A lot of what the Trump administration is doing is aimed at health and science, and not necessarily in a good way. The most obvious blunder is the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a palpably unqualified man with some bizarre views, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the person who advises the President on all health matters. Given Trump’s abysmal ignorance of science, having someone like RFK Jr. guiding government policy is scary.
There’s a lot of beefing as well about the government cutting the “overhead” (money given to universities, supposedly to support the infrastructure of grants) uniformly to 15%, down from over 60% in some cases (each university negotiates it rate with the government). This slashing will reduce university budgets substantially. But in some cases in which a university has huge endowments, like Harvard ($53 billion), I can’t shed many tears over that. Given that in many cases we simply don’t know where overhead goes, the assumption has been that many schools simply use it as a source of money for almost anything, and that means that the taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing not just scientific research, but universities in general.
At any rate, the potential damage that the Trump administration will do to American science is outlined in this new Atlantic article by Katherine Wu. It doesn’t cohere like a good science piece should, but at least lays out some scary things in store for American science. To me, the scariest is the hiding of already-obtained scientific results, financed by taxpayers, that were publicly available but are no long so.
Click below to see the article, or find it archived here.
First, the payoff for funding science. I hope this is accurate as it’s characterizing science as “research and development”:
Every dollar invested in research and development has been estimated to return at least $5 on average—billions annually.
It also looks as if the National Science Foundation is on the chopping block:
The administration’s actions have also affected scientific pursuits in ways that go beyond those orders. The dismantling of USAID has halted clinical trials abroad, leaving participants with experimental drugs and devices still in their bodies. Last week, NIH announced that it would slash the amount its grants would pay for administrative costs—a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge but that would substantially hamper entire institutions from carrying out the day-to-day activities of research. The administration is reportedly planning to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation. Mass layoffs of federal workers have also begun, and two NIH scientists (who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions) told me they participated in a meeting this morning in which it was announced that thousands of staff across the Department of Health and Human Services would be let go starting today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now become the head of that department, after two confirmation hearings in which he showed a lack of basic understanding of the U.S. health system and a flagrant disregard for data that support the safety and effectiveness of various lifesaving vaccines. (The White House did not return repeated requests for comment.)
It’s not clear whether the DEIrestrictions described in the previous post will severely impede science. Wu says this:
Many also expect that the moratorium on DEI-focused programming will have severe impacts on who is able to do the work of science—further impeding women, people of color, and other groups underrepresented in the field from entering and staying in it.
But it’s not clear the restrictions will have that effect, nor that making science more “diverse” (not just via race, but in other traits) will improve our understanding of nature.
There are restrictions on Social-Justice-aimed projects, but again, many of these have been a waste of money and effort, performative efforts not aimed at understandind science, and will we simply have to see how this shakes. But those who do such work are beefing about what the government did. Here’s an example of a peeved but woke scientist whose work I’ve often criticized (click screenshot to go to thread). Most of the commenters don’t support Fuentes’s griping:
One problem is that the government is looking for suspicious grants by doing word searches, and those searches include terms like “environment,” “climate”, and “race”. It’s a quick way to find suspicious grants, but you have to evaluate their quality, not simply defund them because they come up in a keyword search.
Here’s what I find most distressing about what the government did (besides appointing RFK Jr.):
In yesterday’s executive order, Trump highlighted the importance of “protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data.” But that is exactly what the administration’s critics have said it is already failing to do. At the end of last month, the CDC purged its website of several decades’ worth of data and content, including an infectious-disease-surveillance tool as well as surveys tracking health-risk behaviors among youths. (On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the government to restore, for now, these and other missing data and webpages to their pre-purge state.) And as soon as the Trump administration started pulling data sets from public view, scientists started worrying that those data would reappear in an altered form, or that future scientific publications would have to be modified.
I’m not as worried about the reappearance of data in altered form as I am about the simple removal of data—data funded by us, the American taxpayers—from public view. Fortunately, a judge stopped the data removal, but that may be temporary.
What will be the outcome? While Wu thinks this will reduce trust in science, I’m not so sure about that, especially given that trust in science fell strongly during the Biden administration, and trust is reduced simply because science is getting mixed up with politics in every administration. What worries me more is the vulnerability of science to the whims of the administration—an administration that seems to care more about key words than about research itself. My view is that the government is entitled to vet science funding and cut waste if it wants, but that governments are poorly equipped to judge scientific merit. A grant that looks wasteful may come up with useful results, though of course there are some that simply look like government funded-virtue flaunting. It’s best if a generous dollop of money is allocated to science, and then scientists themselves decide how to dole it out, for they are the best equipped people to do so. In this I agree with Wu’s conclusion:
There will undoubtedly be periods, in the coming weeks and months, when the practice of science feels normal. Many scientists are operating as they usually do until they are told otherwise. But that normalcy is flimsy at best, in part because the Trump administration has shown that it may not care what data, well collected or not, have to say. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy repeatedly refused to acknowledge that vaccines don’t cause autism, insisting that he would do so only “if the data is there.” Confronted by Senator Bill Cassidy with decades of data that were, in fact, there, he continued to equivocate, at one point attempting to counter with a discredited paper funded by an anti-vaccine group.In all likelihood, more changes are to come—including, potentially, major budgetary cuts to research, as Congress weighs this year’s funding for the nation’s major research agencies. Trump and his administration are now deciding how deep a rift to make in America’s scientific firmament. How long it takes to repair the damage, or whether that will be possible at all, depends on the extent of the damage they inflict now.
I’m just glad that I don’t have to apply for science grants any more.
Wrt that Fuentes tweet and its replies, the question “What did you expect would happen?” has a prescient answer going back 30 years: “We tried to warn you.” I urge folks to read Jussim’s essay. He doesn’t justify what Trump & Musk are doing, but explains the ways in which it was both foreseeable and avoidable.
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/we-tried-to-warn-you
When trying to evaluate the current upheavals in USAID, NIH, NSF, et cetera, it’s very hard to get objective, non-partisan information on what is actually happening. For example, Katherine Wu writes:
That’s just nonsense, there’s nothing “impeding” those members of groups entering science, quite the opposite: For at least thirty years now there have been massive efforts to facilitate and assist their involvement.
Which means that I can’t trust anything else in Wu’s article.
Umm. . . because she says one thing you don’t agree with, you can’t trust anything else she said. What about the cut in overhead? I’m telling you that you can trust that.
I think it’s misguided to blow off an entire article because you disagree with one thing in it.
Without active recruitment from URMs how do you expect there to be more of them in science? DEI was a good thing when implemented properly. When it wasn’t it was discriminatory and anti-Semitic. The correct approach to that issue was to attack the poorly implemented programs, not this authoritarian Orban-like blanket attack against it.
If DEI were merely about outreach to less-represented groups then I’d be fine with it, and hardly anyone would object to it.
But we should not expect that all groups should be equitably represented in, say, professional basketball, or professional ice hockey or in the audience at a rap concert versus at a rock concert, and we should not expect the sex ratio to be the same in, say, engineering or chemistry as it is in, say, veterinary science or medicine.
Society should not set equitable representation (in science or whatever) as a goal. Instead, what matters is that anyone, from any group, who has both the interest and the aptitude, should be welcomed.
+1
The NFL and NBA are bastions of DEI (and have been for decades). Look at all of those URMs. This result was more or less inevitable. The team owners are all very left-wing and socially conscious.
Aren’t you throwing the baby out the bath water?
I don’t think DEI or gender ideology are good but most of the programs being affected aren’t connected to either.
One can change “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” without shutting down sites or removing entire programs.
It seems to me that a lot of the people here seem to have forgotten that there is a baby at all in the tub.
That’s true. Is it very easy to change a website. But the problem remains because the people who wrote “pregnant people” and “chestfeeders” remain in their positions.
For example, the CDC webpage has been deleted but the people who wrote the following are still at the CDC. How do you propose we throw those CDC staffers out with the bathwater?
In the CDC website’s section on “Health Equity Considerations” – found under its “Infant and Young Child Feeding Toolkit,” the center declared that “Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).
https://nypost.com/2023/07/05/cdc-advises-trans-people-chestfeeding-kids-accused-of-neglecting-health-risks/
You tell them they have to change the text. If they refuse then fire them.
Unbelievable that the CDC wrote that about “chest feeding men.”
I must say, it reduces my sympathy for them.
I don’t think that any of this is blundering, at least not in the sense of clumsy/accidental/unwitting damage. Trump/Musk/MAGA are intent on destruction of the federal government in general. They are not concerned at all about damage caused. The damage is a feature, not a bug, to these folk.
+1
I’m so glad I don’t have to write grant proposals any more! Beyond that, research faculty must be pretty worried about their funding. Trump’s flooding the zone with policy changes and creating turmoil, whatever the eventual outcome.
A. Fuentes is the worst of a pile of bad actors. I oppose anything he says or represents. (We know him from WEIT and the gender “debate”). He inhabits the same trashcan as Chase Strangio, Rebecca Watson, etc. The moron guild.
I like Wu and have been reading her for years. She’s very bright but I think emotionally fragile and her young age suggests she’s been morally poisoned by the wokeesphere she grew up in (the last two decades especially). Her science is good.
Heheheh wokeesphere – I just made that up. Like it?
Moving along…
A lot of the chainsawing of gvt/science we’re seeing is terrible: you don’t burn down the whole house if you have rats in the garage, you just get rid of the rats.
I have a feeling the dumbness of DOGE is going to be overshadowed by absolutely anything that scumbag’s scumbag RFK even touches. It will reek of measles to start with. He is by far the worst cabinet pick of my life: beats the bible bashers of G.W. Bush even. (damn Ashcroft for eg.)
D.A.
NYC
Who is going to pay for DEI if overheads are cut? Who is going to pay Claudine Gay’s salary if overhead are cut?
Minor point – I think that you meant bible “thumpers” :-). And I like wokeesphere!
In my understanding, this really isn’t true. When institutions negotiate the overhead rates with government funding bodies, they can’t just pull a figure out of their hats that the government then automatically agrees to. Rather, institutions are required to justify the rates they request by itemizing all the costs they will incur and providing documentation to prove it. The costs that the government bodies consider legitimate include things like salaries and fringe benefits for support staff, facilities costs such as utilities and maintenance; IT and communications; insurance; etc. etc.
Once an institution has satisfied the government that its requested rate is reasonable and justified, then the government will add the agreed upon percentage to each individual grant approved of, at least until the time arrives for the next review.
It is more than possible, of course, that some of the indirect costs that have been considered legitimate by past administrations would be considered illegitimate by this administration – e.g., costs related to DEI training for staff. I’m just throwing that out, since I don’t actually know whether such costs were previously considered legitimate overhead or not. But, even if they were, I cannot believe that such questionable expenses would constitute a large enough percentage of overhead funds that it would remotely justify lowering the overhead rate for NIH grants to a mere 15%.
I agree with Anderson. If there is anyone who deserves to have his funding cut it is Fuentes. I do not think what he publishes is science.
Obama set up a similar system to DOGE back in 2011. It was not very successful, nor was it very transparent, but reading the report it sounds very similar to what the intent of DOGE to be. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/gat_board_december_2011_report_and_recommendations.pdf
Three key recommendations:
1. “adopt a cohesive, centralized accountability framework to
track and oversee spending” using “Data mining applications”. i.e., they had access to multiple departments’ data.
2. “consolidate and streamline … technology platforms … for information collection and display. ”
3. “migrate to a universal, standardized identification system
for all Federal awards”
Another parallel to DOGE: “the Recovery Board is scheduled to terminate in less than two years”
If one avoids the Blue-anon conspiracy theories about DOGE and assumes the goal it to really reduce spending on waste, then these two programs seem remarkably similar.
Comment by Greg Mayer
I saw an interview with the head of Obama’s effort– unfortunately I can’t recall her name. It seemed quite different from Musk’s operation. Most saliently, the effort undertook months of study before making recommendations, whereas the Trump/Musk plan announced what would be closed before any study whatsoever.
GCM
In addition to Greg’s points, the Obama program was staffed by people that were put through normal approval processes, unlike this DOGE program. Also, the Obama program didn’t do anything but deliver a report and recommendations to Congress. Which is the way these things are supposed to be done. Again, unlike this DOGE program. DOGE is taking actions which circumvent Congressional authority. In other words, illegal. Of course, when enough people in high enough places are motivated to ignore the law, then illegal doesn’t matter.
This is really basic civics 101 stuff here. It is really disappointing to see so many people rationalizing what is going on as if it is legitimate.
“the Obama program didn’t do anything . . . Which is the way these things are supposed to be done.”
I understand your point—having read and written my share of meaningless government reports—but the above still brought a smile to my face.
Right out of Yes, Minister
I’d prefer them to actually do something. Congress has done, and will do, nothing regardless of what party has control. To many incentives to keep spending.
I agree that the better path would be to add the cuts to the budget that the president will present to congress. I also am of the opinion that the precedent of Musk’s appointment will come back to bite the Republicans hard in a future Democrat regime.
The point about Obama’s program not doing anything but gathering and analyzing data and making suggestions is that such entities don’t have legislative authority. Only Congress does. The point is, in the Obama example the law was followed. By contrast, DOGE is not following the law.
If you understand how the US government is supposed to work, has worked for most of its history, then by your comment you seem to suggest that you think our government should, maybe, be fundamentally changed from a constitutional federal republic and a representative democracy, to something else. Something that gives the executive branch the authority to do whatever it wants to do without any oversight or transparency.
If government spending is truly a worry, and I do agree it is worthy of worry though I probably differ on how big of a worry it is, then simply going by the data one could only reach one conclusion. Don’t vote for the GOP. Take a look at the deficit, especially the rate, over the past 50 years with respect to which party was steering the ship. The data is very clear.
I learned from Nellie Bowles what some of those thoroughly vetted Obama staffers said recently about DOGE on their podcast Pod Save America:
“Honestly, some of this is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should’ve done. We didn’t know you could do some of this,” Lovett said.
“We all know that government is slow. We all know government can be inefficient. We all know that the bureaucracy can be bloated. We all worked in the f—ing White House. We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do,” Favreau said.
“The technology in the federal government, at least when we were there, sucked. There was no service in the basement of the West Wing. You couldn’t use your phone because there was no service.” Favreau added.
[Originally in reply to a comment which vanished?]
Does anyone know of a good write-up of what indirect costs actually are, for interested outsiders? Even pre-Trump this sounded like a strange system. Why do they vary so much between institutions yet not at all within? Some private finding has a lower cap (HHMI says 20%), does any university refuse their money as a result?
Secretaries, IT, heating… these probably don’t vary enormously? I’m sure salaries are higher in Boston, but they are also higher for the direct costs (paying scientists to do the work proposed) so you might expect a fixed fraction.
I have heard, but am not certain, that large indirect costs are things like finding patients for medical trials, or paying for their hospital rooms during the trial. That sounds expensive but I don’t know why it isn’t direct. Why should grants in say mathematics pay a high overhead at a place with a big medical school? Or maybe this isn’t how it works.
I understand they are negotiated, and re-negotiated periodically. And that perhaps this replaced an earlier system which was simply too much paperwork, keeping track of how many dollars of HVAC costs a particular student-year consumed.
The journal Inside Higher Education had a good article explaining the problems with the cuts to NIH in general and indirect costs in particular:
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/02/13/why-nih-cuts-are-so-wrong-opinion?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=564761968e-DNU_2021_COPY_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-564761968e-237335649&mc_cid=564761968e#
The author counters several misconceptions, including (this is taken from the text):
1) Indirect cost allocations are in zero-sum competition with direct costs, therefore reducing the total amount of research.
2) Indirect costs are “difficult for NIH to oversee” because they aren’t entirely entailed by a specific grant.
3) “Private foundations” cap overhead charges at 10 to 15 percent of direct costs and all but a handful of universities accept those grants.
I found his arguments convincing.
Thanks for the link. But this seems frustratingly vague to me, and perhaps too wrapped up in countering talking points.
They say:
Sure, but what percentage is the library? Which are the big items in Harvard’s 69%, which aren’t present at places with a 30% rate? (Also, if the average is around 30%, what are some examples of universities below that? I’m struggling to find any.)
Some details re private money here: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html
I don’t understand their reasoning here. If the NIH budget is fixed, these are literally in competition. And in general, many grants specify the total you may request, but the direct amount will vary according to your university’s indirect rate — very much zero-sum.
No argument about the need to fund real research infrastructure. However, the
Inside Higher Ed article contains few specifics on what these infrastructure costs include. Of course laboratory maintenance, libraries, accounting, and so forth are necessary. But are services like the UW’s “Resilience Programming” necessary? See: https://faculty.uwmedicine.org/resilience-programming/ . The latter is part
of the SOM’s “Well-Being” Office, under an Associate Dean for Well-Being. It is possible that the Indict Cost gravy train has enabled some university admin offices to grow a little beyond their real necessity for the conduct of research.
“And then they came for me”
I wonder how long it will be until Atheist websites are deemed Anti Christian bigotry and banned.
Who is going to pay for DEI if overheads are cut? Who is going to pay Claudine Gay’s salary if overheads are cut?
The question we ought to be asking is, what will rise from the ashes? The phoenix, or the pseudo-phoenix?
This reminds me of Ronald Reagan ignoring AIDS for a long time: pretty much until Rock Hudson got it.
Mind you, the press was ignoring it too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_and_AIDS
NIH used to pay just 8% for overhead. “Somehow” that worked. Administrative bloat is a very real problem. For example, the public school system of NYC has ‘only’ 60 times as many bureaucrats (per student) as the Catholic school system. Of course, the problem goes way beyond NYC. Yale has more bureaucrats than faculty and more bureaucrats than undergraduate students. Yale does have a $41.4 billion endowment and had a 67.5% overhead rate. HISD (Houston Public Schools) has (2023) 27,197 employees of whom 10,879 were teachers. CPS (Chicago Public Schools) has 45,014 employees, of whom 24,236 are teachers. Let’s cut to the real bottom line. Who is going to pay for DEI, if overhead is cut? I get that Augustin Fuentes is upset.
Re it being best if a generous dollop of money is allocated to science, and then scientists themselves decide how to dole it out, for they are the best equipped people to do so: it probably varies a lot, depending on which organisation of “scientists themselves” is doing the judging. The recent capture of prestigious scientific organisations and publications should give one pause. Also the Alzheimer’s fraud. Also the widespread replication crisis.
Basically, who can we (the public and its government) actually trust? “Trust me, I’m a Scientist” just doesn’t cut it these days.
The FDA pays 15% for overhead. The DOE pays 8% for overhead. The idea that NIH has too pay a higher rate is BS. I get that folks are upset that the gravy train is ending.
+1
Off topic but there’s an interesting thread on X about the BBC and Hamas that I thought may be of interest to readers.
https://x.com/mishtal/status/1891745321966858693
Most European (I am Norwegian) are well aware of the bias the BBC has shown on this conflict and other stuff.
There’s a saying here: yet another Drag show on the Blib. Their natureshows and science in general is solid, but on stuff relating to Israel and trans they are clearly not unbiased
That said, I still support public adfree television, but BBC and others (like NRK in Norway) has to clean up their act before they lose more credibility and become The Guardian
Have you seen Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video?
An unidentified scientist (a physicist, I guess) acknowledged that some research in Physics is deliberately useless, done only to get grants and keep living off from public funds. Quite depressing.
I rather like the work of Sabine Hossenfelder and have watched her for years. She is quite good.