Under normal conditions, a major part of my job is reducing barriers for faculty, staff and students engaged in innovative research. For example, I make sure my faculty have enough human help to complete necessary administrative tasks so they can focus on their science while writing their grants. My overall goal is to remove roadblocks and foster an environment in which new discoveries are made that can improve people’s lives
Our turn came when DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump administration effort at eliminating bureaucratic waste – turned its attention to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
While interruptions to grant funding slow scientific progress, there is an immediate real-world human cost to the upheaval.
Consider the case of one of my junior faculty members. 2025 was a critical year for them: If they didn’t receive funding, they would lose their employment – it’s common in academia for scientists to need to raise money to support their own research and part of their salary.
Lambert here: See, there’s your problem.
Their NIH program officer – the person who recommends whether a grant would be funded – had previously told them their proposal would likely be successful. But by February 2025, that NIH officer was DOGE’d – that is, fired – and so the fate of the grant remained in limbo.
By the time the faculty member received initial feedback on that grant and resubmitted it for reevaluation, the government had shut down and delayed the review again. By this point, nearly a year had passed and no grant had been awarded – or rejected, for that matter.
Without funding, this faculty member cannot conduct experiments, pay or train students and other lab members, or purchase essential supplies to do experiments. As a result, both scientific progress and their career advancement remain in jeopardy; they hang on by a thread while waiting for yet another grant to come through.
Sadly, this was not an unusual case.
One of the most profound consequences of all this instability has been its impact on the next generation of scientists, especially Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars. Not only are these early-career researchers training to be the scientists of the future, but they are also essential contributors to performing grant-funded experiments, publishing in scientific journals and ensuring research program continuity.
Lambert here: Yeah, but who needs scientists when we’ve got AI?
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