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Last week, the Trump administration an- nounced its plans to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado because it is a source of “climate alarmism.” The reaction in the scientific community was as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been bulldozed with its art inside.
But outside the scientific community, it was just one more headline in a feed of bad and bewildering news. Why should we care about a lab in Colorado that most people have never heard of?
It can be difficult to explain how government-funded research has changed your day-to-day life because it’s so ubiquitous. GPS, the internet, the iPhone, solar panels, life-saving vaccines — the list is nearly endless. In this case, NCAR’s research has been responsible for everything from drastically improving our ability to predict storms and the path of hurricanes to safety improvements in airplane design. There are few, if any, institutions in the world capable of carrying out the complicated computer modeling being done at NCAR.
There’s no doubt the research done at NCAR has saved lives. It’s impossible to say who will lose their lives because the research has stopped. I can tell you how a proposed bridge will improve lives, or how a bridge that closes might harm them. It is harder to talk about a bridge that no one envisioned.
It’s also hard to find scientists willing to talk about this. No one wants to be a target of the administration. Matt Dwyer of Patagonia, whom I interviewed recently for a story on microplastics, noted that many outdoor companies are quietly abandoning environmental initiatives because “they don’t want the Eye of Sauron on them” — a reference to an evil entity in _Lord of the Rings_. He was echoing off-the-record comments I’ve heard from scientists since January.
Karen Maschke
I was curious about what Karen Maschke, a scholar at the Hastings Institute, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, thought about all this. She is in the middle of a multi-year project funded by the National Institutes of Health on the ethical questions surrounding gene-therapy research.
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Many of the gene therapies her team is studying are for rare diseases that affect children, and “there’s a lot of ethical issues about how much evidence you have to have to approve [a therapy] for clinical use,” she says. Pharmaceutical companies would prefer to have as much data as possible, but with relatively few children affected, that can take years. Maschke noted that at least three children have died in the past 18 months waiting for clinical trials.
Cuts to federal funding haven’t threatened Maschke’s work, but she is not reassured. “When I look at the broader field, it’s very worrisome,” she says. “We’re at a tipping point.”
What she means is, even if federal funding is restored after 2028 for scientific projects targeted by the Trump administration, the loss will be more than a few years of research. A new prescription drug might have taken 10 years of research and clinical trials (or more) — studies that only the federal government is willing to fund because of the potential financial losses. Private firms are far more risk-averse.
A new prescription drug can take years of research and testing to develop, with failure
possible at any point. (VectorMine)
When you shut down research, every project in that 10-year pipeline gets wiped out. If a future administration wants to restart, scientists will all have to start at square one. “Science is a large ecosystem of people,” Maschke says. When research is cut, staff at labs get fired and scattered, lab animals get euthanized and local economies suffer (NCAR employs 800 people).
Maschke says she also worries about junior high and high school students interested in science, technology and math. “When they’re in college, is there going to be a science program?” she says. “Pharmaceutical companies can’t hire scientists to develop drugs if there are no scientists.
“When the average American realizes that they can’t get the medications they want, they can’t get the doctor appointments they want, kids can’t get jobs in science or medicine, it’ll be a rude awakening.”
Maschke has experience with awakenings. She was in Bulgaria during the fall of Communism, which she says seemed to happen overnight. Only now, reading about what was going on behind the scenes, is she learning about the unsung work of freedom fighters over years — the cracking that finally caused the dam to burst.
“There’s always somebody, or a group of somebodies, in the background, pushing to do the right thing,” she says. “That’s how you have social movements. That’s how you have the Civil Rights movement and the Enlightenment. It’s always appropriate and necessary to evaluate your federal funding. But people will see that you can’t just keep dismantling systems. People are going to push back.”
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**Type** : Opinion
Opinion: Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data. https://highlandscurrent.org/2025/12/26/out-there-hard-stop/
