Listen to former NIH workers and 27 UNIHTED members and volunteers speak on WCOM 103.5 about the dismantling of science and the state of the NIH. Recorded at 1:00PM ET on June 23rd 2026. You can read the transcript below. It’s broken down into parts
Introductions
Question 1: What is the Implication of Cuts to NIH
Question 2: Diversity Equity and Inclusion
Question 3: Can the Private Sector Step In?
Question 4: What is the Culture Like at NIH Now?
Question 5: What is the Office of Management and Budget’s Role in Research Funding?
Closing Remarks
Transcript:
Larry:
We’re doing a program today,
a WCOM conversation on the dismantling of American biomedical research,
a very timely topic.
And we’re going to have some panelists from formerly from NIH joining us in just a few minutes.
I’m going to give you a bit of an intro to the program and then we’re going
to turn it over to some questions to the panelists.
What is the National Institutes of Health, the NIH?
For 80 years,
the NIH has produced biomedical research that has greatly impacted
the nation’s health, prosperity and security.
During fiscal year 2024, $47 billion in funding,
the vast majority of which went to universities and research institutes,
about $2,500 in total. These organizations compete for funding on the basis of merit and only a very small percentage of applications are funded.
The NIH provides foundational and applied research which is available for the private sector to use in developing medical applications such as treatments, medical devices and disease prevention. A lot of results over the years from NIH research.
Sequencing the human genome, which allows for genetic testing of diseases.
Vaccine development, polio, hepatitis B, HPV, COVID, many others.
New treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers and also immunotherapy.
HIV-AIDS treatment and prevention, heart disease prevention, and prevention of sudden infant death syndrome.
We have all these accomplishments, but despite these accomplishments, NIH and biomedical research in general is in trouble and under attack. By the end of 2025, 5,844 NIH grants had been canceled or suspended. More than 800 focused on infectious diseases.
Other targeted research areas included misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, and studies of underrepresented ethnic and gender groups. The agency lost more than 4,800 employees from a workforce of roughly 20,000, including 12 to 13 direct layoffs in April of 2025 alone.
New grant-making fell 24 percent below the 10-year average. Courts have ordered thousands of grants reinstated, but roughly 2,600 remain frozen, representing about $1.4 billion in stalled investment. Dollars are only part of the picture many researchers have been asked to alter their grants delete or change words or shift study populations to comply with the political agenda of the current administration academic freedom is
under threat in ways that do not show up in any spreadsheet behind every canceled grant is a research project paused a clinical trial in limbo
A postdoc looking for another line of work,
a patient who will not benefit from a discovery that never happened.
This is not money we declined to spend.
It is a seed we planted and refused to water.
The Triangle region here in North Carolina is home to one of
the country’s densest concentrations of biomedical talent.
Introductions:
We feel these cuts up close. I was a scientific program manager of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until May of last year.
And today we have three former NIH program officers to join us who were also formerly of the NIH. We have Liz Ginexi, Dr. Liz Ginexi, Dr. Jennifer Troyer, and Dr. Sylvia Chou.
I’m going to let Liz start off and talk about her background and then we’ll move to Jen and then Sylvia.
Liz:
Thanks.
Thanks for having us today.
I’m Liz Ginexi, and I was at the NIH for 22 years.
I fully believed I would finish my career there, but,
I started in addiction science research at National Institute on Drug Abuse. I eventually moved over to
the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and worked in tobacco control research
for many years I worked in the Office of the Director (OD) at the Office of Behavioral
and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) for many years and I finished my career at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) where I was working
on non-pharmacological approaches to pain management.
And once Doge ripped through, I decided to head for the exits.
It wasn’t looking good for me.
Larry:
Ok Jen
Jen:
Yeah, sure.
I’m Jennifer Troyer, and thanks, Larry, for having us and for hosting this. So I started my career like Liz very early after I got my PhD.
I came to the NIH as a postdoc, and 2000 and had a variety of different positions that was at the National Cancer Institute where I was actually doing research on HIV and related viruses as viruses that cause cancer and how hosts defend themselves
against viruses. I Then became a staff scientist.
I was a contractor for quite a while.
I worked on a lot of development in genetics, which is my area in genome technologies. So technology development was one of my areas.
And then I came to the human genome.
Genome research institute as a program director, before that I was working
at NIH has two parts intramural which are the scientists that are working in labs
and making discoveries and then extramural which are the scientists that are helping to move programs forward across the country and in fact the world to enable science, so that’s the grant making part of the institute
So program directors are the scientific,
Some of the scientific staff who plan and guide and oversee that work to make sure
that the science is being productive and is being done in a way that is for
the public good.
And so I was in that role for many years. and more recently became the director of extramural operations for
the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI),
which oversees scientific review and grant making and policy and planning
of future initiatives. and like Liz I was planning it was this had been my dream position I had loved all my work at the NIH for my entire career planned to be there till I retired and
then everything changed in the way in which we were being allowed
to make scientific decisions changed and became much more political and much more influenced by people outside the scientific realm, and I regretfully decided that I needed to leave.
Larry:
Ok Thank you Jen, We have Sylvia now
Sylvia:
Hi, I’m really excited to be joining this conversation.
My name is Sylvia Chou.
I was a program officer at the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch
that was part of National Cancer Institute.
My work was focused on how to understand how people receive and communicate and act on information, including information of mixed quality. The last few years, I spent a lot of time thinking about the spread of misinformation.
What was exciting was really as a program officer,
we not only help champion, you know, researchers’ priorities,
help them understand how to navigate this very complex and often confusing system, but also we get to chart the course for the future. If there are new areas that we think have been under understood we have the opportunity to issue funding opportunities. I would say it was very meaningful, very engaging work, it was, It was not perfect, there were
a lot of challenges, but it felt like there was rules and boundaries and we understand how to work within that system.
2025 immediately altered all of that with so much fear and paralysis.
I spend a year staying in trying to bare witness, trying to organize, think about how to push back, and really help people understand how science is done.
But ultimately it was really impossible and I decided to leave.
I wanted to say I didn’t leave with the idea of giving up, I really want to reimagine how I can be useful and how I can be proactive in fighting for truth science and democracy,
and that’s why I felt very fortunate to join a group of NIHers, Bethesda Declaration, 27 UNIHTED. We have a lot of work ahead of us,
and we are very excited to be doing that work in defending science.
Larry:
And just to interject,
27 UNIHTED is an advocacy group that’s sprung up since all this stuff happened.
The website is 27unihted, is that right? 27unihted.org?
Does that sound right?
Yes.
Okay, so check that out.
They’ve been very, very helpful in helping sponsor this conversation today.
Questions 1: Implication of Cuts at NIH
I’m going to start off with a question about the implications of these cuts,
and I’m going to let Liz take the lead on that,
talking about clinical trials, drug development. There’s just so many things, and she can talk a lot about that.
So let’s start off with that.
The rest of you can jump in as you need to as we discuss this.
Liz:
Yeah, that’s right.
So NIH has, did, traditionally have a bipartisan vote and was really quite loved
for many decades, for about 80 years.
And with the many billions, you rattled off a lot of the treatments and cures and benefits for
the American people and for the globe, in fact. I think what a lot of people may not also realize is in addition to providing cutting-edge treatments and promise of future cures for cancers, the investment was actually an economic driver as well.
Studies show that of that 47 billion that was invested in the NIH for 2024,
we got about a return of $2.57 in economic output as a result of that.
So not only are we getting medical advances, but it’s creating jobs, it’s fueling patents, it’s fueling all of the basic science that undergirds the drugs that get approved by
The FDA for example. So all the pharmaceutical industry benefited directly from the taxpayers’ investment where they could take that basic science and move it forward to create therapeutics for the American people. So it was
widely believed inside the NIH at the time when those started cutting. “Well, why would they cut that?”
We’re a beacon of hope for cures, but we’re also an economic engine for the country
in the world.
We were the leader in biomedical sciences in the entire world, and now we’re not anymore.
So we’re seeing lost jobs where scientists are literally fleeing to other countries now because they don’t have the grants anymore.
We’re seeing doctoral programs that are either closing down altogether
or really just cutting off the number of new
students that they’re bringing into their STEM programs as a result of cutting all
of this research. And we’re seeing lost opportunity for all of the future cures that we won’t see. And I would say I’ve been tracking quite closely the types of funding announcements
that the NIH has been publishing since the Trump administration took over.
And what’s curious is some promising avenues of science that were ready
to go were canceled for political reasons. And one of the most bizarre examples I came across is we are on the verge of finding
a cure for HIV AIDS, a vaccine that the shot would make it so that you would never get it again.
And there was an RFA written to move this technology forward and get us closer to that vaccine.
And that RFA was already written, ready to go, and the NIH canceled it. So now we’re not going to be doing that research.
We’ve completely shut it down because it’s similar to
some of the mRNA type research that undergirded the COVID vaccines.
And there is a whole host of myths and disinformation and vaccine
you know conspiracies about this technology that are completely unfounded so as a country we’re no longer making the decisions based on science it’s being driven
by conspiracies and political alignment and this is very troubling
because we may not feel it today but five and ten years from now all of these cures
and advances that we could have been working on now will not happen
Larry:
And I think it’s important to mention, too,
that we’re sitting down here in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina
with three major universities,
Duke, UNC, and North Carolina State, all three of which do get NIH funding. The economic impact in our area is tremendous.
A lot of people have the impression that federal money
is in Washington and other folks don’t benefit.
And I think it’s important to make this point that most in
the last time I remember it was about 80% of our money went out the door. Correct me if I’m wrong on that.
It might be even higher than that.’
Liz:
Yeah, that’s right.
80% of the business.
Larry:
And so there’s communities all over the country that benefit tremendously
from NIH funding jobs, etc.
And just the economic benefits of not being sick.
If you’re able to work and you’re not sick, you’re a more productive citizen in this society.
So it’s very important to remember that being well is good for the economy.
And the current NIH director is a Ph.D. economist and one would hope that he would understand that.
Question 2: Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI)
Okay, I wanted to move on to a controversial area for some people, and that’s DEI.
And I followed this when the administration started,
that all of a sudden there was a lot of look into what kind of research was being done, what was being suppressed, what was being censored.
And so let’s talk about DEI,
let’s talk about gender ideology, race, ethnic information. All of that and how this has played into this whole thing the example
of transgender versus transgenic comes to mind but there’s
so many others let’s start talking about that and just see where
that goes
Sylvia:
Jen you want to go ahead and then I can go after you yeah
Jen:
Yeah, I do want to say that a lot of the current funding opportunities that were out
before this administration came in
did ask for applicants to consider many diverse perspectives.
So a lot of the research that had been done in the past had been done
on select groups of individuals leaving out vast swaths of the population.
Therefore,
some of the cures,
therapies,
answers that were determined only were effective for small groups of people and not
for everybody.
And as Larry was saying, the real goal is to make
our entire populace more healthy and so in order to do that there are a couple
of things that need to happen one is that all people are included in studies and
that studies and that there is a focus on areas where specific people are more
harmfully impacted than others.
And the other thing is to think about our future and the workforce and using all
the best ideas from the best people and giving everybody a chance to contribute
to science in the best way.
And there are many people that for lots of reasons traditionally had been left out
of scientific conversations and scientific opportunities.
So many of the funding opportunities that were out also tried to make sure
that we were increasing opportunities for everybody
and were also providing solutions and doing research that would benefit everybody.
And in that wording are things like diversity and inclusion and equity and all
of those things to the administration meant very specifically affirmative action
which is not in any way the way in which it was these things were being used in
a scientific context and in fact I’m in genetics, genomics
cannot study genomics without thinking about diversity of populations.
It’s just part of the field.
And so every application that we had used these words.
And so many things that were terminated were terminated because
of complete misunderstandings or a fear of having these thought ticket words In those Grants
Sylvia over to you
Sylvia:
Yeah and I would add to what Jen you have shared is that the attack on DEI or
the sort of excuse to really censor and cut research was quite muscular.
It was not just
a few words.
It kept expanding.
“Poverty, vulnerable populations, minorities, specific immigrant communities.”
And it is very,
I think when we were all inside,
we used the word soul crushing a lot because it felt like the people who thought
this kind of work should no longer be funded,
didn’t really understand the intention behind the work.
The well-intentioned, I think, goal to broaden representation in science both in training, in workforce, but in study design.
Now there are obviously, for every research project, there are better examples and ones that are maybe less optimal.
But the sort of muscular idea that anybody who’s touched these topics or words are deemed not,
I’m using air quotes, on radio,
you can’t see me,
but not in alignment with agency priorities is really, felt like a gut punch
because it really is coming out of a sense,
I think we felt a sense of senselessness in the way that DEI was used to
you know really control the research priorities.
And I would just add that it’s DEI and adjacent concepts,
but Larry,
like you said,
there were many other hand-picked topics,
all in, you know, vaccine misinformation, climate change.
And I think that the general idea is that politics are driving science at the moment.
And I think that is something that we should all take notice, as it should not be the case.
There should be scientists and, you know,
experts and the community that determine and prioritize areas.
But it is very much the case now that politics are driving the direction of NIH science.
Liz:
Yeah, I would 100% want to echo what Sylvia said.
And what was also peculiar at the time is,
and this is right up Sylvia’s research alley, is the use of false narratives to
Justify cutting the NIH.
So there’s this situation where, even our NIH director, he keeps blaming the NIH for the covid pandemic. Which is not only false, but it’s bizzare.
And RFK Jr. has done similar types of claims towards the CDC staff.
So there’s this sense that somehow the health of the nation has suffered through COVID-19,
and through obesity and chronic illness.
And it is the federal civil servants who worked at the science agencies that are to blame,
which is fundamentally flawed in its logic,
but it’s also cruel and a scapegoating of people like us who, all we were doing was
trying to help the whole nation become healthier through science.
So minding our own business being good civil servants, and now we’re being charged almost as criminals.
So this helped fuel the Doge movement and help give some sort of license to slice
through the agencies with a machete,
or in the case of USAID,
put them in the wood chipper to scapegoat government employees.
Larry:
Okay, thank you, Liz.
Break
I want to take a short break before we move to the next question,
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and all donations are tax deductible
Question 3: Can the private Sector Step In?
Okay, I’ve got a question now about the private sector.
I’ve had folks tell me in the past that NIH is not there.
Well, the companies,
the pharma companies are just going to come in and take over and it’ll all be fine
because if there’s a demand for a treatment,
then they’ll fill it and it’ll just work out just great.
I’ve of course disagree with that and I know you all do but I just wanted
to get your perspective on what NIH offers not only offers research in general
but also offers the private sector as they provide the foundation for research
for applied work. And I guess we can talk to Jen if we want to yeah
Jen:
I can start.
Yeah, and I just want to mention that it’s not just NIH,
it’s NSF,
it’s USDA,
it’s DEO,
it’s all the science funding organizations that are out there,
CDC, Centers for Disease Control, all of these things are working to make sure that
public dollars are going towards the public good.
And asking that question about whether the private sector will step up,
whether that’s for or nonprofit or other organizations, the short answer is no.
And it’s not that they are not investing in science,
it’s that their model of investment is different, right?
And especially if you’re in a for-profit world, you are not saying
Thinking about what is the long term public good.
It’s sort of like asking well if the government stopped paying for roads and bridges,
"wouldn’t the private sector just pick it up because we need roads and bridges. Well the answer is no
They won’t because roads and bridges are for everybody’s use and not just for a particular company.
So if they did, they might charge a lot for other people to use those roads and bridges.
There’s a reason that we want the government to fund the infrastructure that supports science.
So there are several things that won’t happen if the government is not funding them.
The biggest one, and I think the biggest innovation of
the United States scientific research infrastructure is and the reason that it is
the sort of beacon to the rest of the world about how this should work
and has really led the way in scientific discovery particularly in
the biomedical realm but also across the board, is the idea that
we should invest in exploratory research.
So the thing where you don’t know what the outcome is,
it’s a basic scientific question that you don’t know where it’s going to lead and
if it’s going to turn into something 10, 15, 20
years down the road that it didn’t turn out to be good for everybody.
And you have to invest in a lot of sort of startup ideas to find out which
of those ideas are going to be the ones that take off
and become something important.
Everybody these days loves the model of Ozempic or GLP-2,
drugs that come from basic research on Gila monster saliva.
That’s where it started.
There is an average lifespan of a basic research question to applications in the clinic of 17 years.
No private company is going to start looking
into something now that may or may not result in a product 17 years down
the line. That’s not the way they work, it’s not
the way they should work it would be very bad for them at the same time the other thing…
So that’s one, basic, just basic research.
Another thing that people don’t think about or realize or understand that
the government is supporting is the things that are for science like roads and bridges:
which are the technologies,
the databases,
the information that is available in the public realm for everybody to interrogate
and determine what they need to know from it.
So because I’m in genomics, I’m going to use the Human Genome Project, right? that
Larry:
I’m going to take the go.
Jen:
Everybody, all of that would not be invested in.
Another thing is our workforce.
So many of the programs that we have are for training.
scientific workforce.
Companies, private sector, that is not their realm.
So there are so many things that are for the public good that are not going
to be there for us if we do not invest in them.
And then finally, there are the things that we call moonshot projects, right?
And you can take going to the moon as one of those.
But, if you think about it now private companies are doing.
That are doing space exploration are going places but they were never going to do
the first one they were never going to figure out all the problems and all the bugs
and invest all the money into doing something for the
the first time and showing that it was possible.
That needs to be done.
And these large coordinated projects that are multidisciplinary,
that need people thinking in many different places about many different things
and coming together to produce one thing, that’s got to be government funded.
So there are just a lot of places in which you’re not going to get
the private sector to be able to step in.
Larry:
I apologize to you.
I lost you all for about, I guess, about a minute.
I think, Jen, we have the essence of what you said.
We just got you back here about a minute ago.
So if there’s anything you think you mentioned,
Liz:
Larry, I can’t hear you.
Larry:
Okay, you cannot hear me?
Liz:
You’re muted.
We can’t hear you.
Larry:
Okay, here we go.
Now I’m back.
And so the problem was we had some technical problems with the Zoom call,
but we did miss about a minute of Jen’s talk.
And if there’s anything that she thinks we might have missed,
and she may not be sure of it because of the way things work.
But the bottom line is the private sector can’t fill the gaps easily.
I guess we can say that without a whole lot of hesitation, I assume.
I also wanted to interject this as we talk about this question that
Something like,
and correct me if I’m wrong,
but something like 99% of all treatments out there that are FDA approved are NIH,
have NIH involvement.
Is that about a correct assumption?
Jen:
That is correct.
Larry:
Okay.
So there are very few things that are initiated other ways.
Having been involved myself in program evaluation with NIH for 22 years, we used to track
how things were developed and where they came from.
And NIH is a huge, huge part of the whole thing.
So I just wanted to make that point.
And hopefully we can go further on this without any more technical problems.
Let’s talk about something that we can all speak to personally,
the NIH work life and what’s happened.
Question 4: What is NIH like now? What is the culture?
All of us have left, but all of us are in contact with folks that are still there.
What is the culture like now with the new leadership
How have things changed say a year and a half ago or something like that?
Sylvia:
I’ll get us started I would say the culture has it can be characterized as a culture
of fear a culture of paralysis and continued panic. The panic
that started 2025 has not really subsided
but I do think people working inside there are many dedicated
experts and people who are really committed to the mission, they face a choice.
It becomes a personal choice.
And I think, in fact, all of us face a lot of questions about the kind of almost at an existential label.
Some people show up by considering themselves as witness bearers, truth tellers,
they are courageously trying to document and push back, to speak out and speak up.
Sometimes keeping that discomfort alive because there are often questions.
“Can this be shared?
Can this be said?”
So you have to make a decision.
If you can’t say it, then what happens?
So I think there are people who are courageously speaking out,
often facing very, very punishing environments.
I have colleagues in the Bethesda Declaration that has been doxxed,
punished, warned, and just having a hard time day to day showing up.
other people choose to succumb to that fear
and they become very quiet they become very compliant sometimes because they’re told
to other times is what I call anticipatory compliance they’re worried
that something they do or say may get them in trouble or get them in the spotlight
and therefore they choose to be very quiet.
Yet others I would say are apathetic they felt like they don’t have enough power to really make
a difference so they may decide to sort of give up or just go through the motion um and
then yet a very small group may be delusional thinking this is very short
and may be blow over and we can resume to build good old days and I….
Larry:
Okay we have a unfortunately another frozen
Sylvia:
responses that I have observed.
Jen:
Yeah I agree with everything Sylvia said and I just want to add that one thing that
I want to start with where we were before,
because I think that,
as Liz said at the beginning,
the civil service sector has been very demonized in this whole process prior
to January 2025.
I would say that the NIH was such a rewarding and productive place to work.
And I also worked with people at NSF, at USDA, at other places.
I’ve worked my entire career, as I said,
in the government,
and I have never met anybody who wasn’t dedicated to the mission,
who wasn’t professional and very
feeling that what they were doing was very important and trying very hard to do it well.
So this whole casting of government workers as lazy or unproductive or wasteful
or fraudulent, we kept very good track of
government dollars and we worked very hard
to make sure they were being spent effectively and so
the staff there is very dedicated they are right now just under siege and overworked
and so you know I have nothing but admiration for people who are staying and trying
to help people get their funding,
help the science move forward in the face of these sort
of insurmountable odds that’s happening right now.
So there have been, as you said at the beginning, Larry, so many job losses.
But the official numbers that are out there are actually quite an undercount.
So people left for all sorts of reasons.
They were fired.
They left because they were gotten rid of illegally,
because they were probationary employees,
which just means they were in the first year or two of their current position.
And then they were offered
early retirement or retirement packages.
Many people took those because they didn’t know if they were going to be fired
and they needed to have security, financial security for their family.
So a lot of people left because of that.
There are people like some of us here who chose to leave
because we didn’t like what was happening.
But there’s also a a lot of people that didn’t come that would have come otherwise.
There’s also the contracts that were terminated.
So 50% of the contracts stopped.
the contracts had to be cut.
And so all those people that worked every day for the mission of
the federal agencies, though they were not federal employees, they’re also gone too.
So the people who remain are doing two or three or four jobs.
Many of them are doing things that they were never trained to do.
They’re doing their best.
They’re trying really hard, but it is not a good atmosphere to do it.
And I think that maintaining hope is sort of hard
and what people have to do is hope that somehow this will pass.
And unfortunately,
some of the things that are happening are going to just make it worse rather
than ever making it better.
Larry:
Go ahead, Liz, if you want to add
Liz:
I want to add one thing, by working there now, is that
By statute,
the NIH had only two presidential appointees for all of its 80 years,
the NIH director and the cancer director, the National Cancer Institute.
But now that’s all changed.
They have infused political appointees in a completely unprecedented way throughout
the office of the director, the leadership, and made up jobs to bring people in.
People that aren’t scientists, but just it’s...
It’s very strange for the people like us to have to report to political people.
That’s not something we were used to.
And then some of the appointments are being made in ways that are not in keeping
with tradition and the design.
So, for instance,
NIH directors to name an NIH institute director was a very lengthy,
in some cases, six-month process where you would solicit applications throughout
the entire country looking for leaders in a particular field, and there would be committees vetting those people.
Well just this last year, they gave a directorship for the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences for someone
simply because he was a friend of with JD Vance, and
This is not what we’re expecting.
They’re naming people to the advisory councils,
each institute and center has an advisory council,
they’re naming people to the advisory councils because they are friends with people of the administration
not because they’re qualified.
So Todd Blanche’s wife was named to the advisory council of NCCIH.
They just names some folks to the NIMH advisory council who are wholly against psychiatric medications, and they’re not scientists,
so now they’re on these boards,
and they’re trying to influence the scientific decision making,
it’s really quite disheartening and very dangerous.
Larry:
I Just wanted to interject one thing before we move on to a very important question
about the Office of Management and Budget and what’s going on with that,
is that when the cuts were made to employees last year especially,
they were doing it in a way that was convenient for them to cut.
They were not looking at really performance,
job performance and things that mattered like that.
They were looking at who can be cut,
probationary employees,
people in areas like communications or areas that were not central,
science things, anything that was not sort of central.
They would cut whole offices. They were not really looking at the impact of these cuts on the institutes.
Would you agree with that?
Jen:
100% agree with that.
And I want to say the other thing that happened that was extremely harmful is
that not only were these cuts made in very arbitrary and very sweeping ways,
so everybody in communications, for instance, yes, was cut and making it very hard.
I will say if you’re looking at an NIH website,
look very closely at the date it was last updated.
It’s most likely last April.
and so there’s outdated information on all the websites but
The social media sites for most institutes and centers were shut down.
But the other thing that happened is people left overnight.
They were cut off immediately from access to everything.
So there was no way to transition from somebody who was doing a job to make sure
that that function was continued, that there was a continuity of operations.
So we lost so much
just access to things.
There were sometimes somebody who was the only one that had a password to access
a certain system was gone overnight and you couldn’t access that system anymore.
And so the functionality was cut off at the heels and then because they cut off
One of the big groups that was cut was human resources, and then they were firing people.
And so people actually getting their benefits was a problem,
and getting their transition out of the position was a problem
because they were getting rid of, they actually
brought in all of human resources back and said,
“you have to work for another two months before you’re fired so that we can deal
with all these firings.”
It was chaotic and it was crazy.
And to this day, there are email
addresses that are going to nobody.
You might be sending an email and it’s going to nobody because nobody had time
to even shut down their email,
put out of office, put I’m not here anymore, contact this other person.
So there was just a lot of chaos in all of that as well.
And again, function:
purchasing was one that they just completely cut out and
then suddenly there was nobody to buy anything for the labs to function and that had
to be solved.
So a lot of chaos.
Larry:
Okay, we have about a little less than 15 minutes.
I know this is a huge issue, so I want to get to it.
Those folks out there who don’t know what Office of Management
and Budget’s involvement is in research,
Liz has been extremely involved and vocal about this.
I wanted her to give us the background on that and what’s going on
with how it might impact science.
Question 5: What is the Office of Management and Budget’s Involvement in Research?
Liz:
Yes, so this is a very boring topic.
So I’ve tried to do my best to make it exciting, but it’s simply not.
Most people in the country don’t realize that the White House has a budget office and that
The Office of Management and Budget and the reason why we don’t know about is because in normal times it’s just a pass through,
congress will pass legislation allocating monies to various programs, they intend to
to get the money out to the people, out to the states,
and it passes
through this budget office and the money is distributed to
the different executive agencies such as the NIH.
And there are rules about how monies need to be distributed and spent and so on and so forth
So there’s sort of some boring guidelines about these things.
And the Office of Management and Budget would issue guidance to the agencies
about how to dispense this money:
legally, properly, how to do audits and the like.
And for many years that has been communicated in a guidance document call a uniform guidance, right?
And so right now, the person who heads that office is Russell Vought.
And he also happens to be one of the authors of Project 2025.
So if you read Project 2025, you’ll get up to speed about why he’s doing what he’s doing.
But suffice it to say, he doesn’t really care much for the NIH or many of these other agencies.
And he is really a form of libertarian that doesn’t really believe
that our tax monies should be going to programs like this.
And because he doesn’t have the authority to cancel the programs,
he’s tried the courts have been striking this down for a year now,
he’s trying a new way to get around the courts and a new way to circumvent the intentions of congress.
So he’s taken that guidance documentation that I just talked about
that provides guidance to the states.
It’s a 400-page document.
And if you look at it, everywhere with the word guidance used to be,
he’s replaced it with the word regulation.
So he’s trying to magically turn it into a regulatory document that gives him the authority,
not to give guidance,
but to tell the agencies what they can and can’t spend their money on.
So this new rule has been issued and there is a comment period for every rule,
so by July 13th the American Public are encouraged to weigh in and say “No”
because what he wants to do is give his office the authority
to have political control over every single grant, not just to the NIH, but to every agency.
So that’s not just science, that’s all kinds of services.
And he’ll also give them the authority to cancel any of these grants at any time.
So this is what’s happening right now.
It’s sort of taking what has happened at the science agencies and at many agencies
across the year where you’ve heard about programs being canceled and
the courts intervening.
It’s taking it to the next level and trying to codify that cancellation behavior in law.
So that’s what’s happening.
Larry:
Thank you, Liz.
I know it is not exciting, but it can be very impactful if it happens.
Anyone else have a comment on that?
I know Liz has been kind of shepherding the whole thing, but anyone else have a comment?
Jen:
I hope Liz is going to give us our what do we do about this speech.
I do want to add to that some of the other places in which
The new regulations are proposing cutting off science in ways
that are really important for us to protect are in,
for instance,
international collaboration,
the ability to go to meetings and present your work, the ability to
have publish in journals, to have funding for publishing in journals, which costs money.
And so a huge part of science and the way science progresses and
the way we get closer and closer to the truth is for ideas to be put forward
and scrutinized and examined and challenged. And this is sort of cutting off all the avenues for that to happen.
Liz:
That’s right.
So there’s two things I’ve been very active in doing, and I’m writing about this on my Substack.
If anyone wants to follow me on Substack, Elizabeth Ginexi on Substack.
But we have until July 13th to submit comments to the federal registrar and say “no”
And then we also need to call our elected officials about this.
Congress has the power to stop Russel Vought, it’s a matter of convincing them to do so,
so those are two very hot items you can do,
and save your community grant funding for infrastructure,
for Head Start,
for wastewater improvement.
There’s all kinds of grants that are happening right now in your community
that Russell Vought might cancel if you don’t stop him.
Sylvia:
And I just want to say Liz has a gift and I think she’s sharing that gift with all of us which is the attention to the details and the implications both the details
and the broader view and I don’t have that capacity but what I want to reflect
on is really how to be hopeful today and I think
It requires us to take actions and maybe for different people the actions are different.
Some are very small,
some are private,
some are anonymous,
but I just think it is an all hands on deck situation in terms of the future
of our science and our democracy.
And I think I underappreciated the value of science when things were normal or okay.
Science is really an exercise of truth telling.
Of being honest, having a process and respecting that process,
and be challenged when sometimes those results are not what you would like it to be, and sometimes you have a great idea but you cannot find a journal to publish it
or a funder to fund your work.
It requires a lot of humility and thick skin.
And I think I am now seeing how much being involved in that inquiry and the process has taught us about how to hold ourselves accountable
and how to be honest with our reality,
And I really hope that um that is an opportunity for people to think about how to take, how to pair hope with action. And I think this OMB,
you know opportunity to comment is one action and there could be many others
but I just think I don’t want us to have a conversation that ends
with oh this is just a destruction that can’t be reversed but really think
that we each have a role and an opportunity to empower ourselves
because you know what the easiest way to lose power is to think you don’t have any
and I think we do have power and we are talking here freely which I’m so grateful
for
I joke about you know losing the job you know I gained freedom
but freedom ain’t free you know it is something that you know takes a lot
of soul searching and
coordination and community.
And I’m just thankful for all of you to be in that community so that we can,
you know, stronger, we’re stronger together.
I think that’s not just a slogan.
It’s really how I felt right now.
Larry:
Thank you very much, Sylvia.
We’ve only got about four minutes to go.
Closing Thoughts
I wanted to just get final thoughts from each of you very quickly about can
the NIH be rehabilitated?
How can we can we get back to where we were in the future?
How hard would that be?
Is there any thoughts about that?
Jen:
So I’ll go ahead and start and I want to build on Sylvia’s comment of there’s room
for hope here and that resilience and also organization are important.
And so I’m wearing my Courage is Courageous t-shirt today.
And I think that there are a lot of organizations out there who are really thinking about this question,
and moving us forward toward solutions,
I’m going to shout out to, of course, 27 UNIHTED
but also Stand Up for Science, Union of Concerned Scientists,
Partnership for Public Service.
So in that, what can individuals do?
One of the things they can do is join a group.
The question of can we get back,
I think we need to think about not getting back but getting forward.
And really what is the new structure that we put in place that is not as vulnerable
to political headwinds.
and what are the things that we need to conserve and preserve and find a way
to support that are those basic science infrastructure training and resources.
And so I think that, yes, there may be new ways to do things and we should all be open to that.
But what we don’t want is all of that to disappear from the public realm.
Sylvia:
And I would just echo, mine is very short.
Again, I don’t think we’re returning back to 2024, Larry.
If the question is, can we rebuild?
I think it’s going to have to look very different.
And it’s going to require a lot of political will.
Courage skills and clarity, really understanding what’s stake,
For example public health is for the social good, it is not profiting a few people with means, it’s really thinking as a collective,
and I think that’s an important sort of value to continue to hold
and also science is incremental.
It requires patience and it requires solid structure and public trust.
So I think those are things we know in terms of principles and values,
but what it will take to actually rebuild will take a lot more and it’ll be
a long process.
Larry:
Okay, sorry Liz,
I’m running out of time here,
but I wanted to thank all of you, Liz, Jen, and Sylvia for speaking with us today about the trials and tribulations
of biomedical research.
I wanted to mention again that we’re going to have the recording of this program
on 27 United’s website.
That’s the number 27unihted.org in the next day or so.
We’re also going to have it on the wcomfm.org website as well.
Again, thanks to everyone who participated, who listened.
We hope to continue later talking more about these issues right here on WCOM LP.
I’m going to leave you today with some music to kind of talk about here speaking out
against the madness, which is what essentially is going on here.
This is a song from 1969 by Crosby, Stills and Nash.
It’s been a long time coming
It’s going to be a long time gone
And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
It appears to be a long time, is a long,
long, long, long time before the dawn
Turn, turn any corner, hear,
You Must Hear What The People Say
You Know There’s Something
Is going on around here
It surely, surely,
surely won’t stand the latter day, No
and it appears to be a long,
oh Yes it does Appears to be a long, oh Appears to be a long, oh Time
Such a long,
long time before the dawn
Speaker You’ve got to speak up Against
the madness
You’ve got to speak your mind If you dare
Don’t, no, don’t,
no Try to get yourself elected
If you do,
you had better cut your hair
And it appears to be a long Appears to be a long
a Appears to be a long
Such a long, long, long,
long time Before the dawn It’s been a long,
long time Coming It’s going to be a long time gone
Don’t you know The darkest hour Is always Always just before the dawn And it appears
to be a long, Appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long
Time Such a long, long, long, long time
Before the dawn
