What a rich immigrant car salesman from African is doing to US science

[John Clark]

The following  are quotes from 2 articles in the April 17, 2025 issue of the journal nature: 

Some federal scientists say that the government seems to be deliberately trying to make their work harder. “We are constantly barraged with enormous amounts of, let me be frank, bullshit administrative work,” says an NIH researcher. They say that Trump team officials send requests — such as gathering a list of all contract employees — alongside ultimatums that suggest employees will be fired if they fail to respond within 24 hours. The stream of demands is “strangling many aspects of the function of NIH with red tape”

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), a massive biomedical-research funder that also employs thousands of scientists at its own laboratories, is “totally broken and non-functional right now”, according to a principal investigator at the NIH “We can’t hire people. We can’t recruit people. We can’t talk to people on the outside. We cannot travel”

In February, the Trump administration began to put a spending limit of US$1.00 on nearly all government credit cards. The effect has been disastrous at science agencies . NIH labs haven’t been able to purchase essential items: gloves, pipettes, paper towels, Petri dishes, reagents, fluorescent dyes and storage vials. One lab has run out of a chemical needed to freeze brains from organ donors for storage and processing.

Trump team freezes new NSF awards — and could soon axe hundreds of grants

‘Totally broken’: how Trump 2.0 has paralysed work at US science agencies

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