How cuts to science funding will hurt ordinary Americans
From law firms to universities, Donald Trump’s administration has taken aim at elites. But the consequences of cuts to research spending and reductions in the federal workforce carried out since Mr Trump returned to the White House will trickle down quickly.
Federally funded science agencies provide all sorts of services, many of which save lives and generate economic value. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example, provides weather forecasts that farmers rely on to determine when to plant, irrigate and harvest and that authorities use to prepare for disasters. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in its role as America’s public-health agency, collects data essential to the effective treatment of diseases and funds clinics that treat them. Research on pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), meanwhile, is critical for refining regulations that protect Americans from contaminants. The cuts to these agencies and others are likely to hurt ordinary Americans.
DOGE, Mr Trump’s cost-cutting special force, has already implemented personnel cuts at NOAA. A leaked memo suggests that Congress will soon slash its research budget and eliminate more positions. This will further disrupt operations. In normal circumstances the agency’s National Weather Service (NWS) offices launch weather balloons twice a day. These balloons carry instruments that record atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity data, all of which inform predictions of where storms develop, how they move and how strong they may be.
One current NWS employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that his office has lost four of 13 forecasters since the Trump administration took office. He and his remaining colleagues are now sending balloons up only in the evening, in effect halving the resolution of their data. Other offices have delayed or suspended launches. The Mountain West region, which includes Idaho and Montana, is hardest hit. “That’s where the storm systems that produce severe weather really get going in the spring months,” says Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky is no longer able to staff overnight shifts. When tornadoes ripped through the state last week, killing at least 19 people, the agency was hard-pressed to find cover. Workers stayed overtime and neighbouring offices sent support staff.
Cuts to data collection are being exacerbated by cuts to the groups responsible for warning people about dangerous conditions. Kayla Besong worked at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii. Her team wore pagers, like doctors in hospital, which alerted them to earthquake activity. Using data about the location, size and magnitude of a given earthquake, she says, they would have to calculate the likelihood of a tsunami being generated and decide whether the public needed to be warned. Two people were on watch at all times, which made for lengthy work rotas for a small team. Dr Besong was fired in February when probationary employees across the federal bureaucracy were sacked by DOGE. She warns about the toll that long shifts can take on her already thinly stretched colleagues. Burnout was “a huge concern” even before the cuts, she says. Overworked employees may make mistakes which, when it comes to severe weather, could prove deadly.
At the CDC, fewer employees make it harder to prevent the outbreak of disease. The Medical Monitoring Project, for example, was created in 2005 to collect and analyse data on people with HIV. Until recently state and local health departments across the country used its data—on everything from comorbidities and behaviour that causes transmission to barriers to receiving medical care—to direct their services. On April 1st all but one of the 17-person team that ran it was fired, abruptly ending the 20-year-long project. “The only source of nationally representative information on people with HIV is now gone,” says a CDC physician. As much as 45% of the broader HIV-prevention team was also fired. All HIV research at the agency has since been paused and many grants for basic medical care were terminated.
HIV work is in the cross-hairs in part because of its focus on racial and sexual minorities, who contract the virus at especially high rates. Such focus is seen by the Trump administration as evidence of “woke” ideology getting in the way of hard science. Empowerment Resource Centre, an HIV clinic in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, is one of many feeling the blow. Its $400,000 CDC grant for serving gay and transgender patients is in limbo—the funds for May have still not come through. This week the entire HIV department in Fulton County (in which Atlanta sits), its only other funder, was sacked. Jacqueline Brown, the non-profit’s boss, says she is having to make painful decisions about which kinds of services to cut and how to reduce the number of clients the clinic serves. “We will try to continue as long as we can, but inevitably we’ll have to suspend programmes; there is just no money left,” she says. Leandro Mena, a professor of medicine at Emory University, in Georgia, reckons that such cuts mean HIV rates will rise in the next two or three years.
Across the board
Other agencies are also under pressure. In early May Lee Zeldin, the Trump-appointed administrator of the EPA, announced a restructuring that will see staffing at the agency return to Reagan-era levels—equivalent to a 25% reduction—and its dedicated research unit dissolved. The unit, known as the Office of Research and Development, collates independent evidence on pollution, which in turn informs the EPA’s guidelines and regulations. Since the agency’s creation in 1970, these regulations have led to an almost 80% decrease in common air pollutants, saving hundreds of thousands of Americans from early death each year. In Mr Trump’s proposed budget, the EPA also stands to lose almost 55% of its funding, achieved by scrapping “skewed, overly-precautionary modelling” that informs regulations as well as “woke climate research”.
The government may eventually come to understand that warning people of deadly storms and easing access to medical care helps many beyond the elites. But, for now, at least, there are few signs of any such policy reversals. ■