Over the past few months, Kat Milligan-McClellan, a Native Alaskan assistant professor in molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut, has been applying for National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants for her research. Her work is mostly focused on the diversity, communities and exclusion in some communities of microbiota, which are the microorganisms of a particular site, habitat or geological period. She also studies the idea that “academia wasn’t built for people who are underrepresented in science,” and how it affects the way scientists research.
McClellan needs these grants to conduct her research and to ensure that she qualifies for tenure.
“I go up for tenure in the next year or two. If I don’t have NIH or NSF funding, it will look poorly on me,” she said.
However, McClellan’s pursuit of these grants has been paused due to the recent executive orders set by President Donald Trump.
In late January, Trump released two executive orders that threatened to impact research. One froze federal funding on grants and the other is attempting to terminate DEI federal agencies.
Although Trump’s executive order to freeze federal funding was temporarily blocked by a judge, the uncertainty of what might happen next still lingers.
McClellan said that whether she will get approval for NIH and NSF grants is currently up in the air as much of her work is centered around diversity. Many of the words in her research fall under the DEI words being looked at by the current administration.
“All of those words, all of those descriptions that I use include words that are being targeted by the administration for extra scrutiny. Diversity, exclusion and communities. All of those words are on the list of words that are going to be targeted for grants that are going to be funded in the future,” said McClellan.
She also stated that these executive orders will affect how she writes grants in the future.
“A large component of my lab is dedicated to ensuring that there’s diversity and equity across science and inclusion of many different people. And so, this is going to affect the way that I write grants, because I won’t be able to include that work, which means that work will not be funded. If the work is not funded, we can’t do it,” McClellan said.
If this happens, McClellan stated that she will have to look for outside private funding. However, she has found that many nonprofits and foundations are under pressure to not fund DEI.
Earlier this month the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private funder of biomedical research, canceled its $60 million program that works to maintain diverse student bodies in undergraduate science and engineering programs. According to McClellan, this was due to pressure from the United States government to cancel their DEI centered research. If they did not, the government threatened to take away their nonprofit status.
McClellan said she fears that this will also happen to other foundations as well.
She is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a science, diversity and leadership grant, a foundation similar to HHMI. The initiative helps fund her research related to DEI topics and she fears that it will soon be taken away.
According to the Observer, the organization started by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, put an end to its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
As for long term impacts, McClellan said she worries that these changes will discourage students from pursuing a future in science.
“Just about everybody in my lab comes from an underrepresented background in science. My concern is that because of these initiatives, they will be less likely to remain in science. I worry that they will want to leave and take the education that they got in the United States and go back to their home countries, or will go to Canada or other states,” said McClellan.
She stated that overall, it is the uncertainty of the situation that has impacted her the most.
“Part of the issue is that executive orders are not policy, and they are not official. They are not laws, and so it’s unclear to us whether or not these are going to be enforced in the future. We don’t know which of these are going to stand and which of these will be revoked later on. So, it makes it very difficult to plan. It makes it difficult to plan which grants to apply for and it makes it difficult to plan what language we include,” McClellan said.