Republican Attack on Science Targets Water Research that Benefits All

The Republican effort to rid the federal government of initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is expanding to publicly funded research, ensnaring in its wide net scientific endeavors at the National Science Foundation that seek to expand access to clean water, reduce the cost of water purification, and minimize flood damages.

The GOP’s move against the National Science Foundation is part of a broader Republican rejection of federally funded climate and environmental science that does not align with the party’s political and cultural aims. In his first four weeks in office, President Donald Trump has acted imperiously in this regard, firing tens of thousands of federal employees and shelving a major federal research project assessing the value of nature to the country. He has attempted to illegally withhold funds for renewable energy, medical research, and foreign aid that Congress already approved but do not match his America First agenda.

His appointees to run Cabinet-level agencies have acted in concert. The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health and Human Services removed websites that housed data on the unequal burdens of pollution and how they affect personal and public health. According to videos unearthed by ProPublica, Russell Vought, the newly confirmed head of the White House budget office, has said that he wants to put civil servants “in trauma.”

With the attacks on the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, these radical maneuvers are seeping into the heart of the nation’s innovation machine and imperiling the economic growth and social advances it enables.

“Without some baseline level of support for just pure scientific discovery, America is going to lose our edge in that innovation space,” said Catherine O’Reilly, program director in the division of environmental biology at the National Science Foundation from 2022 to 2024. “And we already see other parts of the world, China in particular, really moving ahead of America in terms of its scientific knowledge, its scientific enterprise, its ability to do science, its ability to translate scientific outcomes into products that are beneficial for society or for their economy.”

The long-term implications of the U.S. government dismantling its scientific apparatus – one that helped birth the internet, LASIK eye surgery, and MRI medical scans – would be severe, O’Reilly worries. “I don’t know how American science could recover if it got shut down. It would take decades. We would be so behind.”

The latest point of attack is from Sen. Ted Cruz. On February 11, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which Cruz chairs, released a database of 3,483 grants awarded by the National Science Foundation during the Biden administration.

Cruz claims that the grants in the database, totaling more than $2 billion, promote DEI principles, which are not welcomed by the Trump administration. Trump issued an executive order on January 20 to terminate all DEI policies, programs, and mandates in the federal government. That order was temporarily blocked on Friday by a federal judge while a lawsuit is heard in the courts.

When asked if these research projects would have their funding cut, Commerce Committee staff referred to a press release in which Cruz called for “significant scrutiny” of the grants in the database.

Michael England, an NSF spokesperson, said before the judge’s injunction that the agency is “working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” England did not immediately respond to a question about how the review would change after the judge’s ruling.

The National Science Foundation, with a 2024 budget of $9 billion, is one of the world’s premier funders of scientific research. The research it selects for grants is considered to be “top of the line,” O’Reilly said. Yet its budget is but a flurry in the $6.7 trillion blizzard of federal spending last year.

In previous years NSF water research grants have underwritten projects that protect public health, hold public officials accountable, and advance understanding of water supply vulnerabilities in the American West.

Included in the Cruz database are hundreds of water-related research projects that promise broad societal benefit.

• $299,999 to Cal Poly Pomona to investigate ways to make desalination by reverse osmosis more efficient.
• $74,935 to the Rand Corporation to assess how municipal financial stress affects the provision of drinking water.
• $334,155 to Florida International University for a post-doctoral fellowship to study the effect of heat waves and nutrients on seaweed growth on the South Florida coast.
• $500,000 to Purdue University to develop tools to manage flood risks in southern Louisiana.
• $386,034 to the University of Massachusetts to investigate water treatment membranes that are less prone to salt buildup and thus more effective.

The database singles out research projects that mention race, gender, socioeconomic status, social justice, and environmental justice. Because contaminated water and climate hazards disproportionately harm poor people and communities of color, the grant applications often mention words like “equitable” or “marginalized.” Some applications offer research opportunities to students from underrepresented groups.

O’Reilly, who is now the director of the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota Duluth, said that the Cruz investigation misinterprets how NSF-funded projects are selected and how the science is conducted. The grants ensure that all Americans have an opportunity to engage with science, she said.

“There’s that one sentence in the abstract that is probably $5,000 worth of that project that goes towards making sure that an undergraduate student has a research training opportunity. And then somehow that has been translated into, ‘This is a project that NSF shouldn’t have funded.’”

O’Reilly added: “Nobody’s being elevated or funded because of any reason other than that’s the best. The way the National Science Foundation operates is just not the way that Ted Cruz’s report is implying that it operates.”

Grantees On Edge

“Water is an issue that affects everyone,” said Julius Lucks, co-director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University.

Lucks is the principal investigator for an NSF-funded project listed in the Cruz database.

The five-year, $3 million project is to develop a simple, in-home water testing device that can detect high levels of lead, copper, or PFAS in tap water. The researchers are testing the device in Chicago, which has the most lead drinking water pipes in the U.S., and Evanston, where Northwestern is located.

If the technology can be scaled up, it “stands to make an impact on tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people across the country,” Lucks said.

Lucks said that the project’s funding, which was initially approved through 2028, has not yet been cut. But in other ways the research team is starting to feel the effects of a federal pullback. With a second field trial of the biosensor device planned for the coming months, they would like to hire a project coordinator. But owing to uncertainty at the federal level, Northwestern has restricted new hiring.

“We’re definitely concerned that the project would be impeded in any way, whether it be slowed down or cut at some level,” Lucks said.

Today’s NSF grants build on a legacy of trailblazing research in the public interest – which was the intent of Congress when it established the organization in 1950 to “advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare.”

Those principles were in clear view in 2015, when Virginia Tech researchers received a $49,999 NSF rapid response grant to investigate suspiciously high levels of lead that were appearing in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan.

Marc Edwards, the principal investigator for that project, said the NSF grant “was instrumental in showing the extent of lead contamination” in the majority-Black city, and it also helped to uncover a connected outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a respiratory illness, that killed at least 11 people.

The Flint water crisis catalyzed a national movement to rehabilitate aging drinking water systems – the very definition of science in the public interest.