Trump’s deliberate destruction of biomedical research institutions

The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions.

By Jeff Nesbit

A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?

There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.

What is true and known is that Kennedy’s HHS team has halted communications activities about NIH grants; throttled necessary peer-reviewed grant-review meetings; ordered the federal agency staff to review dozens of keywords in thousands of existing grants and issue termination letters based on what it finds; threatened to fire hundreds of expert reviewers and core staff at the agency; placed a cap on indirect costs that underpin basic scientific and medical research; and put woefully unprepared, lower-level career staff in charge of key functions at the agency.

The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.

An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.

The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?

There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.

Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.

One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions.

The most infamous example is Albert Einstein’s utter failure to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the imminent threat posed by Nazi scientists on the brink of splitting the atom. Most people have heard the simplified version of this story: Einstein wrote a letter warning Roosevelt about the threat from Nazi scientists; Roosevelt heard the advice and then ordered the Manhattan Project to go full speed ahead to beat the Nazis.

The truth is far different. Einstein wrote not one but four letters warning of the threat—each letter more insistent than the previous. All fell largely on deaf ears in Roosevelt’s White House. Roosevelt fobbed Einstein off on lower-level government officials. He never seems to take Einstein’s warnings seriously. The small research program that proved the atom could be split was nearly an afterthought to a president prosecuting a world war. Scientists and their warnings were a distraction.

Some version of this sad story might be at play right now. Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.

NSF funding built and then supported the internet and led to nearly every modern computer and basic scientific advancement we recognize in the hard sciences. NIH medical and scientific research led directly to the creation of nearly all the life-saving drugs developed in the past quarter century that Americans rely on today.

The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.

Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state's economies.

But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.

But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.

And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.

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