BOSTON — Jeremy Berg walked on stage sporting a curious look: a red tie patterned with a word cloud drawn from the applications of 197 researchers who vied to be part of a National Institutes of Health initiative aimed at accelerating junior scientists’ academic careers.
The MOSAIC program, which provided researchers seed funding to start their own labs, was eliminated months ago after the federal government deprioritized and cut funding for scientific research the Trump administration deemed as promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. The former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences wore the tie — featuring words such as “CELL,” “DISEASE,” and “EPIGENETICS — to draw attention to research areas affected by months of turmoil.
“It’s been like living in a washing machine, it’s been constant chaos,” said Berg, speaking Thursday on a STAT Summit panel of former NIH leaders and a researcher documenting the impact of funding cuts.
The chaos is not confined to a single program, said the panelists. And the worst may be yet to come.
“I get asked this constantly: When will we start rebuilding? I don’t think we can know until we know the full extent of the destruction. There’s no reason to think we’ve bottomed out,” said Eric Green, who was forced to retire in March as director at the National Human Genome Research Institute. It’s hard to rebuild when roughly half of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers have acting administrators, Green added.
The list of impacts at the NIH since President Trump’s return to office is already long. Health disparities research has withered, vaccine research has been curtailed, and political appointees have gummed up funding disbursements. Even though the agency was able to spend its entire $47 billion budget by the end of the 2025 fiscal year, the number of grants awarded dropped precipitously. Berg said that his attempts to communicate with Director Jay Bhattacharya have been frustrating.
“I’m less convinced that he’s receptive to rational conversations,” Berg said about a dismissive reply that Bhattacharya sent him in response to a tallying of NIH grant spending.
Asked for a response, Department of Health and Human Services press secretary Emily Hilliard emailed STAT: “Dr. Bhattacharya is restoring the agency to its tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science. For too long, resources have drifted toward projects with limited relevance to the health challenges facing Americans. As part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again, NIH is reviewing funded research to ensure taxpayer dollars target chronic disease and deliver measurable public health impact.”
Mallory Harris, senior data analyst at the Science & Community Impacts Mapping Project, said cuts to training grants and other NIH programs are having a chilling effect on researchers, leading to a “lost generation.”
“In the coming years, people are going to decide not to come to the U.S. very quickly. Our workforce is going to shrink and we’re going to be losing people who could have been the next Nobel Prize winners,” she said. “It is going to take a while for us to really see how deeply these impacts are going to be felt.”
Harris worked on a project that found that cuts to federal health research have already resulted in $11 billion and 49,000 jobs lost. Going forward, those numbers will increase to $17 billion and 72,000 jobs lost per year, according to the project’s website.
“Younger people are going to be looking at this and going, ‘Do I really want to go down this path if there are better options?’” said Berg.
Asked whether the research cuts are costing lives, the panelists said it’s hard to calculate the impact of research not done. But Harris cited Bhattacharya’s own work as a great example of what is lost when research is stalled or ended.
“I’ll point out one paper … by one Jay Bhattacharya, about the amount of lives that are saved in a flu pandemic if you can get a vaccine out early,” said Harris. “We just cut mRNA vaccine research, which we know gives us — we were able to turn around a vaccine in, what, 200 days? So what does that mean for the next pandemic, which will happen?”
