Transcript:
Colin Seeberger: Hey everyone. Welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m Colin Seeberger.
As our listeners very well know, the Trump administration has taken a hatchet to science and innovation in this country, slashing billions of dollars in research grants, funds for universities, and more. These cuts are already having devastating consequences for patients, U.S. businesses, and beyond.
But if that’s not enough, the Trump administration’s budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year would make historic cuts to leading science agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, EPA, and beyond.
Worse yet, [Office of Management and Budget] Director Russ Vought, one of the key architects of Project 2025, is promising to use an unprecedented budget procedure known as a “pocket rescission” to cancel funding Congress has already passed for critical programs like scientific research and education.
We wanted to bring someone on the pod who’s been leading the fight against these cuts and knows about the devastating impact they’re having on innovation in scientific research in this country. So we invited Colette Delawalla, the founder and director of Stand Up for Science, to join us on the pod and talk about the state of play in the scientific community and how we can fight back. And stick around after the interview for a moment of joy, because we could all use some levity in these dark, trying times.
Colette Delawalla is the founder and director of Stand Up for Science, an organization working to protect scientific research in American innovation. She’s also a clinical psychology Ph.D. candidate at Emory University.
Colette, welcome to the pod.
Colette Delawalla: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to join you today.
Seeberger: Well, I’m really excited to talk with you, because this administration has ripped away billions of dollars in federal funding that will devastate our world-leading system of science and innovation. Why is the Trump administration doing this? And is there a point that they’re working towards that makes any logical sense? I am just having a hard time understanding what’s the motivation here?
Delawalla: Yeah, I have been asked this question so many times, which has meant that I’ve really been thinking about it, and this is what I’ve come to: I think that if your ultimate goal is to set in place a system whereby white, male, probably cisgender, straight Christian men are at the top of a hierarchy and every other group in some way or fashion falls underneath this group in power, it makes a lot of sense that you would, at the outset of this mission, dismantle everything that provides evidence suggesting that men and women are equal and have equal capacities; that there are not differences in intelligence across race; that people who are LGBTQ+ have a range—that there’s a range and that it’s natural and that it happens. And I also think there’s this question, too, about being able-bodied and disability, which we’re seeing directly tapped with a lot of the health research that is being dismantled.
But I think that it actually makes a lot of sense if you think about, well, what is their end goal? And their end goal is to reset a system of power that was in place in the early 1900s and before where you had straight, white, rich men in positions of power. So, that’s the way that I am looking at this and trying to make sense of it.
Seeberger: Well, Colette, can you talk to us a bit about—I know that your organization, Stand Up for Science, joined with groups across so many different communities, whether it’s patient advocates, other science groups, universities, among others in launching a campaign last month called Protect Science and American Innovation.
What is the point of the campaign? Why is it needed? And can you touch specifically on how the cuts to scientific research hurt our economy?
Delawalla: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there has been an underappreciation for how productive our scientific ecosystem as a nation has been. And this isn’t just with regard to biotech innovation or cancer research innovation. This is fully across the board.
And so the campaign is needed, because we have this incredible system, this incredible, vibrant ecosystem, that we have invested in and maintained and continued to nurture across the span of almost a century in the United States and been very intentional about it in doing so.
Seeberger: Taxpayers have done that, just to be clear.
Delawalla: Yes, taxpayers.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Delawalla: Yeah. This is your tax dollars at work, in the best possible way.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Delawalla: I mean, it’s promoted in the entire—entire economies—
Seeberger: The internet.
Delawalla: —have happened. The internet, yeah. The [National Science Foundation] grant that funded the original foundations of Google is the perfect example of this, right?
Seeberger: GPS, mRNA vaccines, yeah.
Delawalla: Yep. American Sign Language. We put a man on the moon first. Pick a thing that you use every day, and there’s a direct tie to taxpayer-funded research and development. And so we really cannot disentangle the way that we live our lives today from that investment. And so it’s needed because you cannot separate the investment from the benefits. So, that’s why we’re fighting back.
Seeberger: Speaking of fighting back—in the face of these massive cuts and leveling of decades of career expertise among some of the leading scientists in the federal government, your organization has taken a leading role in spearheading efforts among employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere to push back against the administration’s proposed cuts and sound the alarm about some of the interference that we have seen from this administration trying to strong-arm scientists.
Why is this work important? And what do you think these efforts mean for our country’s ability to stop the administration from imposing further harms on the public?
Delawalla: Yeah. It was such an honor to be approached by federal scientists, and I have such a deep regard and such a deep respect for people who dedicate their lives and careers and expertise to trying to do things as quote-unquote “simple” as keep our water safe to drink and to keep our air clean to breathe.
And so it was such a privilege to be able to work with them. And really, our role in this was to give a voice to people, was to give a voice to these public servants who really wanted to raise the alarms about the harm that was coming to the public because of these cuts.
And so it’s a very interesting thing, because there really isn’t a precedent for hundreds of federal scientists standing up at the risk of their jobs, which we’ve seen with the EPA. They’ve put over 150 employees on administrative leave and under investigation for signing this whistleblower letter. I know, it’s mind boggling. And their whole point was, “hey, we need to be able to keep our water safe.”
Seeberger: Yeah.
Delawalla: Like, it’s not—I’ll never understand it.
Seeberger: Safe drinking water is not political.
Delawalla: Yeah. Right.
Seeberger: Knowing that your food is being properly inspected is not political, that the drugs that you’re taking are on the up and up—
Delawalla: Scientifically sound.
Seeberger: —is not political. Yeah.
Delawalla: Yeah. So, it’s unprecedented to have this many federal employees come together from across different states at different offices and say, “this is not going to work for us. You’re asking us to go against our oath to office. You’re asking us to betray the mission of the agency” that—in many cases, people take government jobs because they’re stable. It’s meaningful work for them. It’s a calling. I mean, in speaking with most of these scientists, it is a calling for them to be working at their agency. And they care deeply about the fact that their agencies are not upholding their mission because of these cuts.
Seeberger: I’m curious to get your perspective. We’ve talked a bit about this one-on-one a few weeks back, but can you touch on the importance of pushing back against these cuts? When you look at not just America continuing to thrive economically, but how cutting investments in scientific research potentially put America in the back seat to other countries, like China, who are going in the complete opposite direction? Can you talk to us a bit about that?
Delawalla: Of course. I think that one of the most stark and tangible examples of this is that China has increased their federal research and development budget 15 percent in the last five years. And [President Donald] Trump’s proposed budget across all federal research and development funding, it’s a proposed 20 percent cut.
So, we are diverging at a time when we really should be, if we care about America first, if that’s really what we’re doing, if that is the thing that we’re going for and we view these people as direct competition on a global stage, then we should be investing even more than they are, to try to keep up.
Right now, if the White House’s proposed budget were to go through, based on China’s increase in federal R&D, we would be investing less than China in research and development. And somebody’s going to discover the cure for cancer. Somebody is going to put people on Mars. And at this rate, it’s not going to be the United States. And I don’t know who voted for that. I certainly didn’t vote for that. I don’t know anybody on any area of the political spectrum that voted for that.
Seeberger: You may wear a red hat, but you weren’t saying, “here, delay finding the cure to cancer. Delay finding the cure to Alzheimer’s.” Again, who is this for?
To that end, Colette, a lot of these actions that we see, I think, have really caught the scientific community off guard. I don’t think a lot of people were anticipating that the administration would cut research for finding that cure to Alzheimer’s, that cure to cancer. Yet here we are.
What do you think that the scientific community should learn from what’s happened today? And how can they be better prepared for the future?
Delawalla: I think first of all, there is ingrained within the culture of science today in the United States, because we have had the privilege of having bipartisan support for so many decades, there’s this complacency about science not being political. And I’m an addiction science researcher, so I’ve never known an apolitical science because my work is so directly tied to policy and laws that are enacted. And so this is a little bit of a foreign concept to me.
But I think that there are thousands of scientists who have grown up as scientists in a culture that, No. 1, encouraged apolitical standing, but also worked out of them any sort of activist spirit. And so there’s no normal that we’re going to return to. Science is political, and now it is bipartisan. We don’t get to go back to normal from here forward.
And so my charge, my admonishment, to scientists is get political. Put on your activist shoes. Sign the petitions. Call your senators. Visit the Hill if you have the opportunity to. Get involved. It really does matter. And the pressure is working. It works. So, we need everybody involved.
Seeberger: Yeah, I mean, we’re already seeing the impact of some of these efforts. You may have seen over the course of the last few weeks that Republican Sen. Katie Britt from Alabama expressed profound concern about the devastating cuts that the administration has made to withhold federal research grants from the University of Alabama, among many other schools.
And she and 13 of her other Senate Republican colleagues wrote a letter to the administration demanding that those funds be unfrozen. And yet at the same time, this is the same conference that is voting for a partisan rescissions package, voting to green light this administration to withhold whatever funding it so pleases if it conflicts with the president’s personal views, political agenda, his extreme White House staff.
So, I am curious. What should Republicans who are truly outraged about these cuts—what should they be doing? And do you think that there is really a large segment of Republicans in Congress who may be able to be persuaded against some of these devastating cuts?
Delawalla: Yeah. So there’s a couple questions there.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Delawalla: And I’ll go down the list. First of all, I commend the Senate Republicans who signed that letter, particularly with regard to Alabama. University of Alabama is the No. 1 employer in the state of Alabama. And that is mostly in part because of the health care systems. And so, I mean, the University of Alabama is going to be wiped out by these cuts.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Delawalla: And therefore, the state economy is going to collapse.
Seeberger: Totally.
Delawalla: There’s nothing fiscally responsible about crashing an economy, particularly in rural America, when they need every economic dollar that they could get. Those dollars go so far in rural America. And so I feel for Republicans right now, because they are between a rock and a hard place. I understand that Trump and the White House are stepping over their boundaries. I mean, legally, they’re stepping over.
Seeberger: Oh, yeah. They’re just operating in total conflict with executing the Constitution and executing the laws of the land—the funding bills that the president of the United States himself signed into law in March.
Delawalla: Right. So, I understand that there’s that on one side and constituents on the other side. And I would just implore people, Republicans in particular, to see reason. You did not take an oath to office to Donald Trump. You took an oath to office to the Constitution, and to uphold the Constitution. And at this point, those two things are in conflict. They don’t have to be, but they are, because of the way that the White House is behaving and Trump is behaving.
And so this is a big “look in the mirror and decide who you want to be and how you want to be remembered” moment for them. And I do think that there is some pretty serious soul-searching that has to happen within the party. Because again, nobody voted to defund cancer research. Nobody in Alabama voted to crash the state economy by way of crashing the NIH. That’s not what people voted for. And so, Republicans need to remember that they work for their constituents. At the end of the day, that’s really what it is.
Seeberger: And all those constituents, many of them have chronic health diseases.
Delawalla: Yes. Everybody knows somebody with cancer, addiction, diabetes. We all have a phone. We all have an iPhone or whatever smartphone that was developed in part through NSF dollars. You use Google. You go to the hospital, and you hop in your fMRI machine to get your body scan for whatever reason. This is science at work.
I think that we’re so used to having the benefits of science without realizing the cost of it, that it seems easy to be like, “oh, we’ll have our cake and eat it too.” And that’s not how this works.
Seeberger: So, you touched on the economy and its connection to the public investments. Last week, just to tie some of these threads together, last week we saw Trump actually fired the head of the government agency the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is responsible for putting out data on monthly jobs reports. And last week’s data showed that the preceding three months had been the worst months for job creation since the pandemic.
It was a total warning light going off that this economy, in the face of these brutal cuts and the mass firings of federal workers and others, may be starting to show some signs of weakness. Yet, we have also seen when the president doesn’t like the data or the science—
Delawalla: Or the weather report?
Seeberger: Or the weather report. We have seen taking a Sharpie.
Delawalla: Taking a Sharpie, yep.
Seeberger: Taking a Sharpie or, whether it’s the EPA saying that greenhouse gases should be subject to an endangerment finding—all of these things taken together really show the administration’s unprecedented rejection of data and willingness to cover it up if it benefits the president politically or hurts a political ally.
So, can you talk about what some of the real-world impacts are from this hostile approach to data and honest record bookkeeping?
Delawalla: Yes. I mean, this is to my point earlier, to the first question that you asked, why is this happening? I think that we’re seeing so extremely clearly that it’s happening with the purpose of dismantling systems that provide evidence for things that go against what the president and the people surrounding him believe or want to be true.
A wonderful, terrible, real world example that played out at the beginning of the 20th century was Lysenkoism. And this was a man in Soviet Russia who did not believe in genes. He didn’t believe in genes. He didn’t believe in Mendelian genetic principles. And he had a completely unsupported view that seeds of the same type of plant did not compete against one another, that there was no competition, that every organism within a species essentially had the same degree of potential.
And so what that led to was farming practices where seeds were planted too close to one another, and it was the only way that people were allowed to farm. But we know that organisms are in competition with each other. And this led to famine that killed over 30 million people across the Soviet Union and China. And on top of that, they banished, arrested, and killed scientists, particularly biologists and agricultural scientists, who tried to stand up and say, “hey, this isn’t the way that nature works, you’re going to kill people.”
And so that’s a really historical example of, I think, a direction that we’re going in. When you ignore data, people die. I mean, we’re seeing this with everything related to vaccines and RFK Jr. We eradicated measles. We eradicated a disease that used to kill thousands upon thousands of children every year, and now it’s back for no reason except for that we’ve decided that we don’t want to vaccinate our kids.
I remember my grandmother talking about how she had a sibling who died of diphtheria, and she was raised in rural Tennessee. When they started being able to get access to these vaccines, it was life-changing for families. It meant that children lived to adulthood. I think that we’ve forgotten that the reason why we have vaccines is because something like 20 or 30 percent of kids didn’t make it to adulthood. This is where we’re headed. This is a direction we’re headed in.
Seeberger: Well, I’m going to choose to be inspired by the incredible career civil servants, scientists, that you guys have been working with over the course of the past several months, standing up to these attacks. And that is going to give me hope in these dark times. Colette Delawalla—
Delawalla: I think there’s so much reason to have hope.
Seeberger: Exactly. Exactly. Colette Delawalla, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Delawalla: Thank you so much.
[Musical transition]
Seeberger: All right folks, that’s going to do it for us this week. Please go back and check out previous episodes. But before we go, Muggs, we have some things that we have to talk about.
Muggs Leone: We sure do, Colin. Where are you getting your pop culture crave this week?
Seeberger: Well, I have actually been glued to my TV all weekend long and throughout this week. I have been watching “The Summer I Turned Pretty” on Prime, and it is so good.
Leone: Is it?
Seeberger: I cannot stop. I cannot stop watching. The way I just made it through Season 2, and the way that I will absolutely riot if she does not end up with Conrad.
Leone: OK.
Seeberger: So, I’m not fully caught up. I need to catch up the last few episodes of Season 3, which just started. And the show is giving me such great inspiration channeling my coastal grandma, real estate porn dreams.
Leone: Sure, sure.
Seeberger: And I’m just like, OK, take me into retirement. Make me much richer than I am. And give me a beach house somewhere on Cape Cod.
Leone: Isn’t that what we all want?
Seeberger: Yes.
Leone: I’ll take your word for it. I will be on the Conrad train. I know I’ve seen some of the promo clips where—
Seeberger: Oh, it’s everywhere.
Leone: Yeah. The lead actor is talking about, listen, she will not speak to where she thinks her character should go, but she thinks that her character’s doing what she needs to do right now.
Seeberger: Well, I don’t know about that at the end of Season 2, at least. And I am a Conrad fan because he actually went to my alma mater.
Leone: OK.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Leone: Sensing a little bias in the chat.
Seeberger: I’ve got to root for the home team, yeah.
Leone: OK. Well, I have been getting a little bit less of that on my feed.
Seeberger: OK.
Leone: Because my feeds have been overwhelmed with Cynthia Erivo at the Hollywood Bowl playing Jesus Christ in “Jesus Christ: Superstar.”
Seeberger: I mean, she is a superstar.
Leone: She’s a superstar.
Seeberger: Perfect casting.
Leone: She looks amazing. She’s also surrounded by Adam Lambert as Judas and Phillipa Soo from “Hamilton” as Mary Magdalene. So, I’ve just been living. Of course she sounds great. They all sound great.
Seeberger: Looks amazing.
Leone: Looks amazing.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Leone: I mean, I also just love the dichotomy of Adam Lambert in 6-inch platform boots towering over a barefoot Cynthia Erivo. And you’re like, OK, well, I can really see the height difference there.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Leone: But yeah, if listeners aren’t familiar, I saw a local production of “Jesus Christ: Superstar” recently.
Seeberger: Oh.
Leone: It was OK. It was good. The show’s not my favorite, but this production is great. You have to go check out Adam Lambert singing “Heaven On Their Minds,” Phillipa Soo singing “Everything’s Alright,” and of course, Cynthia Erivo singing “Gethsemane.” Those are my few recs. Go check them out. That’ll get you started and on the train.
Seeberger: I’ve been seeing the clips on my feed as well, but I will need to do a much closer listen.
Leone: Please do.
Seeberger: Other things I’m looking forward to this week—we got the first clip of the upcoming season of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
Leone: Oh, OK.
Seeberger: Which, like, you know what? “The Mormon Wives” have my Salt Lake City fidelity. I know our listeners all know that. But I do think that SLC is perhaps my favorite “Housewives” franchise at the moment.
Leone: OK.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Leone: Hop in the chat, people. What are your thoughts? Do you disagree?
Seeberger: Do you agree? Do you disagree? But one thing that is not debatable is Mary Cosby is an absolute riot. They posted this first clip as a teaser for the upcoming season this week, and she and Meredith are fishing in a lake. They catch a fish and she’s like, oh, well you need to release it. You need to let it go after you catch the fish.
Leone: Yes, you do.
Seeberger: And she’s like, sure. But before you release the fish, you have to give the fish CPR. And I’m like, Mary. Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary. Sister Mary, that is not how it works.
Leone: Yeah, listen, my mother has taken me fishing a many a time.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Leone: I can’t say that was ever something she taught me.
Seeberger: No.
Leone: But maybe I’ll have to ask her when I get home and see if there’s something she left out.
Seeberger: Well, we will need to record her reaction and we can air it here on “The Tent” for you folks.
Leone: There you go.
Seeberger: Well, that’s going to do it for us. Please take care of yourself. I hope that you are out there enjoying the beautiful weather that has blessed most of the country this week. It has been such a nice reprieve from the oppressive 95-plus that we’ve been subjected to over the course of the last seven or so weeks here in the D.C. metro area. And I hope you’re having a great summer, and we’ll talk to you next week.
[Musical transition]
Seeberger: “The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Colin Seeberger. Muggs Leone is our digital producer, Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, Mishka Espey is our booking producer. Hai Phan, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.
You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.