When Trump took office just a few weeks ago, I was trying to be cautiously optimistic.
His first term, while chaotic, dysfunctional, and stupid, was largely ineffectual, with little long-term negative policy coming out of it.
Day to day, it felt like little changed for me or my family compared to the administration that preceded it or followed it.
Yet this time seems to be different. In several different areas, the new administration’s executive orders have affected my mom’s work.
For reference, she works as an epidemiologist for the University of Washington, yet much of her funding comes from the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH is a major contributor to funds for UW research.
However, recently the NIH has announced that it will start the rate that universities charge for indirect costs at a maximum of 15 percent.
Indirect costs are a form of money given on top of existing grant money to help cover an institution’s operating costs for things like heating, plumbing, etc. that aren’t covered by direct grant money.
The NIH used to pay indirect costs at whatever rate a university set on top of grant money.
For example, the UW would pay a rate of 55.5 percent. This meant that for every thousand dollars the UW received in grant money, it would get an additional 55.5 percent of the total grant money to help pay for indirect expenses.
This slashing of indirects will significantly reduce the overall research budget of the UW, as about $572 million of their research budget comes from NIH grants.
This slashing of indirect costs could apparently cost the UW around $100 million, potentially leading to layoffs and cuts to research funding.
This sounds bad, but this doesn’t just affect the UW, this affects more or less every single major research university in the United States.
Some might say that it is worth scrutinising these large indirect costs, and I would be inclined to agree, as they are fairly large.
But the way to do this would be to audit these institutions, not cut their funding without warning.
Calling what the Trump administration is doing scrutinising government waste is akin to calling the act of lighting your house on fire turning on the stove.
It is impulsive, dumb, and doesn’t actually solve the root of the problem, instead leading to less overall funding for research which means that long-term, more people will die of potentially preventable causes.
This isn’t even necessarily the worst of the cuts coming from the NIH, as newly minted Health Secretary RFK Jr. seems determined to shift the majority of health research funding away from infectious diseases, a questionable decision when we are coming out of the worst pandemic in decades.
This could obviously limit our ability to fight future infectious diseases and our current efforts to treat and prevent them.
We already saw a taste of this with the brief federal funding freeze.
One of my mom’s colleagues’ studies was given a stop work order, meaning that it would no longer be conducted while the study was ongoing.
This doesn’t even seem to be the worst of studies that got their funding suspended, as several contraceptive studies funded by USAID have been suspended with medical implants inside patients, presenting a clear long-term safety hazard.
Another way my mom’s work has been affected has been through the Trump Administration’s executive orders concerning DEI programs.
While many again think that their effect has been limited to the federal government, it also extends to other institutions that get their funding from the federal government.
Additionally, these limitations in funding aren’t only affecting what people usually think of as DEI programs.
A lot of my mom’s work is doing community outreach to help prevent the spread of HIV, namely the African immigrant and queer communities that face especially high risk of transmission.
Now when applying for federal grants to help with these targeted efforts, she and others in their department are being told by CDC officials to remove any references to race, gender, and sexuality, which makes little sense when certain communities are at higher risk of contracting diseases based on their race, gender, and sexuality.
This will cause long-term harm to these comm unities while also setting back research on these topics.
Additionally, this outreach is incredibly important, especially to African immigrant communities, where language and cultural barriers may limit the effectiveness of broader prevention and treatment efforts.
I am holding out hope that these harmful actions will be stopped by the courts or reversed by the administration, but already it seems as if so much damage has been done.
Major research instiutions like the UW are already starting to make decisions based on this new federal normal, so everyday these orders last is another that makes it more difficult to fix the effects of them.
Without change at the federal level, many key programs that many rely on well outside the federal government will be effected, and these are just a few of the many cuts being imposed by the federal government.
