Cristian Farias:

The biggest trial of the second Trump presidency is here. It’s all about the First Amendment, and the right of everyone to advocate for what they believe. Without fear, the government will hunt them down for it. It has everything to do with what we’re exploring on this show. My name is Cristian Farias. You’re listening to the Bully’s Pulpit Trump v. The First Amendment.

I’ll tell you more about that trial in the new segment. But before that, this week, our topic is not one that screams freedom of speech, but when you probe a little deeper, you quickly realize the First Amendment is at the center of it. Today’s show is about the massive cuts to federal funding, and the devastating impacts those cuts are having on research that is critical for a healthier, safer society.

Isako Di Tomassi:

This is a science communication initiative where we’re trying to get scientists to talk to the public about the federally funded research that we are doing, why it’s great, and why it’s valuable. Why wouldn’t any university want their scientists participating in that?

Cristian Farias:

That was Isako Di Tomassi, one of two young researchers at Cornell University who are just getting started in their careers as scientists, who are using the power of collective action, organizing to safeguard funding that is crucial to their work, and to better inform the public on why this funding is worth defending. But before we hear from them and another very special guest, let’s head over to Boston for the trial of the moment as well as other important First Amendment news.

Remember this case name, AAUP v. Rubio. We’ve talked about it on the show before. Now, the trial is underway in a Boston Federal Court. This case was brought by the Knight Institute, the engine behind the Bully’s Pulpit. It’s the biggest First Amendment case of the second Trump administration so far. The lawsuit challenges the government’s weaponization of immigration law against students and scholars protesting the war in Gaza, students and scholars who advocate for Palestinian lives and freedom, and the fear, the reports, and videos of their abductions from their homes or the streets have cast upon other students and scholars across the nation.

So far, the trial has been nothing short of riveting. For the first time since March, the public is learning key details about a government program involving multiple agencies targeting campus protesters. We’ve learned about the formation of a so-called Tiger team that’s charged with reviewing lists of people singled out for potential deportation, about how closely the Trump administration has been taking cues from shadowy groups like Canary Mission and Bitar Inc. which have compiled lists of pro-Palestinian protestors, including Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.

We’ve heard from the plaintiffs themselves, scholars who fear they or their students might be next, and thus our self-censoring. To get caught up on trial developments, head over to the Knight Institute website where you’ll find daily recaps, a link to view the trial online, lots of court documents, and trial transcripts. We’ll also put a link in the show notes.

Since we’re talking about the Knight Institute, in a win for journalists and other members of El Faro, one of Central America’s foremost independent news organizations, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated their lawsuit against the Israeli spyware company, NSO Group.

In their lawsuit, El Faro alleges they were victims of spyware attacks using NSO Group’s Pegasus technology that undermines their press freedom, and our own ability to learn about a region, in this case Central America, that matters a great deal in the public discourse around immigration. What this really does is allow the case to proceed. Lawyers will now begin collecting evidence, obtaining documents, deposing people, and getting answers to key questions that will allow them to prove their case. Definitely, a case to watch.

The Supreme Court is officially on recess for the summer, but they’re not done altering First Amendment law. On their final day of rulings, one decision that flew under the radar may have an untold impact for internet users in a case called Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for people wishing to visit adult content and pornographic websites.

The court set the law doesn’t violate the First Amendment, but access to adult content is protected by the First Amendment under a long line of precedents. Requiring age verification to access this content online poses a lot of problems. It could be really invasive to people’s privacy. It burdens people who may not have a proper form of ID, which is a lot of people. May shut out folks who wish to remain anonymous. There’s no guarantee your personal data is protected. This ruling opens a Pandora’s box for similar legislation. Time will only tell the harmful downstream effects.

This week on Capitol Hill in Washington, leading scientists held what they called a Science Fair for Canceled Grants, a public demonstration to show the public and lawmakers the immeasurable benefits of federal funding to the US and all of humanity, and what may be lost with these cuts from the Trump administration. Take a listen to this clip featuring a Nobel Prize winner in physics.

Speaker 1:

These discoveries may not just save our own lives, but the lives of people we love. Nearly every innovation that defines our era, every breakthrough from my field, and from those of my colleagues traces back to basic science research.

Cristian Farias:

That’s a perfect segue to the heart of today’s show, which deals precisely with the interplay between the First Amendment and federal funding for research and science. The connection between the two may not be immediately clear, but by the end of this episode, I promise you, you’ll see this issue in a whole new light.

With us, to talk about the intersection between the First Amendment and federal funding is Katy Glenn Bass. She’s the research director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Katy, thank you for coming on the show.

Katy Glenn Bass:

Hi, Cristian. Thanks for having me.

Cristian Farias:

It’s wonderful to get to ask you questions and probe your brain. Since the very beginning of the second Trump administration, the issue of federal funding has been top of mind for many universities, researchers, cultural institutions, and others who depend on it. Across the board, many of these funding cuts have been just devastating. Tell us how you organize these different cuts in your brain. What’s a helpful conceptual way to think about them?

Katy Glenn Bass:

Sure. I tend to group them into three categories. There’s some overlap between them, but in terms of where the rationale for the cut is coming from, and I’ll say the rationale, I think in most of these cases is invalid, but just in terms of what the Trump administration is saying it’s doing.

The first bucket of cuts is cuts that are based on the executive orders that were issued at the beginning of his term, banning DEI or attacking DEI, and then also banning gender ideology. I will note that one thing that I think is going to be important in some of the cases we’re seeing now is that they don’t offer a definition for what they mean by DEI or eradicating it, and they don’t offer a definition for gender ideology.

But a lot of the cuts that we have seen in the scientific research institutions, the National Institutes for Health, the National Science Foundation, are based on those executive orders. They’re often very blunt force cuts where they’re just running very crude keyword searches, and any grant that has trans in it gets cut. That’s the first bucket.

Then the second bucket is funding cuts that are happening because the entire agency or 90% of the agency has been fired by DOGE. That’s with USAID. If there is no one left at USAID to make funding grants, then there are no more funding grants. Then finally, I would say, and there’s some overlap here for sure. There have been funding cuts that use supposed Title VI violations as a pretext for why they are cutting the funding. Title VI does allow, in the extreme case after a long procedure has been followed, the government to cut off federal funding to an institution that it finds is not in compliance. But that is not what we’re seeing here. We are seeing the Trump administration declare that an institution has violated Title VI, usually allegations of anti-Semitism that the university has not addressed, and then as a result, they’re cutting off all of their federal funding. Those are the three major categories that I would map out.

Cristian Farias:

You mentioned DOGE a few moments ago. Three words that we’ve been hearing a lot since January are waste, fraud, and abuse. At first blush, a new administration cutting or freezing funding because they want to prevent those things seems to be an unobjectionable. Cut waste and a new president also gets to set his own priorities. How do you cut through that narrative from the Trump administration? How do you help people understand that there’s something else going on here and not these pretexts, so to speak, for these funding cuts?

Katy Glenn Bass:

Sure. I would say that that messaging, that explanation for what they were doing maybe had some purchase at the very beginning of the second term when this was all a theory of what DOGE, et al. were going to do. But if you look at polling on approval of Musk or approval of DOGE more recently, I think it lost effectiveness as a message pretty quickly, because people could see that what they were actually doing was ripping the wiring out of the walls of government institutions, and then taking a blowtorch to what was left.

There was no strategy to it. There was no attempt to carefully review programs to see where you might be able to cut waste. I would point out a few other things as well. When you think about the way they have done this, that they have cut off all of these funds midstream mid-project or they’ve closed down entire government agencies overnight, there’s a lot of waste inherent in that.

That’s taxpayer money that was already allocated. That has already been spent, in some cases, over years for some of these research projects. If you cut it off before the project is complete, all of that money is wasted.

I would also point out that the Trump administration is not really cutting everything. They’re cutting the things they don’t like or they’re cutting funding to institutions whose views they don’t like and want to influence. Then in other areas, in the bill that just got passed last week, they’re allocating enormous sums of money to ICE, for example. I think anyone who has looked at government programs for any length of time can tell you that large influxes of money to an organization tend to go hand in hand with waste, fraud, and abuse down the line. Because there’s going to be contractors who are trying to take advantage of that money. I think we are going to see a lot of wasted taxpayer funds in the coming years as a result of that as well.

Cristian Farias:

Another thing that I thought of, Katy, speaking of narratives is how Trump and his people have been saying, “Oh, but wait, look, there are wealthy institutions. They can do their own research. Should we have to underwrite this when they have the means?” I’m curious if you had any thoughts about that.

Katy Glenn Bass:

I think this is a really important point. It’s not the easiest one to make, but I wish it were getting more coverage in the debates over what’s going on. I would explain this as going back to the post-World War II period. At that point, the federal government decided that it was in the interest of all Americans, and of the government to set up a research partnership with private institutions including our incredibly accomplished network of private universities. That is how the funding structures that we see now, the grant making or institutions that give funding to private institutes to do this research, that’s a partnership that was established because it benefits everyone. It wasn’t like universities were saying, “Look, we need you to give us grants to keep us afloat.” It’s really unfair to characterize this as universities have become too dependent on federal funding.

The federal funding is there because it’s doing research that benefits all Americans. This is a win-win situation for the American people. Because some of this funding is coming from taxpayer money, it is the establishment of the commonwealth, in the oldest sense of that term. It’s meant to benefit everyone. It was the envy of the world, and one of our greatest strategic advantages. We are just systematically dismantling it for no reason.

Cristian Farias:

Yeah, we’re still in the middle of it all. There’s no telling what the after effects will be in the long term. Now, people perhaps don’t think of federal funding and these cuts as a First Amendment problem. Indeed, there’s no such thing as a First Amendment right to federal funding. Help me out here. How does cutting this funding become a First Amendment problem?

Katy Glenn Bass:

The First Amendment questions are most evident when you are looking at funding that has already been allocated or funding that is available to people to apply for. There is a right to not have your funding cut off because the government doesn’t like your political views. There is a right to not have your funding arbitrarily terminated without proper review and without a reasonable explanation given for why. The government can’t deny a party future funding just because they want to punish you or your institution. There are First Amendment questions in play here.

Even with new funding opportunities, if the government sets up a pool of funding that is available for people to apply for it, they don’t have to give that funding to everyone, but they do have to have constitutionally valid reasons for why they are giving it to some people, and not to others.

Cristian Farias:

I want you to tell me about this convening that the Knight Institute organized recently to explore this very question about where the law is or where the law should be, with regards to the intersection of the First Amendment and federal funding. Tell me about that convening.

Katy Glenn Bass:

These convenings are things that we do periodically when we are trying to understand the nuances and the hardest questions in an area of First Amendment doctrine or doctrine related to a free expression question. They’re essentially workshops. We invite a number of scholars and practitioners, litigators, people who have thought about these issues deeply and encountered some of these difficult points to come together for a day at our offices, talk through some of these questions in an organized way, and try to get a better handle on what the hardest things are in terms of where the law is unsettled, but also what the strongest arguments are for why cases should be determined in the way we think they should be in terms of their First Amendment implications.

We also usually ask the participants in those convenings to write a short blog post as part of a series that we publish to become a public resource for other people who are working on these questions as well. We organized a convening on these federal funding and First Amendment questions fairly shortly after Trump took office in January. Because it was clear from day one that he was going to use federal funding as a cudgel to try to enforce ideological conformity with the administration’s views. We looked at the doctrine on this, such as it is, and realized that in some ways, the law is settled in the sense that the kinds of questions we’re seeing right now, the kinds of efforts that the administration has made to freeze funding are clearly unconstitutional.

But there are hard questions within the doctrine that may come up in the future, especially when it comes time to issue new funding and efforts to challenge the denial of funding to certain institutions or to certain research projects. In particular, there’s a couple of Supreme Court cases that have had to do with conditions that Congress has placed on funding that it has allocated, and whether or not they’re allowed to place those conditions on the recipients of the funding.

The broad strokes finding from the Supreme Court has been you can place conditions on the project that the funding is for, of what recipients of funding can do within that project, and what they can and can’t say within the confines of executing that project. But you can’t place conditions that say, “If you take this funding, you have to endorse this policy on exposition, or you can’t say anything about Y.”

There’s a distinction there. It’s not the easiest distinction to work out in practice, which is one of the reasons we had this convening, was to try to understand a little more where are the lines there, and how should we expect the court to make a decision about whether a certain condition on funding is or is not constitutional. But there’s another line of cases that is going to be relevant here, I think, that are pretty recent, that have to do with the question of jawboning.

The idea is that you can’t use threats to suppress speech, which is exactly what the government is trying to do right now, threatening to cut off all funding to freeze it, to ensure that you never get it again unless you abide by the government’s views on how you should hire your faculty or what sorts of courses you should teach, or things like that. That is just quite clearly under existing Supreme Court doctrine, not constitutional.

Cristian Farias:

Can you reflect a little bit on Congress’s role here? After all, lawmakers have the power of the purse and congressional appropriations, which is what this funding comes from. They’re very much laws in our system of government. Where are our elected representatives in all of this?

Katy Glenn Bass:

That’s a good question, Cristian. As with so many other things that we’re seeing the Trump administration do, Congress could stop this at any time. The power of the purse is very clearly theirs. They could have acted either informally just in terms of speaking up and saying, “No, you’re not allowed to impound funds that we have allocated.” Or, more formally, I think there’s grounds for legal challenge here if members of Congress chose to bring them.

But there’s other ways that Congress could act if it wanted to try to constrain the executive more clearly in this area. To reference the federal funding series, Kate Ruane who is from the Center for Democracy and Technology, CDT, wrote specifically about what Congress could do, and pointed out that Congress can also build legislative history by being more clear about what they want the funding to be used for, and what they think the rules should be. They can also try to exercise accountability through oversight hearings. They can also use appropriations reports to require agencies to give them information about program operations, about the ways executive orders are being implemented. There are a number of options that they are choosing to ignore.

Cristian Farias:

Wow, what a shameful place to be in. Now, we have seen some powerful examples of courage, people who have chosen to fight these cuts, not just through the courts but through other means. Is there a particular person or institution that has done something in this area of federal funding that you have found inspiring?

Katy Glenn Bass:

Yeah, I do have a few examples. I’ll say just to start that I really admire everyone who has tried to speak up about the importance of this funding and the research they do with it. Going back to USAID, at the beginning, the people who have tried to point out all of the good that USAID has done for quite a low cost to the taxpayer, like anyone who was trying to make the case for why this research matters, and how it benefits everyone, has my well wishes and my support, then in particular, I would say the researchers within institutions who have been trying to crowdsource information just to figure out what’s going on. One thing that has been quite striking is that often the institutions themselves don’t get a complete list of all of the grants that are being cut. They have to figure that out themselves by asking individual researchers if they got a termination letter.

There are a couple of researchers at Harvard who created a website called GrantWatch that is trying to do that sort of crowdsourcing, trying to figure out through news reports, through individual researchers reporting exactly what has been cut, and what information they’ve been given about those cuts. That is really valuable information.

I’ll also say that I think President Alan Garber and President Christopher Eisgruber of Harvard and Princeton respectively deserve a great deal of credit for standing up publicly, and fighting back against this administration. I think they have done a good job in trying to make the case for that.

Cristian Farias:

As they say, courage is contagious. I hope these examples that you’ve mentioned will inspire listeners and others to take action. Because the First Amendment is only as good as the people who decide to use it.

Katy Glenn Bass:

I think that’s a really worthwhile point to underscore.

Cristian Farias:

Yeah.

Katy Glenn Bass:

Courage is contagious, but also these fights are winnable. One of the really frustrating things in watching some of the institutions that have chosen not to fight back is just that most of the time, these cases are very strong in terms of the First Amendment interests in play, but someone has to bring the lawsuit before you can win it. Fighting back really does matter.

Cristian Farias:

Katy, what a note to end on. Katy Glenn Bass, she’s the research director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. Katy, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you.

Katy Glenn Bass:

Thanks, Cristian.

Cristian Farias:

The problem of federal funding cuts that are ideological in nature, that is, that violate the First Amendment is not academic or abstract, it’s real. Our two guests today will get us closer to that reality. Isako di Tomassi and Emma Scales are students at Cornell University, and two of the organizers behind the McClintock Letters Initiative, an effort by young scientists to raise the profile of federally funded research, why it matters, why the public should care about it, and why they should care that an administration is slashing it without rhyme or reason, the opposite of how science and scientific advancement are supposed to work.

Thank you for coming on the Bully’s Pulpit. Can each of you tell me your name, and what hats do you wear at your institution?

Isako Di Tomassi:

Hi, my name is Izzy. I am an agricultural researcher who is in the second year of my PhD at Cornell University. I also lead the Cornell Advancing Science and Policy Club with Emma here, and a couple other grad students.

Emma Scales:

Yeah, my name is Emma Scales. I have exactly the same titles and positions as Izzy.

Cristian Farias:

Everything?

Emma Scales:

Yes.

Cristian Farias:

All right, that’s wonderful. Now, by virtue of where you are at Cornell, you’re both scientists in training. I want you to tell me what’s your field of study, and what made you choose your field?

Isako Di Tomassi:

We are both in the plant pathology and plant microbiology program. That’s the field that we’re in at Cornell. My concentration is fungal and oomycete biology. As an agricultural researcher, I specifically study plant pathogens. Plants get sick too. They also need protecting from diseases. I am driven to do this work by a desire to contribute, in some way, to the realization of sustainable, global food security.

Cristian Farias:

Emma, how about you?

Emma Scales:

I am in the same field, of course, I also have the same major of fungal and oomycete biology, but here’s where we diverge, I promise. I study a mold, an early diverging fungus that houses a bacteria inside of it. This, endosymbiosis it’s called, is a burgeoning model system for these kinds of symbioses in fungi in general.

Like Izzy was saying, plant diseases are a very real threat in our field. This fungus and others like it can cause diseases in plants, but also in humans. Working on this endosymbiosis could have really big impacts for both agriculture and medicine.

Cristian Farias:

One of you said plants get sick. I kind of love that. The reality that we cannot allow plants to get sick because that could have other effects down the road. That seems really important. Now, in terms of what you’re doing right now as part of the ASAP Club, the Advancing Science and Policy Club at Cornell, what’s the purpose of the club? Emma, you can take that one.

Emma Scales:

It’s a graduate student club. It’s led by grad students. Most of our members are graduate students. We serve to fill, I guess, a gap where we’re introducing graduate students in STEM to different aspects of science policy, and potential career paths in that field. That’s an area that’s not talked about as much in scientific training. But as we see from this issue, it’s definitely very important that we’re engaged in the policy side of things.

Our club serves to bring in speakers who are involved in science policy to hold different webinars and workshops, different events where people can engage with that. Then we also have direct actions where people can actually take part in some kind of science advocacy.

Isako Di Tomassi:

Yeah, I’ll just add that a really important component also of learning about science policy and participating in science policy is learning science communication. As the leaders of ASAP, we are members of SNAP, which is the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy, which is the larger nationwide group that has members, primarily graduate students, but we are early career researchers from across the country at 20 plus different institutions. Emma and I are also core members of that group.

Cristian Farias:

Izzy, tell me about the namesake for this initiative. Barbara McClintock, who was she? Then from there, both of you, tell me about the McClintock campaign itself. What are its goals and who’s involved?

Isako Di Tomassi:

The McClintock Letters Initiative idea did start here at Cornell. The name itself, and its namesake that it was honoring Barbara McClintock, did come from a meeting that we had with our advisor where we were like, “Hey, we want to do this op-ed campaign, but how can we really amplify the impact? Let’s have the simultaneous release of these op-eds across the country starting on a certain date.” We picked Barbara McClintock’s birthday, not only because Barbara McClintock was a scientist who studied corn DNA. To the general public, corn DNA is like, “Okay, who cares about studying corn DNA?”

But Barbara McClintock’s discovery has actually revolutionized molecular biology, and led to all kinds of incredible downstream discoveries and developments like improved crop breeding as well as gene therapies for human diseases. She had a really big impact. She’s also a Cornell alum. Not going to lie, we did choose her for that too.

Emma Scales:

She did what we call basic science, which means that the applications for that science are not immediately clear. We know that it’s important for all kinds of things, but how humans are going to use it is not necessarily right there in the project. That’s some of the science that’s uniquely funded by the United States. Also, is some of the science that’s the most threatened, aside from science that studies, of course, underprivileged groups. Because those impacts are not as immediately clear. But of course, as we see through the example of Barbara’s work, the impacts are vast and immeasurable. It’s extremely needed for the entirety of the scientific community.

Cristian Farias:

How’s the campaign going? What kind of feedback have you been getting both from the public or maybe your parents, family, and friends? What do they think about what you’re doing?

Emma Scales:

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s been really awesome. Just to give metrics to some of the outcomes that we have so far, we have over 600 scientists pledged to write McClintock Letters from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico as well. We’ve covered a lot of ground in the United States. Then we have over 170 that have been published already.

Numbers wise, we’re doing pretty good. These local newspapers, like mine, is still waiting to be published. Because the paper I’m trying to submit to, they only publish commentary once a month. I’m waiting for that to come out. Numbers wise, it’s been awesome.

Then as far as substance of response, we’ve maybe gotten the most enthusiastic response from the scientists who’ve been writing it. They’ve been saying things like, “Oh, I never really thought to consider public facing science communication as part of my role.” Also, a lot of people are coming around to the view that it’s something we should be doing, especially as federally funded scientists. Like, “That funding comes from tax dollars, so we probably should be telling people what we do with that money.” We’ve gotten a of evidence of some transformative thinking among the scientists, which is awesome.

Then the public has been really enthusiastic in their response as well. We’ve had people write to us directly who maybe read about it in the New York Times, NBC, or something like that. Then there’ve been other things, like there was someone in Indiana who wrote, and then they got a response from the county’s health official. They were like, “We’d love to have you come speak or give you a venue to speak more about your work to the community.” It’s been really very positive, really awesome, and better than we expected, really.

Cristian Farias:

That’s incredible. I wanted to ask you, obviously, federal funding cuts during this second Trump presidency have been widespread. I’m curious how you and your community in particular have experienced these cuts, and what kind of material impact they’re having on what you do at Cornell. Izzy, you can start.

Isako Di Tomassi:

Sure. In terms of the federal actions, and how they’ve impacted me personally, my PhD advisor was actually a legally terminated probationary employee. He was a federal scientist with the USDA who was fired in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, where just thousands of federal employees were terminated. Of course, there was that back and forth with the courts about the legality. He ultimately ended up taking the fork. He is technically still a USDA employee, but it doesn’t have a lab anymore. That resulted in myself and two other PhD students in my lab, having to switch advisors, as well as another friend of ours also lost her PhD advisor because of these federal actions.

Cristian Farias:

Your advisor is pretty much a lifeline when you’re doing this stuff, right?

Isako Di Tomassi:

Yeah. To clarify, really, for anyone outside academia who wouldn’t really understand the gravity of that, your PhD advisor is your mentor. That is the person whose your career is really tied to. You are doing the work that makes their research program a reality, that makes it happen. It’s very much a big deal as a PhD student. You’re like a little baby scientist. Your advisor is who guides you and trains you to become a fully fledged independent scientist.

Cristian Farias:

That’s fascinating. Emma, I believe your harms that you’ve experienced are a little bit different from Izzy’s.

Emma Scales:

Yeah. Mine has been a little bit more indirect, and a little more clandestine. I don’t actually know the full breadth of how much I’ve actually been impacted. My lab is funded jointly by the National Science Foundation, the NSF, the US Department of Agriculture, the USDA, and the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. We got an email from Cornell sent to specific research listservs a couple weeks after it was sent to faculty first, that basically hid in a third paragraph or something like, “Oh, by the way, we pretty much haven’t really been receiving payments from the federal government for a broad swath of NIH and USDA grants. But they didn’t really say specifically which ones. Part of that is because the employees who handle the funds distribution, like most other employees at these agencies, are currently under a gag order. They can’t even really tell us which grants are not receiving payments.

It is somewhat normal that there’s a pause in payment issues during an administration change. But this has been now six months. As to my knowledge, it hasn’t returned yet. Cornell has just been footing the bill for these grants that they just haven’t really been reimbursed on yet. To my understanding, they haven’t told us anything differently that that status has changed. I really don’t know. It might be that the grants that are funding my lab just haven’t been paid in six months, maybe we’re fine, or maybe we’re not. I don’t know. They’re not really allowed to tell us. Yeah, it’s tough.

Cristian Farias:

Go ahead, Izzy.

Isako Di Tomassi:

I just wanted to add quickly as well another impact for our department. Generally, our grad program, the plant pathology and plant microbiology field, our cohort was about 10 students. I think last year’s cohort was like seven or eight. This year our cohort is zero. Our program did not take any new students for next year. That’s a big deal. This is happening all across the country. Programs have reduced or eliminated their admissions for grad students for next year. This is because our program is concerned about maintaining funding for these students.

When we became grad students here, they made an agreement with us that they would fund us for five years, because we get paid to do this work. Yeah, that’s kind of a big deal. It definitely reduces the capacity for research output that our program is going to have for the next few years.

Cristian Farias:

Obviously, this is a First Amendment show. We have you here speaking to you about what you’re doing with this McClintock Letter Initiative. That is First Amendment protected activity. Because you’re speaking out. You’re going to the press. You’re letting the world know. You’re using your voice to explain the importance of your research. But also, there is a First Amendment aspect to what the government is doing to this funding in terms of using ideology or certain words, terms, and concepts that scientists are not supposed to be studying because the government deems them to be, I don’t know, wrong, immoral, or whatever. There’s this list of banned topics, for lack of a better term. I’m curious if you’ve seen these ideological litmus tests to cut funding in your area.

Emma Scales:

Like I said, my background is in genetics and cell biology. I heard of a lab at Duke who actually did get some information about why their grants were terminated. That lab basically reported that they had a grant terminated because they used the prefix trans in a context that’s not transgender. Just to give listeners who are not scientifically-minded, some context to that, especially in the field of genetics, trans is the prefix. It’s everywhere. We would say like, “A mutant that we made where we altered its genes is transgenetic.” There’s an aspect of the central dogma of biology where you go from DNA to RNA to protein. The process from going from RNA to protein is called translation. That’s in there all the time. Signal transduction is how signals get passed through the cell, and make their way to regulate whatever process you’re interested in. It’s just everywhere. It’s impossible, really, to write a grant in cell biology without using the prefix trans.

That’s just one example of one of these words. There are endless examples of that. Seeing that has been really disheartening. Our lab is in the process of resubmitting a grant for consideration. I’m considering going through it. I’m like, “Should I have to do this? Should I have to reword everything to appease some administration to make sure that I can finish my PhD?” I don’t know what the right approach is there. But now that I’ve seen it happen, I feel a lot more scared of that. It feels much more real.

Cristian Farias:

That’s a great segue into the next part of our conversation. I’ve noticed that whenever I’m dealing with an expert, they like to let the research speak for itself. Their research sometimes may be very dense or hard to communicate. Could you talk about some of these dynamics a little bit, and how they might be holding scientists back from advocating for their own work more effectively?

Isako Di Tomassi:

As scientists, we are trained to write and communicate in a highly technical, accurate, jargon heavy way in order to adequately convey our ideas to other scientists, for the most part. I’m not knocking it because it’s obviously very important. In order for us to advance in our fields, we have to be able to think, write, and communicate in this way. It’s very much outside of the wheelhouse of most scientists to communicate their work in a jargon free accessible way.

That was a hurdle that we had to overcome in pushing for this McClintock Letters Initiative. We met that challenge by hosting a ton of workshops, all kinds of guides and advice to help scientists get out of their comfort zone, and learn to write in this different way.

Emma Scales:

It’s just absent from our training as scientists. You don’t really get taught how to communicate your work, and the impacts of it beyond the purpose of writing it for a grant. I will say, I spoke to someone from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they have an awesome program where they teach the PhD students how to communicate science, and specifically to a public audience, which is fantastic. But I think it’s largely that it’s missing. I don’t want to fault anyone for it. I don’t think it’s malicious. I think it’s missing from how we’re trained. It’s missing as a tenet of the science that we do.

Cristian Farias:

Yeah. In a way, the McClintock Letter Initiative suggests this different model in which you as younger researchers, you’re taking it upon themselves to communicate your experiences, and your findings to the broader public, and also to policymakers. I’m curious, if in the current environment you’ve seen other scientists be inspired to do this more publicly.

Emma Scales:

We’ve definitely been thinking the whole time of the initiative as this alternative pathway or as filling a gap that’s just missing. The McClintock Letters is really focused on communicating science to the public. It rose out of our observations like in the wake of these firings, there’s a huge lack of public outcry. Then we saw that even people who were advocating in a very well-meaning way for science, could only point to a couple research areas that are really important. Like cancer or Alzheimer’s, which are, of course, crucial. But we do so much more than that.

I think we saw this happening where the people are not upset, and I like to think that we’re still in a democracy. When the people don’t really get that upset about it, then the legislators, of course, are not really going to do anything. They’re not going to be worried about science funding because they’re not getting any pushback from their constituents.

When we saw that happening, instead of taking the approach of, “Oh, everybody just doesn’t understand science, the public is just not smart enough to get what we do or whatever,” we’ve gone the opposite direction of, “We’ve actually done a bad job as a scientific community of communicating our work well in a way that’s accessible to the everyday American who’s a non-expert.” We were like, “Okay, let’s try to come up with something that maybe gets the ball rolling on that."

Of course, the McClintock Letters themselves have had some impact, but this really needs to be a bigger thing. This needs to happen in a much larger capacity than we can manage as two people who are also getting our PhDs. We can’t work at this level for much longer. We were just talking about that on the car ride over here. Like, “We need to do our PhDs.” We really hope that people will take up the banner for this. That’s really how we’ve been viewing it as there’s this gap, there’s this huge communication aspect that’s missing from federally funded research. That has enabled what we’re seeing now.

Cristian Farias:

I’m curious if as part of your campaign, you’ve seen the flip side where there may be some members of the scientific community, specifically students who may be more vulnerable, and they may not want to speak out because they’re afraid of putting themselves on the line.

Isako Di Tomassi:

Even within the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy, SNAP, which is the larger organization that really made this initiative possible, this network that was able to help us, even members of SNAP who were international researchers just didn’t feel safe participating. That’s totally understandable in the current climate.

We also had students, early career researchers from some southern states and Midwestern states who did not feel safe sharing word about the McClintock Letters Initiative within their universities, which is really unfortunate because this is a science communication initiative where we’re trying to get scientists to talk to the public about the federally funded research that we are doing, why it’s great, and why it’s valuable. Why wouldn’t any university want their scientists participating in that? But that’s definitely a reality that we faced.

We had some federal scientists too sign up. Some who participated, actually. A lot of people made sure to put in that little caveat like, “This does not represent my employer,” blah, blah, whatever, as part of their op-eds. We actually had a USDA employee. They signed up to participate. They’re really eager about it. The USDA has this, I guess, policy or whatever right now that you cannot talk to the media or have any kind of external communications without it being okayed by your regional communications specialist or whatever, communications officer.

Basically, this USDA scientist wrote a McClintock Letter, was following procedure, and sent it to their regional communication specialist officer or whatever. They basically just redacted every single part of the letter that even mentioned science advocacy, and made the op-ed basically useless because they took out anything that they didn’t approve. They sent something, in the response email that was something to the effect of, “As federal employees, we all support President Trump’s budget proposals and policies of the federal administration.” I’m like, “What?” Yeah, that was really crazy. They didn’t participate in conclusion. Yeah.

Cristian Farias:

That’s quite a story. You know what I would’ve done? I would’ve sent that letter in anyway with all those redactions, and say, “This is what Trump administration is doing to my attempt to speak out.” Let’s make lemonade out of lemons. Maybe there’s a silver lining in everything that’s happening, and what you’re doing. Maybe the very act of collective action, and working together to preserve this funding may result in a different kind of scientific community in the future. Something that you didn’t sign up for, initially. Has this moment changed the way you see your field, and the impact you would like to have one day as a working scientist?

Isako Di Tomassi:

I will say, one very tangible thing that has come out of this initiative, actually, is the formation of the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy. This, again, inter-institutional group of early career researchers from 20 plus universities across the US, we really formalized around this initiative. We now have this network who has actually already started a few other initiatives, such as we’ll be doing some congressional office visits during the recess in August. We’re going to organize that so that it’s happening across the country. Yeah, that’s one very tangible thing.

I would say, for me personally, I had already ultimately hoped to continue as an agricultural researcher. But to find a role that had some policy component to it, and to ultimately pivot into politics much later on in my career. But this has really made me feel like, “Wow, through grassroots efforts, things like this are possible.” This is actually kind of an amazing thing that, again, this initiative is one component of a larger cultural shift in academia that our generation of scientists is going to make sure happens, basically. Emma?

Emma Scales:

I would say personally, same thing as Izzy. It’s been very empowering. The hope is that other people will do similar things. But also that institutions, when they see young scientists like us, the other members of SNAP, and all of the things that we’re doing, in addition to getting our PhDs, which is already an incredibly taxing thing to do, yeah, it’s not for the faint of heart at all. Once institutions see, “Oh, these kids are doing so much already. They’re taking on all this extra legwork to make sure that the public is informed about science. They’re ultimately protecting the future of science,” we hope that they jump in, and are like, “We can take some of this load. This is something that we probably should be doing.”

I hope that they come to the same conclusions that we have. That this is going to be something that’s really necessary for the preservation of the American scientific enterprise, at least in the form that it is now. We could put our heads down, and become a place where science is not valued or become a place where it’s only privately funded, and that would be a very bleak outlook for the country in general, for everyone, aside from the fact that we probably wouldn’t really have jobs and stuff.

Cristian Farias:

That was Emma Scales and Isako Di Tomassi. They’re young scientists and researchers at Cornell. They’re two of the organizers behind the McClintock Letter Initiative. They’re the future and the present of what they hope becomes a critical mass that rises to preserve funding for future generations, and in the long run, keeps the world safe and healthy for all. Thank you both so much for coming on the show.

Emma Scales:

Thank you, Cristian.

Isako Di Tomassi:

Thank you.

Cristian Farias:

Wow. This was an incredible show. Young scientists leading the way, speaking up, and protecting their little corner of the world and the hopes that we’ll all be better off one day. In doing so, they’re actually increasing the flow of scientific information and knowledge that is threatened by the administration’s sweeping funding cuts.

We’ll be back next week with more First Amendment. More about the trial in Boston that’s rocking First Amendment land. The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I’m your host, Cristian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Anne-Maria Watt and Candace White. Our associate producer for this episode is Kushil Dev. Fact-Checking by Kushil Dev, Ellie Fivas, and Ella Sohn. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeKing. Candace White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid de Silva.

Thanks to Katy Glenn Bass, Isako Di Tomassi, and Emma Scales who joined us for this episode. The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K, and follow us on social media.