Wild Weather and Celebrations (and Policy Changes)

This week - as the blog title suggests - was a combination of wild weather events and celebrations. As this week was Mardi Gras, the streets of Ocean Springs and Biloxi were filled with parades, which started as early as last Friday (although we also had Mardi Gras parades in mid-February). However, we also had severe weather warnings and happenings on Tuesday, including tornado watch and flood warnings throughout the day and into the night. I'm not sure how these happenings affected the celebrations, but the hail and winds on Tuesday evening were enough to keep me indoors. For this week's blog, though, I want to take time to talk about how recent policy changes, firings, and new administration is affecting the scientific community. I am very privileged that the current changes have not yet affected my role or my work, except for snickering audiences when I speak about the Gulf of Mexico. However, I thought I would explain some small points so that everyone understands how the trajectory of scientific research has been shifted due to the recent policy changes. Notably, I am going to present only information that I have been able to check and validate, and I am going to present the facts with some opinions on how some changes may have future impacts. 

One major change that you may have heard about is the reduction of overhead payments in external grants or you may have heard that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and the NSF (National Science Foundation) have had their indirect costs capped by the current administration at 15%. Likely, unless you work in finances or in academia, this language is rather confusing, so I'm going to explain what this means. When a grant writer receives a grant, they receive the direct costs - which they likely wrote a budget for during the grant proposal process. These direct costs cover salaries, supplies, technology usage, etc. Indirect funds go to the host institution and cover aspects like power, environmental systems, facilities, and are an agreed percentage of the grant determined by the host institution and the grant funding agency. While these indirect cost percentages vary by institution and grant funding agency, it is common for governmental grants to include 40-60% indirect costs, which means that the policy changes have reduced these indirect, university supports by more than half. If you are curious to the dollar amounts of these reductions, numerous news outlets provided comprehensive analyses of the costs when the changes were first implemented. 

You're probably not alone if you're now thinking, "So what if institutions get less overhead? What does that really mean or look like?" I had to do research to find out how this reduction looks from an infrastructure standpoint. Without going into too much depth, reduced overhead or indirect costs may caused reduced research capacity at institutions, deterioration of infrastructure or inability to update infrastructure, and potentially institutions may seek to place increased financial burdens on the student population to cover costs. 

The other two major policy changes that have affected and will alter the course of scientific research are the reduction in the federal workforce and reductions in budgets of governmental grant funding agencies. Before these administrative changes, grant success rates were between 20-25% (these numbers from publicly available NIH grant success rate data) and there were approximately 30,000 peer reviewers for NIH grants in 2023 alone. Behind the scenes of the grant proposal evaluation process are teams of federal employees who are responsible for subsections of grant submissions. Based on cuts to overall funding and the reductions in the federal workforce we are seeing, grants are now more competitive and the evaluation process may be more condensed if the same number of submissions occur with fewer people behind the scenes to organize and coordinate the evaluation process. These two changes, therefore, likely create a slower scientific output from the country and - though speculative - may change early career scientists' goals and paths for the future. We have also seen the firings of federal employees in NOAA, the EPA, the CDC, and NIH, among other government and government-associated agencies. Removing scientists and personnel from positions at these agencies will affect weather and storm forecasting, ocean forecasting, pollution monitoring and regulation, disease outbreaks, bacterial and viral research, and so much more. We can't predict every outcome that will occur from these policy changes, but I think many scientists are concerned about the future state of science, and how the availability of data gathered and shared by these federal agencies will change in the coming months to years.

I do want to end today's blog by reminding you that conducting your own research, whether on matters of national policy, scientific findings, medical and pharmacology claims, is so important. While news agencies and press briefings provide a lot of information, the news often lacks important supplemental information including sources and fact checking. If you aren't aware, some scientific journals actually include news sections that may provide helpful resources and which may have links to supplemental material to further readers' understandings of the issues discussed. I hope that through increased awareness and discussions about how policy changes (which often occur) may shift the trajectory of scientific discoveries, cures, and preventative measures, we as an American people can make informed decisions about our futures.