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CLIMATEWIRE | Drastic cuts to federal science programs are draining millions of dollars in research funding from universities in Republican-dominated states, testing the support of conservative lawmakers for President Donald Trump’s chaotic reshaping of the U.S. government.

The administration’s downsizing effort — led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — has resulted in thousands of federal employees being fired and the cancellation of billions of dollars in grants at agencies that support research on climate science, public health and other fields.

Those actions — some of which have been reversed by court orders — have sent shock waves through the nation’s scientific research system and led universities in more than a dozen states to limit the number of new students or staff they’ll take on, citing uncertainty about federal funding.

The science-slashing blitz threatens to upend the nation’s research and development pipeline and diminish the flow of innovation that has bolstered local economies and protected communities from the effects of climate change, according to former federal research chiefs.

Republicans lawmakers, who control both chambers of Congress, have largely supported the administration’s science funding cuts, even as they threaten local institutions and the communities that depend on them. But some GOP senators in states with large research universities are beginning to express concern about Trump’s cuts.

“We just want to make sure the money is being deployed as productively as possible,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told POLITICO’s E&E News.

His state has seen a 25 percent cut in graduate school admissions at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a hiring freeze at North Carolina State University. Similar cost-cutting measures are expected at Duke University.

Universities and the communities they support are reeling as Trump and Musk move to cancel funding for scientific projects focused on climate change, diversity, or other topics they have derided as wasteful and “woke.” The administration is also trying to shut down scientific programs at EPA, NASA, and other agencies that work to advance the nation’s understanding of climate change.

While Washington currently spends around $142 billion more per year on research and development than Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party was already narrowing the gap before Trump’s moves began reverberating through the American scientific system.

“U.S. leadership is clearly being compromised by the Trump administration on the false prophecy of saving money,” said Craig McLean, who served as research director at NOAA during Trump’s first term and sparred with the White House over the president’s erroneous hurricane claims. “This will cost the United States money and opportunity, and endanger people’s lives and property.”

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Caroline Fleck, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, corporate consultant, and adjunct clinical instructor at Stanford University. She received a BA in psychology and English from the University of Michigan and an MA and PhD from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke. Fleck has served as a supervisor and consultant for some of the most rigorous clinical training programs in the country, and has been featured in national media outlets, including the The New York Times, Good Morning America, and HuffPost. In her private practice, Fleck specializes in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and other cognitive behavioral treatments for mood, anxiety, and personality disorders. Fleck’s corporate work focuses on strengthening company cultures and individual performance. She implements custom training programs for Fortune 500 companies and provides executive coaching to industry leaders worldwide.

What’s the big idea?

The secret to influencing others isn’t about persuasion—it’s about validation. In Validation: How the Skill Set That Revolutionized Psychology Will Transform Your Relationships, Increase Your Influence, and Change Your Life, Fleck reveals how acknowledging and accepting others’ experiences can strengthen relationships, defuse conflicts, and even increase self-compassion. Through captivating stories and actionable techniques, she introduces eight powerful skills to harness validation’s transformative impact. Validation uncovers how truly seeing and being seen is the key to lasting change.

Below, Fleck shares five key insights from her new book. Listen to the audio version—read by Fleck herself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. Validation is not what you think it is.

My technical definition of validation is that it communicates mindfulness, understanding, and empathy in ways that convey acceptance. If I were to translate that into a mantra, it would be, “Validation shows that you’re there, you get it, and you care.”

• Validation is not praise: Praise is a judgment. It says, “I like the way you look or perform.” Validation demonstrates acceptance. It says, “I accept who you are, independent of how you look or perform.” When people claim that we shouldn’t rely on “external validation,” they are confusing validation with praise.
• Validation is not problem-solving: Problem-solving focuses on changing someone’s reaction by suggesting solutions to their, e.g., “I know you didn’t do well on that spelling test; why don’t we try reviewing your words on the way to school next time?” Validation, on the other hand, focuses on acknowledging the situation and the validity of someone’s response to it: “You studied so hard; I can understand why you are upset.”
• Validation is not agreement: I can validate why someone would have concerns about protecting an unborn fetus, even if I am pro-choice. If the idea of validating an opinion you disagree with makes you nervous, rest assured that validating another person’s perspective does not necessarily function to reinforce it. On the contrary, people tend to get entrenched in their views when they feel like they have to defend their own position or attack yours. A validating response from you leaves nothing to attack, much less anything to defend against.

So again, validation shows that you’re there, you get it, and you care. It is not praise, problem-solving, or agreement.

2. Validation is like MDMA for your relationships.

Validation improves relationships by transforming how they feel, increasing trust, intimacy, and psychological safety. Research has consistently shown validation to be among the strongest predictors of relational outcomes, ranging from commitment to quality across various types of relationships. This is really important given the effect relationships have on our health and life expectancy. Having poor social relationships is associated with the same death rate as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Data show that the quality of a person’s relationships can increase their probability of surviving by 50%.

Importantly, validation is critical to all our relationships, including the one we have with ourselves. Knowing how to validate your own emotions is essential to developing self-compassion and improving how you relate to yourself. I have many more tips on how to cultivate self-validation in the book.

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In 2013, Susan Klugman, an obstetrician and geneticist who is currently president of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, got back test results that were “really weird.” Her patient was a pregnant woman who had opted for noninvasive prenatal testing, or NIPT, a screen for Down syndrome and a handful of other conditions that had been on the market for only two years. Now Klugman was looking at a lab report that suggested the 13-week-old fetus had a chromosomal condition that should have been lethal. And yet here it was on ultrasound, with a beating heart, developing organs and no sign of a problem. After several rounds of diagnostic testing, Klugman reassured the woman that her baby would most likely be fine. Nine months later, she read by chance in her local newspaper that the new mother had died of renal cancer. Mysterious test results and an unexpected cancer—surely, Klugman thought, there must be a connection.

For decades, prenatal testing for Down syndrome and other chromosomal conditions had fallen into two categories: invasive biopsies using a needle to collect fetal cells from the amniotic fluid or the placenta, or biomarker testing via a simple blood draw from the pregnant person. The invasive test carries a small but real chance of miscarriage. Biomarker testing is easier, cheaper, and safer, but because it looks at proxy measures and not the fetal DNA itself, it casts a wide and leaky net. Some people carrying a fetus with a chromosomal condition are missed, while the majority of those flagged as high risk turn out to be false positives.

Thus, the introduction of a more accurate and noninvasive blood test in 2011 was embraced enthusiastically by expectant parents. Today, NIPT is used in more than 60 countries, and sales of the test have attained a market value of more than $4.5 billion. In the U.S. alone, it is used in more than a million pregnancies a year. Multiple labs offer NIPT. And while they have their differences, they have this in common: all of them work by examining something called cell-free fetal DNA.

In living cells, DNA is contained in discrete structures known as chromosomes. As cells die and are replaced, chromosomes are deconstructed, and tiny snippets of DNA are released into the bloodstream. If sequenced, these blood-borne snippets can be traced back to their chromosome of origin like jigsaw puzzle pieces using our human genome map as if it were the picture on the box. A random sampling of cell-free DNA will consist of DNA from all chromosomes in proportion to their size—the largest chromosome being represented by the most segments, and so on—and therefore we can predict the number of segments we expect to see from each chromosome of origin.

In a pregnant person, some of this cell-free DNA is fetal DNA from the placenta. In the epiphany that spawned NIPT, Hong Kong–based researcher Dennis Lo realized that even though fetal DNA is only a small part of the whole, the fetal genome can be accurately assessed if the numbers are precise enough because any underrepresentation or overrepresentation of a given chromosome is clearly coming from the fetus. After all, the pregnant person’s chromosomal status is known, so their contribution to the cell-free DNA in the sample is entirely predictable.

That’s a safe assumption almost all the time. But from the earliest days of NIPT, there were rare instances of abnormal results that could not be explained by variations in fetal DNA. Sheetal Parmar, senior vice president of medical affairs for women’s health at Natera, who has been at the NIPT lab since it began testing in 2013, recalls that it was clinicians who first drew their attention to a possible link between certain oddball results and malignancies in pregnant people. “It started with people coming back to us and saying, ‘Hey, this particular patient had this finding and has been diagnosed with cancer,’” Parmar says.

But anecdotes aren’t evidence, and this left the labs in an awkward spot. Telling a person they have cancer—an unknown cancer of unknown origin, requiring unspecified follow-up, which insurance will be unlikely to cover —is not something to be done lightly, much less when the person involved is pregnant. NIPT tests showing multiple missing or added chromosomes, which labs had begun to suspect might be a potential indication of cancer, were officially labelled “nonreportable” results. Unofficially, genetic counselors and obstetricians have told stories of off-the-record phone calls from friends at labs whispering suggestions that a certain patient should “get checked out.”

In 2019, convinced that this cancer signal was real, Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, began a study intended to provide clearer guidance to labs and clinicians about how and when to follow up on these atypical results. Called IDENTIFY (Incidental Detection of Maternal Neoplasia through Non-invasive Cell-Free DNA Analysis), the study offered a thorough evaluation to any patient who was currently pregnant or less than two years postpartum, who didn’t already have a cancer diagnosis and whose results were “discordant”—that is, cases in which the fetus seemed fine, yet the pregnant person’s NIPT results showed a pattern of extra and missing chromosomes that should have been impossible in a viable pregnancy.

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A 17-year-old student has been accepted into more than 60 colleges and awarded over $1 million in scholarships, bringing him closer to his goal of pursuing a career in medicine.

“I’m just passionate about helping others, lending a helping hand whenever it is needed,” Mantavius “Lebron” Presley, a senior at Douglas County High School in Georgia, told “Good Morning America” in an interview. “My biggest goal in life is to motivate people and help others, because you never know what somebody is going through, and you can always help somebody eat with just a word of inspiration, a smile or even a hug.”

Lebron said he began applying to colleges on Aug. 1, 2024, the first day of his senior year, focusing on schools that aligned with his goals of eventually attending medical school and becoming an anesthesiologist.

His top college choices include the University of Alabama, Morehouse College, Xavier University of Louisiana, Howard University and Mercer University, all known for their strong pre-med programs.

Juggling dual enrollment courses and work-based learning, he said he made time to complete applications whenever possible and applied to as many schools as he could.

Lebron said he was determined from a young age to attend college and achieve something great.

“When I was a little boy, I always said that I would go to the university, because people in my family will always talk about how much they loved their college life and how much [it] really impacted them,” he recalled. “So, I always thought when I was a little boy, that I would just go off and do something amazing.”

Raised by a single mother, Lebron credits his mom, Chasity Green, as his biggest supporter and inspiration.

“She is my biggest cheerleader,” he shared. “Always on the sidelines, always letting me know that she’s here for me, if I have any questions, if I need any advice, if I ever just need a shoulder to lean on, somebody to cry on. If she doesn’t know the answer, she’s gonna get with somebody and find out the answer. She’s just always willing to help me and be by my side and give me inspiration and guidance when I need it the most.”

Lebron’s first college acceptance came in October from the University of Alabama, and the offers kept pouring in. As of Thursday, he had received 61 acceptances and over $1.1 million in scholarships.

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