UC San Diego scientist weighs in on the state of research after federal cuts and banned words

In one of his first official actions after taking office this year, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to pause the distribution of grants while his administration reviewed projects for alignment with his priorities.

Federal funding for science froze across the country, creating panic for scientists who no longer knew when or if they would be able to continue their research.

Among them was Davey Smith, a University of California San Diego scientist studying HIV and AIDS. Smith is among the university’s largest recipient of grants from the National Institute of Health, which is the leading funder of biomedical research in the United States.

He had about $3.5 million in research funding paused in February by the president. At the time, everyone in the research community was anxious, like “I don’t know what to say or how to act,” he told inewsource.

That’s because officials used keywords to flag research as possibly related to diversity, equity and inclusion, which a day one Trump executive order sought to “terminate to the maximum extent allowable by law.” Grants with words such as “women,” “systemic,” “black,” “sex,” “historically” and “equality” were getting flagged, paused or canceled, according to a leaked list from the National Science Foundation, another source of federal research grants.

Smith’s research was flagged for review and a lot of other studies, too.

The National Institute of Health cut almost $8 billion in funding from February to June, or 40% of its grant funding compared to the same time the previous two years, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

The University of California system receives more NIH and NSF funding than any other institution. As of mid-June, UCSD reported that it hadn’t received at least $24 million in promised grant funding and could lose it altogether due to 165 research related disruptions. That amount, the university noted, could be far higher if multiyear grants are discontinued.

inewsource requested an update on the status of the grants and a university spokesperson said that “Due to the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the decisions and communications from federal agencies, we are unable to quantify or predict exact impacts at this time,” citing uncertainty over what the impact of court rulings would be to UCSD projects.

For example, a Boston-area federal judge, appointed during the Reagan administration, found at the end of June that some of the NIH cuts related to DEI were illegal and that they discriminated against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Judge William G. Young said he’d “never seen government racial discrimination like this.” Another federal judge overruled the 15% cap on indirect costs for research programs, which include facility and administrative costs.

The battle for research funding continues. 

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that will require grants to be approved by political appointees, who will not “routinely defer to the recommendations of others” but instead use their “independent judgment.” The order says it does not discourage scientific peer review as long as it serves an “advisory role.” 

Last week, the Senate proposed increasing the NIH’s budget after Trump proposed further cuts. Trump has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the Boston court and allow him to cut the funds.

On Tuesday, inewsource spoke to Smith, who shared how he got his funding back and what it has been like doing federally funded science this year. Smith is the assistant vice chancellor for clinical and translation research at UCSD. He is also a professor of medicine who focuses on infectious diseases. He’s also a co-director for the Center for AIDS Research, which has been involved in testing key treatments for HIV over the last two decades.

What are some of the research accomplishments that you’re most proud of in your career?

During COVID I did a whole bunch of COVID studies, including clinical trials, like leading a big piece of Operation Warp Speed. That was the most work that I’ve ever done in my whole life. I was 24-7 nonstop working on stuff. And then I’m really proud of The Last Gift, which is a project where people who have HIV are dying of something else. We follow them before they die, and then when they pass away, we do a rapid autopsy. The reason we do this project is to make sure we get all the tissues we can from their body as quickly as possible so that they’re still viable. That’s important so that we can really see how HIV hides in there. We need to know that so we can make cures to get that HIV out. That’s the next stage of where we’re working on this project.

What’s this year been like for you and what does it feel like to be doing science in the current political climate?

It’s hard. I’m an infectious disease doc, and we do research on people who are the most vulnerable, or the most part. Infectious diseases love to hit the most vulnerable first. If you think of HIV, it was gay men, it was minorities. It was injection drug users. It’s because infectious disease loves to hit the vulnerable communities first. But that means that you need to do research in those communities, and that really is how you protect all of us. Same thing for COVID, right? It hit nursing homes first. It hit the people who still had to go to work, the less privileged: That’s just how infectious diseases work. But this past year, or at least, you know, at the beginning of this year, it was very much, oh, you can’t talk about social vulnerability in these ways for research purposes. And that really hampers our ability to think through how infectious diseases work its way into human populations. It really is the most vulnerable. We have to protect the most vulnerable to protect all of us; otherwise, we just aren’t going to get there.

So what’s the status of your research and your grants at the moment? 

Everything seems to be trucking along. There were grants that took awhile that were on pause. We were waiting and having to have discussions with the NIH to get them back. 

The NIH itself had greatly reduced its workforce. It’s a very efficient bureaucracy, but when you start pulling out big pieces of it, it doesn’t work as well. So it was just a lag in time, and that caused a lot of anxiety issues. It’s not like I’m sitting on a very large bank account that can hold people for a long time while we’re waiting for the bureaucracy.

I run the Center for AIDS Research here. It’s a big grant, and it’s a big grant that does a whole bunch of really great stuff, but it has elements of helping the most vulnerable communities in the time of HIV, and that’s what it’s supposed to do. It got caught up in banned words.

We had all the banned words in there: “Gay,” “lesbian.” “Black” was in there – that was a banned word. “Women” was in there – that was a banned word. You name it. We pretty much had them all.

You said you were directed by the NIH back in February to remove some of those words from your website. What did that feel like? 

It felt horrible. It went against everything that I worked for in my career. My whole career is around serving vulnerable communities through research, and all of a sudden having to change words on a website that I’m very proud of just hurt me in my soul. 

What has changed since then?

The scientific community has pushed back really hard. We don’t have that direction anymore. 

Nobody has said you can go put it back on, but nobody has said, you need to take it off. So some people are playing it safe. We have figured that the landscape is changing in the overall environment, but our values are definitely not. So we are sticking to those guns. 

How much work was it to get your grant reinstated?

Hours and hours and hours of my time. And then full time for probably three people just for the Center for AIDS Research.

We didn’t interact with somebody who was mean to us. I think that would’ve made us depressed. These are our friends. We’ve known them for a long time. They want the work to continue, and they’re like, “Yeah, we just need to go through this.” I could feel the pressure that they were under, and they were sheltering us from that pressure. God bless them for doing that. A lot of them had gotten fired.

What projects that you are involved in have not been reinstated? 

There’s a big transgender grant, and that’s really sad. It’s a really good grant because these are people who are taking cross-sex hormones, right? It gives us a really good opportunity to see what happens to those people. They’re gonna take a hormone because they have it for another condition, that allows us to take a look and see what goes on physiologically there. We could learn a whole bunch of stuff about the human condition if we were able to do that study, but just because it’s associated with transgender people, it becomes forbidden in this environment.

It’s not just about the treatment. In fact, it’s actually very little about the treatment. What it really is, is somebody who was assigned male at birth with XY chromosomes and has had testosterone for their whole life. They then start taking estrogen. What physiologically happens in that situation? Big things that we could learn around that is why do women have better cardiovascular outcomes than men? Is it associated with estrogen? What is physiologically happening there?

I am pretty sure that that grant is going to be repackaged in a way that hopefully we can get over the finish line. But, the thing that I worry about the most is, it is a clear attack on the people who own the identity of those words. And that is the bigger harm than just the research. 

What would you say to critics who question why the federal government should pay for this type of research?

It might lead to the next cardiovascular medication, new blood pressure medicine, new et cetera. So that foundational knowledge is important for us to know and something that the U.S. government in the past has been very interested in funding. In fact, most foundational research comes from the U.S. government. Biotechs don’t pick up the ball until later on, once that foundational knowledge comes up, and then they start making drugs attached to that.

What worries you about the future of science in the United States? 

There are a whole bunch of other countries that are envious of our infrastructure. And they are looking at this as a great opportunity to take us down in our number one spot and we are doing it to ourselves. It’s not something that we can just turn off and turn on.

I gave a lecture the other day to the Medical Scientist Training Program. They’re physician scientists and they’re just starting their career. They’re happy and wide-eyed and enthusiastic. They’re not cynical at all, like me. That’s what they wanted to know. Do they have a career going forward? And if we don’t convince them that they do, then that is our future and that is gone. That is the next cure for cancer. That’s the next cure for HIV. That’s the next cure for heart disease. Gone. And whether it is picked up by another country, I don’t know. But for those American kids, they’re not going to have that opportunity to make those next cures. And that is what I really worry about.

So the reality on the ground is close to normal, but you can feel that you’re under attack. And once you’re under attack, the fear permeates. People get poached because they’re afraid; people don’t go into the field because they’re afraid. So it’s eating at both ends. 

You can see the writing on the law, the budget from Congress. Yes, they came back and gave a little more money, but it was clearly attacked and it’s only been attacked over and over again. People who have options will do something else.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It’s part of an ongoing series of conversations with experts and others impacted by federal policy changes. Send suggestions on who we should talk with next to reporter Jake Kincaid.