What Trump/Musk Is Doing to Medical Science

 

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) constitute 27 different research centers, "each with a specific research agenda, often focusing on particular diseases or body systems" (NIH website) -- in toto, a biomedical research enterprise staffed by about 6,200 scientists, steering an enormous grant-making machine that distributes most of its budget across the country to support researchers at 2,500 institutions. For example, National Cancer Institute, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, etc. -- they all funnel money to research scientists, including doctors who work at university hospital complexes in this state.

“The biomedical research enterprise in the United States depends largely on NIH dollars," said senior investigator and chief of the laboratory of molecular immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "You take the dollars away, the labs go away, and you lose the next generation of scientists.”

So first, Trump bypasses the most qualified senior scientist Lawrence Tabak for the directorship, a highly regarded administrator who had actually been acting director previously, and puts in a lower level scientist whose main qualification appears to be that he once disagreed with Anthony Fauci about who should be included in covid vaccination mandates. Playing to his stupid base, who've been brainwashed to think that Fauci is the cause of all evils. So the new director, Matthew Memoli, a longtime NIH influenza researcher and physician who was not part of the senior leadership ranks, is trying his best to keep up with all of Trump's whims and wild hairs.

But then came a hiring freeze, a travel ban, a communications pause and cancellations of routine grant-review meetings. Scientists were even told they could not purchase the basic lab supplies needed to keep experiments going. [And] Lawrence Tabak found himself shut out of meetings with leadership....

Trump’s executive orders to terminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives .... was a shock to the nation’s scientists, who work in laboratories that have been largely insulated from election cycles and the shifting political agendas of Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

[Then came] a jaw-dropping memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget that called for a pause on federal grant activity — one of NIH’s main reasons to exist. This order seemed to encompass most activities that spread NIH grants across the country, including making research awards, evaluating the most meritorious scientific proposals and even just continuing the funding of existing projects that needed renewal.

[By the end of week 2 of Trump 2.0] a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in Rhode Island said funding should be unfrozen....

Then came the biggest blow yet: ... Health and Human Services (HHS) declared that henceforth NIH would cap at 15 percent the indirect cost rates, or “overhead,” in funding it sends to research institutions....

On Feb. 10, a federal judge ... said the federal government must comply with a 10-day-old restraining order. “The defendants must resume the funding of institutes and other agencies of the defendants (for example the National Institute for Health),” wrote U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island. The cap of 15 percent on indirect costs was temporarily halted by a court as well.

At midday on Feb. 11, Tabak was summoned to the downtown offices of HHS. The meeting turned out to be an ambush, according to multiple people familiar with what transpired. As it wrapped up, Tabak was handed a memo that said he was no longer the top deputy at NIH. Instead, he would be a senior adviser to the acting HHS secretary, Dorothy Fink — working in downtown Washington, far from NIH, far from his own laboratory. That evening, Tabak sent an email to colleagues saying he was retiring immediately, after 25 years of government service. (WashPost)

So it goes in Trump 2.0, a regime that hates science.