So to Speak Podcast Transcript: The Trump admin wants to change how scientific research is funded w/ Catharine Young, Evan Morris, and Ryne Weiss.

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Evan Morris: Some of you at FIRE are free speech absolutists, and I’m a merit absolutist. I don’t believe there should be any other considerations taken for deciding what science to fund. Just fund what’s best. It doesn’t matter the color of your skin or what language you speak or where you are.

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Male Speaker 1: Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Male Speaker 2: You’re listening to, So to Speak, The Free Speech Podcast brought to you by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

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Nico Perrino: Welcome back to So to Speak, The Free Speech Podcast, where we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. I am your host, Nico Perrino. Back in May, the Office of Management and Budget proposed sweeping new rules that would reshape how the federal government administers billions of dollars in federal research grants. The stakes are high. That funding fuels scientific discovery, medical breakthroughs and technological innovation. The proposal was open for public comment for 45 days and drew more than half a million responses.

Supporters of the proposal argue that it will prevent waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending. Meanwhile, critics contend that the proposal will politicize research funding by giving executive branch political appointees greater influence over which research grants receive federal funding. The debate comes as the administration is already facing legal challenges over its handling of federal research funding. In one recent case, federal agencies acknowledged using keyword searches for terms related to diversity, vaccine hesitancy, and COVID-19 to identify University of California research grants to terminate.

Court documents have also shown that federal officials terminated more than seven and a half billion dollars worth of grants in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, and the feds did so because those states voted for Kamala Harris in that election. Here with me today to break down the OMB proposal and what it could mean for the future of research are Evan Morris, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and of biomedical engineering at Yale. Professor Morris, welcome on the show. I know you told me to call you Evan, so I apologize for that. It’s just habit. It’s just a habit.

Evan Morris: Thanks for having me.

Nico Perrino: We also have Catharine Young here to my left, a senior fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Catharine, welcome on the show.

Catharine Young: Thank you for having me.

Nico Perrino: And of course, to my right here is Ryne Weiss, the director of research here at FIRE. Ryne, is this your first time on the podcast?

Ryne Weiss: Second. We did that interview about the book Moral Combat. The violence in video games research book.

Nico Perrino: Oh, you did that research?

Ryne Weiss: Yeah, that was, I wanna say, back in 2021. So, it’s been a while.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, it has been a while. Well, welcome back. All right. Well, let’s get started here by laying out what’s in this OMB proposal. Evan, let’s start with you. What caught your attention?

Evan Morris: Well, there were many things, unfortunately.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I think there were something like 300 revisions to how research grants are administered currently.

Evan Morris: Yes, and obviously they activated a lot of anger and frustration on the part of scientists and other people. So, I would say the most important thing that people are alarmed about, which you’ve alluded to, is this idea that political appointees would have final say and for granting grants to scientists. And everybody is worried about that. What caught my eye and we can get back to later is the prohibition on using grant money to publish the results of scientific studies. And it seems to me that that’s one of many examples where the proposals are directly in opposition. They’re in direct conflict with the principles of scientific research. And I’m happy to talk about that more.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I’m not a scientist. So, explain this to me. So, you write a research paper. It gets peer reviewed. It’s ready to get published. You pay a fee for it to appear in the journal?

Evan Morris: Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a whole other conversation about who controls the machinery of publishing. But suffice it to say that publishing companies publish our articles, and they’re for-profit businesses, and we have to pay to have them published. And we have to pay even more for what’s called open access, where everybody can get to it, even those people who aren’t affiliated with a university that has a subscription. But that’s the way to give the most people access to the results of my work, which the public paid for.

Nico Perrino: Got it. Catharine, what stood out to you?

Catharine Young: I very much agree with what Evan said in terms of the political appointees having a say at the very end of this process. So, it is not unusual for administrations and presidents to be able to set priorities when it comes to research.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. My assumption was that’s how it just happened already.

Catharine Young: And we can go through examples of many administrations from the Biden administration downwards in terms of what they put forward as their own priorities. And so, this is not an unusual thing. Where the issue comes is this political power of having the very final say when it comes to the grants, should a grant be funded or not? That’s a very different level of oversight.

Nico Perrino: All right. So, help me understand this. The way it’s historically worked is an administrational set its priorities. Let’s say cancer research under the Biden administration.

Catharine Young: That’s right.

Nico Perrino: And it would go through a process to figure out which proposals had the most likelihood of success or research something that was under-researched in the field. And once a panel of experts presumably signed off on that grant, it would be good to go, there was no political review at the end?

Catharine Young: So, let me take your example of cancer research. ‘Cause I worked on the Biden Cancer Moonshot, which was a presidential priority at the White House. So, this is a really good example to use, to be able to illustrate the process. The president set the vision of the Cancer Moonshot and the audacious goals; in this case, it was to reduce the cancer death rate by half in 25 years. So, that was our ultimate goal we were working towards. So, the agencies, of course, are going to drive towards that goal, but we don’t step in to say how they should drive that goal. So, the process was very protected.

There is a peer review process, which you alluded to, where external experts review the grants and give their take in terms of does this grant align with the methodologies that should be used? Will it have great impact? All the pieces that it’s looking at in order to showcase good science. Then the agencies, because there are these major goals for the administration, will have a say in terms of the direction of the agency itself, and ultimately the budgets that are available for these grants as well. But ultimately, at the very level of deciding whether or not a grant should be accepted or not, should remain a protected and peer-reviewed process.

Nico Perrino: So, if I’m understanding you correctly, it sounds like the executive branch, the president, will set the goals.

Catharine Young: Correct.

Nico Perrino: And then, the agencies more or less operate fairly independently in administering these research grants. Now, my understanding is the Trump Administration 2.0 in particular has pursued what some have called this unitary executive theory where there really is no independence amongst these agencies. And there’s more tightly intertwined political control of the agencies. We’ve seen this with agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the FCC, for example, some of these places that had boards that were bipartisan, some of the minority political party appointees have been fired. And this has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court.

So, what you’re saying is there’s just more control from the White House.

Catharine Young: That’s correct.

Nico Perrino: And this proposal is going to help, I guess, exacerbate that control by having a political review process at the end that didn’t exist before.

Catharine Young: That’s exactly right.

Nico Perrino: Ryne, in your comment that you wrote for FIRE to the Office of Management and Budget, you were particularly concerned with something you called what? A kill switch?

Ryne Weiss: Yes. There is one part of these regulations that doesn’t just involve political review at the time of funding, but ongoing ability to kill a grant at any point with no rationale given for no longer aligning with the goals of the administration. And as we point out in our comment, that warps the scientific process in such a way that, the scientific process is not supposed to be oriented towards obtaining a specific result.

But the incentive that that creates when you know that your project can be killed at any time and you can lose whatever remaining funding is in your grant if you make these government appointees unhappy, or if they think that it’s no longer aligned with the administration’s goals, that really warps the incentives to do proper science in favor of doing something that you think will be most appealing to the government.

Nico Perrino: But hasn’t that been how it’s operated? Last year, I remember there being headlines over all these grants or funds that were just kind of unilaterally revoked from Columbia and Harvard and some of these other institutions. And I was just surprised that the federal government could go in and do that. How does it work currently? Is a kill switch like this not in existence?

Ryne Weiss: So, there’s currently, and this is sort of, as I understand it, the authority that the government is relying on here, there’s this thing called a termination of convenience for government contracts in general. And they’re claiming that they’re codifying this into the OMB rules, even though it’s been implicitly what they’re relying on to do this. But the fact that they’re trying to codify this in the rules implies that this is new to some extent.

Nico Perrino: So, it was a practice before, but now it’s gonna be more formalized?

Ryne Weiss: It’s something that they had attempted to do in this previous process that they’re fighting in the courts. And now they’re trying to formalize this as the practice in the future. But as far as I understand it, these sorts of midway terminations have only been done in the past for things like malfeasance or the researcher having been found to have committed fraud in the past or misuse of the funds in an ongoing manner, whereas this new way, it’s basically up to the whims of the political appointees.

Nico Perrino: So, you can make a political decision to just, “This is no longer something we’re interested in, or even presumably we don’t like the direction that this research is going and the findings it’s going to reveal”?

Ryne Weiss: Mm-hmm.

Catharine Young: That’s right.

Evan Morris: That’s the danger.

Nico Perrino: That’s the danger.

Ryne Weiss: And even if you accept that this is proper for the government in other contexts, similar to the way that we find academic freedom to be an important employment protection for academics, whether they’re at public or private universities, I would argue that the scientific process only works with a similar sort of protection that if the research is being carried out in accordance with proper scientific principles, that canceling it midway, would not be appropriate.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, go ahead, Catharine.

Catharine Young: Oh, I’m so sorry. And I know Evan, you probably have things to say. I just wanted to jump in on that to add some additional context in terms of the harm it does when you’re able to just switch something off midway. So, most research studies that are funded are multi-year, and they’re multi-year for a reason. It’s because they are complex. They require a great deal of equipment, trained staff, animals, sometimes animal models. These require time in order to conduct the study well and efficiently. Now I’m gonna use the example of a clinical trial, which is part of the research ecosystem in which patients come and are part of a study.

In some cases, the only option they have left in terms of trying to find a potential option for their disease. So, rare disease, different cancers, these clinical trials are incredibly important for patients to potentially extend their life. Now, if you can imagine, you cut off a clinical trial midway, you’re not only putting at risk the patients who are in that trial, but you have now lost all of that knowledge that was gained through that potential clinical trial. You have now lost the investment that you’ve made. You cannot simply just turn the switch back on again when it’s decided, “Oh, now it’s time to continue.” You have lost the momentum and all of the effort and trained staff and support in that as well.

And this is not something that is just abstract. So, last year there was a study that looked at the funding that was stopped, and there were 383 NIH-supported clinical trials that lost grant funding, and that affected 74,000 participants of patients.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. How does that work? So, if I’m a patient and I’m in a clinical trial that is supported by a grant from the federal government and that grant just gets turned off, does my treatment stop or does someone else have to pick up the tab?

Catharine Young: Well, scientists have an ethical obligation to ensure that these patients are continued to be taken care of. I don’t know what the answer to that is. I’ve never been on that other side before, but this is just an example of the incredible harm that that’s something like that could do.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Evan, did you wanna get in here?

Evan Morris: I would just say that there are examples in basic research too, outside of clinical trials, that are very much parallel. And, I think this is important for people to understand that even when we do basic research, I’m using brain scanning to study neurochemistry, the chemistry of addiction in your brain, I impose some inconveniences and even some risk on my volunteer subjects in order to acquire data. Okay. And I do that with the implicit understanding that I’m gonna collect sufficient data to have enough power, meaning enough statistics to make a final finding public.

And the people that volunteer that undergo this risk are depending on that. That’s the implicit contract between us. I asked them to volunteer and undergo some risk with the understanding that I’m actually gonna contribute some reliable knowledge to the disease that either they have or a family member has or a condition that they care about. And if my study is abruptly terminated before I’ve acquired enough data to make a statistically sound finding, I’ve broken that contract with the people that have volunteered.

And this is true, as Catharine said, in clinical trials, there’s even this issue of treatment, but even for basic research, we have this implicit contract.

Catharine Young: And Evan brings up a really good point because that all goes towards the trust of the system. Not only the trust that the scientists put in the system, but the trust of the American people who have trust, hopefully, in the scientific ecosystem, and I think this all puts that at risk.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, go ahead, Ryne.

Ryne Weiss: This is one of the things I go into in my comment. You shouldn’t really trust someone who, were the facts different, they would not tell you a different outcome. And when you have set up this funding process that is basically set up to ensure ideological alignment, the science that comes out of that system is no longer really trustworthy because you couldn’t trust them to give you something that was against the interest of that.

Nico Perrino: The incentives are skewed.

Ryne Weiss: Exactly.

Catharine Young: Absolutely.

Nico Perrino: Among the other 300 revisions here, though, I just wanna quickly ask about before we move on is it also limits professional activities and limits foreign research partnerships. Does this concern you all?

Evan Morris: Absolutely.

Nico Perrino: Okay. So, this isn’t just a concern with waste, fraud, and abuse, and that there are some weird partnerships or weird professional fees that people are using federal dollars to support?

Evan Morris: No, no.

Nico Perrino: This is critical to the process?

Evan Morris: Look, all of the work that I do crosses borders. If I invent or my students invent an algorithm to evaluate brain images, which has happened, and we want it tested, we go to the experts. It just so happened that a number of years ago we invented an algorithm which could have use in early drug development. And I knew that the experts lived in France and England. And so, we asked them to be collaborators, which of course they agreed to. So, all of us, the public, are getting the best science if I have access to all of my colleagues around the world. It’s a regular part and parcel of high-level science collaboration.

Nico Perrino: So, every year, every day, theoretically, you’re working with other academics across the world?

Evan Morris: A hundred percent. I’m on Zoom with people in Australia, or in France, or in Canada, or somewhere else.

Nico Perrino: And what about these professional activities? I’m assuming that means conferences, fees to join professional associations. I mean, all of this is part of the ecosystem too, I’m presuming?

Evan Morris: Absolutely. And I mean, maybe this might come as a surprise to the public, but when scientists go to conferences, they’re actually working all the time. Okay. It might be at a bar, but we’re working. We’re talking to people that we don’t get the chance to see and talk to at length all year. And during that time, we test our ideas. We find out about who’s graduating and who I could recruit to come and work for me. We ask for help with data or just, “Will you look at my results? They don’t make sense to me.” All this happens at conferences. It would be a great loss if we were unable to do that.

Catharine Young: And if I could just add to that, the conferences provide an amazing opportunity for preliminary data to be showcased and have that as an opportunity, as Evan was alluding to, have scientists input into that process already at that point. So, it’s a very important, I believe, in terms of the integrity of the scientific process to be able to get that input early. And these conferences are an amazing way to do that.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. If I’m recalling the proposal correctly, I don’t think it totally eliminates the opportunity to have money spent on attending these conferences or joining these associations. But I think that needs to be signed off on pre-approved on an ad hoc basis, which I guess more red tape in a certain respect.

Evan Morris: I mean, I would like to put in a plug for decreasing regulation. I’m a scientist who feels that over the last 10 years, maybe especially five years, the number of forms that I have to fill out has exploded. That’s a waste of my time. Frankly, I’m very much against over-regulation, and it’s not even practical because, often times, and this is proper, the science takes you where it goes. You start out asking a particular question, but you make another finding, and you say, “Whoa, I’ve got to figure this out.” So, to imagine that I could have asked for pre-approval to go and present something that hasn’t occurred yet reflects a naiveté, I would say at best, on the part of the people writing the regulations with regard to their knowledge of science.

Nico Perrino: And Evan, for people like you in the medical sciences, is most of your work funded in some part by the federal government?

Evan Morris: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Would it be really hard to do what you do without federal research support?

Evan Morris: Yes, it would be impossible. And this is something we should really drill down into. I think there’s the perception, I would call it a misperception by much of the public, even the very educated public, that if we shrink the amount of research that’s funded by the federal government, the drug companies and the tech companies will swoop in to replace it. But I would argue that that absolutely won’t happen. What we do is many of us do basic research, and it doesn’t come to a practical application necessarily for a long time. Companies who answer to boards of directors and stockholders will do only what they can make a profit on in the short term. They’re just different processes.

Nico Perrino: And is this unique to the United States or do other countries approach research funding the same way? Or is the United States kind of the big bear in town here?

Evan Morris: I mean, it’s certainly the biggest funder of basic research by far. I would say one last thing if I could, which is I do some work in collaboration with companies if I need their expertise. And there are many programs that NIH, particularly I’ll talk about NIH, has developed and put forth where you require an industry collaborator. But of course, typically they’re not interested unless they can see the possibility of a product down the road or they’re doing it out of their good graces to give you some data.

Nico Perrino: Well, this isn’t my area of expertise, but I often hear about the pharmaceutical companies being boogeymen and cooking the books on some of these studies. So, I mean, if you’re concerned, if you’re in the federal government or you’re a supporter of these sorts of rules and you’re concerned about the politicization of research, I’ve heard RFK, Jr., for example, talk about the pharmaceutical companies as boogeymen. Like “Where else are you gonna go to get this money if you can’t go to the pharmaceutical companies either?”

Catharine Young: No, yeah, exactly. No, there are many misconceptions, particularly with the public as it relates to the process of science, to Evan’s point, decades of basic research is required, which really is at the foundation of all of our treatments that we have. All of our drug discoveries are because of that. But we need the pharmaceutical companies too. We could not kind of hand off this work and have it be built towards a treatment without pharmaceutical companies. Those clinical trials are extraordinarily expensive. They take years.

And so, there is this idea that pharmaceutical companies are the bad actors in this space. And that’s just simply not true. They are very, very important partners in this work. The basic researchers could not do what the pharmaceutical researchers and scientists do and vice versa. We need the entire ecosystem in order to really serve the American people well.

Nico Perrino: And it sounds like, Evan, what you’re saying is this reputation that the pharmaceutical companies have with regard to research and these clinical trials is just totally off base. You’ve never felt pressure to come to some sort of result?

Evan Morris: No, not at all.

Nico Perrino: Or your colleagues? You haven’t heard about that?

Evan Morris: I have lots of friends and trainees who have gone into the pharmaceutical industry, and I count on them as colleagues. And it’s a very synergistic relationship that we have.

Nico Perrino: Another thing in this proposal is a double tap on a May 2025 executive order, kind of putting forward this gold standard of science standard that they want researchers to use if they are going to receive federal research grants. And again, this isn’t my industry, but I read some of the things that are required by this gold standard of science, that the study be reproducible, transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, collaborative and interdisciplinary, skeptical of its findings and assumptions, structured for falsibility of hypotheses, subject to unbiased peer review, accepting of negative results as positive outcomes, and without conflicts of interest. Is that all good stuff?

Evan Morris: I’m for all of it.

Catharine Young: Amazing. But we’ve always been for that. I don’t know a single scientist who would be like, “Oh, I don’t agree with anything. And I don’t know a single scientist or many who haven’t advocated for reform in these spaces before. So, the fact that we read these words now under the title of gold standard science as if this wasn’t the case before is rather a contradiction.

Nico Perrino: Well, you mentioned reform, Catharine, and I know, Ryne, in your comment, you put forward some areas of reform and that you in particular are concerned about what some have called the replication crisis. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ryne Weiss: Yeah. As you listed in the gold standard of science, reproducibility. So, there’s this idea that science, if it’s conducted properly, the result should be reproducible. Someone else conducting the same experiment, someone or somewhere else, should find the same result that you have. What we find is that in a lot of areas of science, that’s actually not the case, particularly in the social sciences. There is an article in Nature, I believe, back in April that showed that some fields had a reproducibility rate of as low as zero percent for precise reproducibility.

I believe that was in the education field, whereas others like economics and political science had precise reproducibility above 50% with general reproducibility that wasn’t precise being even higher than that. So, in general, various factors affect reproducibility, and part of that is this results-oriented interpretation of data because scientists are incentivized in so many parts of their career, like whether they’re going to be hired based on finding splashy results, whether their papers will get into better journals if they’re finding a positive result rather than a null result.

These things sort of all push scientists towards angling outcomes, not in political directions necessarily, but in the directions of finding something that they’re looking for or that they think that the journals will be looking for.

Nico Perrino: So, you don’t make a name for yourself by finding something that someone else has already found and just confirming that it was –

Ryne Weiss: No, or by doing an experiment that fails and you publish a null result. But unfortunately, the practice of science does require that we know what doesn’t work as well as what does work. And science should be set up to incentivize the publication of null results. And unfortunately, we don’t do enough right now to incentivize the publication of null results. So, instead, you’ve created this incentive for scientists to sort of massage their data. There are a number of practices that you can do to disincentivize this, like creating journals for the replication of null results.

Nico Perrino: Catharine, is this right? I mean, is it really kind of hard to get research funding to study something that’s already been studied?

Catharine Young: Absolutely. It is. I think Ryne laid it out really well. And I think one place that actually does need reform is this idea of really being able to embrace negative or null studies as well. So, it’s a critical piece of information that we need. If the experiment did not work, that is just as important information to have than if it did work and we got amazing results. So, how do we embrace this piece of the scientific process in a way that does incentivize scientists where the pressure is not on producing results that are flashy and new?

Nico Perrino: Well, didn’t the president of Stanford, if I’m not mistaken, publish some research that ended up either to be falsified or bunk in some way?

Ryne Weiss: Yeah, I believe a journalist at the student newspaper found that he had committed some sort of data fraud, and that led to him eventually stepping down.

Nico Perrino: So, the assumption here is he kind of wanted to replicate previous studies to avoid the risk of that. If nobody replicates or nobody dives deep into the findings, then it just exists out there as what people presume to be good knowledge.

Ryne Weiss: Yeah, and one of the things that the Nature article found that was very interesting is the same fields with the highest reproducibility are also the fields that have the highest amount of open data. So, the two fields that did the best had the highest rate which were political science and economics had the highest rates of having both their data and their code available to the public, and education, which had the zero percent precise reproducibility, had the lowest rate of data being open and code being open. And you would suspect this if your data...

Nico Perrino: Do researchers not like to make all that stuff available?

Ryne Weiss: They often don’t but there’s a greater movement towards open science, and part of that is coming out of this reproducibility crisis. Part of it is scientists, if they keep the data as proprietary, they don’t necessarily just get one paper out of it, they can get multiple papers out of it, but if they make their data set open to the public, then other scientists can also use it and potentially scoop them on future publications. On the other hand, there are a lot of good outcomes for making that data open in that other people can check it and other people might see something in your data that you might not see.

Just to plug FIRE’s research department, we make all of our data open, our college free speech rankings are pre-registered so you can see how we’re gonna analyze the data that we get back before we get back any of the data. So, it’s something that’s been very important to us in the research department here at FIRE, with some of our folks like Nate Honeycutt and Sean Stevens being a big part of the social psychology movement towards open science. Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Evan, you wanna get in here? Do you agree with this open science movement?

Evan Morris: Well, I’m a data sharing skeptic. But there’s a difference perhaps between the data that Ryne is talking about and the data that I acquire which is very bespoke, and it’s usually acquired along with the development of very complicated mathematical models and other techniques to analyze it. So, first of all, I’m a little bit reluctant to upload all of my data willy-nilly and have everybody else in the world take a crack at it wrongly and then not be able to publish what are the correct analyses when I finally get to it.

That’s one thing. But we may be talking about not all data are created equal. That’s the first. Surveys, you’ll forgive me, but may be simpler than dynamic PET images of the brain. Sorry for saying that.

Nico Perrino: I think it just objectively is.

Evan Morris: Yeah. But there’s another word that’s come to the fore here, which is incentives. And there must be proper incentives, A). To publish my negative results, but let’s not discount my very great need before I was promoted to publish my results at all. Should I upload my data and somebody else quickly grab it and publish something, especially something I think is wrong, then I’m denied the opportunity to show the fruits of all of my labor. That could be devastating professionally, particularly for young people. So, if I could just say one more thing.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, go for it. And then, I have a follow-up question.

Evan Morris: Okay. Which is that I fear that the people listening to this may say, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of scientists and scientists-likers who are patting themselves on the back because everything that they do is already good and objective.” And I don’t want that to be the interpretation. And the other word that’s popped up is reform. Look, there are things wrong. There are bad incentives. They have to be addressed, just like in any complicated field or environment. I’ve taken shots and written proposals about how to improve peer review. But just because a tire is flat on your car doesn’t mean that you chop off the wheel.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. What’s, just very briefly, the parts of peer review that you think need to be reformed? Because that’s part of this right now. The current process for research grants are proposals are submitted. This is if I got it correctly. Proposals are submitted to the relevant federal agency. Then they undergo an administrative review followed by a peer review. So, right now, the peer review is kind of the final line, whereas under this new proposal, the political appointee is gonna be the final decision maker.

Evan Morris: Yeah. I mean, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. But let’s talk about peer review.

Nico Perrino: I’m sure it is.

Evan Morris: Peer review is a great idea, and it says that scientific proposals, or in the case, that’s in the case of grants or in the case of papers, should be scrutinized by other disinterested scientists who can evaluate the methodology and even whether your results make sense given their broad knowledge of the techniques and of the field. I mean, some things don’t pass the smell test. Now, are there things that I don’t like about peer review? Because I’m gonna get to your question. Yes. Peer review as it works currently is a massive amount of unpaid work.

And for me, when I was on study section, which is the group that gets together for four years running to evaluate grant proposals, it’s a huge amount of work, weeks at least every night, going through grant proposals, scrutinizing them, writing reviews that I do three times a year for four years. I’m not paid for it. So, when I got off study section, if I were asked, I would not go back on. But I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge over the years. Those are the people that you want on these study sections. So, I say pay peer reviewers. I don’t know if people in other fields just do all this stuff for free. If you want the best scientists to evaluate grant proposals, then pay them what they’re due.

Nico Perrino: Why don’t we? I mean, is it just the money’s not there?

Evan Morris: It’s just historically that scientists back in the day were well supported, had tenure and salaries, which I don’t, and they did all these things as their way to repay the field. But there are so many demands on my time that I said I won’t, and most of my senior colleagues don’t have time or won’t join new study sections to review grants because it’s just not worth it.

Nico Perrino: So, is it mostly done, as a peer review, mostly done by junior colleagues then, at least in your field?

Evan Morris: Yes, more and more. That was the trend that I saw when I was on study section from 2016 to 2020, and then sort of monitoring things since then. It’s important for everybody, young scientists, to be on these peer review panels because they learn a lot. It’s a wonderful thing to do. But I do think that there’s been a trend over the last few years, whether it’s about inclusivity or just inability to recruit senior scientists, that there has been a trend towards younger and younger.

Ryne Weiss: The incentive is, if you’re a young scientist, you get yourself on a journal, you put in your time, and that will eventually be rewarded, ideally with other roles, whereas an established, tenured scientist no longer really has that incentive to get back. So, I think with other parts of the replication crisis, analyzing the incentives and providing the proper incentive for experienced scientists to get involved makes sense. And as you say, payment there could potentially help.

Evan Morris: I think you can just demand better behavior if you’re paying people, even a little bit.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. So, we’ve mentioned the replication crisis, we’ve mentioned peer review. Catharine, do you have any other ideas for reform or anything else you wanted to add on to what Ryne and Evan talked about there?

Catharine Young: I will say, in the spirit of not patting ourselves on the back, peer review, besides the fact that people are not compensated for their time, is a very lengthy process and probably can be shortened, I believe.

Nico Perrino: Is it a lengthy process just because it takes a lot of time?

Catharine Young: Of course, it’s a lot of time. There’s a lot of logistics involved in getting all these people together at one time. The process is long, probably for a reason, but I think we can do things to try and expedite it more. Reviewers, I’m assuming, come in with their own biases, their own ideological takes on things as well that we have to consider. A lot of times, the big institutions are skewed towards the awards being funded towards the big Ivy Leagues, for example. How do we distribute our funding more to the universities that are not the Top 10? I think these are all questions that we can answer with very intentional and deliberate people like Evan, who think about these things and wanna see change happen.

Nico Perrino: Evan?

Evan Morris: Now, I’m gonna disagree again.

Catharine Young: Okay.

Evan Morris: A little bit, a little bit.

Nico Perrino: Conversations are more fun with disagreement.

Evan Morris: I’m gonna pick on something, perhaps unfairly, just to bring it up that Catharine said, which is better distribute the money. This is a little bit odd to be said by two people who happen to be at Harvard and Yale at the moment. So, okay, just let your attacks rip. Some of you at FIRE are free speech absolutists, and I’m a merit absolutist. I don’t believe there should be any other considerations taken for deciding what science to fund. Just fund what’s best. It doesn’t matter the color of your skin or what language you speak or where you are, and don’t use science funding as a welfare program.

I’m being extreme. I’m not saying that Catharine said this, but it’s not a welfare program. It’s survival of the fittest and the best, because that’s how the public derives the best benefit from their tax dollars, which we, of course, all have to keep in mind. Just to push it one more step, I would say, as an example, I work at a place, Yale, where there happens to be, because of this confluence of expertise, maybe the world’s best PET and MRI centers, and that means we also attract a lot of federal funding to use those centers to do studies.

If you took all the money that Yale has received over the last 20 years to do brain imaging and distribute it equally over the 50 states, let’s say, you would not get 50 little brain imaging centers. You’d get zero, because some of these things are very expensive, and they also require, as I said, the confluence of expertise. It’s a Manhattan project.

Catharine Young: I will just say really quickly, I do not disagree with anything that you said, Evan, and I did not mean for it to be equally distributed. The point I was trying to make is that sometimes the best ideas don’t live in Harvard and Yale, but we get colored by that institution’s name, and there’s a bias towards that sometimes, and that’s what I’m saying. Can we step out of that and, to your point, really award this funding based on merit, and if that idea lives outside of these Ivy League institutions, then we should absolutely.

Evan Morris: A hundred percent, and I was picking on you.

Catharine Young: No, I know.

Evan Morris: For a fact.

Nico Perrino: Well, you had said something here, Evan, that raised a question for me about being a good steward of taxpayer dollars. Now, the group making these changes to this rule was voted in to the White House in November of 2024, so presumably the taxpayers want these sorts of changes. I mean, RFK campaigned along with Donald Trump. I don’t think it was any secret of their views on the science. Is this just the normal direction of democratic governance? I mean, or to a certain extent, do we need, if we want good science, to insulate the field of scientific inquiry from the majority?

Evan Morris: Politics, yes.

Nico Perrino: But how do you do that? Because it’s gonna have to go through politics, right?

Evan Morris: No, 100%. It’s a very complicated thing. Absolutely, I think all of us, I’ll speak for myself, but I’m sure I’m speaking for all of us. In a democratic society, it’s the people’s money, and the public, through its elected representatives, has to be able to set priorities. But priorities are different, as I think Catharine was suggesting with the Cancer Moonshot, which was preceded by the war on cancer, which Nixon introduced.

Catharine Young: That’s correct, in 1971.

Evan Morris: It’s the difference between priorities and day-to-day invasive and deleterious monitoring or canceling. And so, there has to be a collaboration between the politicians who know the people’s will and the scientists who understand how to preserve the integrity of science.

Nico Perrino: It’s kind of like in the Department of Justice. Historically, a new presidential administration would come in and set priorities for the department. So, for example, George W. Bush and terrorism, for example. But you wouldn’t have George W. Bush and White House appointees directing the specific prosecution of individuals. We’re starting to see more of that now. But you would have the career employees at the Department of Justice doing their work more or less independently from the White House, despite the fact that the Department of Justice is also an executive branch agency, and its political appointees run the Department of Justice.

It sounds like you’re talking about something similar and in the ideal situation for the agencies that administer these federal research grants.

Evan Morris: Yeah, I think it’s probably a good analogy. I’m not a lawyer, but I have to imagine that the person sitting in the Department of Justice who is told that such and such is a priority also knows the Constitution, knows the laws of the state he or she is working in, and knows that these things just are not legal. And in our case, what we know is certain principles about good science, objectivity, disinterestedness, statistics. We have to execute our job with that knowledge. And if the rules become so invasive that we can’t preserve the integrity of our work, then really the taxpayer is cheated.

Catharine Young: And if I can just add, I’d like to say that we didn’t know at the time or understand just how much destruction we would see with the second administration, but it actually was clearly laid out in Project 2025, all of these things. And so, the question is...

Nico Perrino: Oh, so this proposal didn’t totally take you by surprise.

Catharine Young: I mean, these types of things that we’re seeing here are in Project 2025. And so, I think how many of us actually read Project 2025, how many of the public read Project 2025 when they were laying out their plans of what the vision for them for what a government should look like and how it should operate? So, I think we have, at an individual public level now, more so than ever, a duty to really understand these principles and the values that our leaders are bringing into the government when we choose to elect them. I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job as the public to do that.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Ryne, go ahead.

Ryne Weiss: And going back to the point that projects often take a very long time, it is not a good stewardship of the taxpayer’s money for every new presidential administration to just cancel all of the things that were funded by the previous administration. If a project is canceled midway through, it’s not like you have 50% of the results you otherwise would have had. You probably have zero percent of the results that you otherwise would have.

Nico Perrino: So, it’s just money that goes down the drain.

Ryne Weiss: It’s just money that goes down the drain.

Nico Perrino: Was this process political before? I think that’s probably the question that most people are gonna have. And the assumption that most people are gonna come to this with is that’s all been politicized. Perhaps they had experience during COVID, and they’re like, “This whole thing was political to begin with.” So, what’s the matter with these new rules that are just making explicit what has always been implicit?

Evan Morris: I think we all wrestle with what’s the difference and what’s the line between politics, which is a normal function of a democratic society, and politicization, which is a type of corruption of the processes. And I think something that’s different, sadly, is that the people doing the work, the scientists, have been demonized. And people have taken this demonization to heart. And so, if I walked down the street with signs that say, “Are scientists all good or are they all on the dole?” I’d probably have a lot more people following the “on the dole” sign. And I think it’s a great shame.

Nico Perrino: Is there a kernel of truth there, though? I know, for example, there were a lot of people frustrated by the shifting guidelines on COVID, for example. Or, for example, they were told that they needed to social distance, but if you were participating in a Black Lives Matter protest, that was okay, to use the classic example.

Evan Morris: Yeah. Well, look, I think, again, this goes to reform. And I take great objection to some things. I might pick on Catharine here, and she doesn’t deserve it, that were done in the Biden administration or before, which corrupted the use of science to achieve social justice goals. And so, I say that for two reasons. One is to tell the people listening that I and I don’t think anybody here believes that this politicization is just a manifestation of a conservative or right-wing or specifically Trump administration. Anybody can go off the rails. The question is, what do you do about it?

If you just destroy the whole scientific edifice that gave us cancer drugs and all kinds of technology and AI, which incidentally was fermenting since 1943, when the first artificial neuron was proposed, then we’re all gonna be the losers.

Catharine Young: Yeah. I think to Evan’s point, the importance going forward now is creating this buffer between these wild pendulum swings that we will most likely start to see between administrations.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. It’s one of those things where it’s like you have these institutions that are in need of reform, but where Americans seem to be at the moment is they wanna just burn it all down. There’s, I think, a lack of nuance in how we’re approaching some of these issues.

Catharine Young: Yes. Although I think those are the loudest voices that we hear. I don’t necessarily think that is a blanketed assessment of the public.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Well, Ryne, we’ve done some research. We find that it’s usually the six percent of the extreme on either or any of the side that really drives the narrative.

Catharine Young: Correct.

Nico Perrino: When we were dealing with censorship on college campuses, and it’s being mobilized by a group of students, it’s usually a minority of students. Most people are happy with the status quo or just disinterested.

Ryne Weiss: Yeah. A small percent can really cow a great majority because they’re louder, they’re more visible, they appear to be more numerous than they actually are.

Nico Perrino: They’re using moral language, for example. To close out here, I have two closing questions. Yeah, Evan, I’ll go to you with this question, and then you can say what you were gonna say.

Evan Morris: Okay, it was the same thing.

Nico Perrino: What is the significance of scientists becoming involved now in this question? Scientists, did they think about politics?

Evan Morris: Brilliant. You read my mind.

Nico Perrino: I can image your mind. You’re gonna have to study me.

Evan Morris: It’s amazing. And I think Catharine has spoken about this as well. And that is, there is a little bit of a silver lining to this whole process of science being under attack. And that is, look, you mentioned at the outset, 500,000 comments were uploaded to the OMB. And I would wager that the majority of them were practicing scientists, because that’s who was getting the word out. And we should all thank Elizabeth Ginexi for her efforts.

Nico Perrino: And you were hearing about this in your networks?

Evan Morris: Yes, absolutely. And we spread the news and asked our colleagues to get engaged. And I think they have done that. Even if there were only 50,000 comments, that’s a heck of a lot of people who sat down and took the time to think, “Why is this important to me? And why is it going to be damaged by the proposals?” And now I would say to all of my colleagues, now that you did it once, you’ve got to continue to do it. And I think really what we need is a revolution of sorts in the way we train scientists. We can’t just all stay in our labs with our heads down, concentrating on the one problem that we’ve been working on for 30 years, however important it is.

We live in the real world, and we have to be engaged. And I actually think, to go back to something that Ryne brought up, we have to be incentivized. I’m not sure exactly how to be aware of science policy. I was never trained on science policy, but we live in the real world. We have to understand. I’m not talking about using it to discriminate against people or to push my own activist goals. It’s different from activism, it’s just activity.

Nico Perrino: That’s what I was gonna ask, has scientists become involved in the political process and science becomes more politicized as a result?

Evan Morris: A hundred percent. All these things have to be carefully titrated, to use a scientific term. You have to figure out exactly what the dose is. But without being an activist, I don’t wanna, and I’m not proposing that we pervert science for one answer, which Ryne is concerned about, but rather that our scientists be scientist’s citizens. We have to know what’s going on. We have to participate in the democratic process. We have to be willing to lend our expertise to the conversation.

Nico Perrino: Catharine, I’ll give you the last word here. Does that sound right to you?

Catharine Young: It does sound right to me, thankfully. There’s a difference between activism and advocacy. And so, our scientists need to step into the space with the power that they hold in knowing that they can make a difference, that they can actually make a difference. When we coalesce together, we have hundreds and thousands of scientists. We can actually get our messaging across in a really intentional way. And we can start to change the tie, I believe anyway. But I completely agree with Evan.

Nico Perrino: But is that different from what Evan was accusing the Biden administration, I’m not asking you to hold water for it before, but of intermingling social justice goals with science goals?

Catharine Young: I think every administration probably blurs the line sometimes, some more than others. I don’t think I’m in a position to really advocate either way for that. But certainly what we’ve seen now in the past year and a half has exceeded any type of ideological interference in science.

Nico Perrino: Because that’s one of the things that I’ve seen often happen is like, there’s a kernel of truth to something and it just gets blown out of proportion to burn everything down. But Evan, you were gonna say?

Evan Morris: If I could just say that this is not a democratic or Republican issue. I told my colleagues when I was encouraging them at a faculty meeting to upload their comments. I said, “You don’t have to agree with my politics. But if we both, whoever we are, if we all agree that science in the United States has been fabulously productive and it has certain core principles that are at risk, then we all have to speak up.” Nobody should listen to this podcast and think that the Republican, whoever that might be, didn’t agree with the Democrat, whoever that might be. That’s not the issue. We agree that science is at risk and it’s a wonderful treasure that has produced lots of benefits.

Catharine Young: I will say my guiding light is that I look at this and think, “Okay, if we didn’t have this current president and it was a Democrat, but we were seeing the same things, would I be doing this out of political activism or because I cared about science?” And for sure, I would be doing the same thing because I care about the science and the scientific system and the integrity of the science that we produce for the American people. So, I think that’s the way I kind of look at that.

Nico Perrino: Well, that’s what we do in the free speech world is like, okay, what if the speaker was just on the other side of this issue? Would we still hold the same position? All right, well, I think we’re gonna leave it there, folks. I appreciate everyone for joining me. Again, we have Catharine Young to my left here, Evan Morris across the way, and Ryne Weiss over here to my right. I am, of course, Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including Bruce Jones, Ronald Baez, Jackson Flegel, and Scott Rogers. The podcast is produced and edited by Emily Beeman.

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