years. This will be effective as of Monday, February 10, leaving institutions with no time to make any preparations or adjustments. For what it’s worth, this is not legal.

If what is currently covered by IDCs is no longer covered, scientists cannot do research. It's honestly that simple. Let’s look at an example. If I earn a grant worth $1,000,000, currently about half of that may go to my institution (the specific IDC rate is negotiated by each institution with the funding agency based on a number of different factors). Half of $1,000,000 is $500,000. If that rate is reduced down to 15%, my institution will now get $150,000 instead of $500,000, a 70% reduction (as a side note, this is true for total cost awards; other awards calculate IDCs in addition to the award amount). The institution will no longer be able to afford to pay for all the resources needed to conduct the research the funding was intended for.

In case you’re wondering if the researcher can just take on that additional work, the answer is basically no. First of all, there is a reason we have ethics review boards—because there is a history of researchers doing things we now consider unethical. Asking researchers to police themselves in this way endangers research participants. Second, researchers are not actually qualified to do most of the other tasks, and most of us certainly do not have the skills, for example, for building maintenance. Third, if the goal is to improve efficiency, it makes no sense to ask researchers to waste their time looking up through long documents regarding allowable costs to figure out whether they can or cannot purchase what they need through their grant. You want them focused on their research. In the current system, I can just contact the person who handles finances for my division and ask whether something is allowable, and she lets me know. If we have no one in that role, I have to spend time I could be doing research trying to find the answer myself.

The most immediate consequence of all this is researchers will not be able to do science. Clinical trials may have to terminate early, and experiments may be left undone. In a short matter of time, the American scientific enterprise will grind to a halt. Thousands of people—the support staff, the ethics panels, those who work in research labs—will be laid off. Keep in mind, in many communities, academic medical centers are the largest employers (think Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota or the University of Alabama in Birmingham). Medications affecting the lives of millions of people worldwide, including effective vaccines for cervical cancer (Gardasil) and Ebola and treatment for Hepatitis C (Sofosbuvir), have been developed with the aid of NIH funds. But if you or someone you love is looking for an experimental treatment for cancer, or ALS, or Alzheimer’s—the chances of that happening in this country just dropped dramatically. American science has been revered worldwide, so much so that people from all over the world come to study and specialize here—over one-third of American Nobel prize winners in chemistry, medicine, and physics have been immigrants. This is part of why science here has been so successful—we have been able to recruit the best minds from all over the world. That will no longer be the case, and scientists will actively leave the US to find a more supportive environment. This should be deeply concerning to all Americans.

Decreasing indirect costs to research institutions will not only severely limit our ability to produce science; it will also cause significant economic devastation. Every dollar spent by NIH results generates almost $2.50 in economic activity. So a $4 billion cut is actually going to cost local economies $10 billion. Many institutions that support research will no longer be able to function. If this dramatic reduction in IDCs sticks, it is no exaggeration to say many medical schools will have to close. They simply will not have enough funds to literally keep the lights on. So not only will there by thousands of jobs lost, we also will not be able to train future physicians.

To summarize, in the name of “efficiency,” the Trump administration has announced a change that will dismantle science and higher education in this country while simultaneously causing severe economic damage. Are we great yet?

NSF Keywords Used to Potentially Terminate Grants

This attack on science via NIH indirect costs is not an isolated move. There is a lot going on, and I want to summarize just a few of the other major things happening.

A program officer at NSF (the National Science Foundation) shared a list of keywords the organization is using to screen currently funded grants. This list includes words like such as female, women, bias, black, disability, diversity, historically, status, systemic, and trauma. Noticeably absent from the list are male, men, or white.

Supposedly, this list is being used to flag applications needing further review to see if they are in line with Trump’s Executive Orders related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and sex and gender. An internal NSF document shared with me indicates those grants flagged for review that are found to have “DEIA” content may 1) have an opportunity to modify their work to bring it into “compliance” with the EOs, 2) be “descoped”, 3) be terminated, or 4) require working with general council to create a plan. This is all happening despite a Congressional mandate to the NSF, on the books since 1997, to “expand participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.”

I want to be clear: this is censorship. Those who follow me know I am a strong proponent of DEIA programs, but even anyone who does not support that kind of work should still be very concerned at the degree of government overreach here and the infringement on the first amendment right to free speech.

F31 Grant Awardees Discriminated Against

In other NIH-related news, grant reviews have resumed, which is great. These reviews are how the institutes determine which grants to fund. Those reviewing F31 grants, predoctoral grants designed to support doctoral students (in programs such as PhDs) to complete their research, flagged a concerning development. Up until now, there have been two mechanisms for this award, one of which (F31 Diversity) is specifically for students from underrepresented backgrounds. The applications are exactly the same, as are the evaluation criteria. This past week, NSF reviewers were instructed to discard the applications from the F31 Diversity candidates, to basically throw them in the trash bin, while continuing to review the applications through the other mechanism. If our so-called leaders were interested in rewarding merit, they would ask for all applications to be reviewed together so the top overall candidates could be selected. Instead, they required reviewers to reject all the candidates from underrepresented based on their identity. I hope it’s obvious to most people reading this that excluding research done by entire groups of people is not good science. Some of these folks may end up leaving science altogether, and we will never know what they may have discovered. What’s happening here sounds a lot like discrimination in service of maintaining white supremacy to me or, as I like to say, dismantling science to own the libs.

ORWH Remains Offline

Last week, I wrote about the Office of Research for Women’s Health, the only office at the NIH dedicated to women’s health research, being taken almost completely offline. The only parts of the website that remained were a basic landing page and a link to a page on autoimmune diseases. There has been no change to the website in the last week, nor has there been any communication to the public about what is going on with the office.

Threat to Higher Education

As an immigrant who came to this country for my mother to pursue a PhD who went on to earn graduate degrees myself, I have a deep love and respect for the American scientific enterprise. American universities are respected all over the world, and that is why so many come to learn here. The changes this administration is making are not just going to “restructure” scientific research in this country. They are going to decimate it. And universities, along with the people they employ, will be casualties.

Think about how hard it is to get in to see a doctor now, especially a specialist, and imagine what it will be like here a few years down the road when almost all the medical schools have closed. What is happening now is a full-blown catastrophe, and we must stop it before it’s too late. The least we can do is make sure everyone understands the scope of what is happening here and how profound the damage will be. Please share this information with the people in your life and contact your members of Congress. A colleague of mine, Dr. Jack Iwashyna, shared a short and simple script he wrote for his mother. Feel free to use it. In last week’s post, I included a script for expressing concern regarding the Office of Research for Women’s Health that you’re also welcome to use. Whatever you do, please don’t toss up your hands in the air and give up. They don’t deserve that satisfaction.

PS People who follow me on other platforms often ask how I keep going—I am almost completely fueled by rage and spite. I was born with an endless supply! If you appreciate posts like this, please consider subscribing (for free!).

Additional resources on this topic:

https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/07/nih-slashes-indirect-costs-on-all-grants-to-15-percent-trump/

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-slashes-overhead-payments-research-sparking-outrage

https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/07/trump-nih-scraps-prestigious-diversity-program/