Health researchers are worried. Back in March, as the Trump administration made sweeping cuts to staffing and proposed funding cuts for medical research, top professors started sounding the alarm.
“This is going to affect health and the life expectancy of Americans,” said Dr. Steven Woolf in an interview with PBS Newshour.
Woolf is a professor of family medicine and population health at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. He helped author a letter that about 2,000 doctors, scientists and researchers signed expressing similar concerns.
“The net effect of this is we’re slower in identifying new treatments for cancer, new treatments for heart disease,” Woolf said. “And we’re going to lose our edge, and the implications are going to affect everyday Americans.”
Some researchers at the University of Wyoming (UW) say these downsizes would also hurt their students’ growth and job prospects, as well as the pursuit to improve health outcomes more broadly. That includes David Fay, a professor at UW who runs a nationally recognized molecular biology research program.
“I kind of run a small business within the state of Wyoming. I employ maybe a half a dozen full time people,” Fay said. “I love being at the University of Wyoming, because it's not an Ivy League school. It's affordable – it's for everyone. Training students from Wyoming is one of the most gratifying things I can imagine doing.”
They research everything from genes and cancer to worm molting. Specifically, round worms shedding their skin. About a third of the world’s people are infected with the parasites that can cause icky health issues and collapse agricultural systems. Fay’s research will ideally help develop drugs that get rid of them by only targeting the molting process and not killing other things in our bodies.
But to do all this potentially life-saving work, Fay needs money. The main source of funding for his lab is federal from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which the Trump administration is proposing a 40% budget cut to.
“If I don't have that money, I'm shutting my lab down,” Fay said. “There's nothing else I can do.”
There’s also proposals to cut general university research funding costs, what Fay calls “indirects.”
“These turn out to be absolutely essential for the research to be carried out,” he said. “We're talking about basic utilities, building maintenance, core infrastructure, accounting, purchasing, grants, management, hiring, biological safety, compliance – you name it, there is a cost associated with it.”
Trump wants to cap indirects at 15%. Fay said UW’s are currently almost 45%.
“Our costs are really at the low end,” he said. “If you cut into that much, then places like UW won't be able to afford to carry out scientific research on their campuses, and that's probably true for nearly every university in the country.”
For Fay, that’d mean scores of students losing out on being a part of his science lab. Which means more textbook time, and less learning-by-doing.
“We'll have to talk about research that other people have done, not things we're doing,” Fay said. “For a lot of students, getting into the lab, getting their hands dirty and just getting that experience is a benefit for them personally – and also looks great on their resumes.”
While getting their hands dirty in the lab may not necessarily lead to ground-breaking cures, Fay argued he and his students are helping solve one corner of the jigsaw puzzle of health science.
Take his skin-shedding worms. Many who want to see the federal cuts say it’s up to the private sector to take on this kind of niche research. But Fay said companies can’t afford the bold funding risks it takes to discover new ideas.
“You really need academia to sort of plant those seeds, and they get to a certain point where those companies can then take on a certain amount of risk to bring those forward to the next step,” Fay said. “They're not going to make those really early investments. They just can't afford to do that."
Fay said those seemingly off-the-wall ideas lead to things that have impacted just about everyone.
“Every cancer treatment, every vaccine – there's essentially no treatments that have probably not had their roots somewhere in university research,” he said.
Fay added that America taking its foot off the research pedal means other countries could pull ahead – and even pull workers and knowledge out of Wyoming and the U.S.
Now, a lot of this is still up in the air. But there’s been some U.S. congressional members sounding similar alarms to Fay. Recently, a Senate committee pushed back on Trump’s proposed cuts, going so far as to suggest a modest increase.
When Congress reconvenes this fall, the funding outlook is expected to become more clear.
Additionally, just on Aug. 7, Trump signed an executive order that focuses on federal grants, including for research. Grants will now require approval from the head of the awarding federal agency. Some are concerned about political appointees having the final say in independent research. The order said awarded grants must be “consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”
