Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and Jealousening to Science Verses.
We are Dazzling 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 border works, 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 U .S.
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.
It's mostly just shocking.
It just can't believe that this is happening.
This is Jostling 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.
Joslyn 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 does this world or 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 science that will make Americans dumber and sicker.
So after the break, what is actually happening right now and how bad is this?
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Welcome back to day on the show, the Trump administration's so -called War on Science.
I talked about what was happening with Max Coslove, who's a science journalist at nature, focusing on biomedical research and U .S.
policy. And nature, if you don't know, is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world.
Max and the team and 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, you know, 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 firing the mass freezing of funds, the censoring of government websites that 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 I'm not likely 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, just sort of a bunch of pages on Monkey Pocks, 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 want to, you want to read it out?
Any information on this page promoting gender ideologies 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 unbelievable.
It's so, it's so Orwellian, to just say that, when in fact, the biological realities is the exact opposite.
Also on our 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.
And 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.
And with all this data coming down, not only are entire data sets 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 monkey pox 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 were at higher risk and especially those who 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 Monkey box in 2022, and you'll see, there's this big curve up and then almost immediately a big, 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 being just the websites don't work anymore.
So my colleagues at Nature have reported that there are scientists who are bending 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 like terabytes and terabytes of data because these are such an important and incredibly useful resource for epidemiologists who monitor things like weekly fluent infections to see if there's an uptick in cases or monitoring the latest with what's happening with each five and one right.
Now, to make sure that that doesn't become, uh, full -blown pandemic.
Right. And because some of these data sets use these, it's supposed, uh, diversity and inclusion words, like tracking the sexuality of individuals, the gender, the race.
They're worried that they're going to get scribed.
Is that right? Yes.
Exactly. Um, and even in some cases, I mean, entire, anything with the word race or I had a lot of very small issues, conspiracy and in a way that a lot of researchers say this is actually extremely inefficient, and it's as a huge waste of resources for, you know, all these federal employees to be spending time just, you know, combing through website by website, data set by data set to see if it matches any of the keywords that the administration is looking for climate change is 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 assisting.
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 really a culture of fear that if they don't listen to these directives, they will be fired.
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.
And then speaking of job losses, there has been quite a few firings going on just recently, so what's going on who's been targeted when it comes to science?
Yeah, thousands and thousands across agencies like CDC and IHU, you name it, have been terminated.
And some actually were terminated.
and I think they realize that their tribes 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 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 gone around funding for research, talking research for cancer drugs, heart medication and 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 you can keep doing your research so our scientists still getting money for their research?
Yeah, you ask a great question, because like I said, it's been a rollercoaster.
So pretty early on in the Trump administration, they tried to issue a funding freeze on all federal grants and foreign aid.
And it was such a enormous directive that everybody was like, what do you mean?
like, 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 you can see how this gets very confusing.
So, um... We're straining?
We're straining. I hate a double negative.
But in this case...
I know. I don't envy people who cover the courts.
Um, 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 room.
remarks and said, look, the Trump administration needs to start funding again because I was pretty clear and 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 stuff, that is how the administration does its work.
I remember the last time Trump was in power.
There was a lot of stuff that was 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 that.
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 NIH.
Those federal register notices are not allowed to be posted right now.
This is how 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.
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, you know, the longer that this happens, you know, the longer that researchers who submitted grants months ago wait to see if their projects even get funded.
And this is 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 plate 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?
Yeah, 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.
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 try to grant with the word women in it anymore?
Plus, why the Trump administration might be going after science.
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Welcome back. Today on the show, we're talking about the state of science in the U .S., and it is not looking good.
I'm chatting with Max Coslove report of fin nature.
So, Professor Dabi Saksby 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.
when they're scouring, you know, tens of thousands of grants, and it's still unclear exactly what they want to do with them.
Proposed actions were either modifying the grant so that, you know, 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 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 the 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?
I mean this list is out of control it's like to call it as to 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 from just so many postdocs who are like shoot.
Like I used one of these words in my grant application.
They don't know what's next for them.
And in some cases that they had 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 actually might be more accurate to what some of the people are researching, so.
Yeah, yeah. People with vagina 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, it hit hard as 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's also seen funding dry up as a result of all this.
Wow, it's called the President's Valeria clearly that this president?
Yeah. I mean, and this program and PEPFAR, which is a big one 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.
And because of the dismantling of US aid, 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's so is distrust of both science and in general, the United States.
It's harrowing to hear stories like that.
Absolutely. The USAID was on a 90 day freeze, but has it actually just been shut down?
It's still unclear what will become of USAID.
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 and 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?
You know, RFK Jr. has frequently said that he's not an anti -vaxxer, that he doesn't wanna take away vaccines for 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 and a lot of people are worried that our shared juniors has a tremendous amount of power and one of the important things that come with their responsibilities is overseeing a key scientific advisory committee called ASIP that makes recommendations as to what should be on the child vaccine schedule, what the fluke 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 of scientists, and he could easily stack it with people who are more favorable to his opinions about vaccines.
So in addition to that, he also oversees what's called the Vaccines Fort Children Program.
This is a program that provides vaccines to children whose parents might not be able to the reason that we're able to achieve herd immunity to achieve nationwide coverage for diseases that like measles that were now seeing recurgeances of and 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's 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?
You asked me on January 19, 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 off to 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 and 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 a what they would consider a good faith efforts to try to reform the system.
This is a dismantling of the system.
You don't just stop funding projects, go up the entire funding process if you're trying to reform it.
I think 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.
Well, this still pissed about masks is that what's going on here?
I've still yet to see 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'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 optimism, they either see this as sort of like Trump's negotiation tactics with the tariffs, make it really bad to begin with, then you sort of side on 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 four years at least, and this is only going down hill.
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.
I talked with researchers who were optimistic or who were willing to give this administration a chance, and I think that 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, I live in Washington, DC, and it's been particularly difficult.
I know it's kind of 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 and whether you're in a blue stick a red state or your living in another country.
I think it'll be felt around the world at 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 don't know if you so much.
That's right. Thanks so much Max.
specs for your time and your work.
Yeah, of course. Thank you.
That was max cause love, reporter, and 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 verses will be back in your ears in March and we'll be using a lot of those forbidden words.
I promise and Wendy's are coming back to next time.
