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Boston Globe

How Trump upended New England science and health research in 100 days

'I do think science will shrink,' said Brandon Ogbunu, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, during a Globe-hosted panel discussion last week. 'It's going to shrink substantially.' Advertisement Ogbunu tempered his remarks with a note of hope, saying pressuring a system can reveal where its weak points are. 'What that does, hopefully, is it allows us to think carefully about what this system is, the way it's engineered, and hopefully how to do it better,' he said. Related : Advertisement The federal cuts have an outsized impact in New England, with Massachusetts alone accounting for nearly 3 percent of targeted National Institutes of Health funding, according to a Globe analysis of terminated grants compiled by Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Noam Ross of rOpenSci, a statistical analysis firm for the sciences. The size of the reductions themselves is unclear from the data, but in Massachusetts, the administration targeted NIH grants that collectively were valued at more than $100 million, and grants from the National Science Foundation worth $17.6 million. In some cases, while the Trump administration terminated only portions of these grants, it effectively brought entire projects to a premature halt, wasting money and years of work. The state ranked eighth in the number of NIH grants terminated and fourth in NSF grants lost — behind California, New York, and Texas. And those numbers don't include the Elsewhere in New England, the NIH canceled a portion of a grant to Maine worth almost $40 million — one of the largest grants affected nationwide. Dr. Clifford Rosen, a Tufts University professor who is a leader of the project through the MaineHealth hospital system, said his team will lose $1.4 million that supports research by young scientists into health issues in rural communities. 'We're just stunned by this,' Rosen said. 'This is really counter to what we're hearing from NIH, that the new leadership wants young investigators. That's the core of what we do.' Advertisement Rosen suspected the program was targeted because it had previously supported research into vaccine hesitancy. NIH cuts targeted grants worth more than $44 million to Connecticut, and almost $10 million to Rhode Island. New Hampshire also recorded multiple terminations, though the size of the affected grants is smaller. Among the avalanche of terminations are National Science Foundation grants to study misinformation. The foundation, announced that such research 'could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights' of Americans. But Mary Feeney, who until recently, directed the She noted there is no substitute for the collaboration among university researchers that federal funding engenders. 'It creates interdisciplinary and collaborative teams across the country, which creates more value for multiple states, multiple universities, multiple communities, people working in different places,' she said. 'It has more impact.' Experts also said private donors usually don't have enough money, and corporate sponsors don't have the incentive, to support long-term research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, both part of HHS, said they would claw back about $11 billion in unspent public health funding nationally. Some of that money is still flowing, for now, to states that obtained a Advertisement The CDC grants originated as COVID-19-related funds but now support a range of public health initiatives. One with $2.2 million outstanding supports waste water monitoring in more than 30 Massachusetts communities conducted by Cambridge's Biobot Analytics, said Newsha Ghaeli, the company's president. Waste water testing gained prominence during the pandemic, and has since been used to track a variety of illnesses. 'We're currently using it to monitor for avian influenza as well as seasonal influenza. We use it to track measles,' Ghaeli said. 'This can be used for so many different applications beyond just COVID or respiratory diseases.' New Hampshire is particularly vulnerable to the public health cuts, said Karen Liot Hill, the sole Democrat on New Hampshire's executive council, which oversees some state functions. It has no income tax or sales tax and a powerful libertarian force in state government. 'We just have very, very limited resources,' she said. Liot Hill said New Hampshire has since paused programs related to community health, mental health care, public health labs, and immunizations. New Hampshire kindergartners have the The US Department of Health and Human Services didn't respond to a request for comment, though spokespeople for the department have previously said the changes are part of a Advertisement Delaney, the Harvard epidemiologist, began tracking NIH grant terminations in March to monitor and potentially oppose the government's actions. The terminations started with research focused on transgender health, then moved on to studies involving the LGBTQ community more broadly, DEI-related efforts, HIV prevention, vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation. What's surprised him is how inconsistent cuts seem to be. 'We've never figured out why one grant instead of another grant,' Delaney said. 'If you're a researcher and you want to do what the government is asking so your grant doesn't get canceled, it's impossible to do. It's very chaotic.' Mohammad Jalali, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, was surprised to learn the Food and Drug Administration terminated a two-year, $1 million research contract he oversaw at Massachusetts General Hospital. He thought his work, computer modeling to determine how factors such as treatment access, policy interventions, and drug supplies influence overdose rates, aligned with the administration's goals of taking ' was needed to address drug use. 'This feels more like the unintended consequences of a rushed process,' Jalali said. 'What just happened is a big, big waste of taxpayer money.' Dr. Michael Paasche-Orlow, a Tufts Medical Center researcher, expected to finish an interactive app to provide young people and their parents with accurate information about the vaccine for human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted infection associated with six kinds of cancer. He is driven, he said, by the real possibility widespread vaccination could virtually eliminate illnesses such as cervical cancer in the United States. Then he learned on April 1 that almost half of a $2 million NIH grant was terminated. Advertisement 'Science is really quite a fragile ecosystem, it can't just be turned on again,' Paasche-Orlow said. 'I'm afraid that some things are being broken right now that will take time to fix, to rebuild.' Jason Laughlin can be reached at