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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. For decades, the US government has funded scientific research while largely allowing experts to set priorities. Now, that relationship is shifting fast and being tested. In just weeks, the Trump administration has frozen research funding, erase decades of public health data, slash budgets, and ban scientific terms related to DEI and gender identity.

As The Atlantic's Katherine Wu puts it, science and government are now weeks into what will likely be a prolonged battle over how research can and will be done in the United States. Now, political interference in science isn't new. Wu points to the 1990s when the National Rifle Association successfully lobbied Congress to defund gun violence research at the CDC, leading to decades of lost data under the so-called Dickey Amendment. What's happening now is broader, deeper, and moving at record speed.

This isn't just about budgets or bureaucracy. It's about who controls science and what kind of research gets to exist. It'll shape careers, public health data, and the future of evidence-based policymaking. Some changes may be temporary, but others like missing data, halted studies, researchers forced out of their fields could leave lasting scars. We'll talk about all this now with Katherine Wu, staff writer for The Atlantic. Hi, Katherine. Welcome back to WNYC.

Katherine Wu: Hello. Always good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, an invitation for you, especially if you are a scientist navigating these changes firsthand. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Do you work in medicine, climate research, public policy, feeling the impact of shifting federal priorities or funding cuts or freezes in any science-related field right now? We know it's touching a lot of universities and other institutions all over the country. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Katherine, your piece lays out obviously an alarming picture of the Trump administration's impact already on science. What are the most significant changes that you're seeing so far?

Katherine Wu: Oh, my goodness, do we even have time to go through them? There have been so many. I think this really comes down to the fact that it has been so many that it's actually difficult to point to the most significant ones. Certainly, the fact that funding has been frozen, that means that researchers are essentially not getting the funds they need to pay their staff to continue their studies.

That means participants in clinical trials are potentially being called and told, "Well, we can't continue to study anymore. This very important experimental drug that might be helping you stay alive may not be an option for your care anymore." We've seen thousands of federal workers fired from across government and that includes scientists doing vital work. We have seen foreign aid abroad been totally dismantled.

People who need life-saving HIV treatments not getting the care that they need. I am sure I am missing things from this list only because the list is so ridiculously long. There truly has not been a sphere of American science or American science being done abroad that has not been impacted by this. It is the way that science is being done and who is allowed to be doing science right now, every aspect of it.

Brian Lehrer: One of your articles is called The NIH, National Institutes of Health, Memo That Undercut Universities Came Directly from Trump Officials. Remind us of that one.

Katherine Wu: Yes, so this is one of the most important changes that has happened in the past two weeks. I suppose I hesitate to call it a change because it never actually fully went into effect. On February 7th, the NIH seemed to release a memo. They did release the memo saying that indirect cost rates were going to be cut and indirect costs are basically overhead.

You get a grant. You apportion some of that grant to cover the day-to-day logistics of being able to do your research, paying rent for your lab, paying the utilities bills for your lab, making sure that administrative stuff gets done, all the logistical stuff that makes the research run on the side, not just the hard science that we picture or see in stock images. This is essential stuff.

Those rates can go as high as 60%, 70% at some universities. It's a very big deal for it to be slashed all the way down to 15%. For that to be a hard cap effectively overnight, which is what that would have done, that would have been devastating. That would have been an overnight salary cut for countless people and the work that they do. You can't sustain that kind of cut with no notice whatsoever.

This created huge uproar that has since been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. We're going to see how that all shakes out once this is fully litigated in court. The larger issue here was that it was not NIH behind this memo, even though it was their website that released it. The Trump administration pushed that directive through and basically forced them to publish it on their website as what appears to be just a show of force.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call from a scientist. Isabel in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Isabel.

Isabel: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a postdoctoral neuroscientist at Columbia University. I'm also a proud member and steward for my union, UAW 4100. I wanted to talk about how these funding cuts to science, health care, and higher education are impacting my job and the jobs of scientists like me. I love that I get to come into work every day and study how our brain makes memories. These funding cuts are putting my job and my science at risk along with the work of thousands of other hardworking researchers and educators.

I also want to talk about something that's giving me some hope right now, which is academic labor power. Academic unions are more prolific than ever. This Wednesday, we organized a national day of action, including a rally here in New York City that was co-organized by my union, UAW 4100, and other academic unions across the city. These rallies brought together thousands of researchers, academic workers, and allies to say no to these funding cuts. It's really empowering for me to see the collective labor power that we're building in New York and nationwide. I think this is going to be a powerful tool to fight for the future of science, health care, and academic jobs.

Brian Lehrer: Isabel, thank you. I'm going to add another voice to yours, Isabel, as our next caller, I think, is another scientist also getting involved with the UAW actions. Alexa in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Alexa.

Alexa: Hi there. I'm a lifelong scientist and labor organizer.

Brian Lehrer: And?

Alexa: What do you want me to say? Oh okay. Well, for me, I feel like I can talk to you about the ways that this has affected the prospects of my career and the ability to do science, but I'm really passionate also about us making the connection that what we're watching happening in science right now, what were victims of in science and in research and in higher education right now also is something that is part of the global or the US economy at large with the decline in manufacturing and that we should learn from history since we're organized with the United Auto Workers.

What they've experienced in the auto industry over the past 40 years is what we're experiencing right now in research and higher education, and that when we talk about the funding of US science and US research at large, we can't pretend that it's been good. The past 30 years have been a major stagnation of research funding. That's come at the cost of workers where we haven't kept up with inflation.

That's why we've organized ourselves into unions. It's because of how bad it's been. The fact that this is happening should highlight to everyone across the US and internationally just how tenuous the system of research funding is. It's right now that we need to decide whether we believe that we are a country, whether we are people that believes in public knowledge production or not.

Brian Lehrer: What would you say to listeners who might think, "Okay, you're a microbiologist. The pharmaceutical industry is big and wealthy. If they want to develop medications--" I'm sure your work isn't only on medications. If private industry wants to develop things that are science-based, that are going to be useful to the public, then they will make money on them. Why do we need taxpayers to subsidize this at the level that they have? What would you say to that?

Alexa: I also get this question in another frame, which is, "You have a PhD. You're a microbiologist. Why don't you just work in private industry?" I just don't believe in that. I believe that there is such an important place for public research and for basic science research. I actually don't study anything in biomedicine. The research that I do actually is only valued by the Department of Energy right now. My PhD is in soil microbiology. I think it's so crucial. We have no idea what discoveries we make now will be important for innovation, technology, medicine, climate change 20, 30 years from now. We need to be investing in the big questions that really propelled knowledge forward. Knowledge in and of itself is a public good.

Brian Lehrer: There isn't profit in basic research, right?

Alexa: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Alexa, thank you for your call. Katherine Wu, what are you thinking listening to those couple of callers?

Katherine Wu: Yes, so much. I think it's worth reiterating just how important it is to keep training future generations of scientists. Discoveries don't get made. Drugs don't get developed unless there is rigorous training in place and funds to make sure that those young scientists have the training that they need, the support they need, especially scientists from underrepresented backgrounds.

I think the system now is so strapped that some universities are trying to figure out, "Do we need to pause graduate student admissions?" There could be multiple generations of young scientists at risk here. We will see the fallout of that loss for years and years and years. That is so much knowledge that is at stake here. Absolutely, I think the conversation about private funding is an important one.

I think if you think about the amount that the federal government contributes to scientific research, if you're even to pair away at that a little bit, there isn't actually a really reasonable way for private funding to fill that gap. There's not enough of it. A lot of private funding comes with strings attached, right? It's what foundations want to fund. It's to their own ends. Certainly, pharmaceutical companies are doing their own research, but it's what's lucrative. What about rare diseases? What about things that don't have a big dollar sign attached to them?

It's incredibly important to work toward the public interest and not just where the money is. I also want to point out, we have so many examples of discoveries that were made totally by accident in the pursuit of basic research, penicillin maybe being the most famous one. There will be devastating consequences for everyone's health and well-being and our understanding of the world if any type of science is hampered by this continued pause.

Brian Lehrer: Katherine Wu is our guest staff writer at The Atlantic who writes frequently about health and science. Your reporting points, to take another example, to the widespread erasure of federal health and behavioral data. You write that any gaps in data sets will be permanent. Can you expand on what's happening with that? Are Trump and Musk ordering scientific agencies in the government to erase data that they've already collected?

Katherine Wu: Right, so we've already seen some troubling examples of this. It was just a couple of weeks ago that massive troves of data were deleted off the CDC website without any warning or explanation. This included data on HIV surveillance. This included data on youth behaviors that have pointed behavioral scientists to patterns and what kids are doing that might put them at risk for depression, drug use, all sorts of things that are important for ensuring the well-being of generations to come.

For that data to disappear along with a bunch of other very important CDC content that clinicians use to guide care for patients, that's terrifying. That should be publicly available information. It's about the American people. It's often paid for by taxpayer dollars because a lot of it is collected from health surveys done by states and local jurisdictions. Data about people should be available to those people and they should be able to benefit from them.

For those data to disappear, it's almost a violation of a social contract between government and science. A lot of that data is now back online, in part because federal judges have ordered it so. The fact that they disappeared at all, I think, showcases just how much power the administration can have. We've seen other examples where the government is basically placing restrictions on potentially how data may be collected in the future.

If they're pulling contracts, if they're ceasing funding of clinical trials or telling people you can't have words like "transgender" or "non-binary" in your manuscripts, that limits the ways in which people are going to attempt to collect data and propose collection of new data. If scientists feel censored, they're not going to take an unbiased approach to gathering knowledge. That limits our ability to learn more about the world around us. I think that's really troubling. It has big implications for how well we're going to be able to care for this nation's people.

Brian Lehrer: Another caller going through this. Joan in Peekskill, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joan.

Joan: Hi, Brian. I adore you. I'm so excited to be able to talk to you today.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. What you got?

Joan: I am a former academic researcher who shifted their career to a federal scientific agency that funds academic research. This week, I was one of 168 people who were purged from federal service under false pretext and in violation of federal labor laws. It has been really difficult since January 20th in the issuance of the first executive orders that started impacting science and government and research in academic settings is equivalent to a hostile takeover of my agency by the DOGE, by OPM.

Brian Lehrer: If you're comfortable saying, what was the pretext in your case and what do you think they're actually after?

Joan: There are two pretexts. One is they reclassified people who had tenure in federal government, who had the protection of federal labor laws and reclassified us as probationary, which is another class of employee that has no federal service protections and is very vulnerable to dismissal. That was done to our personnel records without notification. Some people didn't even know they'd been reclassified and were invited to this meeting and fired and told to leave the building in three hours.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Joan: The second pretext is that all of us-- Yes, it was awful. I think it's underreported because people from the academic community were in the building that day reviewing proposals for us on review panels, helping us make good decisions about how to invest the American people's money to advance the scientific community. They bore witness to this tragedy. The other pretext that they fired us under is poor performance, which is simply not true and not consistent with documentation that many of us have in our personnel files, which we, by the way, downloaded and saved for ourselves because we were afraid they were going to be deleted or further altered.

Brian Lehrer: Joan, do you think that they're just trying to cut as much budget as they can from the scientific establishment as well as from other agencies that they're going after or is there some other motivation here also?

Joan: I think there are a number of different things moving here at one time. One is relates to, and Elie Mystal was so great in your previous segment, to DEI, whatever that is, and the purging of programs, the archiving and closing of programs. On my agency's website, you can look at active or closed funding opportunities. The list of closed opportunities are clearly related to the Ted Cruz report that has the Voldemort words in science. There's this ideological attack on our science.

I think there's also this effort to undermine the public's perception of federal servants, people who are civil servants, and work in this angle of the scientific community to discredit us and to discredit the credibility of the agency. I don't know if the long game is to close it. Our annual budget is about $10 billion, which, in the scheme of things, is, "Okay, what is that?" In the larger scheme, I don't know. I think it's an erosion. I don't know. This baffles me. I can't understand what their end-game is.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see what Katherine Wu thinks about that. Joan, thank you very much for your call. Another first-person testimonial there, Katherine, from Joan. You warn in one of your articles that dismissing established scientific methodology as politically transgressive is a dangerous precedent to set. What do you think they're really after? Are they really looking to dismiss established scientific methodology, science itself, as transgressive?

Katherine Wu: It's hard to say whether it's quite that calculated. I do think there has been a long-running thread of, I guess, anti-intellectualism. Certainly, even during COVID, especially during the first Trump administration, there was a big backlash against scientific expertise. This is certainly not new, but I think a lot of the gutting of the federal workforce, scientists included, is largely just that, a gutting of the federal workforce.

They want to diminish that. They want to replace what they can with people they feel more allied with. I think a lot of this is frankly a blanket show of power. Some of it may not be motivated by science or lack thereof. It may simply just be, "Let's see what we can get away with." There's not much regard for what may be impacted along the way, including the future health of this country.

Brian Lehrer: Let's sneak in one more caller from a university setting here. Cliff in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Cliff.

Cliff: Hi. Thank you so much. Just two points I'd like to make. One is not philosophical because I think what she just said was brilliant. I visited one of our major labs and research centers yesterday at Columbia, trying to understand what this all means. Not only does it mean cutting the people and so on, but I got a clear understanding that the communication coming from the government using words like "overhead" is totally misguided because they make it sound like, "Oh, there's all this fat. We're going to cut it out."

In some cases, seminal research, that phrase of overhead can run up to 90% covering different costs that are involved in deep research, the advanced equipment that's necessary, the operation of these highly sophisticated devices, which help us create new drugs. The idea of just flailing around by the government saying, "Oh, we're going to cut the fat out of it," is total nonsense.

Brian Lehrer: Because if you're doing science, you also have to pay the rent, and that's overhead.

Cliff: Of course. Absolutely. In some cases, I looked at some of these advanced microscopes and such that it can look at proteins and so on. This is not casual stuff. In fact, this is the tools necessary for us to lead in medical research in the world. These people are out of their minds on what they're doing.

Brian Lehrer: Cliff, thank you. Thank you for your call. One listener writes, "This reminds me of Mao's Cultural Revolution, where scientists were marched through the streets in dunce caps." I know you got to go in a minute, Katherine. Where's the battle line? Is it through the UAW, which represents university scientists in many cases?

Katherine Wu: Frankly, I think a lot of what happens next depends on what Congress says. They are in charge of funding institutions like the NIH. They are in charge of setting a lot of the ground rules that are being flagrantly disregarded here. There has been a big show of power from the executive branch at this point, but the legal scholars I'm talking to are certainly agreeing across the board. It's not appropriate. I think we are staring a true test of whether or not checks and balances is really operational in this country. I am just going to pray that science and the future of it is not one of the bits lost to the collateral damage here.

Brian Lehrer: We'll close with a little text from a fan of yours apparently. Listener writes, "Love Katherine Wu and follow her reporting. I work in the pharmaceutical industry. This halt in funding will slow drug development. This is going to impact health care for decades. Keep up your reporting, Katherine. Thank you for your coverage," writes that listener. I will echo it from me. Thank you for coming on.

Katherine Wu: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Katherine Wu, whose articles in The Atlantic recently include the one called The Erasing of American Science.

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