We can’t measure the damage that President Trump’s administration is doing to science. We’ll never know how many promising scientists quit the field because their funding was cut or how many fled to other countries seeking academic freedom. We’ll never know which diseases won’t be treated because the research funding a cure was cut.
A 10-part series by STAT, a health care publication that shares a parent company with The Boston Globe, highlights the wide-ranging impacts of the president’s hacksaw approach to science.
There are political ramifications to the cuts: The United States may very well lose its status as a global powerhouse in scientific research and discovery. But for many, the losses are more personal — the loss of a job, a passion project, or a chance at a cure for a disease.
For one West Virginia community with high smoking and lung cancer rates, it means the loss of a successful smoking cessation and education program.
For Brittney Dockery, who grew up a nature-loving child in Appalachia, it meant losing her dream job as a lab technician working with monkeys at Emory National Primate Research Center. The grant paying her salary ended, and her supervisor was having trouble finding new funding, so Dockery quit research to take a more predictable job at an IT help desk.
The STAT series profiled Kelly Barta, who suffered from a little-researched but painful disease called topical steroid withdrawal. Ian Myles, an allergist-immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, conducted some of the first research to identify the biology of the disease and was preparing a trial to test a potential treatment. But cuts to the NIH plus a shift in administrative priorities made him shelve the trial, leaving people like Barta in the lurch.
Under Trump’s crackdown on studies related to diversity and gender identity, STAT found that queer, transgender, and nonbinary researchers are considering leaving science, fearing for their personal safety and their academic freedom.
But many Trump cuts don’t fit neatly into an ideology. Trump terminated a grant program for early-career researchers because it was “diversity-focused” even though the program met the administration’s stated priorities of giving more money to public universities and universities that are not on the East or West Coast.
Looking at Trump’s early cuts by the numbers paints a grim picture. According to STAT, the number of NIH grants awarded between January and September this year was 8.2 percent lower than the average of the same period over the last nine years and 11.6 percent lower than last year. Early-career grants fell to their lowest level since 2016. There were fewer grants in areas like cancer and HIV research.
Perhaps more significant than the numbers are Trump’s methods — making sudden cuts to how the NIH pays for “indirect costs” like salaries and lab equipment, terminating existing grants mid-stream, and freezing all federal funding for disfavored institutions, like Harvard.
While judges have blocked some of these moves, the uncertainty has led universities to preemptively pull back on research, including by accepting fewer PhD students. As STAT noted, some researchers and professors are fleeing the United States altogether, seeking a more stable funding environment and a guarantee of academic freedom in Europe or Canada.
If the United States loses its superiority in scientific and medical research due to Trump’s budget cuts, some of that research and development may move to other countries. Some may simply not happen at all, and we will never know how many disease treatments or cures we never gained due to the president’s misguided policies.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.