What's it like being a scientist facing federal funding cuts?

It’s a weird time to be an environmental scientist. The proposed cuts to federal science funding in the United States are profound, and if they come to pass, it’s not clear what American science will look like on the other side. But for many researchers, science is much more than a career: it’s a community, lifestyle, and sometimes even a family business. This episode was produced by our fellow NHPR podcast Outside/In. You can check out photos and more related to this episode right here. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:25Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Today, we're going to zoom in on a small sample of a big change happening in the United States. Over the past months, the Trump administration has paused, reduced, restricted, or eliminated federal funding for programs, research, and jobs that advance medicine, science, technology, and education, to name a few. Grants have disappeared, people have been laid off, years of progress has been put on the shelf. Now, I'm working on an episode that will explain what this kind of funding actually is and how this is all happening. Stay tuned for that. But in the meantime, we're trying to understand who and what is being affected by these changes.

• 2:08Hannah McCarthy?

  We're turning to our friends at Outside In, a podcast that I warmly recommend you start following if you haven't already. Producer Justine Parry spent time with a community of researchers who are trying to understand a threat to drinking water for millions of people. This is the story of how these scientists are navigating this task, increasingly unsure of how or if anyone will be able to pay for it. I'll let Outside In take it from here.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Hey, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegy.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Our story starts at a barbecue at a park just outside of Ithaca, New York. It's a warm day in late spring. There's a waterfall nearby. Swallows are nesting in the rafters. And almost every person here is a scientist. They're grilling, catching up, and making so many PhD jokes.

• 3:05Speaker 05

  They're having a good laugh about too many PhDs cooking the barbecue.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  How many does it take?

• 3:13Speaker 05

  All of them. All of them, of course, because they all have an opinion.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  This group has spent the past few days together, collecting samples on the lakes in the area. They're studying a growing environmental problem: toxic algae blooms. But one thing that struck our producer, Justine Parry, who was there, was that pretty much everyone appeared to be in a great mood.

• 3:38Speaker 06

  You know, part of that, what I'm curious about coming here is understanding just the general mood of scientists right now. And everyone seems so happy, at least at this table. We've got some wine.

• 3:53Speaker 07

  What's the alternative? Just roll over and be like, okay, the world's gonna, you know, just end up like a Star Wars scene? Like, I mean, come on. No one expects us to do that. It will all work out.

• 4:08Speaker 07

  Don't know how, but it will.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  That's Renee, a researcher at Cornell. She motions at her colleague across the table, Bob Howarth, a bio-geochemist.

• 4:16Speaker 07

  He says I'm an optimist.

• 4:18Speaker 08

  I don't know that I am. I mean, the world's got a lot of problems, but I'm tremendously excited about being in this group of people. I mean, on the average day, what we're doing is tedious as hell, quite frankly, and yet it's still really fun.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  This is a weird time to be an environmental scientist. That guy, Bob Howarth? He's one of the most widely cited scientists in his field. "A legend," one of the others said. And the questions they're working on have global implications. But there's also a feeling of unease in the air because funding for this type of research is changing dramatically.

• 5:01Speaker 08

  It's going to be very, very difficult. And for our graduate students, extremely, extremely difficult. And I'm OK. I'm an old guy. I'm retiring, and I've got friends, and we're doing exciting things. But the future scares me.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  You've probably heard about all the cuts being made to research programs and federal grants. These changes are so widespread and happening so fast, it can feel dizzying just to keep track of it all. So, Today on Outside In, producer Justine Paradis is focusing on one group of scientists: researchers from three different countries and seven universities who are trying to continue their work at a time of huge transition and uncertainty. We'll meet some of the people behind the headlines, find out how the cuts are impacting their science, and why they're willing to put themselves on the line to keep doing it. Stay tuned.

• 6:15Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 7:00Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 7:22Speaker 00

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• 7:50Speaker 02

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• 8:23Speaker 06

  This is Outside In. I'm Justine Paradis. The morning after the barbecue, I headed out bright and early to meet the research team at a boat launch at Owosco Lake.

• 8:32Speaker 10

  So we can do four transects.

• 8:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, let's do four.

• 8:34Speaker 10

  Come back and then go back in and then go up.

• 8:35Speaker 08

  And then do the next four. So we're doing the work on shore, which is easier, right?

• 8:39Speaker 06

  This was their last day collecting samples, and they were getting organized.

• 8:43Speaker 08

  We're compromised.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Owosco Lake is one of upstate New York's Finger Lakes, a cluster of long, narrow troughs carved by retreating glaciers beginning millions of years ago. Historically, they are deep and beautiful, and clean. But the team here is trying to understand something new happening on these lakes: harmful algal blooms. Generally speaking, harmful algal blooms, or HABs for short, are not uncommon in the summer. But globally, they're on the rise. Factors like heat and agricultural runoff can feed pre-existing microbes until their populations suddenly explode.

• 9:29Speaker 06

  The ones that these scientists are most interested in are actually caused by cyanobacteria, which is technically not actually an algae, but anyway. These blooms can look weird: foamy or scummy, turning the water as green and thick as pea soup. They can also smell weird, like sulfur or rotten eggs. But the scary part is less immediately perceptible. The blooms produce toxins, harmful to your nervous system and to your liver, and that makes the water undrinkable and dangerous. Here's Bob Howard.

• 10:02Speaker 08

  Exactly. They'll stick to a dog, and the dog goes home and licks them, and it'll kill them.

• 10:08Speaker 06

  Yikes.

• 10:09Speaker 08

  Some of the toxins are also volatile, so it'll be released to the air, and even kayaking through the bloom can be hazardous.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  No way.

• 10:21Speaker 06

  Until 2015, no one had ever documented a hab in all but one of the Finger Lakes. That's because typically, harmful algal blooms occur in muckier water, places that are high in phosphorus. According to scientists, these blooms should not be happening in the Finger Lakes. But they are. And they're starting to appear in other places where they shouldn't. In Lake Superior, Quebec, lakes further north in the Canadian Shield. So the scientists here are calling them unconventional harmful algal blooms.

• 10:55Speaker 08

  I thought I understood lakes. I thought I understood cyanobacteria blooms, and I don't. What am I missing?

• 11:02Speaker 06

  This week's sampling will be, they hope, a start of an answer.

• 11:12Speaker 08

  Doug says we're on station. Roger, Roger.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  Today, they're sampling a shallower area. But all week, the team has been pulling cores of mud in very deep parts of the lake, layers of sediment that will let them look back at conditions for the past couple centuries.

• 11:28Speaker 10

  The front side of the boat is just the muddy part.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  I'm in the mud zone.

• 11:32Speaker 10

  You're in the mud zone.

• 11:33Speaker 06

  That's Joshua Thienpont, a Canadian paleolymnologist. He studies ancient lakes.

• 11:38Speaker 10

  There's like these hands here. It looks like some swamp monster has come out of the bottom of the lake and was clinging to the front door. In reality, it's just me.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  You're the swamp monster.

• 11:50Speaker 10

  The mud monster.

• 11:52Speaker 06

  Josh is a flurry of activity, tossing the unwieldy core into the water, then lying down flat on the deck, leaning over the side, then up again, hauling ropes like he's pulling up an anchor.

• 12:01Speaker 10

  Coming up.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  It is really physical work, and it's going, okay.

• 12:06Speaker 10

  Sorry.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  Josh loses one coring tube, and then, a few minutes later...

• 12:12Speaker 10

  Another tube.

• 12:13Speaker 06

  He loses another.

• 12:17Speaker 11

  Sorry, I'm here to capture the hard day.

• 12:20Speaker 10

  That's okay. I don't want it all looking like sunshine and rainbows. There are some sediments that just give up their secrets a little bit less easily. So...

• 12:35Speaker 06

  From the outside, science might feel far away from everyday realities. Maybe a sterile or even elite life of papers, journals, lab work. But today, Josh is literally getting his hands dirty. He's got mud splattered everywhere, on his clothes, on his face, even in his mouth. You've got it in your teeth.

• 12:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, I can taste it.

• 12:59Speaker 06

  It looks clayey.

• 13:00Speaker 10

  20% sand.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  And the stakes of this work are very real. It's hard and expensive to remove the toxins caused by harmful algal blooms. Boiling the water doesn't help, it actually makes it worse. And the Finger Lakes alone are the water supply for over a million people. And that's one reason why, for many of these folks, science is more than a career. It's a community, a lifestyle, and sometimes even a family business. Josh, for instance, has a six-year-old. When he gets back to Toronto, his wife, who's also a paleolimnologist, will take off to do her own fieldwork. Irina Creed, one of the leads this week, is a hydrologist at the University of Toronto.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  And she's here with her 20-something-year-old daughter, Nico Trick.

• 13:50Speaker 12

  I've tagged along all my life, actually. Since I was like 10. I've done coring in particularly since I was about 10.

• 13:58Speaker 06

  Nico's dad, Charlie Trick, he also studies harmful algal blooms, but on the ocean. About 20 years ago, after returning from an 18-day ocean cruise sampling a particularly big harmful algal bloom off the coast of Vancouver, Charlie got sick. Here's Irina.

• 14:17Speaker 13

  He was giving a lecture at Western University in Canada. It was the time of chalk and blackboard, and he's writing there. And by the end of the lecture, he had dropped the line that he was writing, and it just fell right down to the bottom, and he had no strength whatsoever left.

• 14:35Speaker 06

  It was neurological damage in his shoulder. Charlie couldn't lift his nine-month-old baby. And he says the doctors said this was one in a million neurological damage caused by a poison. And their family thinks the timing was such, that it was caused by the algae.

• 14:51Speaker 13

  It makes it very personal. I've seen firsthand the harm that these toxin-producing algae can create. And so it makes me feel even more wanting to solve the problem. Not only for my husband, I can't solve what happened to him. But maybe we can avoid it happening to others, or at least understand it better so that others can benefit.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  Is he still living with that?

• 15:17Speaker 13

  Yes, since that time, which would have been 22 years ago. The recovery has not been complete.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  You might think that all this personal sacrifice and proximity to climate change and pollution and the problems of the world might be a good reason for scientists to feel depressed. But at least here, that doesn't appear to be so. Back at the barbecue, I overheard Irina reflecting on the week.

• 15:51Speaker 13

  Do you ever just feel lucky? This whole week has been luck. Everything working out, good weather. You come here with a good heart, everything works out.

• 16:03Speaker 06

  I heard this kind of thing repeatedly, expressions of positivity, gratitude, and curiosity. But the truth is, there is also a whole other set of feelings running in the background: fear, anxiety, and shock.

• 16:19Speaker 13

  Well, I work with US EPA, USGS, US Forest Service, and it's almost like we're mourning on the call for the first 20 minutes about what the loss is. And it's very heavy. It's very heavy.

• 16:33Speaker 06

  Here's Bob Howard.

• 16:34Speaker 08

  Hey, Cornell. I'm on the faculty at Cornell University. I lost $1.2 million worth of funding over the last month or so. We had a grant from the USDA to measure methane emissions from dairy farm operations. That funding's been pulled, it's gone.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  The Trump administration is making major cuts to science funding. Shuttering the entire scientific research arm of the EPA, pausing federal grants to universities. So there's hiring freezes all over the place and fewer opportunities for students.

• 17:04Speaker 08

  Our graduates are scared. They're wondering whether there'll be jobs available for them when they get out. Our undergraduates, if they're majoring in environmental science, some of them are doing it just because they are so in love with the field and so dedicated. But those who have a practical bent are going, "Look, we're giving up on environmental protection. Research stuff is going away. Will there be jobs?" I get asked that on an almost daily basis when I'm at work advising students. There isn't a good answer. You can't be reassuring, I don't think.

• 17:38Speaker 08

  We're not being reassuring.

• 17:39Speaker 13

  We're not safe. If I gave that impression, we're not. I have colleagues in Canada who receive funding from the United States, who have expended funds on doing research for American organizations, and that funding has just been cut off. And there are debts that are associated with that that Canadian universities have to reconcile and address. We're not talking about tens of thousands of dollars. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 18:09Speaker 06

  Another member of this international group is Fulbright scholar Anita Dedich, a Bosnian scientist with a special focus on algae. This is a huge career moment for her, years in the making.

• 18:21Speaker 14

  For me, it was confirmation that I'm on the great way.

• 18:27Speaker 06

  You almost couldn't come, right?

• 18:29Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 18:30Speaker 08

  She's worked for years to apply to get here, right? It's a very, very competitive process to be a Fulbright scholar. Anita, you started applying three years ago, working on...

• 18:41Speaker 14

  Four.

• 18:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, right?

• 18:43Speaker 14

  Yes.

• 18:45Speaker 06

  Earlier this spring, just as Anita was set to get her visa, the entire Fulbright program was frozen at the State Department. Bob had to personally intervene to get her here.

• 18:56Speaker 08

  It just adds chaos and stress. And that's true of virtually everything we're doing now.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  And that's just the money. Travel to the United States wasn't a simple choice for everyone. So for the Canadians in the room, crossing the border, how was that feeling these days?

• 19:22Speaker 13

  Uncomfortable.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  Because of nerves or? Tell me more.

• 19:29Speaker 13

  It's a complex situation. I think some of my colleagues have been afraid to cross the border, especially ones that are visible minorities. We've had national academic organizations giving advisories for us not to come to the United States, especially if you're socially active on media and custom officers can stop and check your social media. And there have been reports of computers being taken and academics being detained.

• 20:01Speaker 06

  These experiences aren't the norm, but Irene says it only takes a couple stories to make everyone scared. So they did take precautions, like instead of the Canadians driving their equipment across the border, Bob, an American, drove up and brought it back himself, just in case.

• 20:19Speaker 13

  These tense times, you just don't know. Things are not normal. And so you kind of feel a blessing when it works and pray for the best.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  Pray for the best. This project involves acts of faith. Faith that they'll find a boat capable of doing this kind of sampling, in this case, lent and driven by a local dairy farmer who even paid for the gas out of his own pocket. Faith that the delicate work of deepwater coring will go well. And faith they'll find the money to even pay for it. They don't actually have any dedicated funding for this project. Some are earning their regular salary this week, while others aren't getting paid at all. But their time is just one part of it. There's also the cost of analysis. Six lakes, 120 samples each, each sample costing about $1,000 to process.

• 21:18Speaker 06

  So hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 21:21Speaker 13

  Frankly, I'll be completely honest with you. I don't know where I'm going to get some of the funding. Maybe we've been at this long enough that we believe that it will come and we'll figure it out. But that's where we're, that's the situation we're in. You hope.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  Outside and we'll be back after a break.

• 21:54Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background.

• 22:39Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 23:00Speaker 00

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• 23:29Speaker 02

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• 24:00Speaker 06

  This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Justine Paradis. We spent the first half of the show on and around upstate New York's Finger Lakes. Now I want to take you to another place, not far from there, to a hill just south of Ithaca, New York.

• 24:18Speaker 15

  So, there's our precipitation collector. And up there is where we're collecting air quality samples.

• 24:26Speaker 06

  This is Tom Butler, today sporting a Cornell Ornithology baseball cap and a t-shirt depicting the state fossil of New York. He manages this site in the woods outside of Ithaca, one of the longest-running atmospheric monitoring stations in the country. It's modest. At the top of the hill, there's a little hut with a small tower. And down the hill in the meadow... Basically, it's like a wooden platform with a couple buckets. That's what it looks like from here.

• 24:53Speaker 15

  Yeah, bucket science.

• 24:55Speaker 06

  Bucket science. Tom tells me this method was originally designed to measure nuclear fallout in the mid-20th century. But here, they're using it to measure rainfall chemistry, notably acid rain. Up the hill, he's measuring atmospheric gases, like ozone.

• 25:13Speaker 15

  So, there's, the ozone is 32 parts per billion, 33 parts per billion, which is pretty good. You want to keep it under, under 70.

• 25:24Speaker 06

  This site is one of hundreds across the country, which together offer a window into the atmosphere. The data is available for free, for anyone to use, and has been critical for designing policy that tackles things like acid rain. Every week, Tom visits the site to collect the samples and mail them off to a central lab in Wisconsin for processing.

• 25:45Speaker 15

  Okay, and then, you know, they ask about sensor heater and motor box operated properly? Yes, spring gauge.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  It's quiet, routine, even kind of boring. The only drama today was the question of if a bird had pooped in his samples.

• 26:02Speaker 15

  Bird droppings, no.

• 26:03Speaker 06

  It hadn't. Or if the hornets were still nesting on one of his platforms. They weren't.

• 26:10Speaker 15

  Okay, how long have I been doing this? We found this location in 1976.

• 26:18Speaker 06

  So you've basically been coming here at least once a week for 50 years?

• 26:23Speaker 15

  Yeah, yeah. Stuck in a rut.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  You think?

• 26:30Speaker 15

  No, I think it's worthwhile. It's a real worthwhile. You know, long-term monitoring is not sexy. Lots of times, people don't want to fund it, but it's very, very valuable stuff.

• 26:42Speaker 06

  Why?

• 26:43Speaker 15

  Because you can see what's happening over the long term and what direction things are going. And you only get that with long-term data. And it takes a while to consider something long-term.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  In recent years, these monitoring stations have started to pick up something new, not just here at this site in upstate New York, but in a lot of places across the country. A rise in ammonia. Ammonia is a form of nitrogen gas. It's not regulated as a pollutant, but plenty of people consider it to be one. And one reason why this matters...

• 27:21Speaker 15

  Around here, everybody's concerned about these harmful algae blooms.

• 27:26Speaker 06

  Is that it could be connected to these new, unconventional, harmful algal blooms.

• 27:36Speaker 06

  That ammonia hypothesis, it's Bob's. Bob Howarth, Earth Systems Scientist and Cornell Professor.

• 27:43Speaker 08

  My hypothesis is that it's nitrogen. I think it's safe to say that no one can claim with certainty and understand what's going on.

• 27:51Speaker 06

  Bob's getting ready to retire next year. And he's been around the block. Again, Bob is one of the most widely cited environmental scientists in the world, and he's worked under a lot of different political winds. He's even served on the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee under multiple presidents.

• 28:07Speaker 08

  When Mr. Biden became president, he fired everyone on that panel, including me, in order to have a clean slate. And then they reappointed me. And as far as I know, as of today, I have not yet been fired again.

• 28:19Speaker 06

  Through it all, he's found a way to get a lot of different work funded. But this moment is different. And one way to understand why scientists are so concerned is by understanding the distinction between basic science and applied science.

• 28:36Speaker 06

  Applied science is a targeted way of looking at an issue, pursuing ways to make batteries more efficient, to support renewable energy, or trials of new treatments to fight cancer. Basic science is much more, well, basic. It's the pursuit of understanding almost for the sake of it. Things like, how do black holes work? Or spike proteins on viruses.

• 29:01Speaker 08

  You know, in order to do strong science long term, you can't only do applied science. You really need to encourage people to do basic science, follow their curiosity, follow their creativity, and that's how totally new discoveries are made.

• 29:17Speaker 06

  This spring, on top of the canceled grants, the Trump administration proposed about $15 billion worth of cuts to basic science. That's a third of the nationwide budget for this work. This is, of course, all in flux, and that number may change. But if big cuts come to pass, a lot of scientists think that would be a huge mistake. There are proposed cuts to applied science, too, but the folks I talked to are specifically alarmed about the cuts to basic research. And that's because basic science is specifically long-term in nature, an investment in the future. They say, with this level of cut, we don't know what we won't know.

• 30:05Speaker 06

  Plus, applied science, the more targeted kind, tends to be built on basic science. Take the research into the harmful algal blooms. It doesn't fall easily into one category. It's both.

• 30:19Speaker 08

  If we're going to manage it, we need to understand it. You can't manage what you don't understand. So that's a real applied issue. My interest in it, you know, I'm interested in that management aspect, but, you know, I'm driven equally by just raw curiosity. I thought I understood lakes. I thought I understood cyanobacteria blooms, and I don't.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  To do applied science, to manage harmful algal blooms, we're gonna need information from cool international teams doing deep-water coring out on the Finger Lakes, from unsexy stuff like long-term monitoring, and who knows where else.

• 30:53Speaker 08

  As a basic scientist, you can never tell what will matter and what won't, right? You just, you can't tell.

• 30:58Speaker 06

  I did, by the way, reach out to the National Science Foundation for this story to ask about what's getting cut and why. They declined to comment. For Bob and the scientists sampling in the Finger Lakes this week, the project has involved acts of faith, a gamble that things will work out. But that's not just true for the scientists. Investing taxpayer money into scientific institutions and research grants, that's kind of an act of faith, too. A gamble that the scientific process is a pretty decent way of stress-testing new information and ideas. That supporting scientists to follow their curiosity ultimately benefits society, or at least the country.

• 31:39Speaker 08

  We live in the richest country in the world, richest country that's ever existed in the world, and that's in large part because of our technological prowess, and that comes from high-quality science and engineering.

• 31:55Speaker 06

  Without that federal money, some research, perhaps the most obviously profitable kind, might be fine. But environmental research, bucket science, and long-term monitoring, Bob's doubtful.

• 32:09Speaker 08

  You know, would someone else fund it? Well, no one else has, you know? No one's stepped forward for this so far. So that's one answer, and I don't think, I don't think it would happen.

• 32:24Speaker 06

  A little scale here.

• 32:28Speaker 15

  So I got a weight and I want to subtract the lid. I know the weight of the bucket.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  Back at the hill, just outside of Ithaca, Tom Butler is wrapping up a sampling for this week, collecting information on acid rain and ozone. Just one site in a couple of networks of nationwide monitoring programs built over decades.

• 32:51Speaker 15

  You know, this data is used by people all over the country and all over the world. Just since 2007, they've estimated over 3,000 publications related to these networks.

• 33:06Speaker 06

  Over the years, Tom's routine has changed, largely for a reason that you might be able to guess: money. Tom used to come out twice a week. Now it's once, every Tuesday. Right now, they're testing new, cheaper types of samplers. They're also planning to combine samples to save money on analysis, not to mention to save on postage. How much does it cost to run this site?

• 33:30Speaker 15

  Boy, that's a tricky question because there's analytical costs and, you know, site operator costs

• 33:42Speaker 15

  per year, I would say. If you're including everything, it's probably $25,000 a year, or something like that.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  So what happened this spring?

• 33:56Speaker 15

  So, April 30th, CARRY Institute got a letter from the federal government.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  The CARRY Institute is Tom's employer.

• 34:08Speaker 15

  Saying, "Your contract is immediately terminated at the convenience of the government as soon as you acknowledge that you received this message." And we acknowledged we received the message. So at 1:53 PM on April 30th, our contract was terminated.

• 34:34Speaker 06

  Right at a moment when the Trump administration is moving to open coal plants and loosen regulations on power plants, the federal government is pulling their funding from one of the country's oldest atmospheric monitoring sites.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  The kind of place that can tell us what's going on in the atmosphere and if acid rain is on the rise. As for Tom, he's been doing this 50 years. He could have retired a long time ago. But for now, funding be damned. Tom's out here every Tuesday. Yet you have kept coming out to take the samples.

• 35:12Speaker 15

  Yeah. And I'm going to keep doing it as long as I can.

• 35:20Speaker 06

  Later, after I turned off the mic and we got back in the car to drive down the hill, Tom added something else. "It's easy to wreck stuff," he said. "It's a lot harder to build it."

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Justine, you took a ton of pictures of science in action during your reporting, right?

• 35:55Speaker 06

  Yes, to see pictures of bucket science and of late coring in action. You can check out the show notes. We've got a link to our website and to our Instagram. We are at OutsideInRadio there and on Blue Sky and TikTok.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  That's it for Outside In this week. This episode was produced, reported, and mixed by Justine Paradis.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  Special thanks to all the folks who talked with me for this episode, including Jean Leikens, Charlie Trick, Doug Young, Roxanne Moreno, Gareth Smith, and Renee Santoro. At AAAS, thanks to Sudip Perik and Alessandra Zimmerman.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  This episode was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. I'm your host, Nate Hedgy. Our team also includes Marina Hanke, Jessica Hunt, and Felix Poon.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  Music in this episode came from Low 5, Silver Maple, and Blue Dot Sessions.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Outside In is a production of NHPR.

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