The lifeblood of scientific research—money and robust debate—may be in conflict as academia anticipates a second Donald Trump presidency. Researchers at UC San Diego said their colleagues are chilling their own speech out of fear their federal funding may be cut off.
Why it matters
Researchers say their colleagues are practicing preemptive silencing, when a powerful entity uses intimidation and threats to mute people.
Scientists remember President-elect Donald Trump’s first term when climate scientists were terminated, and when Dr. Anthony Fauci was attacked during the pandemic. Dr. Davey Smith, an infectious disease doctor at UCSD, said his colleagues believe that environment will return in the next Trump administration and they don’t want to be caught in the crosshairs.
“So everybody's anxious and then they're worried that if they say something that it's going to come back on them, but I depend on grants from the NIH and if the NIH is going to cut infectious diseases, then that's going to hurt my livelihood, but also my science,” he said.
To be clear, no one at UCSD said any kind of edict has come down from the university’s leadership about censoring their public statements.
By the numbers
UCSD receives $972 million in federal funding, and about $557 million of that money comes from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. That also has a big impact on the local economy.
And there is a lot on the line if that funding were to go away. Smith said reducing infectious disease funding would be devastating to prepare for the next pandemic.
“As a virologist, bird flu is coming by the way and it is going to probably have some pandemic type effects as well,” he said. ”We're going to need those strong institutions to take care of it.”
Another impact is brain drain: Smith knows scientists who have either left already or are planning to leave in anticipation of the effect of a second Trump Administration.
Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, a professor of medicine at UCSD and an AIDS researcher, said that work was stigmatized and targeted in the 1990s. She recalled scientists being audited for no apparent reason and worries that Trump could usher in a new era of fear among scientists that could last generations.
“What it means is you’re losing memory of how to get things done,“ she said. “If you wipe the slate clean and start over again, it's going to take a lot of time, to regrow that kind of institutional memory. And so it's yet another layer of unraveling that I think is going to be an issue.”
Looking ahead
San Diego Congressman Scott Peters said local researchers who are feeling angst about Trump’s second term should take a deep breath and chill.
He thinks some of the fear is unwarranted and some of the threats coming from Trump’s camp are bluster. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers and Trump are concerned about China overtaking the U.S. in research and aren’t about to upend funding to San Diego’s life sciences, he added.
But if he’s wrong, Peters said he’s prepared to fight for local scientists.
“This Congressional delegation, I in particular, have made it a priority to support the life sciences here with both public research dollars, which we've increased dramatically, and keeping an ecosystem where private investment also happens,” he said.
