With co-Presidents Donald Trump and Elon Musk now inflicting deep cuts on federal agencies that sponsor medical research, thousands of scientists, researchers, and medical professionals are getting fired. Experts are sounding dire alarms, predicting that this could set back our ability to cure deadly diseases and debilitating physical ailments, and leave the nation less equipped for future public health emergencies. Musk is giddily cheering these cuts despite those fears—or perhaps because of them.
But one downsizing just started attracting notice among insiders at the National Institutes of Health, because it seems particularly inexplicable: According to people familiar with the situation, approximately one-tenth of the workers have now been let go at the NIH’s Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias, or CARD, including its incoming director, a highly regarded scientist credited with important innovations in the field.
What makes this particularly jarring is that it could set back efforts to treat and develop cures for these awful afflictions, as these insiders and other experts fear. But it’s also that the potential for this center to do good—and the importance of the broader cause of battling Alzheimer’s—have both been championed by Republicans. Indeed, CARD’s full name—the Roy Blunt Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias—honors former Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, an influential Republican who spoke glowingly about its potential to advance human progress when its opening was announced in 2022.
On Tuesday afternoon, at a meeting inside CARD’s building at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, employees were informed that a sizable swath of the center’s workers were being fired, according to an employee who was at the meeting. One of those being dismissed, the source says, is Kendall Van Keuren-Jensen, who had been tapped to eventually become CARD’s acting director, replacing the current director, Andrew Singleton, who is reportedly set to depart.
Singleton described the impact of the news in dire terms in an email to colleagues that I obtained from two NIH employees. “This loss,” wrote Singleton, will “have a profound impact on the work we do to understand and treat disease.” Singleton added: “The next period will be difficult.” (He didn’t return emails for comment.)
The firing of Van Keuren-Jensen, CARD’s incoming director, is seen as particularly damaging to the cause by people familiar with the situation. They describe her as a leading researcher in the Alzheimer’s field, including when it comes to innovations enabling early detection of the disease. They note that CARD worked hard to recruit her, and while she can be replaced, they say her hiring would have enabled the center to make great strides in the field that are now in doubt. The other firings, which include senior researchers in the field, will also put those advances at risk, those people say.
“These people are experts and are irreplaceable,” the CARD employee told me. “It’s devastating for us—and for anyone who is worried about getting Alzheimer’s, or has already gotten Alzheimer’s, and is hoping there will be better treatments in the future. It’s a huge blow.”
Michael Greicius, a neurologist at Stanford University, pointed out that CARD has been at the cutting edge of advances not just for Alzheimer’s but Parkinson’s disease as well. He said that other researchers across the country rely on CARD’s work, meaning that if its work is hobbled, it threatens to have a “negative amplifying effect” across the field.
“CARD has developed infrastructure and a braintrust that’s really unmatched in the world, in terms of its advances in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” Greicius told me. “Weakening CARD will set Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research back substantially.”
This saga also reveals the absurdity of one of Trumpworld’s defenses of these cuts: That they’re largely focused on “probationary” employees. After all, the employees laid off from CARD were also probationary, in that they had started recently, but Van Keuren-Jensen and the others are nonetheless accomplished experts who can’t easily be replaced.
“It’s going to be really hard to recover,” Greicius said, speaking of CARD’s future and of the broader Trump-Musk assault on medical research funding. “As we’re learning across institutes and agencies, it’s much easier to destroy something than to gradually build it back up.”
The funny—or profoundly sad—thing about this is that some Republicans, at least, surely agree. When then-Senator Blunt spoke at CARD’s opening in 2022, he hailed it as “critically important” for the “future of aging and the future of people caring about other people.” Blunt noted that the cost of Alzheimer’s is expected to mount astronomically in the future, and that CARD’s “promising work” could offset that.
The sheer stakes of all this were neatly captured by another senior Republican who attended CARD’s 2022 dedication, Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. Cole recounted that during a previous period when NIH funding had remained flat, it sent a bad signal to “young researchers” about our commitment to science, and about “our position in the world.”
Cole, who lost his own father to Alzheimer’s, has proudly hailed the work that congressional Republicans have done to fund Alzheimer’s research, insisting that it may ultimately help “unlock the mysterious cause of the disease, slow and stop its onset, and ultimately find a cure.” Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine has also championed public spending on Alzheimer’s, describing it as key to preventing it from becoming “one of the defining diseases of our children’s generation as it has ours.”
How many Republicans will voice similar sentiments in the wake of the Trump-Musk downsizing at NIH’s flagship organization devoted to doing just that?
One of the crowning idiocies of the Trump-Musk attack on publicly funded medical research has been their phony, cooked-up rationales. Musk and his partisans justify it in the name of attacking “wokeness” inside these institutions—which they absurdly savage as hives of elite liberal entitlement and self-dealing—and in the name of achieving “efficiencies” in service of the national interest.
Yet, as The New York Times’ Zeynep Tufekci details, this sort of spending has propelled our nation into a global leadership position in biomedical research. It has been a huge boon to institutions in red states as well as blue. Cutting it in Musk’s desired proportions will mean fewer future options for a new generation of scientists, including young people from red states, and narrow the possibility of future breakthroughs that further alleviate human suffering and loss. And such expenditures can save money in the long term, because treating illness and physical debilitation is pretty damn expensive. In fact that’s a key reason some Republicans have historically championed these kinds of public investments.
All this is revealed with peculiar force in the saga that’s now befalling CARD. It’s another sign that, as the Trump-Musk assault on the state generates specific awful outcomes, it will reveal how thin the justificatory fictions the duo are spinning truly are—and grow harder and harder for Republicans to defend.
