The New Know Nothings' wrecking ball

Trump's frontal assault on medical research and global aid will undermine health here and abroad.

Pictures from this weekend’s Stand up for Science at the Lincoln Memorial sent me scrambling for the history books. Thousands turned out to protest the cuts in science funding ordered by the New Know Nothings: A president who declares global warming a hoax; a secretary of health who sees more harm than good in vaccines; and an unelected billionaire who uses a meat axe to pare global health programs.

The original Know Nothings sought electoral power in the late 1840s and early 1850s on an anti-Catholic platform aimed at demonizing and deporting millions of Irish and German immigrants. The Know Nothing name came from instructions that members say “I know nothing” if asked about the party’s secret rituals and violent assaults on immigrants. The party’s place in history gave the name a very different meaning.

The Lincoln Memorial was an appropriate place for the scientists’ protest against the new know-nothingism. The rise of the Know Nothings divided and eventually destroyed the Whig Party — then the opposition to the pro-slavery Democratic Party. It led abolitionists and free soilers like Illinois’ Abraham Lincoln to form the Republican Party to oppose slavery’s expansion. The resulting party realignment led to the Civil War.

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?” Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855. “How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?”

Big VHA cuts coming

Degrading white (and black and brown) veterans is certainly on the New Know Nothings’ agenda. Government Executive magazine reported last week that Veterans Administration Secretary Doug Collins plans to eliminate 83,000 jobs or nearly 20% of the workforce at an agency that provides health care at for more than 9 million veterans at 1,380 health care facilities across the nation. One-third of VA workers are veterans; two-thirds of those enrolled and treated by the VA are white.

The VA also provides sites for numerous clinical studies, often in collaboration with academic medical centers, that seek to improve veterans’ and the general population’s health. The VA, like other research sites, will bear the brunt of a decision made last week by the new leadership at the National Institutes of Health to terminate millions of dollars in research grants. The order was carrying out Trump’s executive order defunding anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The implementation of that order is one more confirmation that we are now living in a country under diktat rule. The contract cancellations ignored a Maryland federal judge’s injunction blocking moves against DEI programs as violations of freedom of speech.

‘We don’t need no stinkin’ 1st amendment’

The latest move against academic speech came over the weekend with the administration’s cancellation of about $400 million in grants to Columbia University. The reason: its alleged failure to silence antisemitic speech on campus. While the move did not affect grants from NIH, according to the Wall Street Journal, it certainly violated the first amendment and any semblance of due process.

I am just one of thousands of Columbia graduates (Journalism School, 1982) who received a very disappointing email letter from interim president Katrina Armstrong on Friday night. “We are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” she wrote. “To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism. This is our number one priority.”

Since the Hamas slaughter of more than 1,200 innocent Israelis, more than 40,000 innocent Palestianians have been killed in Gaza, sparking protests around the world against Israel’s tactics. Antisemitism is a real problem in our society. But anti-Zionist or even anti-Jewish speech is not a crime, no more than racist or anti-immigrant speech is a crime.

Yet Columbia threw the student chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine off campus for “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The New York Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Columbia for bypassing normal disciplinary channels and violating civil laws prohibiting disproportionate sanctions.

“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent,” said Reinhold Martin, a Columbia historian of architecture and president of the university’s American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, chapter. “And for those who take the Trump administration’s actions at face value, remember Charlottesville.” (Nazis: “The Jews will not replace us.” Trump: “You had some very fine people on both sides.”)

I will resume my small contributions to the J-school when a Columbia president makes defending freedom of speech as much a priority as defending the sensitivities of students offended by opposing views.

The domestic fallout from attacks on global health

Meanwhile, the dire effects of the Trump administration’s war on foreign aid and global health are beginning to be felt. Writing this morning in The Atlantic, Craig Spencer, a public health professor at Brown University and Ebola survivor from his time treating the disease outbreak in Africa, warns how this is undermining America’s outbreak preparedness. “We are sure to regret it,” he wrote.

Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization. Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency has all but destroyed the Agency for International Development, which in addition to fighting diseases around the world feeds information on infectious disease outbreaks to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Musk gleefully declared on his X platform (whose CDC account has been cancelled) that USAID has been “thrown it in the wood chipper.”

“Much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores,” he wrote. “Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.”

With monkey pox, Ebola and Marburg outbreaks ongoing in Africa, Trump/Musk’s mass firings at the agency eliminated all but six of the 50 positions monitoring infectious disease outbreaks around the world. “I have no idea how six people are going to run four outbreak responses,” one still employed official told the New York Times. He, like nearly every one of 30 former and current government officials interviewed in a front page story, chose to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution.

Spencer also reports that despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s promise that waivers would allow lifesaving work in Africa and other parts of the developing world to continue, “few have materialized.” The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established under George W. Bush and largely funded by USAID, is on pause. Since its founding in 2003, PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives. “More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program,” Spencer wrote.

For a full catalog of the devastating consequences from cuts in global health aid, read this memo, written by Nicholas Enrich, the acting administrator for global health at USAID who was immediately placed on administrative leave after its release.

Pandemic unpreparedness

Finally, the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico continues to spread. More than 200 people have been infected, mostly children, and at least two people have died.

Texas health officials reported nearly all of the infected were either unvaccinated or had “unknown” vaccination status. While the CDC website (last checked March 10, 2025) continues to promote vaccination as the best way to prevent measles, the agency announced this weekend it would investigate the link between vaccines and autism, a priority for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

What would Ben Franklin say about current research policies?

At least seven states run by the GOP are considering legislation aimed at banning or limiting use of mRNA vaccines, which was the technology used to rapidly develop the COVID shots. Some in Congress are pushing a similar bill. Kaiser Health News reports some of the state measures would fine and possibly revoke the licenses of doctors who administer mRNA vaccines.

To sum up today’s news: The administration ended aid for overseas health organizations providing early earnings about infectious disease outbreaks. It all but eliminated staff that monitors new threats. Research into promising technologies has ended while support for new research into thoroughly debunked theories is expanding. A measles outbreak is rapidly spreading.

As I wrote a month ago about the recessionary impact of Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies (major media outlets have picked up on that theme; consumer confidence is collapsing; and as I write at mid-day today, the S&P 500 is down 2.3%), what could possibly go wrong?