Trump's NIH Cuts Send Shockwaves Through the Science World

Joe Weisenthal (0:00)

Hey, Odd Lots listeners, we're coming to DC.

Tracy Alloway (0:02)

We're finally doing it, Joe. It's gonna be our first live show in Washington DC, our nation's capital. It's also finally gonna be the time where we actually talk about the Jones Act.

Joe Weisenthal (0:13)

We've been talking about doing the Jones Act episode of Odd Lots for a long time, and it's become this recurring joke that we've never done. But we're gonna do it in grand style, because we're gonna be doing it live in DC, and it's actually gonna be a debate.

Tracy Alloway (0:28)

Yeah, so we have Sara Fuentes from the Transportation Institute. She's gonna be taking the pro side, and we also have Colin Graybaugh of the Cato Institute. He'll be taking the against side. It's gonna be really interesting to see how all of that shakes out.

Joe Weisenthal (0:43)

In addition to that, we're gonna be speaking with Blair Levin, who was around during the telecom bubble, and we have Andrew Ferguson, the new head of the FTC, the one who's replaced Lena Kong. We're gonna be talking about mergers and acquisitions and all that stuff, so it should be a really fun night.

Tracy Alloway (0:59)

If you want to come and join us for that evening, it's gonna be on March 12th at the Miracle Theatre. Go to bloomberg.com/oddlots, and you can find the link to purchase tickets. We hope to see you there.

SPEAKER_3 (1:14)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (1:30)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (1:35)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (1:36)

Tracy, we're recording this February 25th, and we're just a little bit over a month into the new Trump administration. And setting aside how one views the long-term goals of the administration from the outside, it's chaotic. And there have been a lot of cuts, and it doesn't look like scalpel types of cuts. Many things have been shut down or frozen completely in some respect. And you see a lot of people talk about the implications of these moves, but I find it hard to wrap my head around.

Tracy Alloway (2:08)

There's a lot happening, that's for sure. And I think one of the struggles of everyone who's trying to follow this at the moment is that you have new executive orders coming out almost daily. Then you have the legal challenges to those. And then you have the administration itself sometimes arguing within itself about whether or not certain orders should be followed, certain emails should be replied to. It does feel very chaotic.

Joe Weisenthal (2:33)

One area that I think has caught a lot of people's attention in particular has been immediate moves at the NIH, the National Institute of Health. And there are multiple moving parts here. But from what I've been understand, that when there are grants awarded, some of the money goes to direct costs, and some of it's indirect, and there has been a change in what's allowed on the indirect. And then I've also seen, and it's almost hard to believe, but I've now seen it in enough places, that there have been whole programs that got hit with an immediate freeze, which I have to imagine in science creates all sorts of problems. I imagine there are lots of endeavors that can't just be stop started on a switch.

And so, understanding what's actually happening right now in science funding and the implications of some of these moves is obviously something we need to discuss, especially given the broader thing of like, we want to be, I think, a country at the leading edge of science and technology.

Tracy Alloway (3:29)

Yeah, this is exactly the tension, I think. So even Elon Musk and Donald Trump will talk about how important it is for the US to be technologically advanced and to beat competitors like China. But at the same time, they're doing this, and I guess their argument is that by capping some of the cost of research, you might make it more efficient, you might make it more monetizable, you might see more breakthroughs. But again, there is this tension to the sledgehammer approach that we've seen, where if you just put in a cap on something like indirect funding, it can affect a bunch of research programs. So we should talk about it. I also, I must admit, I don't know anything about NIH funding. It seems very sprawling and very complicated. So I want to get into that as well.

Joe Weisenthal (4:15)

All right. Well, I'm very excited to say we have the perfect guest, someone who actually is a scientist in the lab working on these things and has been talking about the impact of the moves over the last several weeks. Thrilled to bring on to the show Carole LaBonne, Professor of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University. Professor LaBonne, thank you so much for coming on the Outlots podcast.