Trump and his appointees are stealing the public science my children need to survive.
My mother spent thirty-one years as the school nurse at St. Stanislaus in Lansdale. She checked kids for scoliosis. She calibrated the EpiPen dose for the second grader with the peanut allergy. She measured blood pressure on the kindergarteners’ grandparents at the May procession and told them, in the same calm voice she used at school, that they needed to call their doctor. The protocols she ran came from somewhere. They came from publicly funded research — from the National Institutes of Health, from the National Science Foundation, from the kind of slow, unglamorous, decades-long inquiry that does not produce a product but does produce the screening guidelines and dosage protocols a school nurse runs on a Tuesday morning in a Montgomery County parish school. I am writing this from the specific privilege of a household where my college-educated parents could navigate the healthcare system my mother had spent her working life inside.
What my children are losing is a concrete thing, and I can do the math.
When Eva was four, her pediatrician followed an American Academy of Pediatrics screening schedule that traces, line by line, to NIH-funded research. The lead-screening blood draw at age one. The autism screening at eighteen months. The vision and hearing checks at every well-child visit. Each of those guidelines cost the federal research enterprise decades of unfashionable work, and each of them cost my family zero dollars out of pocket because the science had been done, peer-reviewed, and turned into a public protocol. The same is true for the EpiPen protocol Ben’s daycare follows. The same is true for the vaccination schedule Eva is on, which keeps her eligible for public school and keeps the other kids in her class safer. The same is true for the dose my mother used to calibrate when she was the school nurse.
The numbers behind this are not sentimental. The EpiPen two-pack retails for $300 in 2026. Anaphylaxis ER visit: average $1,800 to $2,800, depending on the hospital system. A scoliosis brace caught at the school nurse screening: $0 to $500. A scoliosis case missed until the curve is severe enough to require surgery: $80,000 to $100,000. The lead-screening blood draw at a well-child visit: $20 to $40. Early intervention for a child with elevated blood lead: a few thousand dollars. Lifetime care for a child whose elevated blood lead was missed: a million dollars or more, depending on the state, in special education, lost wages, and social services. The pediatric asthma protocols that keep a child with a rescue inhaler out of the emergency room: $0 to $50 for the inhaler and the spacer. The ER visit that replaces it: $1,500 minimum, frequently four figures, plus the missed school day, plus the parent’s missed work day, plus the next attack because the protocol wasn’t followed. None of this is theoretical. The screeners, the protocols, the dose calibrations, the catch-early-while-it-still-fits-in-a-brace moment — all of it is what federal science funding paid for, and the science was paid for because no private board of directors is going to fund research with a forty-year payback timeline for a public health outcome the customer can’t be billed for at the point of delivery.
The mechanism is not a single headline grab. The Office of Management and Budget released proposed rules in May that would centralize control of billions in federal research grants in the hands of political appointees, with scientists at the AAS, AAAS, AGU, and APS already organizing to push back. The rules require grants to be evaluated for whether they advance “the president’s policy priorities.” Researchers at NIH-funded institutions have been told, through modified review processes and forced title changes, that grants cannot use the words disparity or marginalized in their project descriptions. You do not get to ask why Black women have a maternal-mortality rate three times the rate of white women if you cannot write the word disparity. You do not get to ask why poor children have higher asthma rates if you cannot write the word marginalized. You get to ask whether the research advances the president’s policy priorities. The president’s policy priorities are not a peer-reviewed question.
Meanwhile the National Science Foundation is cutting basic science budgets and redirecting $1.5 billion to a new initiative called X-Labs, “meant to support the creation of new products and technologies by looking ‘outside of traditional institutions.’” Outside of traditional institutions means inside private companies. This is the same drained-pool move the same administration has run on public schools and public housing: defund the public version until it is barely functional, redirect the money to private contractors, let the contractors capture the customer base the public version used to serve, and declare the public version a failure that never deserved the funding in the first place. The postdocs and the early-career researchers moving abroad to keep doing the work are the same people who would have produced the next round of NIH-funded breakthroughs. The math of basic research does not yield a quarterly earnings call, so the administration treats it as dead weight.
Taylor Swift’s Midnights has a song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” The title line is the mission statement of contemporary American infrastructure. When a government abandons the public funding of basic science, it is telling the next generation that the commons is closed. The friendship bracelets on the chorus — the only safety net the narrator has left — are the other mothers in the group text, swapping the pediatrician’s name, asking who has a spare EpiPen, comparing which daycare is screening for lead. That is what gets to be the safety net now. The dose was the dose because the science decided. The science is what the OMB is taking out of the decision.
The Catholic-worker tradition I was raised in had a word for what the OMB rules would prohibit, and the word was visit the sick. Dorothy Day’s argument was that the works of mercy and the works of justice are continuous — that feeding the hungry is a private obligation until the structural conditions of hunger are themselves a public-policy choice, at which point feeding the hungry is also a policy obligation. The NIH-funded research that produced the vaccine protocols my mother ran at St. Stanislaus was the policy form of visit the sick. Visit the sick is not a profitable line item. Vaccine protocols for a disease that mostly affects poor children in other countries are not a profitable line item — not a line item a board of directors will defend to its shareholders. The reason the public sector funded the work in the first place is that the public sector is the form of organization in which the work that is not profitable but is necessary actually gets done. The OMB rules are a decision that the necessary work should not get done if it is not profitable.
A real pro-family, pro-future policy would fully fund basic scientific research, protect the peer-review process from political appointees, and ensure that federally funded discoveries remain a public commons rather than proprietary corporate assets. It would pay junior researchers a living wage so that the only people who can afford to do the math are not just the ones who already have a trust fund.
The OMB comment period closes July 14. The dose was the dose because the science decided. The science is what the OMB is taking out of the decision.