The only member of the Congress with a doctorate in science weighs on Trump cuts

Terry Gerton I know that you are one of the few scientists in the congress. What do you do with the Trump administration, by some charges, $ 3 billion in scientific and research programs since they took office?

Bill Foster Well, this will cause damage that will take generations to repair. It takes decades to build a scientific research organization or a business or any other effective organization, but it can be destroyed in three months in terms of funding. And you will see the speed at which they were able to destroy things like consumer it financial protection office. They just told everyone to go home and tore off the building panel and stopped paying people and closed all the contracts and subsidies that operated the place. And so even if we obtain a court decision which says that this is illegal, you have no legal basis to do this, in many cases, the damage has been caused. And this is aware of a very deliberate attack that will take place over a longer period to convince people to retire with threats, by moving their workplace in a place where it is incompatible with their family life and many other strategies that Trump administration has tried to use the last time and uses force every day.

Terry Gerton Regarding scientific funding in particular, many people find it difficult to follow all the cuts and logic behind them. There are private sector groups that are now trying to recreate data files. Where do you think that the authority for this resident and are you concerned about the loss of transparency here?

Bill Foster Yes, well, if we look at things like (the government’s ministry of efficiency) resumes subsidies.gov and therefore the transparency of decision -making is not there. We had yesterday before the Financial Services Committee, on which I work (Treasury) Secretary (Scott) Bessent, where we asked him exactly what was Doge and he said: “Oh, I don’t really know.” And this is not an acceptable response when the results of what is happening are potentially massive exfiltrations of government data in large databases managed by 22 -year -old children without government experience. And so there is a danger there. There are also some of the directives that come out or directives which are deducted by the decisions according to which there is a long list of illegal words which better do not be in your grant or a future subsidy request. Things like “women”, or I think that my favorite is a geologist who studies plates tectonics had to rub the word intersectionality of his subsidy request because it turns out that it is an illegal word. Anyway, it is quite far from science because it has been practiced and I am really afraid that the damage does not take the generations to be reversed.

Terry Gerton Well, you mentioned Doge in charge of subsidies.GOV. It seems not only that they have regained the administration of the system which grants more than $ 500 billion in grants, but now it is in fact those who make grant decisions. Does this seem to you as a conflict of interest?

Bill Foster Well, we have a very well evolved system for grant grants evaluated by peers based on merit in science. And he has just been turned on his head. And there is an appropriate level of control when a new administration arrives to reset priorities and agencies. There is a system that has evolved over many decades of how it should work. And it’s just throwing it all through the window and saying that I don’t care about the rules. I don’t care what has been done in the past, from all the lessons learned from what works well and what does not work well to give requests for federal subsidies and obtain the best science, to throw all this in favor of the apparently arbitrary decisions of certain people named political here. Serve a return to the loot system, the bad old policy days, which had never even been applied to science before and now.

Terry Gerton I speak with the representative Bill Foster (D-ill.). So I know that you had the chance to look at the president’s lean budget because it occurred for 2026. There are massive cuts for scientific projects, 50% for (National Science Foundation), $ 18 billion on (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), ending the scientific missions in progress at NASA. What do you think in terms, as you have sort of mentioned, the future of science and science funded by the federal government?

Bill Foster Well, one of the first things that occurs is that faced with budgets like that, many very good people abandon and leave. Many people working in government sciences have abandoned very good jobs they may have in the academic world. And they do this by sense of duty towards the country and to the scientific mission of our country. But when you see people like Sethuraman Panchanathan, the director of the NSF and a person appointed by Trump leave, apparently disgusted by the budgets given to him and the mandatory cuts. It is just the tip of the iceberg on the number of very good people you have seen leaving, Peter Marks, one of Covid’s real heroes and Operation Warp Speed ​​Response, just to say: “Ok, I got it.” And when you lose good people like that, you know with certainty that there is a second and a third layer of very good people who simply say, forget it, I come back to a job in the industry, I come back to a job in the academic world, and our government and our country will be poorer for the lack of their services.

Terry Gerton You mentioned the departure of the people who have currently worked on the government. What about the next generation of scientists, doctoral students whose grant and research programs are not funded, which may never come to the government?

Bill Foster Yeah, well the teachers contact me all the time, I suppose that since the inauguration, I suppose that my mobile phone has somehow burned a hole in my pocket. I had a wave of physicists who call me when they decided that they were going to draw all the arms researchers (national nuclear security) who ensure that our nuclear weapons are safe and effective. And so they somehow shoot them and say, oh, we had no idea what they were doing. Maybe we will get some people again. And when these kinds of random threats occur in your scientific careers, you know you don’t want to enter it. And one of the things that I hear from the teachers again and again is that the young children they are trying to recruit in their research team say, why will I enter this area? When I can put myself halfway with my doctoral project and all of a sudden, boom, the money will be cut and I can never finish it. Or halfway along my career, then note that this whole area has been funded because it does not correspond to the priority of this administration of the day. And so another really important symptom of this is that you see Europeans and the Japanese and the Koreans rub your hands with a joy to a chance to reverse the brain flight. After the Second World War, our country benefited enormously from having the best and most brilliant of researchers from around the world from Europe, Japan and Korea, around the world, and this is reversed. And they simply say, okay, there is no future for you in the scientific enterprise of the United States, and back to Europe where you are welcome.

Terry Gerton So what is the plan for Congress to act here?

Bill Foster Listen, I mean, the first thing you have to do is for scientists who come with me and say, Bill, please stop this. First of all, I don’t want to lie to them. I’m not sure it will end well. But I think the best thing we can do right now is that we need, frankly, four Republicans who are ready to get up and vote not on these budgets. We only need four because I imagine that each democrat will defend science in this country. And it is therefore not necessarily impossible. So my advice is that very often the research group has children who grew up in a farm in a rural red state. Tell them to go home, to meet with their representative or their senator, and say, look at it, you ruined my perspectives. Or even universities and research groups in the red states that are threatened. Just tell them to have a meeting. I think it is probably more effective to have these meetings in the original state or in the original district than to DC where we, scientists, can be confused with another special interest group. But you go home and you explain how a young child will love science and want to enter science and see no future because of the things he is about to vote and tell them to reconsider your vote. Because as I said, we only need four, then everything is rails.

Terry Gerton Well, the clock turns, so we hope they will have these conversations quickly.