For Scientists Studying Environmental Health, Trump’s Diktats Are a Slow-Moving Disaster

A sweeper cleans an area as smog envelops the area and reduces visibility in Lahore, Pakistan. Toxic smog has sickened tens of thousands of people in recent months. K.

M. Chaudary/AP Gabriel Filippelli opened up his email inbox on Monday to encounter some unexpected news: a notice that his $300,000 grant from the State Department was no more. Filippelli is the Chancellor’s Professor of Earth Sciences and executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University.



Previously a senior science advisor to the State Department, he has dedicated his career to understanding and improving environmental health. “I work on issues related to pollution and air quality,” says Filippelli. Increasingly, he has worked on projects involving “climate and health in the present and the future.

” He’s also one of the many scientists whose research was thrown into disarray by the recent flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration. Filippelli is more exposed than most. In addition to the above-mentioned project, he had a pair of proposals up for review by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of which have placed a “temporary” freeze on their grant processes.

His institute, meanwhile, relies on a $5 million grant via the Inflation Reduction Act, whose funding President Donald Trump has vowed to claw back. Nothing has yet been done to jeopardize his IRA funding, which Filippelli has already received, but he says the institute’s work, which centers on environmental justice, may be uniquely “vulnerable.” “We recognized that there was a gap between what Midwestern communities need to build climate resilience and the resources available to them,” he explains.

The Environmental Resilience Institute fills that gap for those communities, “both red and blue,” and helps train people for jobs in the clean energy and decarbonization sectors. I caught up with Filippelli earlier this week to discuss the details. Our conversation below was edited for length and clarity.

Tell us more about the project whose funding was eliminated. It’s a really cool one. The embassy in Pakistan put out a call for projects to help build capacity by developing partnerships, and one of those areas was in climate and air quality.

We built a team of folks—including Indiana University, two Pakistani universities, and one Pakistani tech company—to help acquire a set of air quality monitors and deploy them in Pakistan to train faculty and students in Pakistan on air quality and climate resilience, and also bring some of that expertise and partnerships to the US. It was funded in October and we’ve been working on it over the last year. How were you informed that your funding was rescinded? Over the weekend, the State Department notified universities around the country, including mine, that they were going to suspend awards effective immediately.

That’s what the term is: “suspended.” At least in my case, the award no longer “effectuated the priorities of the State Department.” It was simply a form letter that just said that—and then warned that no further spending can be made on any of the awards.

And you had been actively working on this from the start? We started in October. We just finished drafting our first quarterly report to the embassy in Pakistan. I just had to cancel a trip to Pakistan to run some on-the-ground workshops.

Will this project be able to continue in any way? Not in it’s current form. I’m sure the networks and partnerships that we’ve built will continue. They can’t forbid us from working with the universities, but they can forbid us from being supported by [federal] funds.

The future is kind of murky. What was the reaction of your Pakistani partners? I’ve only gotten one very brief message. [The news arrived in] the middle of the night there.

I think they’ll just be waking up now. The one brief message was just like two words: “My goodness.” It was a shock response.

How will this loss affect you and your colleagues? The impacts for Indiana University and me are that we’ve already built up structures to spend time in Pakistan to implement this. We have students and staff involved. We had already begun arranging for a visit by Pakistani colleagues to the US to learn from us, and also to teach us about their environmental work in Pakistan.

It’s going to be relatively devastating for Pakistan. They’d already begun the process of constructing some air quality monitors and recruiting a bunch of the team members. When the US fails to come through on a commitment, it’s pretty demoralizing, particularly for the international partners.

They need answers badly. Their air quality is terrible. It’s not getting any better.

They rate really poorly on climate resilience. They need these resources now. Have you ever had funding pulled like this? Never in my life.

Nor, based on chatting with some colleagues, in theirs. Federal funding can easily and rightfully be pulled if there’s malfeasance on the part of the grantee, but I’d never experienced this. I’ve received 40 research awards in my career, and never once would it even cross my mind that something like this would happen.

You are one of many American scientists grappling with these directives. What is the atmosphere among the researchers you are in touch with? Pretty much shocked. A bunch of these dominoes are falling.

First NIH suspends their study sections , meaning that there can be no action taken on any proposal. Ironically, I have a proposal in front of the NIH right now. And then the NSF just announced they are pausing all of their panel reviews.

I have a proposal in the panel that would have been meeting today and tomorrow. The NIH is under HHS, so we can [understand] a pause in some of that funding, but the National Science Foundation is usually hands off by the administration, and so that’s particularly shocking to me. What are those proposals you have in the works? The NIH proposal was to work with communities in El Paso, Texas, and Indianapolis to determine the major sources of lead in their blood.

What are the environmental sources and how do you engage with those communities to reduce lead poisoning? The one at the National Science Foundation is developing a new graduate program around environmental sustainability and urban sustainability. Is there anything else you’d like to emphasize about all of this? I don’t think that many people know—certainly the administration doesn’t seem to—how much investment the US government puts into science and how much those dollars actually accrue to where they’re being spent. My research projects at Indiana University support student training.

They support undergraduate lab researchers to get inspired by science. They support new discoveries that have resulted in patents. They have included changing some recommendations at the national level.

They are investments —local investments. I fully expect congressional delegations to push back against a lot of that stuff, because this money is going into their districts, including some large grants. I hoped to see an uproar at that level and a restoration of some of these very imprudent decisions.

Universities are our discovery makers, but they also train the next generation of Americans. When you start providing this kind of uncertainty in universities, you’re imperiling many generations in the future..