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Scientific American
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Scientific American
Science Agency Staffers Speak Out about Trump Administration's Actions
The federal government is full of scientists who lend their expertise to key decisions about our food, medicines, environment, health care, and more. But as the first six months of President Donald Trump's second term have unfolded, these scientists say they have found themselves as pawns in what they call a strongly antiscience administration. Some are speaking out publicly. Several hundred staffers at the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA have banded together to write to their leaders and other government officials. The resulting letters, published by the nonprofit organization Stand Up for Science, decry deep cuts at the agencies and changing priorities that belie their traditional missions and go far beyond the shifts that typically occur under new presidents. (A fourth letter, made public late July 22 by the New York Times, was written by National Science Foundation staffers to Representative Zoe Lofgren, senior Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, calls on the committee to defend NSF citing similar complaints.) 'As an administrator, you carry out the policy of the president; that's always been so, and that is [so] today,' says Christine Todd Whitman, who served as administrator of the EPA under then president George W. Bush. 'But the policy has never been the dismantling of the agency.' Now, she and the letters' authors fear, it is. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The EPA staffers' letter, which they call a 'Declaration of Dissent,' highlights five key concerns about how Administrator Lee Zeldin has been running the agency. Officials are 'undermining public trust..., ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters..., reversing EPA's progress in America's most vulnerable communities..., dismantling the Office of Research and Development [and] promoting a culture of fear,' the staffers write. The second point— ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters —is a particular concern for Amelia Hertzberg, an environmental protection specialist who worked at the EPA's Environmental Justice Office until she and the rest of that office were placed on leave in February. 'The EPA was founded with a mission to protect human health and the environment, regardless of its effect on industry,' she says. The EPA works with companies to ensure its policies are reasonable, she notes, and companies receive broader support from other government agencies. Hertzberg also highlights the administration's circumvention of established protocols for reducing staffing. 'If you want to have a reduction in force, that's fine,' she says. 'Let's do it legally; let's do it according to procedure.' Another signer of the EPA letter is Michael Pasqua, a life scientist and program manager for the EPA's safe drinking water efforts in Wisconsin. He says he has been particularly upset by changes at the agency's Office of Research and Development, which is being slashed to one third of its staff and folded into the administrator's office. 'This is the science that everything is based off of,' Pasqua says of the Office of Research and Development's work. Now, he fears, researchers will be pressured into arriving at findings that match the administrator's priorities. 'They are turning science into this subjective cultural conversation that doesn't really make any sense,' he says. Pasqua says he just wants to be able to focus on his work: supporting Wisconsin's effort to ensure residents have access to safe, clean drinking water. The state, he says, is still facing challenges from its historically heavy use of nitrate chemicals in agriculture, even as it has been among the first to quantify and begin addressing perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances PFAS, or 'forever chemicals,' in drinking water. 'I thought I would be helping people,' he says of his decision to join the EPA. The EPA did not return Scientific American 's request for comment on the letter. After the letter was published, the agency put about 140 employees who signed it on administrative leave. 'It was an act of courage to develop and sign on to this letter, knowing that signatories would likely be sidelined or even worse,' said Gina McCarthy, who served as administrator of the EPA under then president Barack Obama, in a statement to Scientific American. The most recent of the three letters was sent to NASA's interim administrator Sean Duffy. Its signers are particularly afraid of retaliation, says one current employee, who signed the letter but asked to remain anonymous in this article. This NASA employee has been worried for a while. 'I'm someone who has been pretty heavily involved with diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility groups around NASA, so once the executive orders getting rid of those were issued and then very quickly implemented, that's when I knew that the destruction was coming our way,' they say. Although all three agencies are facing dramatic changes, the details look different, and each letter speaks to those individual circumstances. The NASA letter, for example, is heavily shaped by the way human spaceflight disasters, such as the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, have become baked into the agency's culture—the letter calls out by name astronauts who have died in the line of duty. NASA staffers also highlight, in particular, the move by the Trump administration to cancel more than a dozen healthy spacecraft that have been conducting extended operations—old missions that now require a minuscule budget but still return valuable science data. 'Once we hit the off switch, there's no on switch,' the NASA employee says of the proposed mission cancellations, noting that some spacecraft are designed to be destroyed at the end of their life. 'There's just no coming back from that.' (NASA also did not return Scientific American 's request for comment on the letter.) The NIH employees' letter, dubbed the 'Bethesda Declaration,' was published first, in early June, and has seen perhaps the most open reception. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya met with 38 staffers who signed on to the letter on July 21. 'I felt there was a lot of empathy, there was some engaged discussion. I didn't really hear a strong plan for change,' one attendee said during a rally following the meeting. 'We're going in the wrong direction, and there has been irreparable harm done. But there's still time to right the ship.' —Ian Morgan, molecular biologist and postdoctoral fellow, NIH Before the meeting, Bhattacharya had hinted at openness to discussion within the agency. 'The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration,' he said in a statement provided to Scientific American. 'Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.' Like the other letters, the Bethesda Declaration highlights key concerns about the agency's activities under the second Trump administration. In it, employees complain that the NIH has been forced to 'politicize research by halting high-quality, peer-reviewed grants and contracts..., interrupt global collaboration..., undermine peer review..., enact a blanket 15% cap on indirect costs,' which hinders funded research, and 'fire essential NIH staff.' Ian Morgan, a molecular biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, who studies antimicrobial resistance, says that the months since Trump took office have been difficult. 'Everything was shut down,' he says. 'We weren't allowed to communicate outside with our collaborators; we weren't allowed to order any supplies to do our work; we weren't able to do any new research.' Morgan, who has worked for the NIH on and off for more than a decade, was able to reprioritize his work to focus on writing up existing findings. Still, he says, he was struck by the havoc wreaked on the research conducted within the agency and upset by reports from clinic staff who had to let patients know they would no longer be able to receive treatment at NIH facilities. 'We're going in the wrong direction, and there has been irreparable harm done,' Morgan says of changes made in the past months that drove him to sign the letter. 'But there's still time to right the ship.' In a statement to Scientific American, an NIH spokesperson responded to each concern included in the letter, saying that the agency's 'funding decisions must be based on the merit of provable and testable hypotheses, not ideological narratives.' In addition, the statement said that 'legitimate international collaborations' have not been stopped—that the agency is merely trying to understand where money is going—and that the concerns about peer review are a 'misunderstanding' as the agency focuses on 'enhancing the transparency, rigor, and reproducibility of NIH-funded research.' The statement also pointed to other funders that cap overhead costs at 15 percent and said that the agency is 'reviewing each case of termination to ensure appropriateness,' reversing these decisions as it sees fit. 'Still, as NIH priorities evolve, so must our staffing model to ensure alignment with our central mission and being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.' Morgan, Hertzberg and Pasqua all say their fundamental goal in speaking out is to ensure they can continue doing what they believe is important work that benefits people across the U.S. 'I hope the general public understands that what we're doing, we're doing for them,' Pasqua says. 'If you drink water and you breathe air, we're trying to protect you.'
Hindustan Times
4 hours ago
- General
- Hindustan Times
Michelin star chef Vikas Khanna shares ‘simple, quick and 100% vegetarian' recipe for home cooks that is easy to make
Are you looking for a vegetarian dish to make for your family that is easy to make and requires simple ingredients? In an Instagram post shared in September 2021, Michelin-star chef Vikas Khanna posted his flavourful Potato Au Gratin recipe. Let's find out how to make it: Michelin-star chef Vikas Khanna shares his simple, quick and 100% vegetarian recipe. (Freepik) Also Read | Chef Sanjeev Kapoor shares delicious Moringa leaves recipe to add protein, anti-inflammatory benefits to your daily diet Vikas Khanna's Potato Au Gratin recipe Sharing the recipe, the celebrity chef wrote, 'Simple, quick and 100 percent vegetarian. This flavourful recipe is sure to impress everyone in the family. Try it and you'll definitely thank me later. To make it right #MakeInIron.' So, if you want to learn a quick and easy vegetarian recipe for your family, here's all that you need to do: Ingredients: Butter 1 medium onion Coarsely chopped ginger Mashed potatoes 4 baby potatoes Salt to taste Pepper ½ cup of grated mozzarella cheese ½ cup of heavy cream Method: 1. Start with two tablespoons of butter and one medium onion, finely chopped. 2. Add two tablespoons of coarsely chopped ginger and cook them together on medium-high heat. 3. Next, incorporate four mashed potatoes, salt, and pepper to taste. You can also add your favourite spices. 4. Then, mix in half a cup of grated mozzarella cheese and half a cup of heavy cream. Cook until the mixture comes together. 5. For the next step, take four different baby potatoes and finely slice them. 6. Layer the slices in a cast iron kadahi (pan). Pour your potato mixture right on top and evenly spread it. 7. Bake it in a preheated 350-degree oven. Once done, turn it upside down, garnish with cilantro, and enjoy with your family. Why should you cook in an iron pan? In the post, Vikas Khanna stressed that to cook the dish right, make it in an iron pan. According to a June 2021 study reported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), cooking food in an iron pot escalates the levels of blood haemoglobin and iron content of the food, and thus reduces the incidences of iron deficiency anaemia. Another 2013 study found that an increase of 16.2 percent in the iron content was found in the snacks cooked in iron pots compared to those cooked in Teflon-coated non-stick pots. After 4 months of supplementation, a significant increase of 7.9 percent was seen in the haemoglobin of the children. Note to readers: This article is for informational purposes only and not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your doctor with any questions about a medical condition.
NZ Herald
11 hours ago
- Health
- NZ Herald
Many lung cancers are now in non-smokers. Scientists want to know why
'My family needs me,' she recalled thinking. Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer', said Dr Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. However, worldwide roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations, or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in non-smokers. They are trying to understand why it is more prevalent: in people of Asian ancestry; in women; and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in non-smokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among non-smokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body check-up during a visit to China — a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in non-smokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history — and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 non-smokers with lung cancer from around the world. Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution — for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution. The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu — both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease — are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that non-smokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason why lung cancer among people under-50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. Leah Phillips at her home in Peewee Valley, Kentucky. Photo / Jon Cherry, the New York Times There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003. Studies from Asia have also suggested second-hand smoke, fumes from cooking oils, and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the US, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the US, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American non-smoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the US, routine screening is recommended only for people aged 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in non-smokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people aged 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients — enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for non-smokers with a family history of lung cancer. Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 and had never smoked. In preliminary results from about 200 patients, they found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. Data from the full set of 1000 patients who were screened is forthcoming. Still, it would take far more research to determine who in the US, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13, and 14. 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who co-founded a non-profit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Nina Agrawal and Allison Jiang Photographs by: Shuran Huang, Jon Cherry ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Health
- Boston Globe
Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers. Scientists want to know why.
Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer,' said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But worldwide, roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. Advertisement These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Advertisement Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in nonsmokers, and trying to understand why it is more prevalent in people of Asian ancestry and women and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr. Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in nonsmokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among nonsmokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body checkup during a visit to China -- a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in nonsmokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history -- and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 nonsmokers with lung cancer from around the world. Advertisement Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution -- for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. (The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution.) The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu -- both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease -- are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr. Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that nonsmokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason lung cancer among people under 50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. (Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003.) Advertisement Studies from Asia have also suggested secondhand smoke, fumes from cooking oils and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the United States, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the United States, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American nonsmoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the United States, routine screening is recommended only for people ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in nonsmokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr. Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people ages 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients -- enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for nonsmokers with a family history of lung cancer. Advertisement Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 years old and had never smoked. They found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. That study included only about 200 women, though. It would take far more research to determine who in the United States, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow-growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr. Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14. Advertisement 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who cofounded a nonprofit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in
Scientific American
a day ago
- Politics
- Scientific American
NASA Staff Rebuke White House Cuts in Rare Public Dissent
More than 280 NASA employees past and present, including at least 4 astronauts, have signed a declaration of opposition to the many drastic changes that the administration of US President Donald Trump is working to enact. The declaration also urges the acting head of NASA not to make the unprecedented budget cuts Trump has proposed. 'The last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA's workforce,' reads the employees' letter to interim administrator Sean Duffy. It argues that Trump's changes threaten human safety, scientific progress and global leadership at NASA. The Voyager Declaration joins similar protest documents by employees at other US federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The appeals stem from Trump's sweeping campaign to overhaul the federal government, which has led to mass firings of workers and the proposal of steep cuts to agency budgets. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The declaration is 'about getting our dissent out to the public and saying, hey — this is what's happening at NASA, and this is not OK', says Ella Kaplan, who has signed the document. Kaplan works on a contract basis as a website administrator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and was speaking on her own behalf and not that of her employer or of NASA. Kaplan says she does not expect Duffy to read the document or to care much about it if he does. When Duffy ran for a seat in the US Congress more than a decade ago, he released a campaign advertisement that featured him wearing lumberjack clothing and saying he would bring his axe to 'topple the big spending in Washington'. The agency is not interested in sustaining 'lower-priority missions', said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. 'We must revisit what's working and what's not so that we can inspire the American people again and win the space race.' Staff exodus The Voyager Declaration, named after the twin NASA spacecraft that are exploring interstellar space, protests against staffing cuts at the agency and Trump's proposed cuts to science funding and other NASA budgets. The agency has fired some employees and pressured others to leave, resulting in the loss of more than 2,600 of the 17,000-plus NASA employees, according to news platform Politico. At least US$118 million in NASA grants has been cancelled outright, and the White House has proposed slashing nearly half of the agency's science budget for next year. Congress, which sets US spending, might reject at least some of those proposed cuts. But the managers of many NASA science projects have been asked to draw up plans for winding down their programmes even though Congress hasn't finalized the budget — drawing dissent from the declaration's signers. 'Once operational spacecraft are decommissioned, they cannot be turned back on,' the document says. NASA, like other agencies, is supposed to follow spending priorities laid out by Congress, and Duffy, as interim administrator, could theoretically ignore the White House requests until a budget is finalised. The declaration asserts that since Trump took office, safety has taken a back seat to politics, marking a 'dangerous turn' away from NASA's efforts to make human space flight less risky. Stevens responded that 'NASA will never compromise on safety.' The document's signers also disapprove of the agency's withdrawal from international missions, saying that such actions threaten partnerships with other nations' space agencies. The White House budget proposal, for instance, would cancel NASA participation in European Space Agency missions to Mars and Venus. Dissent by employees at other federal agencies has met with mixed reactions. At the NIH, where more than 480 employees signed a Bethesda Declaration, director Jay Bhattacharya has said he intends to foster respectful dissent. But EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has placed more than 100 signatories to a dissenting document on administrative leave, saying he will not tolerate employees undercutting the president's agenda. Staff at the US National Science Foundation are also planning a declaration, according to a leaked version of the document. Of the 287 signatories to the NASA document, 156 are anonymous.
