When the Environmental Protection Agency, during the first Trump administration, put the word out to scientists that it was looking for alternatives to chemical testing in animals, researchers at Texas A&M answered the call.
Ivan Rusyn and Weihsueh Chiu, professors in the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, were awarded an EPA Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grant in August 2020. With nearly $800,000 in government funding secured, the researchers dove into their work on improving “in vitro-to-in vivo extrapolation” methods.
“What we’re trying to do,” Chiu explained, “is develop complex systems where we can test these chemicals in the lab, and then also use computer models to predict what type of chemicals are safer and can be used in our economy, and which ones we should avoid using.”
Five years later, the second Trump administration insists it’s as committed as ever to ending experiments on animals — but the innovative toxicology work happening at Texas A&M was abruptly halted in May, one of hundreds of EPA grants cut short by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“In our opinion,” Rusyn continued, it’s the “termination of an award that was and is and remains quite responsive to the current interests of the first Trump administration — and the second Trump administration.”
EPA-funded grants scrapped by DOGE include projects to improve air-quality monitoring near a refinery notorious for emitting pollutants, examine the impact of fireworks’ chemical concentrations in drinking water, develop predictive models to forecast future pandemics through the surveillance of rural wastewater sources, and myriad others whose cancellations seemingly undercut the Trump administration’s supposed environmental priorities.
Many of those grants appear to have been dropped simply due to the fact that phrases like “environmental justice” or “equity” were used in the applications. The EPA said in response to a request for comment that it has canceled “at least $29 billion in wasteful spending” and saved “more than $2 billion taxpayer dollars” through its work with DOGE, while fulfilling its “core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
Lambert here: Who knew the brain geniuses at DOGE couldn’t even perform a competent keyword search!
The Carnegie Mellon team jumped at the chance to apply for the same type of STAR grant that was awarded to Rusyn and Chiu at Texas A&M, and in the final months of the Biden administration, they got the good news: $1.5 million in funding to develop a “predicted reaction network” that used experimental and computational data to assess the environmental lifecycle of certain chemicals.
In layman’s terms, [Carrie McDonough, an associate professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon] and her team were attempting to accelerate the chemical testing process undertaken by the EPA.
“Bureaucracy and safety assessments that are done by the EPA take forever, and the EPA doesn’t like that either,” McDonough said. “No one likes how long those things take.”
Creating a model that attempted to address that problem would seem to be right up DOGE’s alley: a more efficient way to test synthetic substances, using machine learning to analyze data and predict outputs to ensure harmful chemicals aren’t used and safe ones can be utilized faster. The environmental section of the White House’s Make America Healthy Again report, McDonough noted, essentially described the kind of work Carnegie Mellon researchers were doing.
“What we want to do is have more independent safety assessments not done by the companies,” she said. “And we want to be more rapid, and we want to involve computational prediction, machine learning and safety assessments — exactly what the grant is. Yeah, [the grant cancellation] was frustrating.”
Scientists working on the Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M projects leaned heavily into predictive tools and models. So, too, did a team of University of Illinois researchers who in 2022 were awarded a $1 million EPA grant to improve wastewater monitoring in rural areas, a project aimed at more quickly detecting infectious diseases and other potentially dangerous pathogens.
Helen Nguyen, an environmental engineering professor at Illinois and principal investigator of the study, said the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the value of wastewater monitoring and revealed current systems’ shortcomings — particularly in overlooking wide swaths of the country.
“When you have the next pandemic — which will come and we need to deploy wastewater treatment to monitor the pandemic — how do we do it with the communities that are not connected to centralized wastewater treatment?” Nguyen said. “We know how to do it for Chicago, Boston, whatever, everyone else, OK? But we have rural communities. … How do we monitor that?”
The Illinois team aimed to answer that question by developing a system to analyze various datasets covering rural areas — weather, population density, civil infrastructure, “social dimensions,” etc. — and then forecast where the transmission of infectious diseases would be most likely to occur.
The predictive nature of that modeling paired with on-site wastewater sampling, Nyugen said, would have served to inform “underfunded” and “low-resource” areas of looming trouble. In awarding the grant three years ago, an EPA administrator said: “Protecting public health is one of [the agency’s] highest priorities.” And now?
“The current administration doesn’t seem to care at all about infectious disease anyway,” said Nguyen, whose project was stopped at about its halfway point.
Nguyen, the Illinois environmental engineering professor, doesn’t believe that the government’s changes will be permanent and the “pendulum” will swing back. But as someone who grew up in Vietnam and studied in the former Soviet Union, she’s already seen a backsliding in American universities’ ability to recruit the best scientists in the world. “We used to be at the frontier,” she said, “and it’s probably moving to another country now.”
A massive part of foreign-born scientists’ shift away from the U.S. is the Trump administration’s extreme immigration policies, but Nguyen believes there’s another factor at play: areas of technological innovation not being “valued” here anymore, with the EPA grant cuts just one example.
“It takes a long time to do something, and then, just by a stroke of someone’s pen, that’s it. And we stop it,” she said. “I don’t know how we are gonna recover from it.”
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