Trump Administration Changes at NIH, EPA, NASA, NSF Spark Internal Dissent
The federal government is full of scientists who lend their expertise to key decisions concerning our food, our drugs, our environment, our health care, etc. But as the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term, these scientists say they found themselves as pawns in what they call a strongly antical administration.
Some are expressed publicly. Several hundred staff members of the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA have gathered to write to their leaders and other representatives of the government. The resulting letters, published by the non-profit organization, represent science, denounce the deep cuts in agencies and change the priorities which believe their traditional missions and go far beyond the changes which generally occur under the new presidents. (A fourth letter, made public at the end of July 22 by the New York TimesWas written by the employees of the National Science Foundation to the Representative Zoe Lofgren, principal democrat of the Chamber of Sciences, Space and Technology Committee, and calls on the Committee to defend the NSF citing similar complaints.)
“As a administrator, you put the policy of the president; It has always been so, and it is [so] Today, “explains Christine Todd Whitman, who was an administrator of EPA under President George W. Bush.” But politics has never been the dismantling of the agency. Now she and the authors of the letters fear, it is.
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The letter of EPA staff members, whom they call a “Declaration of Dissent”, highlights five key concerns about how the administrator Lee Zeldin heads the agency. Officials “undermine public confidence …, ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters …, reversing EPA progress in the most vulnerable communities in America …, dismantling the Office of Research and Development [and] Promote a culture of fear, ”write staff members.
The second point – indicating a scientific consensus to benefit the polluters – is a particular concern for Amelia Hertzberg, an environmental protection specialist who worked at the EPA environmental justice office until she and the rest of this office are placed on leave in February. “EPA was founded with a mission to protect human health and the environment, whatever its effect on industry,” she says. EPA works with companies to ensure that its policies are reasonable, she notes, and companies receive broader support from other government agencies.
Hertzberg also highlights the bypass by the administration of established protocols to reduce staff. “If you want to have a reduction in force, that’s good,” she says. “Let’s do it legally; let’s do it according to the procedure.”
Another signatory of the EPA letter is Michael Pasqua, a life scientist and program director for safe efforts of EPA drinking water in Wisconsin. He said that he was particularly upset by changes to the agency’s research and development office, which is reduced to a third of its staff and fell back into the administrator’s office.
“This is the science that everything is based,” says Pasqua about the work of the Research and Development Bureau. Now, he fears, the researchers will be in a hurry by the arrival of the results that correspond to the administrator’s priorities. “They transform science into this subjective cultural conversation that has no meaning,” he says.
Pasqua says he just wants to be able to focus on his work: support the Wisconsin efforts to guarantee that residents have access to safe and clean drinking water. The state, he says, is always confronted with challenges of its historically intensive use of nitrates chemicals in agriculture, even if it was among the first to quantify and attack the Perfluoroalkyle and polyfluoroalkyle PFAS, or “chemicals forever”, in drinking water. “I thought I would help people,” he said about his decision to join EPA.
EPA has not returned American scientistRequest for comments on the letter. After the publication of the letter, the agency put around 140 employees who signed it on administrative leave.
“It was an act of courage to develop and connect to this letter, knowing that the signatories would probably be sidelined or even worse,” said Gina McCarthy, who was an administrator of the EPA under the president of the time, Barack Obama, in a press release American scientist.
The last of the three letters was sent to the NASA temporary administrator Sean Duffy. His signatories are particularly afraid of reprisals, explains a current employee, who signed the letter but asked to remain anonymous in this article. This NASA employee has been worried for some time. “I am someone who was quite involved in the groups of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility around NASA, so once the executive decrees got rid of these were issued and very quickly implemented, it was then that I knew that destruction was happening,” they said.
Although the three agencies are faced with spectacular changes, the details seem different and each letter talks about these individual circumstances. The NASA letter, for example, is strongly shaped by the way disasters of human space flights, such as the Challenge And Colombia The tragedies have become cooked in the agency’s culture – the letter calls by its name astronauts died in the exercise of its functions.
NASA staff also highlight, in particular, the Trump administration’s decision to cancel more than a dozen healthy spacecrafts that have carried out prolonged operations – missions that now require a tiny budget but still refer precious scientific data. “Once we have struck the switch off, there is no switch,” said the NASA employee about the mission cancellations proposed, noting that certain spaceships are designed to be destroyed at the end of their lives. “There is simply no return from that.” (NASA has not come back either American scientistrequest for comments on the letter.)
The letter of NIH employees, nicknamed the “Bethesda declaration”, was published in the first, early June, and perhaps saw the most open reception. NIH director Jay Bhattacharya met 38 employees who signed the letter on July 21. “I felt that there was a lot of empathy, there was a discussion committed. I did not really hear a solid change of change,” said a participant at a rally after the meeting.
“We are going in the wrong direction, and there have been irreparable damage. But there is still time to straighten the ship. ” —Ian Morgan, Molecular biologist and postdoctoral stock market, NIH
Before the meeting, Bhattacharya had referred to the opening to the discussion within the agency. “Bethesda’s declaration has fundamental false ideas on the political instructions taken by the NIH in recent months, in particular the continuous support of the NIH for international collaboration,” he said in a statement provided to American scientist. “Nevertheless, the dissent respectful of science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed. ”
Like the other letters, Bethesda’s declaration highlights key concerns concerning the agency’s activities under the second Trump administration. In this document, employees complain that the NIH was forced to “politicize research by interrupting subsidies and contracts with high quality reading committee …, to interrupt global collaboration …, an examination by peers …, promulgate 15% coverage on indirect costs”, which hinders funded research and “fire the essential staff of NIH”.
Ian Morgan, molecular biologist and postdoctoral stock market of the National Institute of NIH General Medical Sciences, which studies resistance to antimicrobials, says that the months following the adoption of Trump were difficult. “Everything has been closed,” he said. “We were not allowed to communicate outside with our employees; We were not allowed to order supplies to do our job; We could not do any new research. ”
Morgan, who worked for the NIH on and outside for more than a decade, was able to restart his work to focus on writing existing results. However, he said, he was struck by the ravages on the research carried out within the agency and upset by reports of the staff of the clinic who were to inform patients that they would no longer be able to receive treatment in NIH facilities.
“We are going in the wrong direction, and there have been irreparable damage,” says Morgan about the changes made in the past few months that have pushed him to sign the letter. “But it’s still time to straighten the ship.”
In a declaration at Scientific American, A spokesperson for the NIH responded to each concern included in the letter, saying that “agency’s financing decisions must be based on the merit of pro-provable and testable assumptions, not ideological stories”. In addition, the press release indicates that “legitimate international collaborations” have not been arrested – that the agency simply tries to understand where the money is going – and that the concerns concerning the peer exam are a “misunderstanding” while the agency focuses on “improving transparency, rigor and reproducibility of research funded by NIH”.
The press release also underlined other donors according to which general costs caps of 15% and declared that the agency “examines each case of dismissal to ensure relevance”, reversing these decisions as it judges it appropriate. “However, as NIH’s priorities are changing, our endowment model must also ensure alignment with our central mission and be good dollar goalkeepers of taxpayers.”
Morgan, Hertzberg and Pasqua all say that their fundamental objective to express themselves is to make sure they can continue to do what they believe to be an important job that benefits people in the United States
“I hope the general public understands that what we do, we do for them,” says Pasqua. “If you drink water and breathe the air, we try to protect you.”
