The Trump administration has taken an axe to federal agencies, including the massive National Institutes of Health, which announced it would sharply reduce the size of its grants. The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, with an annual budget of nearly $48 billion. Most of that money is given to universities, medical schools, and research institutions. These cuts and policy changes are leaving scientists scrambling to figure out whether they can continue their work.
Carrie Bearden, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA, leads a lab focused on risk factors for serious mental illnesses, particularly psychotic disorders like schizophrenia that begin in adolescence. Their clinical research program follows young people who are experiencing early symptoms of schizophrenia, and so far they’ve found that earlier intervention is linked with better possible outcomes. They aim to follow their subjects long-term to see which treatments could be most effective.
About 80% of their funding currently comes from the NIH, she says, and they haven’t been told specifically that they’ll lose the money, but there’s constant uncertainty and they’re waiting day-to-day to see what will happen.
Carolyn Johnson, a science reporter for The Washington Post, says that same uncertainty and anxiety is nearly ubiquitous among scientists she’s heard from. “Even people who are fortunate enough not to have grants currently being canceled don't know how they can plan the next year, the next five years. And science requires really long timelines,” she notes.
Among those who’ve had their grants pulled, what were the reasons? Johnson says some of them support research into gender identity issues, and President Trump’s recent executive order stopped those kinds of activities. Others focus on boosting vaccine intake. And Columbia University lost many grants because it’s in a back-and-forth with the administration over antisemitism.
Johnson explains that a few weeks ago, the U.S. suddenly wanted to change its longstanding policy of science research funding. “It's a pretty arcane issue, but it's really how universities and academic medical centers are able to run huge research programs. And that is that the federal government pays for the direct costs of scientific research and also their so-called indirect costs, which are overhead, facilities, and administrative costs. But overnight there was a notice saying that those costs would be capped at 15%, and right now they're over 50% at lots of places.”
However, a federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked those cuts from being carried out — for now.
Bearden clarifies that indirect costs include electricity in the buildings, bathroom sanitation, and safe management of hazardous waste. Those things are actually essential to the research, she says, and if withdrawn, the university would lose hundreds of millions of dollars and staff would have to be laid off.
Johnson adds that scientists are particularly worried about young trainees in this situation. “The whole idea that graduate students and postdocs who are just at this very starting-out point of their career, when they should be thinking, kind of being the most ambitious … the rug is being pulled out from under them. I think that's a major worry that people have, that there will be a lost generation of scientists.”
Bearden says her lab includes 15 staff research associates who want to attend graduate school or medical school, along with graduate students and post-docs, who are all incredibly stressed about their futures.
“I should mention: Science is a really fragile ecosystem,” Bearden adds. “So even these really short-term disruptions are really undermining the infrastructure, the teams, the projects. … And the thing that really is so devastating to me is that these are young people who really, really care so deeply about what they're doing. … So to just be told summarily that their work is not important, or just to see their colleagues’ … grants terminated just arbitrarily, just the callous disregard for people who have really dedicated their lives to this work — is really devastating.”
Scientific knowledge is not only for elites either, despite the Trump administration’s narrative about it, Bearden points out, and instead, it’s a public good.
She says scientists are coming together, holding rallies nationwide, including in DC and LA. “It was really incredible just to see the energy and the spirit. … The hope is that people recognize that this is hurting everybody.”