Science Vs - The War on Science

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

U.S. science is in turmoil. Amid agency firings and confusion over federal funding, researchers are freaking out. Many can’t do their work, and they have no idea what the future holds. Plus, we’re hearing that all of this could jeopardize medical treatments for people in the U.S. and all over the world. So, what exactly is going on? And how bad is it? We speak with Nature reporter Max Kozlov and Science magazine reporter Jocelyn Kaiser. Find our transcript here: bit.ly/ScienceVsWarOnScience  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Scientists are freaked out (02:40) The chaos on government science websites (11:28) Firings and research funding freezes (18:09) Flagging words like women, Black and Latinx in grants (22:20) USAID cuts and vaccine concerns (27:04) What could be the motivation for all this? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, Peter Leonard and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Lauren Silverman and Nimra Azmi. And thanks so much to all the scientists who shared their stories with us. We appreciate you. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. We are busily working on new episodes for our next season, which kicks off in March. We've got some awesome episodes coming up on ADHD and squirting. But before the fun games and waterworks, we just really wanted to update you on what was going on with science in the US right now. So Trump has said that he's trying to cut government spending. And last year, the US federal government deficit was $1.8 trillion. But still, scientists say that what is happening right now is unprecedented and insane.

They're telling us that it's scary. One person told us that they've been crying every day. And to be honest with you, while following this attack on science, I've been crying too. I mean, it's mostly just shocking. You just can't believe that this is happening. This is Jocelyn Kaiser, a reporter for Science Magazine. We talked about how in the past few weeks, thousands of federal websites have had information pulled from them.

Thousands of people at agencies like the CDC, National Institutes of Health and the EPA have been fired. Clinical trials, really important clinical trials have been halted. Funding for research was stopped and then possibly restarted. There's just a lot of confusion. Jocelyn has been a journalist for over 30 years.

And she told me that the changes she's seen since Trump became president are startling. You know, because we covered the first Trump administration and it was nothing like this. It is just like nobody, I mean, you know, it goes far beyond science, but it's like nothing anybody has ever seen in their lifetimes. And it's just, it's just bizarre. It's like, what is this world we're living in? I mean, it's censorship, it's not scientific, it's just complete crap. Headlines are screaming that Trump is waging an assault on science

that will make Americans dumber and sicker. So after the break, what is actually happening right now? And how bad is this? Welcome back today on the show, the Trump administration's so-called war on science. I talked about what was happening with Max Kozlov, who's a science journalist at Nature, focusing on biomedical research and US policy. And Nature, if you don't know, is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world. Max and the team at Nature have been tracking what's been going on since Trump became president very closely.

Now when describing basically what's happening to science in the US right now, I'm hearing academics use words like unprecedented, scary. How would you explain the current situation? I think those words would be absolutely accurate. I've heard harrowing tales of people getting fired. There have been grants frozen and then unfrozen and then re-frozen. So there's just a lot of confusion right now because the Trump administration has acted very quickly in putting out executive orders and directives. And at the same time, there have been a number of lawsuits. Those are still very much in process given that we're only weeks into the administration.

But because of that, there's been kind of this roller coaster of emotions because things have started, things have stopped. But what is very clear is the mass firings, the mass freezing of funds, the censoring of government websites, that is all unprecedented. And so let's talk about the government websites because in some cases, entire webpages have been taken down. So what is going on? This largely stems from a directive in Trump's first days in office that ordered certain terms related to gender ideology and woke terms and terms

related to diversity, equity, and inclusion to be deleted from any federal resources. And what has happened is they've taken a very liberal approach to scrubbing anything with these. Ironically, something liberal. What? I know, something liberal. What? I know. I know.

And so it's been very difficult to keep track because it's just been thousands and thousands of websites that all of a sudden link to an error page. It's really wild. So last week, as I was preparing for this episode, I just saw a bunch of pages on monkeypox prevention, HIV and transgender folks, health disparities among LGBTQ youth. They were all offline, but now they're back. Yeah, and I don't know if you noticed, they come with a certain disclaimer on them now, but the disclaimer is pretty wild. Yeah, do you wanna rate it out?

Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation and to women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities.

This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the administration and this department rejects it. That is, that is unbelievable. It's so Orwellian to just say that when in fact the biological reality is the exact opposite. Also on a website about monkeypox vaccines and prevention, this is insane. So I've covered a lot about the monkeypox outbreaks. People might remember in 2022 especially, this is a virus that swept the world.

It's a virus that has largely been endemic in parts of Africa, but now it caused a huge surge of infections all over the world, including in the United States. With all of this data coming down, not only are entire datasets missing, but also certain classifiers, certain categories of data. For example, data about sexual orientation.

And part of the reason that we were able to stop the monkeypox outbreak so quickly in the United States is because we had very detailed data on precisely who was getting infected and which communities it was infecting. We knew quite quickly that it was really the population of men who have sex with men who are at higher risk and especially those who are HIV positive.

And so because of that knowledge, we were able to redirect resources, vaccines, treatments, education materials to those communities. And if you look, you can look up a chart of the infections in the United States of monkeypox in 2022, and you'll see there's this big curve up and then almost immediately a steep decline down. And with this data getting fragmented and deleted now,

it's basically shooting ourselves in the foot for being able to stop future outbreaks is what I'm hearing from public health officials and researchers. And is data actually being erased or it's just the websites are being just the websites don't work anymore? So my colleagues at Nature have reported that there are scientists who are banding together online to try to download entire websites, try to download these datasets before they go down and in some cases trying to access archived versions of the websites so they

can save the databases. They have terabytes and terabytes of data because these are such an important and incredibly useful resource for epidemiologists who monitor things like weekly flu infections to see if there is an uptick in cases or monitoring the latest with what's happening with H5N1 right now to make sure that that doesn't become a full-blown pandemic. Right. Because some of these datasets use these supposed diversity and inclusion words, like tracking the sexuality of individuals, the gender, the race, they're worried that they're going to get scrubbed. Is that right? Yes, exactly. Even in some cases, anything with the word race or ethnicity, and in a

way that a lot of researchers say this is actually extremely inefficient. And it's a huge waste of resources for all these federal employees to be spending time just combing through website by website, data set by data set to see if it matches any of the key words that the administration is looking for. Climate change has also been hit really hard by this. We're seeing the Department of State had a climate change section on their website. It's gone. The White House website climate change page is no longer existing.

Max, so speaking of, you know, you've mentioned these kind of forbidden words, these words that are no longer allowed to be on websites. The CDC told its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript that's been considered by a scientific journal to ensure that those manuscripts do not use these terms and just to be explicit the terms are things like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBTQ, transsexual, non-binary, assigned male or female at birth. Why is the CDC, this is a memo coming from the CDC,

why is that organization capitulating to this? Yeah, I mean, the CDC is a federal agency and it has to listen to federal directives. So that's why you're seeing what you're seeing right now. And I don't think that the researchers at CDC are thrilled with this for the most part. I think a lot of this has been very demoralizing for researchers there who have spent years

getting the funding to do this research, to do the research itself, to write up the paper and then to be told in the final moments as the paper will be live in mere weeks that they can't publish it because it might use one of these words. I think that's extremely demoralizing. I think there's a really a culture of fear that if they don't listen to these directives,

they will be fired. And I think it's a difficult decision because so many people at CDC understand how important their jobs are, how many lives of Americans and people around the world depend on what they do. So it's a tough gamble because if you decide to disobey,

not only is your paper still might not be published, but then you also might be out of a job. Then speaking of job losses, there has been quite a few firings going on just recently. What's going on? Who's been targeted here when it comes to science? Yes. Thousands and thousands across agencies like CDC, NIH, you name it, have been terminated. And some actually were terminated. And I think they realized that their jobs were so important that they've tried to reinstate

them in some cases. I know that a lot of these agencies, I've talked to people who have tried to argue that, you know, we can't fire these people because they're working on trying to stop H5N1 from becoming a pandemic. But a lot of those exemption requests have gone unanswered or gotten denied. So a lot of people getting fired at the NIH and CDC. There's also been a lot of confusion around funding for research, talking research for cancer drugs, heart medication, new scientific discoveries. What is going on with the funding? I was speaking to an academic who said at one point they got an email from their university saying,

stop all research now, and then soon after, no, no, no, you can keep doing your research. So are scientists still getting money for their research? Yeah, you ask a great question because, like I said, it's been a roller coaster. So pretty early on in the Trump administration, they tried to issue a funding freeze on all federal grants and foreign aid. And, you know, it was such an enormous directive that, you know, everybody was like, what do you mean? It's especially confusing because in the United States, Congress controls money, controls appropriations. They have the what's called the power of the purse. So we're talking about funds that have already been set aside to say, yes, this is going

to the NIH for them to spend money on clinical trials, to spend money on research. And that's why courts in the United States issued a restraining order, a pause on the pause. You can see how this gets very confusing. Yes. So- It's restraining the pause. You can see how this gets very confusing. Yes. So... Restraining the restraint. I hate a double negative, but in this case... I know. I don't envy people who cover the courts. So technically, any funds, any grants that have already been given out, they should be going to the universities, the institutions,

to the researchers again. Is that happening in all cases? Not really. And that's why a federal judge last week was pretty scathing in his remarks and said, look, the Trump administration needs to start funding again, because I was pretty clear in that I issued a pause on the pause, so funding should be going out. But importantly, at the NIH, they have a very rigorous way of deciding which grants to fund. Basically, two separate panels of scientists have to say, yes, this is important research that we should fund. And all of that has been gummed up.

Virtually none of those advisory council meetings where grants are kind of given the stamp of approval to say, yes, let's fund this research have been happening. I mean, it's a slightly more boring thing, but essentially anytime they want- But it's this boring stuff. That is how the administration does its work. There's a lot of, I remember the last time Trump was in power, there was a lot of stuff that hit the news cycle that was really flashy, but a lot of the damage that was done around immigration and things like that, it was in these really boring things that don't hit the news cycle. So I want you to tell me the boring ways that Trump is stopping science.

Yeah, well, let me tell you, I have a lot to tell you then. So basically, there's this whole process. Anytime the government wants to hold a meeting, even if it's a meeting that's not open to the public, they have to basically post a notice to the federal register, basically saying to everybody, we're going to have a meeting, we're going to talk about grants, and at NIH, those federal register notices are not allowed to be posted right now. This is how it ha- that's right, these incredibly mundane ways that therefore, as a direct consequence, researchers cannot get money to do their science.

Because instead of saying, we're freezing funding, which they tried, and that didn't work now, the strategy is, don't let them do a boring post. Yeah. And, you know, it's one thing for these meetings not happen for a week or two weeks, but now that we're getting near the one month mark, and then the longer that this happens, the longer that researchers who submitted grants months ago wait to see if their projects even get funded. And this has huge implications, right? I mean, there was this study that came out a few years ago about NIH funding showing

that every new drug approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019, with every new drug, the NIH played some role in researching that drug. And so that's new drugs that people listening would have taken. And so now, if this funding gets severely cut, I mean, the expectation is that we will have fewer drugs on the market, at least as quickly as we would have otherwise, right? Yes, exactly.

And I was talking with the former NIH director, Harold Varmus today, and he was wondering why industry, why pharma, why biotech hasn't been screaming, saying these changes are really bad because they're going to hurt industry, they're going to hurt the economy, because they're going to hurt industry, they're going to hurt the economy, and they're going to hurt people, ultimately. Again, this culture of fear is very real. Nobody wants to draw a target to their back because they're worried that the administration, they've shown that they're interested in retribution, that they might be targeted next. After the break, why you shouldn't write a grant with the word women in it anymore. Plus, why the Trump administration might be going after science. Welcome back. Today on the show, we're talking about the state of science in the US, and

it is not looking good. I'm chatting with Max Kozlov, reporter for Nature. So Professor Darby Saxby at the University of Southern California received this list of words from a colleague. And the colleague received funding from the National Science Foundation and received this list directly from the National Science Foundation that basically implies that if you use these particular words, it can automatically cause a grant to be flagged, maybe pulled. And this list includes words like women, female, activism, black and Latinx, even systemic, trauma, biased. So no more talking about blunt force trauma or statistical bias, let alone talking about research into women or black and Latinx folks.

So what is going on with this list? What do we know? Basically, NSF staff are going through all of the existing grants and looking for examples of these words being used. They're scouring tens of thousands of grants, and it's still unclear exactly what they want to do with them. Proposed actions were either modifying the grants so that these words are removed, or potentially in some cases, maybe if they have many of these different flags archiving or

removing the funding altogether. It's still unclear, but just to say that even while that is happening, while the lawsuit keeps going on, the NSF staff are still kind of combing through the grants in preparation for the next step for whatever it is on this crusade to get rid of gender ideology terms. But I also want to push back on the idea, like you mentioned, that these are in some way promoting what they call woke gender ideology. You know, I talked with a researcher who works on women's health issues, and she was very frustrated that women's health was being equated with gender ideology, because it is not gender ideology to study things like endometriosis or menstruation.

And that was already, it was a huge hurdle to get funding for those kinds of projects in previous administrations, let alone now. And we're talking again about the lives of millions and billions of women around the world here. Yeah, it's all part of the same package. It's all part of the anti-science agenda, whatever you want to call it. This list is out of control. To call it, to try to pretend that this list is about gender ideology, racial ideology. I mean, it's really just a list that makes many branches of science difficult to function.

Yeah. And that's exactly what I've been hearing. I've been hearing from just so many post-docs who are like, shoot, I used one of these words in my grant application, they don't know what's next for them. Um, and in some cases that they had their, their funding pulled in this whole roller coaster. So just everybody just has no idea what's coming next. What is great though, is that people with vaginas is still allowed.

I know. Just putting that out there, which, which actually might be more accurate to what some of the people are researching. So yeah, yeah. People with vag, still okay, apparently, for now. For now. For now. And by the way, we did reach out to the NSF, the National Science Foundation, and they wrote back saying, quote, NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs, and activities

to be compliant with the existing executive orders." And then they sent us to their website on these orders. Now, Max, USAID has been hit really hard. What are the public health implications of what's going on here? Yeah, hit hard is an understatement. I mean, it's a whole scale dismantling is what it looks like. I mean, just again, there is litigation pending there as well. But even still, we're talking about thousands of employees being put on administrative leave

around the world. And USAID is important for so many reasons. So for example, USAID leads the President's Malaria Initiative. It's a program that funds malaria prevention and research. And that program has also seen funding dry up as a result of all this. Wow, it's called the President's Malaria. Clearly not this president. Yeah. Valeria, clearly not this president. Yeah, I mean, and and this program and PEPFAR, which is a big one that that

funds HIV research and prevention. Those were started by Republican President George W. Bush, and it's frequently cited as one of the most impactful global health initiatives in the world. And to see it dismantled in this way, I think has been gut-wrenching to so many researchers. USAID funds a lot of clinical trials around the world. Because of the dismantling of USAID, participants were just left absolutely hanging in the middle of a clinical trial.

Some people on experimental drugs, experimental treatments, and all of a sudden just abandoned. And what this does is it sows distrust of both science and in general the United States. It's harrowing to hear stories like that. Absolutely. And so the US aid was on a 90-day freeze, but has it actually just been shut down? It's still unclear what will become of USAID. Again, there's litigation pending, but it's

not a mystery what the Trump administration is trying to do with USAID. I believe Elon Musk tweeted that it's time to get rid of it. Trump has supported this call. And you don't just try to gut an entire agency if you were trying to reform it, you're trying to burn it to the ground. And now that RFK Jr. has been confirmed as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, you know, this is someone who's rejected the science on vaccines among many other things. What are you most worried about? RFK Jr. has frequently said that he's not an anti-vaxxer,

that he doesn't want to take away vaccines from everybody. But his actions, his entire career would say the opposite. He has worked for an organization that has tried to remove vaccines from the childhood vaccine schedule. A lot of people are worried that RFK Junior has a tremendous amount of power. One of the important things that come with the responsibility is overseeing a key scientific advisory committee called ACIP that makes recommendations as to what should be on the

childhood vaccine schedule, what the flu vaccine composition looks like, the COVID vaccine composition, all of it. The secretary is able to pick who's on that committee. The secretary is able to remove people from that committee. They have a tremendous amount of influence on that committee, the secretary is able to remove people from that committee. They have a tremendous amount of influence on that committee of scientists, and he can easily stack it with people who are more favorable to his opinions about vaccines. So, and in addition to that, he also oversees what's called the Vaccines for Children program. This is a program that provides vaccines to children whose parents might not be able to afford them.

It's a large part of the reason that we're able to achieve herd immunity, to achieve nationwide coverage for diseases like measles that we're now seeing resurgence of. Anything that undermines this program, even if it's just casting fear or casting doubt about vaccines can make a huge difference in how likely it is that there is a measles outbreak. We're hearing about parents in the US

downloading the vaccine schedules for their kids now because they're worried about that information being wiped and changing. Do you think that's an overreaction? If you ask me on January 19th before this administration started whether they would be taking down thousands of websites relating to a whole slew of random words, I would have said you're crazy. So I don't think that's an overreaction. Why do you think the Trump administration is going after science in this way? Is this all just about saving money?

I think that's a great question. I think that saving money is one saving money is the most logical thing I can think of, but this fundamental research pays dividends in a big way in industry, in drugs that are brought to market. It's absolutely essential to the pharmaceutical industry for this research to be going on. I think people have all kinds of criticisms about how the NIH could be reformed, how we could be more effectively spending our research money. But what we've seen here is not what they would consider a good faith effort to try to reform the system. This is a dismantling of the system. You don't just stop funding projects, gum up the entire funding process

if you're trying to reform it. I think you could, some people have attributed it to retribution. I think the NIH caught a lot of black after the COVID-19 pandemic by Trump and his allies. So it could be something along those lines. Wow. They're still pissed about masks. Is that what's going on here? I've still yet to see kind of a full-scale explanation for what's going on.

It feels like a war on science, if we call it that, makes sense because science is how we understand the world and how we can tell facts from misinformation, from lies. And so if you have an administration that just wants to say whatever it says, whatever fits its agenda, whether it's facts or not, science would get in the way of that. Yeah, I think that that's one interpretation of this all. And I think that people are really struggling to make sense of it. I think that's what hurts so much.

I think my last question is, do you, when I talk to academics about this, I think depending on their optimism, they either see this as sort of a bit like Trump's negotiation tactics with the tariffs, make it really bad to begin with, then you sidle somewhere in between and it's maybe not so bad, there's some victims along the way, science survives having lost an arm or two. But then others tell me they think the war on science is here to stay for the next four years at least, and this is only going downhill. What do you think? The changes that have already been made in three weeks will have lasting implications.

And so it seems to me that it's not just a threat of tariffs here. You know, I talked with researchers who were optimistic or who were willing to give this administration a chance. And I think that in just a few short weeks, that optimism has quickly soured once they realized just the tenor and the vitriol of some of the administration's actions. Who knows what will come after, but that is kind of the reaction I've been hearing so far. You got any good jokes? Oh man, good jokes. I need a good one, my God.

It's, you know, I live in Washington, DC and it's been particularly difficult. I know it's kind of, you know, maybe folks don't care about the bureaucrats in Washington, DC, but this is a whole scale dismantling of the scientific research enterprise. And I think that people in whether you're in a blue state, a red state, or you're living in another country, I think it'll be felt around the world, the impacts here. You asked about a funny joke though.

My God, I've just been relying on my plants to give me some peace and levity in these trying, trying times. They're trying their hardest, but you know. I love you so much. There's only so much they can do. That's right. Yeah. Thanks so much, Max.

Thanks for your time and your work. Yeah, of course. Thank you. That was Max Kozlov, reporter at Nature. We reached out to the White House, the Health and Human Services Department, the NIH, and the CDC for comment. But we didn't hear back by the time we published this episode. And Science Versus will be back in your ears in March.

And we'll be using a lot of those forbidden words, I promise. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. back to you next time.