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
Chapter 1: What is causing chaos in U.S. science?
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 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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How has the Trump administration affected federal science websites?
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 refrozen. So there's just a lot of confusion right now because the Trump administration has acted very quickly in... Putting 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 firings, the mass shootings. freezing of funds, the censoring of government websites, that is all unprecedented.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of funding freezes on scientific research?
And so let's talk about the government websites, because in some cases, entire web pages 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, 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.
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Chapter 4: Why are certain terms being flagged in scientific grants?
Yeah. Do you want to, you want to 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 in this department rejects it.
That is unbelievable. It's so Orwellian to just say that. I know. When in fact the biological reality is the exact opposite.
Chapter 5: What are the vaccine concerns related to USAID cuts?
Also, on a website about monkeypox vaccines and prevention, it's... 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 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.
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Chapter 6: What could be the motivation behind the war on science?
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 data sets before they go down. And in some cases, trying to access archived versions of the websites so they can actually 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 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, and because some of these data sets 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. And even in some cases, I mean, entire 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, 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 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?
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