Mona Hanna says federal funding cuts reminiscent of precursor to Flint water crisis

Yahoo

3 days ago

Howard Crawford, left, Matt Elliott, center, and Mona Hanna, right, speaks at a panel about the impact of cutting federal funds for higher education research during the Mackinac Policy Conference on Mackinac Island, Mich., on May 27, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Roth/Michigan Advance)
MACKINAC ISLAND – Dr. Mona Hanna says federal funding cuts by the administration of President Donald Trump are reminiscent of the circumstances that led to the Flint Water Crisis she helped expose.
'It wasn't just the austerity of changing the water to save money,' Hanna said. 'It was years of austerity in state government and federal government that really had hollowed out our bureaucracies – our Department of Natural Resources at the time, our public health departments that had become skeletons of themselves and they only really could react to crises, and they didn't have the infrastructure to really be proactive and to prevent issues.'
She said that when those institutions failed, researchers stepped up.
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'It was research that was the scientific safety net,' Hanna said. 'It was the source of truth. It was the check and balance to kind of protect a community.'
Among the programs that have already seen its funding cut is the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, Hanna said.
Hanna was speaking during a panel at the Mackinac Policy Conference sponsored by Michigan State University.
University President Kevin Guskiewicz said other projects at MSU that are either at risk of losing funding or already have include a project to create more resilient crops, research to improve health outcomes for expectant mothers and babies, and a Detroit wastewater surveillance program that was among the first to detect COVID-19.
'Federal investment enables high risk, early stage innovation that commercial entities wouldn't likely fund,' Guskiewicz said. 'It's the starter fuel, as we like to say, for breakthroughs in health, security and technology.'
Howard Crawford, senior scientist and scientific director at Henry Ford, researches pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic cancer patients have a median survival of about 10 months, Crawford said.
'The first thing they usually hear from their doctor is to get their affairs in order,' Crawford said. 'And the thing that I always want to tell everyone that ever hears that … is get yourself to a university hospital, because that's where the second opinions are going to come, that's where the clinical trials are being conducted, and that's your best hope.'
But he said the research he and others have done is already starting to make an impact, with the five-year survival rate more than doubling since he began 25 years ago, largely due to work done in university hospitals.
'This progress we've made, this is stuff that started 40 years ago, not four years ago, and what we have to have is a continuity of research so that we can make this progress mean something,' Crawford said.
While scientists could be on the verge of a breakthrough in treatment, Crawford said that work is jeopardized by the ongoing uncertainty around funding.
He said that's in part because the public doesn't understand the impact of the work researchers do.
'We spend all of our time writing papers and writing grants, and that's what we have to do to function, but if the public doesn't understand that's what we're doing, why we're doing it, what is happening in the laboratory, what we're bringing to them in the next few years, that's our goal, and we need to be better,' Crawford said.
Hanna added that 'we need to get out of our ivory towers, classrooms and labs and clinics, and get more comfortable in these public spaces.'