Late last month, the National Science Foundation, a U.S. federal agency that supports scientific research, terminated more than 400 grants that related to misinformation, disinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion. A proposed budget from the Trump administration would also cut the NSF budget in half. Kate Starbird is the co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. She joins us to share more about the broader impacts of these cuts.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are in the middle of the most profound reduction of federal scientific funding in U.S. history. A proposed budget from the Trump administration would cut the National Institutes of Health budget by more than a third. The National Science Foundation budget would be cut by more than half. And NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense would all see reductions in their ability to fund innovation and basic research.
Kate Starbird joins us to talk about the collective impact of these cuts. She’s a co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Kate Starbird: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Miller: Can you give us a sense just for the scale of the public disinvestment in science that we are in the middle of right now?
Starbird: You know, it’s honestly hard to get our heads wrapped around it. We’re getting up every day, going to work and doing the things we need to do. But around us, [we’re] just seeing financial disruption. I don’t even know how we’re gonna make it quite work. For those of us in a college of engineering, which I am, we just rely so much on grant funding to do research, to train students. At the University of Washington, a research university, to serve that role, we rely so much on government grant funding. I don’t know if we’ve even wrapped our heads around what we’re going to do, with the loss of what looks like to be 50% or possibly more of that grant funding.
Miller: You were at a conference in Japan recently, I think just last week. I’m curious how much people, whether U.S.-based scientists or international scientists, were talking about this?
Starbird: That’s all we were talking about, outside of the talks that were being given. Even the talks that were being given were impacted because many of the authors hadn’t flown to the conference. If they were international authors, they were often afraid of getting back safely, so they weren’t there.
Miller: So, you mean international researchers based in the U.S., didn’t go to Japan because they weren’t sure if they would be able to get back into the U.S.?
Starbird: Yeah, so we were dealing with that. And the person who came on behalf of their team would say that the first author wasn’t there to present for that reason. In the hallways … we even created new sessions to talk about what the impact to grant funding was going to mean and is there something that we should be doing to help people understand what that impact is, what it means to pull, instantly, some of these things have been canceled, to just pull back funding that we need to pay PhD students, that we need to to keep our technology infrastructure going. And how do we communicate that?
So all of those conversations were happening. A lot of people were just processing [the fact that] grant funds that they were using this week and next week to pay PhD students and others to do work were just gone, and with no warning.
Miller: How do you think about the pipeline of future researchers or people who are early in their academic scientific careers right now?
Starbird: I mean, this is the biggest thing. People keep asking me, “Kate, are you affected?” or “how’s it going” and “oh, I’m so sorry.” I’m a tenured professor. My career is already in place and in some ways winding down. But the real loss is the junior scholars. So, yeah, the loss of grant funding means we can’t do science in the moment. But it also means we’re not going to be able to train the next generation of scientists and junior scholars. PhD students to junior faculty are really likely to be the most affected.
What we’re looking at is, yeah, disruption in the moment. There are studies that we won’t be able to do. But really the impacts are going to be on the future of science and technology in the United States. And those impacts are going to be hard to measure. There’s technologies that won’t be developed and cures that won’t be discovered, problems that we won’t be able to address because we won’t know that they’re there. And we won’t have the people in place to be able to do that work because we won’t be able to train them, because most of the funding that we get goes to paying PhD students so they can do the work.
Miller: To a great extent, for decades and decades, the U.S. has been the global magnet for some of the smartest people all around the world who want to do all kinds of research. If that, in just a couple months, has changed, where are those people going to be going instead of the U.S.?
Starbird: That’s another thing we were talking about at the conference. There were people from other countries and they were saying, “we’re gonna try putting in place a program to have a fellowship, or add an extra postdoctoral scholarship, or add a new position.” I do see a lot of conversations [among] Europe, Australia, Asia, other parts of the world, trying to think about how they can take advantage of … All of a sudden, we’ve got a lot in this class who are highly trained. In the next class it’s going to be harder, but right now we have all these highly trained scientists and they’re not gonna necessarily have a home in the United States.
So we will see a lot of the talent get scooped up and relocated to other parts of the world. Then the future of science and technology may not lie in the United States the way it has for decades, really since after World War II, when Vannevar Bush and others started to put in place this push for basic science and government funding of basic science. We’ve all been the beneficiaries of that for decades without really understanding that that scientific engine was there. And that’s going to be displaced and possibly moved to other places.
There were a lot of conversations we were having. Things like, “I got this student. Do you have a position for them?” Just networking in a different way to help find jobs for our current junior scholars in other places.
Miller: There’s obviously been a huge outcry from the scientific community about what you’re talking about – what these cuts will mean now and and going forward. But I don’t feel like it’s broken through in a significant way in the public at large. Why do you think that is?
Starbird: I don’t think the public understands that so many of the things that are really out there for the public good, and even things that end up becoming part of companies and helping drive our industry … I don’t think the public understands that the U.S. government funds the basic science that is the engine of innovation, medical cures and all those other things. I don’t think people really understand that.
I’ve been trying to put together just a presentation that shows that if you take out your phone, you look at how it works, it’s online and it’s got all these technologies. We can trace back just about everything from the internet, to personal computing, to the design of these phones, their size and how they work. We can trace that back to research projects that were funded by the U.S. government. We take for granted so much of the innovation that’s been government funded and I just don’t think we’ve done a good job of communicating that. I think we have a real task at the moment to help people understand that.
Miller: You could make that presentation in the form of a series of [posts] on Bluesky. But I’m curious, as somebody who focuses on information, misinformation and digital communication, what do you see as an effective way to actually communicate what you think would give Americans a fuller understanding of what federal investment in science has meant? I mean, how do you do that in 2025 in a way that changes people’s minds?
Starbird: You need thousands of communicators. You need hundreds of scientists going out there making the same kind of presentation in their communities. You need a journalist to pick up on it. You need every person to “memify” it, get it out there. There needs to be short form videos, long form videos. You need to get the attention of some of these podcasters and have them have some of these scientists on to really explain it. In this environment, it’s not just one message and one messenger. It has to be a series of messages adapted to different audiences.
And scientists are just not used to doing that. We’re used to letting our work speak for itself. I think we do have to dedicate some time and energy to thinking about how we all, a little bit, become evangelists for science, and help others understand this message and help share it … which is part of the reason why, in the middle of today, when I’ve got a lot of other things to do, I’m here. We all need to be taking advantage of every opportunity we have to come talk to folks.
Miller: What would you say to scientists who are afraid of speaking out because they are afraid of being targeted?
Starbird: I think it’s really important for us to understand that there are different situations. If I was a PhD student right now or a junior scholar, I think the right move is to just keep doing your work as well as you can. But for those of us who are more senior, that have tenure, this is what tenure is for. It’s for us to be able to come out and be brave, and weather some critical fire if we need to. These are important messages to be shared. I think it is really critical for everybody that has the privilege to be able to do that, to stand up and do it.
I’m hoping that others will follow the lead. I’ve seen some others in different institutions and different individuals, but I think it’s critical right now. If everybody puts their head down, we’re already seeing what’s happened. We’re not going to save your little project. Everybody’s project is going to be gone, unless we all start to stand up and speak out.
Miller: Kate Starbird, thanks very much.
Starbird: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
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