In October 2020, Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email that maligned a colleague. A few days before, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, had, with two others, put out a statement—the Great Barrington Declaration—calling for looser public-health restrictions in the face of the pandemic. In place of lockdowns, the statement contended, the nation could simply let infections spread among most of the population while the old and infirm remained in relative isolation. Collins, like many other scientists, thought this was a dangerous idea. Bhattacharya and his co-authors were “fringe epidemiologists” whose proposal needed a “quick and devastating” rebuttal, Collins wrote in an email that later came to light through a public-records request. Collins doubled down on this dismissal in a media interview a week later: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he told The Washington Post. “This is not mainstream sncience.”

So where are these two now? Collins abruptly ended his 32-year career at NIH last week, while Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s pick to take over the agency. The turnabout has created a pleasing narrative for those aggrieved at scientific governance. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you because of what you believed,” Jim Banks, a Republican senator from Indiana, said at Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing yesterday. For Bhattacharya, a man who has described himself as the victim of “a propaganda attack” perpetrated by the nation’s $48 billion biomedical-research establishment, Collins’s insult has become a badge of pride, even a leading qualification for employment in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The “fringe” is now in charge.

Last year, when Collins was asked by a House committee about his comments on the Great Barrington Declaration, he said he was alarmed that the proposal had so quickly made its way to his boss, Alex Azar, who was then the secretary of Health and Human Services. Now that role is filled by another figure from the fringe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and presumably, outsider scholars such as Bhattacharya—a health economist and a nonpracticing physician with a predilection for contrary views—will have greater sway than ever. (Bhattacharya declined to be interviewed for this story. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Science, to succeed, needs free speech,” Bhattacharya told the committee during the hearing. “It needs an environment where there’s tolerance to dissent.” This has long been his message—and warning—to the scientific community. In Bhattacharya’s view, Collins helped coordinate an effort to discredit his and others’ calls for an alternative approach to the pandemic; Collins’s role at an institution that disperses billions of dollars in research funding gave him a frightening power to “cast out heretics,” as Bhattacharya put it in 2023, “just like the medieval Catholic Church did.”

Now he means to use the same authority to rectify that wrong. In his opening remarks yesterday, Bhattacharya vowed to “create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.” What this means in practice isn’t yet clear, but The Wall Street Journal has reported that he might try to prioritize funding for universities that score high on to-be-determined measures of campus-wide “academic freedom.” In other words, Bhattacharya may attempt to use the agency’s billion-dollar leverage in reverse, to bully academics into being tolerant.

These aspirations match up with those of his allies who are riding into Washington as champions of the underheard in science. Last month, Kennedy promised in his first speech to his staff that he would foster debate and “convene representatives of all viewpoints” to study chronic disease. “Nothing is going to be off-limits,” he said. Marty Makary, the nominee for FDA commissioner, has talked about his experience of the “censorship complex” and bemoaned an atmosphere of “total intolerance” in public health. Consensus thinking is oppressive, these men suggest. Alternative ideas, whatever those might be, have intrinsic value.

[Read: Revenge of the COVID contrarians]

Surely we can all agree that groupthink is a drag. But a curious pattern is emerging among the fringe-ocrats who are coming into power. Their dissenting views, strewn across the outskirts of conventional belief, appear to be curling toward a new and fringe consensus of its own. On the subject of vaccines, for instance, there used to be some space between the positions of Kennedy, the nation’s leading figure casting doubt on the safety and benefits of inoculations, and Bhattacharya. Kennedy has made false claims about the dangers of the mRNA-based COVID shots. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, once called the same vaccines “a medical miracle—extremely valuable for protecting the vulnerable against severe COVID-19 disease.” (He even criticized Anthony Fauci for downplaying the benefits of COVID shots by continuing to wear a mask after being immunized.)

Bhattacharya has in the past been tolerant of others’ more outrageous claims about vaccines. But that neutrality has lately drifted into a gentle posture of acceptance, like a one-armed hug. Under questioning from senators, he said that he is convinced that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccine (and that he fully supports vaccinating children against measles). But he also floated the idea that Kennedy’s goal of doing further research on the topic would be worthwhile just the same. Last July, despite his past enthusiasm for mRNA-based COVID-19 shots, Bhattacharya said that he was planning to sign on to a statement calling for their deauthorization, because they are “contributing to an alarming rise in disability and excess deaths.” Kennedy has petitioned for the same, on the same grounds. (There is, in fact, no meaningful evidence that the vaccines have caused a spate of excess deaths.) In a post on X, Bhattacharya explained that he’d been hesitant to take this step at first, because some groups might still benefit from the vaccines, but then he came to realize that pulling the vaccine will create the conditions necessary for testing whether it still has any value.

[Read: The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest]

On this and other issues, the dissenting voices have started to combine into a chorus. The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin provides another case in point. In yesterday’s hearing, Bhattacharya described scientific experts’ early dismissal of the possibility that the coronavirus spread from a lab in Wuhan, China, as “a low point in the history of science.” That’s an overstatement, but the criticism is fair: Dissenting views were stifled and ignored. But here again, what started as mere endorsement of debate has evolved into a countervailing sense of certainty. Although there’s still plenty of reason to believe that the pandemic did, in fact, begin with the natural passage of the virus from an animal host, the most important details about the pandemic’s origin remain unknown. Yet the fringe is nearly settled on the alternative interpretation. Bhattacharya has said that the pandemic “likely” started in a lab (a position that has been endorsed, albeit with low or moderate confidence, by almost half of the government agencies that have looked into it). Makary called the theory “a no-brainer.” And RFK Jr. published a 600-page book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, in support of it.

Based on the Senate’s Republican majority and the precedent of Kennedy’s confirmation, Bhattacharya is almost certain to sail through his Senate vote, and in short order. His prospects of delivering on his mission, though, are hazier. Some of his positions are already being undermined by the Trump administration’s prior actions. According to a new report in Nature, the agency is terminating hundreds of active research grants that may be construed to have a focus on gender or diversity, among other topics. Some work may be permitted to continue as long as any “DEI language” has been stripped from associated documents. This is hardly the “culture of respect for free speech” that Bhattacharya promised yesterday. Other, basic workings of the NIH have been dismantled under the second Trump administration: Approximately 1,200 employees have been fired, grant reviews have been frozen, and policies have been declared that would squeeze research funding for the nation’s universities. Bhattacharya is about to take the levers of power, but those levers have been ripped from their housing, and the springs removed and sold as scrap.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

When pressed on these developments yesterday, Bhattacharya kept returning to a single line: “I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH, and the scientists that the NIH supports, have the resources they need.” Whether he’d have the authority or know-how to do so remains in doubt. “Dr. Bhattacharya doesn’t really understand how NIH works, and he doesn’t understand how decisions are made,” Harold Varmus, who ran the agency in the 1990s, told me shortly after the hearing ended. As for Bhattacharya’s goals of promoting free speech among scientists and nurturing cutting-edge ideas for research, Varmus said that the problem has been misdiagnosed: Whatever conservatism exists doesn’t really come from the top, he said, but from the grant-review committees and the scientists themselves. “It’s exasperating for me to see what is about to happen,” he told me, “because this guy should not be in my old office.”

For what it’s worth, Bhattacharya has also shared other ambitious plans. He aims, for instance, to make science more reliable by incorporating into NIH-funded research the dreary work of replicating findings. “Replication is the heart and soul of what truth is in science,” he said during the hearing. That might help solve a pressing problem in the sciences, but it would also be a very costly project, started at a time when research costs are being cut. Under current conditions, even just the basic job of running the NIH seems pretty stressful on its own. Bhattacharya has, by his account, experienced lots of stress in recent years due to the many efforts to discredit him. His confirmation may not bring him full relief.

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On a long car ride recently, I listened to a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. I’d noticed it at the top of the charts, which I found curious. I later learned that was in part because Joe Rogan had recommended it. “I think some telepathy is real,” he had said. “It is real”—which is not a statement normally worth taking seriously. Except maybe now, when belief in telepathy seems to be joining forces with vaccine skepticism and belief in UFOs and nutritional remedies to create a Marvel Universe of conspiracy theorists banding together to fight the common enemy of Establishment Science.

The Telepathy Tapes starts with a small domestic miracle. It features nonspeaking autistic children who have learned to communicate using a method sometimes known as spelling, or facilitated communication. The facilitator, who in the podcast is mostly the speller’s mother, guides the child’s hand, or arm, or sometimes lightly touches them to help them spell out words. It’s a method developed in the 1970s to allow nonspeaking children to express their thoughts. Later tests proved the method to be wholly unreliable, although the podcast claims that it has evolved to be more so. And then the podcast ups the ante. Not only can the children communicate, but they are telepathic, and by the end of the series they are communing with the dead and predicting disasters.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we bring on Dan Engber, a senior editor on The Atlantic’s science desk, who started looking into facilitated communication about a decade ago. Engber explains how spelling and alleged telepathy have always been intertwined. And he theorizes why the forces of conspiracism have lately been aligning in a novel way.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: On a long road trip over winter break, I listened to all 10 episodes of this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. The show is about a group of nonspeaking autistic kids who are able to communicate using a method sometimes known as “spelling” or “facilitated communication.” Essentially, someone—the facilitator—helps guide the kids, using a keyboard or an iPad to spell out messages.

That already is a kind of magic because kids who have been unable to communicate can now share their thoughts. But this podcast takes it to a whole new level of magic. It’s not just that they can communicate; these kids can read minds.

Houston’s brother: I’ll bring Houston up to them and just tell him, Hey. Think of one little thing, and he writes it out on the board.

Ky Dickens: So he’s read your friends’ minds?

Houston’s brother: He has read my friends’ minds before. I’ve seen it firsthand.

Rosin: By the end of the series, the kids are not just reading minds. They’re communing with the dead, predicting disasters, and generally outclassing the neurotypical mortals.

Maura:  Again, she always tells me about these God visits, as she calls them, that happen at night. And so I said, Did he talk to you again last night? And she said, Yes, unfortunately. And then she does: Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Rosin: On that road trip, my partner and I got into a big argument about this podcast. The mind-reading scenes sounded so believable on the podcast, but telepathy?

Manisha: What is this phenomenon happening? Why are his mind and my mind completely connected?

Rosin: Why were so many people buying into this?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Today we’re going to talk about how an idea like telepathy lands differently now: the cultural conditions that make this old idea—that’s almost too fringe to bother debunking—take off.

And we’re going to do that by looking at this blockbuster podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which started out as this low-budget independent project. And then, in December, Joe Rogan started spreading the word.

Joe Rogan: I think some telepathy is real.

Duncan Trussell: It is real.

Rogan: I think it is real.

Rosin:  And then the host of Telepathy Tapes—her name is Ky Dickens—got an agent, did an interview with Rogan and then more interviews, and now she has a documentary in the works.

From the car that day, I sent a Slack message to an Atlantic colleague who knows a lot about facilitated communication.

Dan Engber:  December 28, 4 o’clock p.m.—not a time that I was on Slack.

Rosin: That is Dan Engber, a science writer at The Atlantic.

Engber:  I discovered that sliding my can of seltzer around on this table is sort of like an ASMR thing.

Rosin:  Dan started looking into facilitated communication about 10 years ago—

Engber: Was developed in the 1970s in Australia.

Rosin: —as part of the disabilities-rights movement, a form of empowerment.

 Engber: And it was seen in this whole tradition of liberating people with communication issues from, basically, the prison of lowered expectations—just because: They might not do well in an IQ test if they can’t talk, but if you give them a way to communicate, they can reveal who they really are.

Rosin:  The way it works is: A facilitator helps the autistic person spell out messages—

Engber: By holding the person’s hand or forearm or possibly their shoulder, or touching them in other ways, or holding the keyboard or the letter board in front of them.

The facilitated part of “facilitated communication” means someone has to be there to help.  It always involved someone else there, doing something to help the person type.

Rosin: Now, to be clear: Spelling, facilitated communication—or FC for short—is not reading people’s minds. Or it’s not supposed to be. So it’s a bit of a jump from FC to telepathy, which is why Dan agreed to look into the Telepathy Tapes podcast. It was a new—let’s say—development.

Ky Dickens, the host of the podcast, is not a science journalist. In interviews, she’s referred to herself as a “science nerd” and a “skeptic.” Generally, she makes documentaries. But since she didn’t have the funds at the time to make this documentary, she decided to make it into a podcast.

By the way, The Atlantic reached out to Dickens for comment, but she didn’t respond.

Okay. So the podcast begins with the series of spelling experiments that she’s running, sort of living-room experiments.

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: What’s the setup? Describe to us who and what is in this room.

Engber: Okay. The setup is, she starts by—this is kind of her entrée into this world. She hears a woman named Diane Hennacy Powell. This is a psychiatrist based in the Pacific Northwest who’s written a book about ESP and is very interested herself in the topic of people with autism who, in Powell’s view, have kind of a savant skill for reading minds or ESP or psi phenomena. So Dickens hears Powell on a podcast and gets the idea that she wants to pursue this.

And so she starts working with Powell to get some of these people and to design experiments, ways to test them, and then she’s going to film it and record audio from it and talk about it. And so that’s where the podcast starts.

So they set up in a rented house in Glendale, and they fly in a family from Mexico. All the spellers only go by their first name.

Sophia: This is Mia.

Diane Hennacy Powell: Hi, Mia. Nice to meet you.

Sophia: Yes. She’s waving.

Engber: So it’s this girl, Mia. I think she’s a teenager. And they start running these experiments.

Dickens: So Dr. Powell, what numbers do you want to put in there?

Powell: I would like to try three-digit numbers, so they’ll be numbers between 100 and 999.

Engber: Powell will generate a random number on an iPad app.

Rosin: Powell’s the scientist?

Engber: Powell’s the scientist.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: Then she’ll show that number to Mia’s mom. Behind a screen, Mia has a blindfold on. They’ve taken extra care to make sure, you know, they’ve covered up any mirrors in the room, even a TV screen.

Powell: That’s a reflective surface there, the TV, so we need to cover that.

Dickens: Okay. And there’s a mirror there.

Powell: And there’s a mirror there. Yes, that’s got to be covered up, as well, or taken down.

Engber: So they’re taking a lot of care to make sure only Mia’s mom is seeing this number. And then, Mia’s mom, who is the facilitator, sits next to Mia. And Mia spells out, using her letter board, what her mom has just seen, or she says what the number is. There could be numbers on the board too.

Woman: Se puede quitar.

Dickens: She’s pointing at six.

Mia’s mother: Nine, eight.

Engber: So that’s the test. That’s the telepathy experiment as described in the first episode of the show.

Rosin: And I have to say, listening to it, now just in the pure audio—obviously, I can’t see it, but I’m listening to it—it is like a magic show. I mean, when you listen to it, you do think, Whoa. You know, How are they doing this in the way they’re describing? Like, How is this autistic child doing this? Like, the mother hasn’t said a word. You haven’t heard the mother say a word. So that’s the feeling of listening to it. It is a little like watching a miracle, you know?

Engber: Yeah—

Rosin: Listening to a miracle. We’re not watching it. And I think that’s probably a key difference.

Engber: Well, I hate to say this to a podcast host, but I think the problem here is: There’s sort of a pernicious problem with audio that is in play here.

Rosin: Boo.

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: It’s all right. Go ahead.

Engber: It’s all about voices and people’s impressions. And it’s so intimate, right? And I think these are all things that are echoed in the people with telepathy—supposedly with telepathy—as well. So I think it’s worth talking this through. In listening to the podcast, you’re hearing Ky Dickens, the host, just be so amazed by what she’s seeing. And then one of the members of her crew, she describes as this real, like, skeptical guy, this real materialist, and he kind of has a conversion in real time on the podcast.

Michael Ognisanti: It’s hard for me to not believe this is authentic. I’m looking at everything. I’m watching her. I’m watching the mom. I’m watching—I’m watching everything. And for me and my perspective, it’s real.

Engber: So for the listener, you’re not even hearing Mia. Of course, Mia doesn’t speak. That’s the point. But you’re hearing the people who are seeing Mia, and you’re getting their reactions, and they are so amazed, and it is so sincere that that emotion just transfers to you. Also, the podcast is really, I would say, amateurishly produced. I talked to one podcast producer who described it as having kind of like a Blair Witch effect, which I thought was apt. It’s like, that just makes it feel a little more real somehow.

Mia’s mother: Uno, tres.

Group: Bravo, Mia! (Applause.)

Rosin: Okay. So back to my original question: Dan, as someone who knows about facilitated communication and spelling, what are we missing?

Engber: Okay, so what is not described in that first episode is how spelling works, which involves the facilitator—in this case, with Mia, her mom—sitting on the sofa next to her and placing her finger on Mia’s forehead the entire time that Mia is spelling.

So, I mean, this is just—what does that mean? I know what it means. But, like, I think if the average listener of the podcast were to watch the videos, and there are videos on the podcast website—you pay $10, you can become a member, and then you can watch the videos—it just, like, gives you a first sense of, well: This process of producing the answers, you know, the messages from Mia, it’s very intimate.

It’s collaborative. Something here is going on. It’s not Mia on her own with a pen and paper writing out digits. It’s this intensely cooperative process to produce the messages. And that is a signal for what could really be going on here, which is that this method—again, going back to the 1970s in Australia—has long, long, long been known to have a problem, which is: It can be really, really hard to tell who is the actual author of the messages being produced.

[Music]

Rosin: Facilitated communication found its way from Australia in the ’70s to the U.S. by the ’80s and the early ’90s.

In a PBS Frontline documentary called “Prisoners of Silence” that aired in 1993, Kathy Hayduke, the mother of a nonspeaking autistic child, recalled the moment her daughter Stacy had a breakthrough—all thanks to FC and her daughter’s new facilitator.

Kathy Hayduke: And she said, Kathy, she’s telling me this, and she’s telling me that, and you’ve got to see it. So one day, she came over to the house and she said, Stacy, I know you’re excited. After all these years, you must have something you want to tell Mom. And Stacy types out, I love you, Mom.

Rosin: I can understand a mom wanting to hear I love you from her child. So the relief was real, and the emotions around FC were deep. But soon after the method came to the U.S., it was debunked—or, at least, declared wholly unreliable.

Engber: A lot of tests were done of people using facilitated communication to see if they could ever spell out a message with information that their facilitator didn’t know. So if the problem is, maybe your facilitator is really the one writing the messages, well, there’s an easy test for it. Like, okay, let me show you a picture of a sandwich. And then while your facilitator is not in the room, bring him back in the room. Tell me what you saw. And the reality was few, if any, people using FC could pass that test.

Rosin: To quote a program director in the PBS documentary who was involved in some of that testing, out of 180 trials, quote: “We literally really didn’t get one correct response.”

Rosin: Are you suggesting manipulation? Or what are you suggesting, exactly?

Engber: Definitely not manipulation.

Rosin: As we mentioned before, FC in its original form was just holding someone’s hand or arm or shoulder while the other person typed on a keyboard. Potentially—at least, optics-wise—lots of room for subconsciously guiding the person to where you want them to type.

But in Mia’s case, on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, her mom just had a finger on her forehead, or she was holding her chin.

Engber: I think this is really important. It is extreme—you could have read or reported on this at great length, as I have, and it’s still extremely hard to tell what’s going on when you’re seeing it with your own eyes. So I think that’s sort of how the podcast works. The people, the host, the camera guy—they’re seeing it with their own eyes and then reacting. And they’re reacting the way most people would react, seeing this with their own eyes, which is not like, Hey. This looks fake, but rather, This looks real.

Rosin: Okay. So the filmmaker had a certain reaction, which we can assume was an honest reaction. I mean, let’s just say it was an honest reaction, the filmmaker and the cameraman. They looked—they saw the hands on the forehead; they were like, Whoa, something beyond my comprehension is going on here. What did you see then? How did you assess the forehead touch?

Engber: Well, I think what is so easy to miss or so hard to grasp, even if you know what you’re looking for, is this idea that this might be working something like a Ouija board, where, you know, two or more people put their hands on something, and just the uncertainty of having multiple hands on it—I think it’s called a planchette, on the Ouija board, the thing you’re sliding around to different letters—

Rosin: Sure.

Engber: —it kind of feels like it’s moving on its own, even when you’re doing it, right? But even understanding that—this is my point: Even knowing that a Ouija board is a toy or a game, it works. You know that, you know, a spirit isn’t moving this thing, and yet it kind of feels like, Well, who is moving it?

Rosin: So Mia and her mom are doing what, then? Is it, like, a collective—I’m just trying to find a word or articulate what is happening in that room, because you’re not calling it manipulation. You’re not saying that Mia and her mom are kind of hucksters doing a circus trick to get themselves on a podcast. That’s not your characterization of them at all, right?

Engber: No chance.

Rosin: And you’re not saying that Ky Dickens, the host, or the cameraman are lying. We’re not saying that.

Engber: No chance, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t read minds. I will admit that up front, but I just—I’ve interviewed a lot of spellers. I’ve interviewed a lot of spellers’ moms. I’ve never met one that I thought was lying about it.

There’s one part in the podcast, actually, where Ky Dickens is addressing the skeptics that she knows are out there, and she just says, The idea that the facilitators might be somehow creating these messages is—I forget the phrase—like, unambiguously false. She just rejects outright the possibility that there’s any unconscious influence from the facilitators, from the parents.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And then she quotes one of the parents saying, “The thing is, Ky, we can’t all be lying.”

Rosin: Right.

Engber: And the implication there is, Yeah. Okay. Maybe you’re so skeptical you think Mia’s mom is a grifter or something. But there are so many parents out here who feel that their kids have telepathy. It can’t just be a whole army of grifters.

Rosin: Okay. So what’s in the mix then? Let me just try this, and you see if I’m with you here. So it’s not lying that you think is in the mix between this parent and child. It’s some form of communion—love, maybe, even? Connection? I would say, hope?

Like, there’s so much out there—I’m a parent of an autistic child, though not a nonverbal one, but—so much hope of, like, inside the child, there’s so much that this child wants to say and express with me and, like, a wish for connection. There’s a relationship or intimacy, and that translates into something. But it’s not clear what it is. Is it something like that?

Engber: I think it is a profoundly intimate act. I’ve had facilitators facilitate me. And it is—I mean, you’re sitting with a stranger, or I was sitting with a stranger, and she puts her hand on mine, and I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just, like, you suddenly are holding hands with someone; you feel close to them, right? And there’s just such a desire to—I think we all have a desire to connect and feel understood and feel like we’re understanding people.

Now, raise that desire to the hundredth power if you’re talking about a mother or a father trying to connect with their child, to the thousandth power if that child is nonspeaking, and it’s always sort of hard to exactly understand what’s going on in your child’s mind.

I mean, “desire” is even shortchanging it. It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: And here is this thing, and at first, it’s frustrating. It’s not working. And then, Wait! What’s that? A glimmer of something. Like, We’re doing this method, and we spelled out a word, and then it flowers from there, right? And then now we’re spelling out short sentences, and now my son is writing poetry. And now I’m learning about all this stuff. Like, Oh! He’s got a girlfriend. And he’s telling me all about that. What more could you want than have your kid tell you about their first love?

And so you can just see how the drive to make this thing work and to find meaning in it is so intense. And I think that is both very moving and very dangerous.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: If you believe telepathy is real, what else might you believe?

[Break]

Rosin: So facilitated communication has been around for decades and, as you said, has been debunked. But this podcast goes way further than that, right?

Engber: Right. Yeah. And this podcast actually invokes something that—I didn’t realize it, but—has been present since the start of facilitated communication, which is just that: Okay, if it is the case, if you’re facilitating me, and the messages that are coming out are actually you subconsciously writing those messages yourself, at some point, you might think, Hey. Wait a second. Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right?

It is just a natural effect of how you have this Ouija-board illusion, right? Just eventually, I might type something or spell something that is, you know, information that only you know, that I shouldn’t know. And so this is, in some way, just a byproduct of the Ouija board effect, right?

Rosin: Oh. So the flaws that you’ve already described in facilitated communication—if you’re not seeing them as flaws, the other word to call them is telepathy.

Engber: Exactly. So it’s really—it’s just like, you hit this fork in the road early in the process, right? There’s two problems here. If it is really true that the facilitator is the one who’s actually creating the messages, there’s two problems.

One: If the speller knows something that the facilitator doesn’t know, the speller can’t spell that out. That’s the message-passing test. That was the test that the scientists used to debunk this whole thing. So that’s problem No. 1e. So you have to deal with that problem.

Problem No. 2, though, is exactly the opposite: Okay, why does the speller seem to know things that are in the head of the facilitator? Like, they shouldn’t—why can they do that? And so you can either see that happen and go, You know what? I’m a little worried that this method doesn’t work, and then you move on to other interventions to try to help the nonspeaking person, or you say, Oh, I know what it is. The spelling is valid, and they have ESP.

Rosin:  Oh my god. That’s so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that. That’s exactly what it is. Of course you would call that telepathy because you are, in fact, reading the thoughts of the facilitator. It’s literally just a synonym for the problems you were describing.

Does the podcast talk about the history of facilitated spelling or telepathy at all?

Engber: Yeah, the podcast gets into it. I mean, there’s a certain point right at the beginning—it’s not clear what we’re even talking about. It’s just, Here’s this girl, Mia. She can read her mother’s mind. And as it goes along, it gets into the history of facilitated communication, the scandals. There were false sexual-abuse allegations; there were the debunkings of the ’90s.

And so the podcast has to engage with that, right? And what the host, Ky Dickens, does is: She basically acknowledges that all that happened. She says, But look—people were experiencing telepathy from the very beginning, and also the method has improved. We now have these new versions, called Rapid Prompting or Spelling to Communicate, and they’re much better. And also, she talks about one guy that she features in the podcast.

Manisha: What is that? What do you see, Akhil?

Engber: A man named Akhil, who is, according to the podcast, telepathic and can also speak to the dead.

Manisha: Akhil used to see, like, when my mom passed away, and I used to sit down and study with him, he would say, Your mom wants to play with me, and I said, Where is she? He said, She’s sitting beside me.

Engber: And he does this without being touched. So for her, it’s like, There you go. That’s proof.

Rosin: And what would you say about that? Because I do have to say, listening, Akhil and his mother are the most charming mother-son pair you will ever encounter.

Engber: I mean, this is, again—one of the complicating things about this is it’d be nice if you could just say, Oh, FC is fake, and everyone who uses it is, you know—the message is coming entirely from the facilitator. But it’s just such a diverse set of practices, and it involves such a diverse set of people and people-facilitator pairs. It’s just, like, a very complicated question.

Now, Akhil—you watched the video of him. He’s not being touched by his mother. But there are cases where he appears to read her mind by typing into an iPad keyboard, and she’s not touching him or the keyboard.

Dickens: Okay. So, Manisha, come stand here.

Dickens: (Narrating.) I’ve taken a step back and changed my body position slightly, just in case. I reach into the paper bag, and the new word is: tiger.

Dickens: This one.

Manisha: Okay. Here you go, buddy.

Voice software: T-i-g-e-r. Tiger.

Dickens: Wow, awesome.

Engber: I mean, it is really impressive. It looks like telepathy, but she is very involved in the process, right? She’s making sounds. She’s moving. And I think it just goes to show how this influence—what I would say is, like, unconscious influence over the creation of the messages—can happen in many different ways.

Like, it could happen if you’re holding a person’s hand. It could happen if you’re holding their shoulder, putting your finger on their forehead, holding the letter board for them and not even touching them. And my belief is that in the case of Akhil, it’s through these other cues. You can see in the video, she’s, like, leaning her body to one side or the other in concert with the direction that he has to move his finger to hit the next key on the keyboard.

So he has to type, you know, a-r, and those are on the left side of the keyboard, and she’s kind of leaning to the left. And then he has to type i-p-o, which is on the upper right of the keyboard, and she, like, leans her body in that direction. Now, in order for Akhil to pick up on those cues, I mean, the level of attunement that he must have to what she is, you know, perhaps subconsciously, wanting him to do is truly exquisite. I mean, it’s amazing.

Dickens: The answer is: 44,126,388.

Voice software: 4-4-1-2—

Engber: On the other hand, your other choice here is to believe that he really is telepathic and speaks to the dead. So you’re confronted with, you know, two extraordinary skills, one far more extraordinary than the other.

Rosin: Yeah. I have to say, I—listening to Akhil and his mother, I mean, never was I more torn. Like, I was tearing up listening to them, but mostly because of the depth of their love and attunement for each other, and her dedication to him. Like, I wasn’t so much paying attention to: Is he telepathic? I just doubted it from the beginning. But just this specific kind of intimacy they created with each other was just amazing.

So, you know, we’ve been talking about spelling and love. What are some of the more, can we say, outlandish claims that the podcast makes?

Engber: Yeah, so Dickens says that communing with the dead is—she describes it as—“a very common gift” among these telepathic spellers. I mean, there’s something funny about it—I’m sorry—about the fact that, you know, you’ve rejected, from the beginning, the possibility that this is a Ouija-board thing, and then the power that is emerged is, like, literally the conceit of a Ouija board, is talking to the dead.

Rosin: But it’s not just communing with the dead. I mean, you know, where it lost me is: She’s talking about universities in heaven. I mean, there’s some of the parents who feel extremely influenced by religiosity or spirituality.

Engber: Yes, the people are talking to angels. They’re prophesying disaster. They’re treating cancer. They’re, you know, reading hieroglyphics.

The list of powers—I mean, again, in Episode 1, it’s like, Oh, I know what number my mom is thinking of. By Episode 10, it’s like, I’m astrally projecting to a place called “The Hill,” where I am reading The Great Gatsby with angels.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: We hear about a telepathic parrot. We hear about a group of elephants that, for some reason, is able to observe a memorial on a specific day of the Gregorian calendar. Like, the claims really just—it’s almost like once you’ve accepted that telepathy is possible, once you have broken out of what Dickens refers to as the “materialist” mindset, anything is possible. Everything is on the table. You’re off to the races.

Rosin: Yes. Once you’ve gone through the portal, like, magic happens. Anything can happen.

Engber: Yeah, there’s a part in the Rogan interview where they’re just taking this to logical places. Like, once you accept the premise, Rogan is like, Imagine what the government would do with these kids.

Rogan: Isn’t that disgusting? That’s the first thing you think about: If someone’s extraordinary, could the government—like, the X-Men?

Dickens: Yeah.

Engber: And Dickens is like, Yeah, that’s a totally valid concern.

Rogan: That’s what everybody worries.

Dickens: Yeah. And it’s a fair worry. I mean, it is a fair worry. And, you know—

Engber: And I’m sitting there, and I’m like, I mean, it is a valid concern, right?

Rosin: Right, exactly. (Laughs.) Exactly.

Engber: They’re correct.

Rosin: So you and I could sit here in our mutual podcast spaces and, you know, be skeptical. And yet, the podcast has been enormously popular. As you were reporting—it’s now been a few months—how did you see the podcast evolve as a cultural phenomenon?

Engber: Yeah, so, I mean, it really—it was getting big in December. It was climbing its way through the Apple audio charts. And then Joe Rogan got into it on his Christmas Day episode. He said—

Rogan: Here’s the thing about all this.

Engber: —I think telepathy is real. And he talked about this podcast.

Rogan: Have you listened to The Telepathy Tapes?

Trussell: No.

Rogan: You haven’t?

Engber: And then, it immediately—The Telepathy Tapes shot to No. 1. And it’s really been, like, in the top 10 almost ever since. So I think it was that moment of, like, getting tapped by Joe Rogan.

It’s funny—if you actually watch the video of that episode, Rogan is wearing, like, a jester hat with bells, I guess, for Christmas. But it just makes it extra funny to have him talk about how, like, No. This seriously is real, and he’s dressed literally like a clown.

Rosin: And then he had Ky Dickens on more recently.

Engber: Yeah. Just last week, Ky Dickens was on the show for two and a half hours. And I think what you see there—just to your question of, Why now?—is the way that different sets of, I mean, I would say, sort of conspiratorial beliefs start to overlap and gravitate towards each other. And sometimes it’s very clean and it makes sense, and then other times, little tensions emerge.

So for Rogan—and he says this—he talks on and on in this podcast about, Oh, yeah. You know, there are these skeptics who just—they’re afraid of sounding stupid, and they just like to accept the mainstream narrative. And Dickens totally agrees. And you can see how their worldviews are just copacetic, right?

Like, Yeah. Why not telepathy? And you’ve proved it. And that’s amazing. And they’re, like, loving each other. And to the extent that Rogan has a whole set of other beliefs that I don’t know if Dickens has, but, like, they’re bonding in having figured out the truth about what “they” won’t tell you—what the elites, media elites, don’t want you to believe. And so I don’t know. I really—I was like, Oh, this is the moment right here where there is such resentment against the standard narrative—the elite narratives—that any counternarrative is appealing.

There have been people using spelling for decades, as we talked about. There have been people who believe that spelling reveals telepathy for decades. There are people who believe a lot of weird things. But I think, until now, they’ve all been kind of living in their own worlds. And now, I would say, in this moment, those people are kind of finding common cause. They’re realizing that they kind of share an outlook with respect to “the narrative,” maybe, and they’re forming alliances.

Rosin: Meaning that there have been people forever who have wanted to believe in counternarratives, or believe that you’re being lied to, and just right now, that’s ascendant. Like, that energy is ascendant.

Engber: I mean that there have been communities of people living in their own realities, but that’s just sort of like a private reality. And there are people who, for example, believe that childhood vaccines are deadly or cause autism or have many, many other harms. And they’re sort of living in their slightly more public private reality. And there are people who believe in UFOs, and they have their own community.

Of course, these people have been around all this time. But I think there are moments in—if I can be so grand—American history where the inhabitants of all these private realities kind of band together, and it becomes less like a menu of choices than a full meal. That’s what I mean by “the alliances.” So just to give an example, Diane Hennacy Powell, the scientist in the show—she is anti-vaccine, who’s spoken at an event with RFK Jr.

RFK Jr. has likened people who are skeptical of spelling to pediatricians who deny the harms of childhood vaccines. So right there, there’s an alliance between anti-vaccine activists and spellers.

Rosin: Yeah. They do meet in this place where, you know, mystical ideas, intuition, anything that mainstream science or the experts don’t believe is ascendant. Now, you are a person who is a science journalist, who does want to align yourself with what the mainstream scientific institution finds to be true. So what do you make of a moment like this?

Engber: I mean, I think sometimes the counternarratives are true, and it is good when they get an airing and become ascendant. It’s just, I think what is interesting to me to observe is the way it’s, like, open season on counternarratives, right? And so you’re seeing this negotiation among adherence to counternarratives, and it’s playing out even in the federal government.

And so it’s become—I mean, just to give one example: I’m sorry. This is going to sound far afield, but I think it speaks to the central point here. So we have an anti-vaccine activist in charge of [the Department of] Health and Human Services. There’s also—we’re going to have a COVID contrarian take over the National Institutes of Health. Both those people—Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr.—are into, essentially, paleo diets and the idea that carbohydrates are what’s causing so much chronic disease in this country, as I understand it.

Okay, so now maybe you’re getting this other group that has, you know, been making this counternarrative argument about nutrition, that the problem is not calorie intake but sugars. Now they have a foot in with this administration. This is just, like—somehow there’s, you know, common cause between the sugar-is-toxic crowd and the anti-vaccine crowd and the, you know, like, COVID contrarians.

And as I have said, like, you can draw these connections over into the world of spellers and telepathy. Like, I just think if you mapped out all of these different groups with, you know, their own hobbyhorses, some of which I think are, you know, reasonable—like, the reasonable arguments to have about what nutritional policy should be—but, you know, there’s just these new alliances. That’s what’s interesting to me about this moment.

Rosin: Dan, you have thoroughly explained this phenomenon to me. Thank you so much.

Engber: My pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

If you have tips about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake American science, you can contact Katherine on Signal at @katherinejwu.12.

For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding. For weeks on end, as other parts of the government have restarted funding, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, have pressed staff at the agency to ignore court orders, according to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials I spoke with. Even advice from NIH lawyers to resume business as usual was dismissed by the agency’s acting director, those officials said. When NIH officials have fought back, they have been told to heed the administration’s wishes—or, in some cases, have simply been pushed out.

The lights at the NIH are on; staff are at their desks. But since late January, the agency has issued only a fraction of its usual awards—many in haphazard spurts, as officials rushed grants through the pipeline in whatever limited windows they could manage. As of this week, some of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers are still issuing no new grants at all, one NIH official told me. Grant-management officers, who sign their name to awards, are too afraid, the official said, that violating the president’s wishes will mean losing their livelihood. (Most of the officials I spoke with requested anonymity, out of fear for their job at the agency, or—for those who have left—further professional consequences.)

[Read: The erasing of American science]

NIH lawyers have told officials at the agency that to comply with court orders, they must restart grant awards and payments. But HHS officials have handed down messages too, several current and former NIH officials told me: Hold off. Maintain the pause on grants. And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says. Memoli, HHS, and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment.

NIH officials are used to following cues from their director and from HHS. But they were also used to their own sense of the NIH’s mission—to advance the health of the American people—being aligned with their leaders’. For weeks now, though, they have been operating under an administration ready to dismantle their agency’s normal operations, and to flout court orders to achieve its own ends.

As the freeze wore on, one former NIH official told me, some people at the agency recalled a mantra that Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s longtime principal deputy director, often repeated to colleagues: As civil servants, your role is not to call the policies, but to implement them. That is your duty, as long as you’re not doing something illegal or immoral. The NIH’s expert staff might have their own ideas about how to allocate the agency’s funds, but if political leaders chose to pour money into a pet project, that was the leaders’ right. This time, though, many at the NIH have started wondering if, in implementing the policies they were told to, they were crossing Tabak’s line. Over and over, the former NIH official told me, “We were asking ourselves: Are we there yet?”

Without the ability to issue research grants, the NIH effectively had its gas line cut. The agency employs thousands of in-house scientists, but a good 80 to 85 percent of its $47 billion budget funds outside research. Each year, researchers across the country submit grant proposals that panels of experts scrutinize over the course of months, until they agree on which are most promising and scientifically sound. The NIH funds more than 60,000 of those proposals annually, supporting more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions, spread across every state. This system backed the creation of mRNA-based COVID vaccines and the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” Taison Bell, a critical-care specialist at UVA Health, told me.

That system ground to a halt by late January, after the Trump administration paused communications across HHS on January 21, and a memo released from the Office of Management and Budget just days later froze funding from federal agencies. The NIH stopped issuing new awards and began withholding funds from grants that had already been awarded—money that researchers had budgeted to pay staff, run experiments, and monitor study participants, including, in some cases, critically ill patients enrolled in drug trials.

Several of the agency’s top officials immediately sought advice from Tabak, who served as interim director from December 2021 to November 2023, and had long been a liaison between the agency and HHS. But Tabak openly admitted, several officials told me, that his power in this moment was limited. Although he had been the obvious choice to act as the NIH’s interim leader after Monica Bertagnolli, the most recent director, stepped down, the Trump administration hadn’t tapped him for the position. In fact, several officials said, the administration had ceased communicating with Tabak altogether. (Tabak declined to comment for this story.)

The role of acting director had instead gone to Memoli, who had no experience overseeing awards of external grants or running a large agency. But, officials said, Memoli had expressed beliefs that seemed to align with the administration’s. In 2021, he had called COVID vaccine mandates “extraordinarily problematic” in an email to Anthony Fauci (then director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and reportedly refused the shot himself; last spring, Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, praised Memoli on social media as “a brave man who stood up when it was hard.” And last year, Memoli had been deemed noncompliant with an internal review, two officials said, after he submitted a DEI statement calling the term “offensive and demeaning.”

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

From the moment of his appointment, Memoli became, as far as other NIH staff could tell, “the only person the department or the White House was speaking directly to” on a regular basis, one former official said. And the message he passed along to the rest of the agency was clear: All NIH grants were to remain on pause.

That position was at odds with a growing number of court orders that directed the federal government to resume distributing federal funds. Some of those orders included painstaking, insistent language usually reserved for defendants who seem unlikely to comply, Samuel Bagenstos, who until December served as general counsel to HHS, told me. In written correspondence with senior NIH leadership in early February, current HHS lawyers, too, interpreted the court’s instructions unambiguously: “All stop work orders or pauses should be lifted so contract or grant work can continue” and contractors and grantees could be paid. In other words, put everything back the way it was.

Government lawyers aren’t the final arbiters on what’s legal. But the National Science Foundation, for instance, unfroze its funding on February 2. And the independent lawyers I spoke with agreed with what HHS counsel advised. The continuation of the NIH freeze “is unambiguously unlawful,” David Super, an administrative law expert at Yale University and Georgetown University, told me. The money that Congress appropriates to federal agencies each year is intended to be spent. “If they’re holding it back for policy reasons,” Super said, “they’re violating the law.”

At a meeting on February 6, several of the agency’s institute and center directors demanded that Memoli explain the NIH’s continued freeze. David Lankford, the NIH’s top lawyer, said that the position of the general counsel’s office aligned with that of the courts: Grants should be “awarded as intended.”

But Memoli called for patience, officials with knowledge of the meeting told me. He was waiting for one thing in particular to restart grant funding: He had tasked Michael Lauer, the deputy director of the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees grants, to draft a formal plan to make the agency’s funding practices consistent with Trump’s executive orders on gender, DEI, foreign aid, and environmental justice. (Lauer declined to comment for this story.)

Squaring those orders with the NIH’s mission, though, wasn’t straightforward. One sticking point, officials said, was funding for research into health disparities: If the administration’s definition of DEI included studies that acknowledged that many diseases disproportionately affect Americans from underrepresented backgrounds, complying with Trump’s orders could mean ignoring important health trends—and broad cuts in funding across many sectors of research. Cancer, for instance, disproportionately affects and kills Black Americans; men who have sex with men are the population most affected by HIV. “To pretend that entire communities don’t exist—in health, that doesn’t make sense,” Bertagnolli, the former NIH director, told me.

In several discussions that followed, officials with knowledge of those conversations said, Memoli assured NIH officials that health-disparity research could continue, as long as the inclusion of diverse populations in studies was “scientifically justifiable.” But given the administration’s disregard of scientific norms up until this point, “nobody was particularly satisfied by that explanation,” one former official told me.

Still, on February 7, Memoli yielded a bit of ground: He green-lighted the NIH to start issuing a small subset of grants for clinical trials. That allowance fell far short of Lankford and other lawyers’ recommendation to resume grant funding in full—but some officials wondered if the ice had begun to thaw.

That afternoon, Memoli acknowledged to other NIH officials that he understood what the agency’s lawyers were telling him, an official with knowledge of the meeting told me. But then, he offered an alternative justification for holding back the agency’s funds. What if, he said, the halt was continuing, not because the agency was adhering to the president’s executive orders, but because it was pursuing a new agenda—a new way of thinking about how it wanted to fund research? Such shifts take time; surely, the agency couldn’t continue its work until it had reoriented itself.

The lawyers were unmoved. At best, they said, that argument came off as a thinly veiled attempt to disregard court orders. Memoli contemplated this. He had no choice, he insisted: He was following the directions of three HHS officials—Dorothy Fink, then the acting secretary; Heather Flick Melanson, chief of staff; and Hannah Anderson, deputy chief of staff of policy—who had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the pause was to continue, save for the few award subtypes he’d already okayed. In other words, the Trump administration’s political leadership at HHS wanted funding to stay frozen, and that overruled any legal concerns.

And, as officials learned later that day, HHS officials had been planning new ways to limit NIH funding. That afternoon, they foisted a new policy on the NIH that would abruptly cap the amount of funding that could be allocated to cover researchers’ and universities’ overhead. The first Trump administration had tried to cut those “indirect cost” rates in 2017; in response, Congress had made clear that altering them requires legislative approval. And so within days, yet another temporary restraining order had blocked the cap.

[Read: The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials]

By this point, NIH lawyers were grim in their prognosis. If the agency moved forward with slashing indirect cost rates, they explained, individual staff members could be prosecuted for failing to comply with a congressional directive. On February 10, Sean R. Keveney, HHS’s acting general counsel, sent a memo to Flick Melanson that included a directive in bold, italicized font: All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.

Two days later, Lauer, the extramural-research director, issued a memo authorizing his colleagues to resume issuing awards—what should have been the agency’s final all-clear to return to normalcy.

Even then, the staff remained divided on how to proceed. Some institutes immediately began sending out awards: Lauer’s email spurred one institute, a current official told me, to process 100 grants in a single afternoon. Others, though, still held back. “They’re scared out of their minds,” the official told me. Some worry that, despite what Memoli has said, they’ll be held accountable for somehow violating the president’s wishes, and be terminated.

So far, at least 1,200 federal workers—many of them on probationary status—have been fired from the NIH; a new OMB memo released yesterday indicates that more layoffs are ahead. On February 11, HHS also attempted to unceremoniously reassign Tabak, the deputy director, to an essentially meaningless senior advisory position to the acting HHS secretary, with an office in another city, far from the laboratory he ran at the agency—a demotion that several NIH officials described to me as an insult. Tabak chose instead to retire that same day, abruptly ending his 25-year stint at the agency; Lauer, who had worked closely with Tabak for years, announced his own resignation that same week.

Their departures left many at the agency shocked and unmoored, several former and current officials told me: If Tabak and Lauer were out, was anyone’s position safe? And because Lauer left immediately after clearing his colleagues to issue grants, who would ensure that the agency’s core business would continue? “We’re all still terrified for our jobs,” one current official told me. Agency hallways, where colleagues once chatted and laughed, have sunk under an uncomfortable silence: “No one knows who they can trust.”

The administration has also kept up its attempts to block NIH grants. Even after Lauer’s memo went out, HHS continued to bar agency officials from posting to the Federal Register, the government journal that publishes, among other things, the public notices required by law for meetings in which experts review NIH grant applications and issue funds, one official told me. The NIH might have been allowed to award grants, but logistically, it was still unable to. Finally, on Monday, Memoli announced in a leadership meeting that the agency could resume submitting to the Federal Register. But there were limits: Although officials could post notice of some meetings to review grant proposals, meetings to finalize funding recommendations were still off the table—meaning the NIH would still be in a grant backlog. “We can’t go crazy and put all our meetings on,” Memoli told his colleagues. But if agency personnel responded to this new allowance reasonably, he said, they’d be granted more liberty.

[Read: Grad school is in trouble ]

To Super, the administrative lawyer, curtailing posting to the Federal Register constituted yet another strategy intended to circumvent court orders. “These aren’t legitimate workarounds,” he said. “This is contempt of court.” The NIH’s developing plan to align the agency’s strategies with the president’s executive orders—which, officials told me, is still awaiting formal HHS approval—may end up being a legal battleground too: On Friday, a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order attacking DEI programming a potential violation of the First Amendment.

The longer the pause on NIH funding has dragged on, the more the American research community has descended into disarray. Universities have considered pausing graduate-student admissions; leaders of laboratories have mulled firing staff. Diane Simeone, who directs UC San Diego’s cancer center, told me that, should the pause continue for just a few more weeks, dozens of clinical trials for cancer patients—sometimes “a patient’s best chance for cure, and long-term survival,” she told me—could be at risk of shutting down.

Even if courts ultimately nullify every action that the Trump administration has taken, the NIH—at least in its current form—may remain in jeopardy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leader of HHS, has said that he wants to shift the agency’s focus away from infectious disease and downsize the staff. Some Republicans have been pressing for years to slash the number of institutes and centers at the agency, which depends on Congress for its budget, or to disburse its funding to the states as block grants—a change, Bertagnolli told me, that could mean biomedical research in America “as we know it would end.”

At a meeting with NIH leadership on February 13, Memoli explained to officials that “we are going to have to accept priorities are changing.” He didn’t say what those changing priorities might be, but previewed an era of “radical transparency,” language that would headline an executive order from Trump just days later. In this moment, federal judges were “hampering us” from moving forward, into the agency’s future, Memoli said. But the path before them remained the same: The NIH would do as the nation’s leaders wished.

President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America’s egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn’t outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information.

Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump’s administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.)

If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump’s health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease.

Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines.

Many of Trump’s health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance.

One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn’t turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it’ll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs.

Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission.

Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that “federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.” How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter.

Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn’t like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease’s spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker's ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them.

The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it “sounds good politically, but I think it’s a very expensive solution to something that won’t work.”

Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can’t really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president’s support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d’être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he’d take on. In 2023, he tweeted, “Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.” In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country’s leaders can’t be bothered.

“I’d summarize it as: fuck.” That’s what one senior university administrator told me when I asked about the chaos that erupted at the National Institutes of Health this week. Academics are in panic mode in the face of sudden new restrictions from the Trump administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has told employees of several health agencies, including the NIH, to stop communicating with the public. Even more disruptive for universities, the committee meetings for reviewing NIH grant proposals have also been abruptly put on hold until at least February 1.

“This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities,” Jane Liebschutz, a medical doctor and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, posted on Bluesky, in reference to the grant-review shutdown. The UCLA professor Lindsay Wiley echoed the sentiment, adding on Bluesky that the pause, which affects the distribution of a multibillion-dollar pool of public-research money, “will have long-term effects on medicine & short-term effects on state, higher education & hospital budgets. This affects all of us, not just researchers.”

Even if the mayhem ends early next month, it would still represent a large and lasting threat to universities in years to come. The NIH funds a major portion of the research that gets done on campus, and money from its grants also helps pay for universities’ general operations. The fact that this support has been switched off so haphazardly, for reasons that remain unclear, and despite the scope of troubles it creates, suggests that higher ed will be profoundly vulnerable during the second Trump era.

It’s hard to overstate the role of HHS, and the NIH in particular, in funding universities. In 2023, the department contributed $33 billion in research grants to American institutions of higher education, representing more than half of all federal spending on academic R&D. Indeed, HHS alone accounts for nearly one-third of all funding for university research—most of which is distributed by the NIH.

This situation makes the NIH a golden goose for universities, and also a canary in a coal mine. Researchers know just how much research capital comes from the agency—and they worry about the calamity that might ensue if those funds were to be tied up more than momentarily. NIH money funds everything from basic science research (figuring out what a particular gene does, for example) to the work that makes that knowledge useful (inventing a new gene-editing treatment, say). And its resources are put to use well beyond the field of medicine, with grants for work in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, social sciences, and social work, among other fields. Take that all away, all at once, and a mess of different kinds of researchers are left uncertain as to whether and how long their labs, personnel, and experiments can be sustained.

Not only is the NIH the most generous provider of government funding for research, but it also gives out money in a way that has secondary benefits for grantees and their institutions. For one thing, it generally doles out funds in larger chunks than other agencies. That’s good for individual recipients: Writing grant proposals is a lot of work, so the fewer grants you have to chase, the more time you can spend doing actual science. Some NIH programs allow researchers to ask for standardized, “modular” allocations—say, $250,000 a year—instead of itemizing every element of a budget request. That saves time for science.

NIH grants have their own appeal for university administrators too, in the form of payments for what are called “indirect costs.” Most federal grants pay fees to cover overhead for whatever research has been funded. That money helps pay for all of the campus infrastructure that goes into doing the research. This includes the buildings and labs in which the work gets done; the maintenance and management of those facilities; specialized equipment; the badge scanners, payroll services, and other costs associated with the postdoctoral researchers or research scientists who staff the labs; and other operational expenses.

Exactly how much federal grant money gets added to a grant for “indirect costs” is subject to negotiation. Universities work with federal agencies to determine the percentage, which may change from year to year. Some funding sources, such as the Department of Agriculture, tend to pay lower rates, with perhaps a 30 percent premium going to indirect costs. But the NIH goes very high, in general: Its rates will at times exceed 60 percent. Under such an arrangement, for every $1 million the agency gives to a scientist, that scientist’s university gets $600,000.

These overhead funds, of which the NIH is such an important source, are mysterious and complicated. Many universities rely on them to balance their budget. The problem is, schools almost always have to spend more money to support research than they take in from grants. They do the work anyway both because research is part of their mission and because it helps them compete for better students, faculty, and rankings. But with grant-funded research already operating at a loss, any long-term interruption of schools’ indirect-cost revenue could create a real financial crisis on campus.

Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science and a former university chancellor and provost, told me that many schools could weather these disruptions without issue: A university with a big hospital, for example, might use clinical revenue to offset uncompensated research costs. But some schools could be destabilized by even a small-scale interference with the flow of agency grants, and most research institutions would be thrown into at least some disarray.

An extended pause on grant funding isn’t happening, or at least not yet. And Thorp said that panic isn’t a useful response to whatever is happening at the NIH. It’s totally understandable for researchers, students, and administrators to be unnerved, he said, but there are many possible explanations, and “it’s best to keep calm and carry on.” My own university, Washington University in St. Louis, made the same suggestion in a statement sent to faculty from the vice chancellor for research. It read, in part, “While these disruptions are frustrating, they are occurring government-wide and are not focusing on university research activities or targeting specific scientific disciplines.”

But the NIH freak-out may have less to do with the present disruption (however long it lasts) than with what it signifies. If the viability of university research, and of universities themselves, can be so upended by a disarrangement of a single unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, then what might be coming next? Donald Trump’s nominee to run the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, has floated the idea of linking grants to measures of free speech on campus, according to The Wall Street Journal. And Trump’s executive orders have already made clear that any federal grantee will have to answer for its own DEI initiatives. The Trump administration has many bones to pick with higher education, and it seems willing to abide—and even encourage—whatever chaos those squabbles may produce. The present situation might be a fluke, or it might be a test.