In October, at a private event for the Center for Renewing America, Russell Vought, the conservative think tank’s leader who now leads President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, laid out his plan to dramatically remake the federal government. It included defunding agencies, rolling back civil service protections, and generally just making life hell for government workers. “We want to put them in trauma,” he said.
At the National Institutes of Health, that pain has arrived sharply and swiftly. Not even 100 days into Trump’s second term, his administration’s onslaught of actions has slashed the agency’s workforce and choked off funding for biomedical research. By STAT’s own analysis, billions of dollars that would normally be flowing out to universities, academic medical centers, and nonprofit research organizations have either been staunched or clawed back.
Harder to wrap one’s mind around is the human toll of all these cuts — the thousands of personal tragedies playing out across the country, far beyond the NIH’s Maryland campus — as labs go dark and careers evaporate and clinical trials for new medicines lag. That trauma looks like a young scientist suddenly worried about paying rent, a researcher halting her study of maternal mortality, a lung disease specialist forced out of his dream job by his own conscience, a cancer patient facing a treatment delay, a university administrator trying to hold it all together.
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