One of glaciologist Lauren Vargo’s summer highlights during the past two years has been to take a group of teenage girls to Mt Ruapehu to introduce them to the outdoors, science and art. They would stay in an alpine hut, practise moving safely across snowfields and the volcanic landscape, sharpen their observational skills by sketching mountain ridges and design their own research projects. Vargo, a research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, also hoped to inspire the girls to consider working in research or other careers that remain dominated by men.
Girls* on Ice Aotearoa is for 15- to 16-year-old girls but also encourages applications from female-identifying, non-binary and intersex students. It is one of many international branches that grew from Inspiring Girls Expeditions, which started in the US in 1999, and financial support came from the US Embassy in New Zealand. Vargo, who moved here from the US in 2016, took part in the 2022 American expedition in Alaska as a science instructor.
But within weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration for his second term as US president, Vargo heard that Girls* on Ice Alaska had lost the bulk of its funding. Not long after, she received a letter from the US Department of State informing her the embassy grant would be cancelled because it no longer “effectuates agency priorities”.
The executive order to end “radical and wasteful government diversity, equity and inclusion programs” was one of 26 Trump signed during his first day back in office. Girls* on Ice Aotearoa was among the first international projects to lose its US funding.
Since then, the Trump administration has “unleashed an unprecedented rapid-fire campaign to remake … vast swathes of the federal government’s scientific and public health infrastructure”, according to Science magazine, which summarised the president’s impact as “almost certainly the most consequential period US scientists have experienced since the end of World War II”.
Thousands of people working in federal agencies were fired, rehired and fired again. Research and training grants worth billions of dollars were terminated abruptly. University funding was withheld and databases and government sites temporarily went dark. Decades worth of data collected by entire agencies are being erased, access to long-running satellite measurements has stopped and clinical trials have been aborted with no regard for participants’ safety, leaving them without medications or with unmonitored device implants.
Individual researchers and many organisations have challenged the president’s orders through the courts and multiple suits are under way, with some success in reversing decisions, albeit temporarily. In June, a federal judge ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to immediately restore about 900 cancelled grants (out of an estimated 2300) on topics such as racial health disparities, transgender health and vaccine hesitancy, calling the processes that led to their termination “bereft of reasoning”. But two months later, the US Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, ruled the NIH must proceed with ending US$783 million in grants linked to diversity and inclusion initiatives.
The legal tug of war makes it difficult to keep track of each individual presidential order, but the Trump administration’s longer-term intentions are clear in its budget for 2026, which is before Congress.It proposes a 40% cut to the $48 billion NIH budget and a 56% contraction at the $9b National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds research across all disciplines. The $25.4b budget for Nasa is facing a 24% cut. Nasa’s interim administrator, reality TV star Sean Duffy, has already called for the end of the agency’s focus on studying how Earth’s atmosphere is changing. Similarly, the budget document for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a litany of terminations, reductions and transitions.
Long shadow
The changes go well beyond destabilising the entire research community in the US. They cast a long shadow across the world, including in New Zealand.
Helen Petousis-Harris is an associate professor at the University of Auckland and co-director of the Global Vaccine Data Network, a groundbreaking global project set up to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. In 2021, the network received US$10m from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for a five-year project to investigate the safety of different types of Covid vaccines, billions of doses of which have been administered worldwide. But in March, Petousis-Harris was notified the remaining funding had been terminated, with immediate effect.
The Global Vaccine Data Network operates from a co-ordinating centre hosted by Auckland UniServices Ltd but includes 35 collaborating sites in 29 countries. By analysing post-vaccination health data from more than 300 million people, the group is able to detect and quantify rare but serious vaccine side effects.
It has already published significant findings, including a study evaluating the risk of 13 potential adverse events following Covid vaccination. Based on 99 million people who received various Covid vaccines, the team found that following the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there was a raised risk for the rare autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome and a stroke caused by vaccine-linked blood clotting.
The team was weeks away from wrapping up other critical research projects assessing the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. There were also studies looking in depth at vaccine safety during pregnancy and investigating the genes that may be associated with rare adverse events. All came to an immediate halt.
Real-world data
Before any novel vaccine is released, its safety and effectiveness is assessed through randomised controlled clinical trials, Petousis-Harris says. But such trials often miss certain population groups, including people with particular health conditions, ethnic minorities or pregnant women. While clinical trials include tens of thousands of participants, very rare events cannot be discovered until many more people have received a vaccine.
To trace the risk of a rare but serious side effect from a particular vaccine that might affect only one in 100,000 people requires large numbers and big data, Petousis-Harris says.
“The more people you have, the bigger the study population, the more you can drill down into the rarest events and also within subgroups of the population such as age groups. You can also look at whether people had one dose or more doses and whether they had a variety of different vaccines – all of those things you can’t possibly look into unless you have enormous numbers.”
No one country can do this alone. “This is the kind of work where we actually need global collaboration.”
Petousis-Harris expects the funding termination of the “biggest, most comprehensive vaccine safety evaluation in the world, and also in history” to have serious consequences. Its cancellation removes the scientists’ voices and creates an information vacuum, she says.
“During the pandemic, we’ve already seen a rise in misinformation and when you have a vacuum, it gets filled with conspiracies and myths. When you defund and delegitimise these core agencies that provide information about infectious diseases and vaccines, you’re essentially demolishing and replacing them with something that has no basis in fact.”
Disinformation is not confined by geography, she says, pointing to ripple effects in New Zealand, with climbing vaccine hesitancy and harassment of public health experts. “This threatens to destabilise measles vaccination rates and confidence in future pandemic vaccines. We’ll see history repeating and the resurgence of infectious diseases that we already had some control over, but also the emergence of new infectious diseases like Covid and, as we’ve already seen in the US, more deaths.”
Out on their own
On the same day the Listener spoke to Malaghan Institute director Kjesten Wiig, the NIH announced the end of foreign subawards from this month. This includes about US$500m worth of annual funding to laboratories and hospitals outside the US to collaborate with American teams on global health projects and clinical trials in fields ranging from emerging infectious diseases to cancer.
The NIH is by far the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. Previously, US researchers with a grant could give subawards to international collaborators to contribute research that could not be carried out in the US. Now, any subawards will have to be renegotiated individually with the NIH and entire projects could be terminated if they can’t be completed without international collaborators.
“Essentially, this means US scientists can’t collaborate internationally,” Wiig says. She points out that each year, millions of people lose their lives to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. Even if a disease is not prevalent in the US, collaborative research between it and affected countries remains important.
Wiig sees the move as a self-defeating strategy for the US, but an incentive for New Zealand to improve pandemic preparedness because we can no longer “rely on the US being the provider of fit-for-purpose vaccines”.
After vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr was confirmed as the US Secretary of Health in February, an independent advisory group meeting that selects the flu strain for each year’s vaccine development was cancelled.
In June, RFK Jr abruptly fired all 17 members of an expert panel advising the Centers for Disease Control on immunisation practices, replacing them with new professionals, some of whom have limited expertise on vaccines. The new advisers’ first recommendation was to discourage the use of flu vaccines containing thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative long considered safe.
Then in August, RFK Jr announced plans to pull $500m in funding for vaccines based on mRNA technologies (used to make most Covid vaccines) that were being developed against human and bird influenza.
This implies New Zealand should be proactive and develop skills and capabilities here, Wiig says. The NZ$70m investment over seven years announced in 2023 by the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation for a research platform focused on mRNA technologies is a good example of how this country can lead in areas the US may have previously driven but is now likely to withdraw from. Already, work is under way to investigate vaccines against certain cancers and autoimmune diseases.
“The potential is huge,” Wiig says.
Funding on ice
During late summer, two research vessels – New Zealand’s Tangaroa and the Australian icebreaker Nuyina – were exploring the Southern Ocean and Antarctica’s coastline. Both approached regions usually covered in thick, impenetrable sea ice, but found none. From a scientific perspective, it was exciting to sample previously inaccessible areas, says Craig Stevens, an oceanographer at the University of Auckland who led the Tangaroa voyage. But it was also a stark reminder of how quickly and dramatically the icy continent is changing.
Research published in August warns Antarctica is now at risk of abrupt and potentially irreversible changes. Yet the Trump administration has already curtailed access to US defence weather satellites that track sea ice and plans deep cuts to monitoring programmes. “Less data is not going to help,” Stevens says. “Unquestionably, it’s a time when we want to be looking harder, because the changes in Antarctic sea ice have been challenging … with our present knowledge.”
If Congress passes the budget, it would shut down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Antarctic atmosphere monitoring programme, the Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory and its long-term global ocean observations, and Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory, which has been documenting the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958 in what’s become known as the Keeling Curve.
“It’s a fundamental indicator of climate change for humanity,” Stevens says. “From a Southern Hemisphere perspective, the Australians have [a monitoring programme at] Cape Grim and we have Baring Head, but it’s actually understanding the different hemispherical responses that is a critical part of the atmospheric carbon story. Losing Mauna Loa would be a huge challenge.”
Historically, the US has led the world in Earth observation systems and shared the data freely. Weather forecasting agencies across the world, including New Zealand’s MetService, rely on international data sharing through the World Meteorological Organisation.
“Weather doesn’t respect political boundaries,” says Norm Henry, chief of science and innovation at MetService, and “a loss of data, especially from a country with a landmass and ocean area as large as the US, would be concerning”.
The data feeds global models that are run at a limited number of centres with large supercomputing systems. MetService routinely uses information from models run by NOAA for local forecasting models, but it equally relies on the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
Similarly, weather satellites are operated by a small set of countries because of their high cost. But Henry says MetService already makes extensive use of satellite data sourced from Japanese and European satellites. “We are keeping a close eye on the situation and will adjust our approach should there be changes to NOAA data availability.”
Polar partners
One of the longest collaborations between New Zealand and the US is in Antarctica, both in logistic support and research, going back to 1958. Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Jordy Hendrikx says he’s confident the upcoming summer season will go ahead as planned. He has already met officials at the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s polar office and is expecting a business-as-usual season.
Despite the deep budget cuts to the agency’s overall budget, the Office of Polar Programs will lose less (at 16%) than other research areas funded by the NSF. “And there is effectively no cut in the logistical capabilities because a lot of these assets require quite advanced forward planning.”
Although science programmes are losing support, funding typically comes in multi-year contracts so Hendrikx expects research to “continue for some time as people spend out those existing grants”. The caveat is what “the outer years look like and what this does to the next generation of scientists, the next round of grants – you can’t cut science funding by that much without having an impact”.
Despite that long history of collaboration, New Zealand doesn’t have a formal agreement with the NSF in any area of science, including Antarctic research. To formalise and grow strategic relationships in Antarctic science, New Zealand invested up to $5m over five years earlier this year. Hendrikx says collaborative pilot projects are being compiled but are contingent on the NSF signing a memorandum of co-operation and then co-funding the research.
But it’s not just the job losses and cuts to America’s own science sector. The US has been withdrawing support from several international bodies and agreements, including the Paris Agreement, the World Health Organisation, the World Meteorological Organisation and, most recently, Unesco. This worries Tim Naish, a climatologist at Victoria and chair of the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme, which co-ordinates projects to produce research to feed into the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The World Meteorological Organisation, which hosts the programme’s secretariat, faces funding cuts that will trim staff by 20%. “We’re planning to lose up to two-thirds of our budget for next year,” Naish says.
Another concern is that existing climate information is not secure, because the US is defunding data-storage infrastructure and beginning to publish reports that cast doubt on climate science.
But this is where many new initiatives are emerging and other countries are stepping up. Unesco’s response to the US withdrawal was to point out it had already been diversifying funding sources in anticipation.
Antarctica NZ already works closely with Italy and South Korea and recently signed new co-operative agreements with the Swiss Polar Institute, Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute and Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates. Efforts are under way to archive climate data safely; weather forecasting agencies are moving to use other nations’ satellite data and European countries are rolling out welcome mats to US scientists willing to move.
And Lauren Vargo has found other donors happy to fund future summer expeditions for Girls* on Ice Aotearoa.