Donald Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Second Term

Welcome to the golden age of reverse philanthropy, an era in which America’s richest barons, who were once committed to funding medical research, the arts, and international aid, are now hanging such fields out to dry. Many Republican presidents have run on the idea of cutting waste. But Donald Trump—whose administration picks include multiple billionaires and who has deputized the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to slash government spending—has ushered in a new regime. It’s one that defies Bill Gates’s spirit of capitalistic largesse, instead seeming to regard humanitarianism as “wasteful” on the whole.

Ironically, Musk, whose own businesses have flourished in the spaces of science and technology, is leading the Department of Government Efficiency, which has reportedly hit both spheres especially hard: On Friday evening, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was drastically cutting grant provisions for roughly 2,500 recipients by capping “indirect funding” at 15%, all for a yearly savings of about $4 billion. A person with knowledge of the matter told The Wall Street Journal that DOGE had a hand in the cuts.

Historically, the NIH’s indirect funding has helped universities and labs perform groundbreaking research on everything from cancer to chronic health conditions to food allergies by paying for staff and equipment. That includes things like sophisticated microscopes that enable scientists to probe molecular structures, as Duke University professor and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Robert Lefkowitz told The New York Times. “Those who are facing any health challenges will suffer from less biomedical research,” Dr. David Skorton, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, added to the Times.

This is to say that cutting indirect funding is not like “trimming the fat” of a private company, as Musk claimed to have been doing with the website formerly known as Twitter. But since the DOGE chief has been moving fast and breaking things, as he does in the corporate world, his department likely didn’t consider the gravity of what it was actually cutting.

Consider my own interaction with Musk this past weekend, in which I pointed out over X that the DOGE leader was cutting funding for cancer research. “I’m not,” he responded to my post, even though that is almost certainly what’s happening. “Wtf are you talking about?” In other words, it’s clear that the Tesla CEO doesn’t seem to realize that by having the government step back from commitments it’s made to world-leading researchers, his department is effectively slowing medical advances for millions of patients who desperately need critical care and is imperiling the economic position of America, a leader in biomedical innovation.

The decision is also threatening the livelihood of academia, and could devastate the communities around colleges and universities. Take, for instance, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which, as al.com reports, “has received more than a billion dollars in NIH funding in recent years.” So these cuts will not only affect the scientific research; they’ll also negatively impact the broader economies of these states. “People need to be reminded that UAB is not just the largest employer in the city,” Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin explained to the outlet. “It’s the largest employer in the state.”

Pennsylvania, too, is in the crosshairs. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the University of Pittsburgh will “see about $183 million less in government research funding—overall at least a 25% cut—under a new National Institutes of Health directive that went into effect Friday, a policy change that could chill western Pennsylvania’s meds-and-eds economy.” Meanwhile, the pain will also be felt in Georgia, where “universities, hospitals, and businesses received more than $780 million in NIH support in the 12 months that ended in September,” writes The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re all reeling,” Dr. George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School, explained to NPR, summarizing the reaction to the situation. “This would decimate medical research.”

When Trump entered the presidential race in 2015, he positioned his personal wealth as a sign of financial and economic acumen—implying that he was so rich, he could solve all of America’s problems. “I have [a] total net worth of $8.73 billion,” he claimed at the time. “I’m not doing that to brag. I’m doing that to show that’s the kind of thinking our country needs.” Some 10 years later, the 47th president seems to have also brought that line of logic to his administration, whose billionaire members and nominees are collectively worth, as of December, “at least $383 billion—higher than the GDP of 172 countries.”

But being rich is not a qualification for running the government. And it’s definitely not a qualification for identifying government waste. Is some federal spending wasteful? Perhaps, and there is probably room for budget cuts at notoriously bloated agencies like the Pentagon. But by gutting the NIH, Trump and his allies, many of whom don’t understand the nuances of grant writing and don’t even work in science or medicine, are holding back institutions that have made quantum leaps in both fields. Just because Trumpworld doesn’t hold expertise in high esteem doesn’t mean that the rest of America should suffer the consequences.