Addendum, Wednesday Feb 5
Regrettably, I have to extend this post due to even more news. The assault on scientific funding and agencies continues, for one thing. Since I posted this, Elon Musk's team has entered the offices of NOAA, since their remit of weather forecasting and climate science has made them a target for the sort of people who believe that any talk of climate change is some sort of liberal plot. Granting opportunities having anything to do with diversity have disappeared from NIH sites, and I have seen reports that the option to request grant extensions has disappeared. There are reports of Musk staffers on the CDC campus today, and yesterday an NSF official said at an internal meeting that the agency is apparently planning to lay off up to half its staff over the next two months.
This is all having exactly the results you would expect in the scientific community: fear and disruption, which I'm afraid are two of the goals from the start. My prediction that what is being done to the NIH, NSF et al. was just a preview of what the new administration intends to do to the rest of the government appears to be accurate. The Office of Personnel Management, following up on its bizarre "Fork in the Road" memo, is telling Federal employees that they are in danger of missing a "once in a lifetime chance" to leave their jobs, which is clearly an effort to panic people into leaving. Agents and staff at the FBI are under attack by the administration is what is clearly retaliation for investigations of the January 6, 2020 insurrection, and the CIA has apparently sent a buyout offer to its entire workforce in what looks like an attempt to gut the agency. And the entire Department of Education is said to be targeted for attempted abolishment by Executive Order. That's just as of this morning. There will be more. Elon Musk has said recently that his goal is to have no regulations at all - they'll just put some back in if any turned out to be useful after all. I think that's bullshit from him, and that he's mostly looking to terrify people while he gets rid of the rules that he finds inconvenient to his businesses or personally annoying. But that's more than bad enough, and has nothing to do with how we supposedly run this country.
Almost all of these actions are illegal, and many are actually unconstitutional. The administration is obviously daring someone to try to stop them, and as mentioned in Part Six below, right now that's the Federal Judiciary. The Republican majority in the Senate and the much slimmer one in the House have signaled that they (so far) are completely uninterested in doing anything about all this - whatever Trump wants, they're in favor of. This seems to be due to a mixture of outright agreement, criminal indifference, fear of losing their positions, and (let's be frank) fear of actual physical violence from the kinds of supporters that Trump attracts. It's not exactly what James Madison had in mind.
We are getting very close to a moment when a judge issues an injunction and the Trump/Musk people just wave it off and keep doing what they're doing, a "Yeah, now enforce it, make us stop" crisis that could quickly shred what remains of constitutional order. I realize that I sound like an paranoid fool, but I see no other conclusion to be drawn. We have to support the rule of law with our voices and actions, loudly and consistently. The re-election of Donald Trump now looks like it could be the worst act of American self-destruction since the Civil War: don't roll over and just let it happen.
Now to Tuesday's post below, as written yesterday:
Intro:
This is a long post, and it just keeps getting longer although I keep removing curse words. If you only have time for some of it, see Part Two and Part Six.
It's become apparent that the Trump Administration is trying to make major changes to the way that the scientific funding agencies of the US government operate. That's about as neutrally as I can put it: my own opinion is that said changes (as they appear at the moment) are an outrage, a vindictive ideological assault on agencies that (for all their flaws) have helped produce major scientific advances in more fields than I can name. But let's go into the details so you can see why I think that way.
I have to say up front that I've been working on (and reworking) this post for the last few days as I get more information. At first it looked like the NIH, NSF, CDC et al. were being singled out for special treatment, and I devoted some thought about why that might be. There is no shortage of plausible (albeit shameful) explanations, but recent events argue that the entire federal government is in line for the same sort of contemptuous working-over, at least if the administration gets its way. I'll concentrate on the agencies named above, though, since they are closest to the usual subject matter of this site and because what's happening to them may well be a preview of what Trump and his people would like to see happen over and over.
Part One: The Organizations As They Now Exist
The first thing to do is sketch out how things are (or have been?) organized. The NIH (the primary player in the biomedical fields) is inside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and is made up of 27 different institutes and research centers, many of which (such as the National Cancer Institute) are famous in their own right. There are layers involved - for example, all of us in the biomedical field make use of PubMed, the searchable literature database that attempts to cover a huge swath of the open scientific literature in medicine, biology, chemistry, and related fields. PubMed is part of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which also includes the GenBank database, and the NCBI itself is part of the National Library of Medicine which is one of those 27 branches and is the largest collection of its type in the world. Many of the institutes are disease-area-focused (the NCI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and so on). In addition, the NIH helps oversee ARPA-H, the recently created Advanced Research Projects for Health, which is itself another agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services. All of them disperse grant money for extramural research, and they also have smaller budgets for intramural research which is carried out in the NIH's own lab facilities.
The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is yet another agency under the HHS umbrella, while the NSF (National Science Foundation) is an independent agency (although not cabinet level) that handles nonmedical scientific research, although it should be noted that there are other outlays in those nonmedical science areas from the Department of Energy and others.
There's a lot of money involved, but as with all government spending it helps to put these things in perspective. If you look at the entire HHS budget, ($1.7 trillion in outlays), 50% of that is Medicare, 33% of it is Medicaid, and other assistance programs take up another 8%. Thus only 9% of the 1.7 HHS budget (about 153 billion) go towards all discretionary outlays, and of that the NIH spends $46 billion and the CDC spends $13.5 billion. The entire NSF had outlays of about $9 billion. The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the details).
And to put those into perspective, the largest single oulay for the Federal government is Social Security benefits ($1.4 trillion by themselves), with interest on the national debt coming in second at $949 billion, Medicare comes in third at $870 billion, and the Department of Defense fourth at $826 billion and Medicaid next at $618 billion. NIH and NSF money are buried deep in the "other" category when you look at things at that level. As does foreign aid, I should note as another comparator: USAID had outlays of about $35 billion in FY2024, not that you can get that from their web site, which is completely down at the moment thanks to a bunch of activity over the weekend that looks prima facie illegal if not downright unconstitutional. We will leave "immoral" and "inhumane" out there for thought as well. It should be mentioned at this point that these real numbers are not what most members of the general public would guess: the amounts spent on foreign aid, for example, are often wildly overestimated. And although reducing overall spending is fairly popular (although not overwhelmingly so) the details of just where you would cut tend to get hazy very quickly.
Part Two: What's Been Happening
Well, as anyone who's been reading the headlines knows, there has been a ridiculous amount of turmoil. On Monday, January 27th the Office of Management and Budget put out a memo freezing all government grants, loans, and other forms of financial assistance (first reported by Marisa Kabas). This was, well, unexpected - never before had anyone attempted to hit the brakes in that manner, and all sorts of confusion ensued. What grants did this cover (existing ones in progress, new ones, or?) and was this pause supposed to take place immediately (and if so, how?), and if it was indeed supposed to be immediate, what the hell was supposed to happen to people? With NIH and NSF grants, you had labs who were already depending on these funds to run their research and pay their staff members: how were these facilities and these people supposed to survive? It appears that many people in the Trump administration had no idea of the answers to these questions, and had not even seen the memo before it was sent.
Meanwhile, other directives had already gone out telling everyone in these agencies to cease all public communications. We're not just talking blog posts here, either: the CDC's widely read MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) has ceased to appear for the first time in decades - a widely used public health tool yanked for no good reason that anyone has been able to explain. The NIH was told to suspend all meetings until further notice, which included grant review study sessions and advisory committee meetings. Similar freezes went into effect at the NSF, throwing the complex timetable of grant initiations and renewals into unprecedented chaos.
Last Wednesday the 29th, a terse memo went out rescinding the grant-freeze orders, though. But the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately undermined whatever effect that had by saying on Elon Musk's X platform that "This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo", whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. A multi-state lawsuit had already been filed in federal court by the relevant Attorneys General, and Leavitt's statement was enough for the judge to allow it to proceed anyway on Wednesday afternoon. On Friday, January 31, the judge issued a restraining order blocking the funding freeze until the plaintiffs filed for a formal injunction and the judge ruled on that in turn. That has now taken place, and Judge Loren Alikhan issued a sweeping order on Monday to stop the funding freezes and any further attempts to implement them while proceedings continue.
But that's not all. It's also become apparent that these agencies (and many others) are being targeted particularly regarding any programs directed towards women or minorities. There has been a government-wide purge going on of references to any sorts of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) criteria, and indeed, various elected and unelected officials have for some time now been using "DEI" as a scapegoat term and apparently a shorter way of casting suspicion on anything that is not being run by some white guy. As a white guy myself, I find this phenomenally offensive, and I can't even imagine how I'd be feeling about it as a direct target of this garbage. Later on Monday it was reported by Darby Saxbe at USC that the new NSF administrators are working from a long list of words and phrases (things like “underrepresented”, “socioeconomic”, or “community”) that will cause grants (including existing ones) to face further review.
Meanwhile, large chunks of websites from the CDC and others that relate to women's health and the like have been disappearing all weekend, and it appears that an even larger purge is underway of all public-facing CDC databases. Fortunately, it appears that archives are available, and that link reminds me to urge people to give money to the Internet Archive people and to Wikipedia as well if you can, because independent sources of information do not seem to be popular right now with some of the people in power. As for me, I'm using my employer's offer of matching funds for such donations, and you should look into that as well if it's available to you.
Part Three: On the Inside
I've been hearing from several sources about what this looks like from inside the agencies, and as you'd imagine, it's a mess. No one at the NIH, NSF, etc. has ever had to go through something like this before - there's no one to ask about what happened last time and no rulebook to follow. There are disruptions in all parts of these organizations - the extramural research offices funding outside grants at universities have of course been directly targeted by the freeze order, and the intramural research labs are under pressure as well. You'll get a feel for that when you see the timeline for everyone inside the NIH, which went something like this:
First, All travel canceled until at least the end of April. The the no-public-communications order went out. Next the websites and pages with any mention of diversity programs started to go down, and at this time everyone got a memo urging them to report any attempts to disguise such programs (!) The Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) then asked for a list of all employees who could be dismissed without any civil service protections (probationary employees), and around that time all funding and internal spending was frozen. All federal agencies were by this point asked to suspend any work involving the World Health Organization and other global health initiatives. Then the Acting NIH Director was replaced, and the new Acting Director (Matthew Memoli) sent out a memo that caused even more confusion. It directed people (among other things) not to initiate any new studies after January 20th (Inauguration Day). This was such a disaster that another memo had to go out within a few days trying to clarify (and perhaps walk back) many of its points (see below).
Then came the halt of any new publications along with a ban on using preprint servers, along with the OMB freeze on grants mentioned above (and which has for the moment been rolled back, as already detailed). But right after this, most of the Federal workforce (very much including HHS employees, NIH and CDC therein, as well as NSF) got the now-infamous "Fork in the Road" memo. This basically urged everyone to resign if at all possible, complete with bizarre statements about how perhaps it was time to take a "dream vacation" and how much more productive everyone would be in the private sector. It also contained what can only be interpreted as not-so-veiled threats about instituting "Performance Culture", re-organizations, layoffs, stripping of civil service employment protections, and investigations into individual conduct. The similarities in tone and content to Elon Musk's purges after taking over Twitter have not gone unnoticed.
The second Memoli memo at least made clear that people could order lab supplies if these were related to human safety or human or animal health care, and that travel for such work could also continue. Everything contracted before January 20th could proceed, but the NIH's intramural researchers were still restricted from starting any new studies not planned before that date. Supposedly the study section meetings are resuming starting this week as well, but I will wait to see if that's actually happening (there were reports late on Monday that they are resuming). God knows the disruption in those so far has been enough. This is of course not the way to run a healthy research organization.
And neither are the directives that have come down in the last few days. It has been reported from several sources (starting with Jeremy Faust at Inside Medicine) that CDC scientists have been ordered to retract any manuscripts that are in the process of publication that mentions topics or even phrases such as gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, assigned male/female at birth, or biologically male/female. This goes for manuscripts that have been submitted, and also for ones that have been accepted but not yet formally published - all of these are to pulled back and edited. I would assume that a similar policy is going to be extended to all of the NIH, but the CDC is where it has first shown up. And obviously new manuscripts (and new research) that might mention one of these newly forbidden terms would not seem to be welcome.
Part Four: What Comes Next?
That's a hell of a question, isn't it? We've already blown past so many norms of behavior (and past a number of outright laws and provisions of the Constitution) that guessing what might come down the chute tomorrow is difficult. The things that have already been said are terrible enough, but there are a lot of things that haven't been said, either. Are the study sessions for grants going to resume as before, and if so, when? Is intramural research in the various NIH branches going to be targeted under the banner of cutting costs? What other subjects are going to be struck off as Unacceptable Topics?
As it stands now, scientists in these organization who are from outside the US have to be wondering about their futures: can they leave, how soon could it be arranged, where would they go? And as mentioned above, those people in the probationary category (who do not have civil service protections against being fired outright) are in an awful bind. They got the same memo as everyone else that makes it sound as if the new management would be happy if everyone just left. From what I'm told, the great majority of NIH staffers (probationary or not) are working on their CVs (or asking themselves why they aren't) and trying to find somewhere to land should things get worse.
This would be a drain of expertise and experience that would take many years to get over. It's not just the scientists in the labs (although God knows that's bad enough). The people who organize the study sessions and handle the entire extramural grant application and award process have skills that have been built up over many years, for example. And if the NIH granting apparatus is "paused" for as little as two months, things will indeed begin to fall apart as the effects roll down to the universities and research groups involved, disrupting the entire biomedical academic research structure across the country.
I’ve spoken to academic researchers who are on the receiving end of these grants, and naturally enough they’re very worried. On Monday the main electronic portal for these things (eRA Commons) was down for several hours, and people were worried about when and if it might actually come back up. That statement would have sounded ridiculous a few weeks ago, but as Sarah Hengel at Tufts put it, “I never thought anything like this would happen in my lifetime”. It’s important to realize that NIH grant funds are not just paying for reagents and supplies; they’re paying salaries. Graduate students, for example, are already partway through their multiyear PhD programs, working in the lab with stipends paid out of these grants: what do they do if things stay “frozen”? The professors involved (like Prof. Hengel) feel as if these young researchers, ones that they’ve taken on with an implicit promise to mentor them towards their degrees and to develop them as scientists, are being hung out to dry. Everyone involved is being jerked around, and for what?
Thinking about that sort of senseless disruption brings us to a big question.
Part Five: Why is All This Happening?
Some of it is the "starve the beast" philosophy that many of Trump's team have. This is amply laid out in the Project 2025 documents, and let me say right here that I was volcanically pissed off at the way that topic was handled during the campaign. The provisions in that large and not always cohesive set of plans for a new administration proved terribly unpopular as they began to be publicized, causing the Trump campaign (and Trump himself) to disavow them. Not us, never heard of them, etc. And many large news organizations let them get away with it. "Oh well, false alarm, he says it's not his plan, so what else is going on?" Of course, in reality, many of the Project 2025 authors worked in the first Trump administration, had never left that ecosystem, had been praised by Trump himself over the years for their great work, and many of them now have positions in the government to do exactly what it said they were going to do all along.
And one of those things is to dismantle as much of the Federal government as possible. They regard it as a tax-sucking parasite on the Real America, a Deep State of faceless government workers who are hostile to Trumpian ideas and methods and will just try to obstruct the new administration at every turn if they aren't dealt with. And what we're seeing at the NIH and NSF is Dealing With Them, in real time: whacking the organizations hard to terrify everyone involved and making it clear that they are not wanted and should leave. Robert F. Kennedy, the catastrophically awful nominee for HHS Secretary, open told everyone at the NIH to "pack your bags" before the election, and here you see that philosophy in action.
Past that dislike of the government in general, there's a specific animus towards the NIH and its branches like the CDC after the coronavirus pandemic. That’s a gigantic can of worms that I don’t have the energy to open at the moment, but past that, there is a broader hatred of education and expertise of all kinds. I hate to bring that one up, because it makes me sound like a crank, but there really is a strain of Trumpism that is nothing more than a desire for revenge against snooty over-educated elites who try to tell people what they should do based on their so-called "research." So if by pummelling the NIH and NSF you can simultaneously punch some huge bureaucracies in the face, revenge yourself against your imagined pandemic enemies, and cause distress at a bunch of big universities where they mostly hate you anyway, well. . .what's not to like?
Part Six: What Is To Be Done?
I don't want to end there, because I don't want to make it look like there's nothing to do but roll over. Never do that. You've already seen the judiciary at work here (the restraining order on the funding freeze, with injunctive relief being debate even as I write this blog post). And this is all part of a broader fight that the Trump administration wants to have over impoundment of funds, the idea that the executive branch (specifically, the President) can override Congressional spending allocations simply by refusing to release the money. The Nixon administration already tried this and was slapped down by the Supreme Court, and specific legislation has already addressed this idea to emphasize its illegality.
The Trump administration has a "Unitary Executive" theory that they love, though, which basically sees the President as the unassailable monarch of the Executive Branch of government and the Executive Branch itself as supreme over Congress and the Judiciary. It is difficult-to-impossible to find any support for this in the law, but I said that about the issue of presidential immunity, too, and look what the Roberts court made of that. But the idea that the President gets to withhold funds at will is (from a legal standpoint) even crazier than that, so we will see. And we certainly will: all this Mighty Executive Power stuff is heading relentlessly to the Supreme Court.
There's much more going on that is even more flagrantly lawless, such as the over-the-weekend gutting of USAID by Elon Musk and a few guys barely old enough to grow mustaches. One big answer for now is the courts. Sue, sue constantly, ask for injunctive relief to grind all this bullshit to a halt whenever possible, and then sue some more. Another answer is Congressional oversight. I strongly urge everyone to make their voices heard with their Senators and Representatives about these issues: the Republican ones need to hear that not everyone agrees with this stuff, and the Democratic ones need to hear that their constituents are not in a handshaking bipartisan mood. Point out to them that their own constituents are being hurt by this attack on research funding, and that universities in their own states are going to be hit hard. Keep in mind that much of the general public hasn’t heard about any of this, and they should. We are in a Constitutional crisis whether we like it or not, the worst of my own lifetime by far, and the more voices that are raised against it all, the better. That's what we can do for now. If it gets worse, it gets worse, and we'll revisit the topic, God help us.
But most of all, don't give in to cynicism or apathy. That's what the people promulgating these horrible policies want - a bored, indifferent public who figures that who cares, nothing matters any more, it's gonna happen no matter what. But it doesn't have to. Never forget that: it doesn't have to happen.