AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Since President Trump took office less than a month ago, he’s signed dozens of executive orders. We begin today’s show looking at how these measures have affected the science and medicine, the practice of it, in the United States. Many describe it as taking a wrecking ball to the enterprise, considered the crown jewel of the scientific community worldwide. Staff layoffs; slashed budgets, diversity programs; canceled studies and conferences have already had a profound impact at home and globally as scientists, students, doctors, professors, patients have been left reeling. Republican-led states may see some of the worst fallout from cuts to the National Institutes of Health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disease detective program is among the latest to be gutted, even as the avian flu threatens the country.

We go right now to STAT reporter Angus Chen, who’s been closely following the impact of the Trump administration’s executive orders on science and health. His recent exclusive was headlined “Trump policies spark fears of brain drain, threatening to undermine U.S. dominance in biomedicine.” His other pieces include “Trump’s restrictions spark chaos across health and science agencies,” “Growing number of federal health agencies are combing grants for taboo words” — he’s talking about words like “women” and ”COVID” — “Trump pressuring universities to end DEI or lose federal grants,” “NIH plans to slash support for indirect research [costs], sending shockwaves through science,” and “Federal judge halts Trump administration cuts to NIH research payments in 22 states.” STAT News is a leading news outlet covering health science and medicine.

Angus Chen, thanks so much for joining us on Democracy Now! Why don’t you start off by just going through the executive orders and, while some may seem bureaucratic, the kind of, as many have described it, wrecking ball that has really been launched through the scientific and medical establishment in this country?

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah. And you mentioned two of them. There’s the executive order on DEI, sort of banning or trying to end programs about DEI, and the executive order on LGBT identity. This also has a big impact on research. We’re already seeing that some grants for studies that look at LGBT identity and risks for certain health or certain diseases are being canceled.

And then, finally, I would say one really important thing is the NIH directive that was announced about a week ago, a little over a week ago, that cut something called indirect rates down to a cap of 15%. This is really having a really serious chilling effect on the scientific community, a very, very serious — causing very, very serious concern among the scientific community here in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Angus, let me ask you — that just sounds very bureaucratic, “indirect costs.”

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What exactly do you mean? And how will it affect the leading scientific and medical research universities across this country?

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah. So, the one thing to know about indirect costs is that this is one of the most important ways that a federal government helps to subsidize and fund the scientific and research infrastructure here in the United States. It goes towards paying things like electricity and plumbing and security bills and things like that, stuff about the basic upkeep of running a research institution. This is why it’s also called facilities and administration costs, or F&A costs, because it pays for those things, the things that you absolutely need if you’re running an organization, if you’re running a facility that conducts research.

And it’s really — it’s not cheap. It’s really real costs. Sometimes people say that these are just administrative costs, sort of administrative bloat. That’s, by and large, not true, that these costs mostly pay for things like administrative bloat. Actually, the amount of dollars that can be paid towards administration inside of F&A costs is capped at 26%. So they actually never even fully cover the total overhead of a university’s sort of research budget.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what are the institutions that are most likely to be affected? And also, in general, in talking about these massive cuts across the country, a lot of them are in Republican areas. I mean, you’ve got places like the University of Alabama that get enormous amounts of money to do research.

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah, yeah. You know, these indirect costs are so vital to universities and other types of research institutions, like academic medical centers, to actually running, to actually being able to keep the lights on every single day. And that’s not just true for red states or states like Alabama, where you have big research institutions like the University of Alabama at Birmingham. It’s true for basically every single research institution, every research university, every academic medical center in the entire country. All of them rely on these indirect costs that come from the federal government, from agencies like the National Institutes of Health.

Without them, a lot of university leaders and a lot of scientists told me that they simply wouldn’t be able to run. They would have to — and certainly not at the level that they are today. They would have to cut back severely on their research programs. They would have to cut back on students. They might have to cut back on a lot of important clinical trials even, that patients rely on, especially cancer patients who rely on these clinical trials for really the most advanced form of cancer care.

AMY GOODMAN: You are a cancer reporter. Can you talk about the effects on the cancer research establishment, and in specific examples, what is taking place right now? And we’re not only talking about this hurting the United States. But how much of cancer research in the United States is used by doctors and the scientific establishment all over the world?

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think that NIH dollars have been so important for advancing cancer care and advancing our understanding of cancer over the past several decades. If you just look from 1991 to today, the number of cancer deaths that we’ve cut in this country is down 33%. We’ve eliminated almost a third of cancer deaths, mainly because of our investment in cancer science and in our investment in health research. That’s led to so many different kinds of breakthroughs, from CAR T cells, which are living cells that are engineered — immune cells engineered from your body and put back in the patient in order to fight cancer. It’s so important for other kinds of breakthroughs in immunotherapy that have, you know, created treatments and cures for so many different patients, not just in the United States, but all around the world.

You know, I spoke with one scientist who is at Humanitas University in Italy, and he said that he was really concerned with some of the cuts on funding that have been proposed for the NIH in the U.S., because the U.S. is such a leader in biomedicine in the world that the loss of research in the U.S. would not just be a loss to American patients, but to people all around the world who depend on this type of science and are looking for that science to bring them the next breakthrough they might need for tomorrow.

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote another — 

ANGUS CHEN: And if you think about how common — 

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Angus.

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah. Oh, I was going to say, you know, you think about how common cancer is. It’s about one in two men in their lifetimes will be affected, one in three women in their lifetimes will be affected. And that means that no family, no person will be untouched by cancer in their lifetimes. And you never know if you or a loved one or a friend in the future might need a breakthrough that’s in development today. And those types of breakthroughs and that type of research in medicine is only made possible by dollars that are funded by the NIH.

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote a piece, “Trump policies spark fears of brain drain,” — as we begin to wrap up — “threatening to undermine U.S. dominance in biomedicine.” Can you explain what’s happened, who you talked to and what they were saying?

ANGUS CHEN: Yeah. So, my colleague Jonathan Wosen and I spoke with over — well over a dozen different researchers, scientists and doctors from around the country, and really around the world, about this issue. And the cuts that have been proposed to the NIH, that were put into effect last Monday and then quickly halted by a federal court until its hearing date of February 21st, lead to such devastating — potentially devastating cuts to the research infrastructure of our country that it’s causing many young researchers, and even older researchers, more senior researchers, to question if they have a place in the United States to do science anymore.

The NIH has been so vital to holding up our biomedical industry, our sort of — the engine of American biomedical discovery, that without it, so many jobs could potentially be lost, which means that for a young investigator, a young scientist thinking, “You know, I want to start a lab in the U.S. I’m looking for a university or an academic medical center to begin a research lab,” they might — they are really starting to question now if that’s going to be possible here for them. So they’ve begun to think, “Maybe there’s a better place for me to do my science outside of the United States, maybe in a country like Canada or in the EU or China to do that work.”

And that’s having a really, really devastating effect on the scientific community, because people are really worried that they’ll begin to lose really brilliant individuals, really talented young scientists, away — like, sort of going away from this country and beginning to investigate disease and other health issues outside of the U.S. That potentially could have the result of the U.S. losing its dominance, sort of its place as a leader in biomedicine in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Angus Chen, we want to thank you for being with us, cancer reporter at STAT following the impact of the Trump administration’s executive orders on science and health.