Up Close and Personal with the Trump Administration’s NIH Funding Cuts: An Interview with Sylvia Chou and Alexa Romberg - The Scholarly Kitchen

"More than 400,000 US federal employees have left their jobs during the second Trump administration – voluntarily or, in many cases, not. Even taking into account new hires since January 2025, there has been a net loss of 285,000 staff, many of whom had years, if not decades, of experience. Over 10,000 of them were experts in STEM and health fields, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) especially hard hit, losing more than 1,100 staff – around 10% of its workforce. Among them were Sylvia Chou and Alexa Romberg, who chose to leave the organization as a result of the changes being made under NIH Director Dr Jay Bhattacharya. They were two of the original signatories of the Bethesda Declaration, an open letter to Dr Bhattacharya that expressed serious concerns about the changes being made under his leadership. Sylvia and Alexa are both involved in 27 UNIHTED (Sylvia as a Senior Advisor), an organization that was set up in 2025 as a way to continue supporting the integrity of publicly-funded health research in the United States. 

I met Sylvia and Alexa through my work on censorship as part of the #DefendResearch team, and they kindly agreed to talk to me about their experiences, their concerns, and their hopes for the future of US federally-funded research."