‘This administration doesn’t value research and the scientific process.’

Isaiah Chang is a junior in the Freshwater Sciences program at UW-Milwaukee. Outside of the classroom, he leads Bridging the Divide, a student-run program encouraging civil discourse, and works in a microbiology lab researching E-coli. One day he hopes to become a maritime professor after gaining experience as a maritime technician or lead scientist on research vessels.

Amber Moreno-Padilla: It’s been 10 months since Trump entered his second term in office. On a personal level, what has been the most impactful change his administration has made?

Isaiah Chang: One of the biggest changes has obviously been funding for universities. I’m a SURF-funded student, so when university funding goes down so does research support. For me, it was that our summer stipend was cut in half because of university funding cuts.

Initially, I was supposed to be on a grant through my lab, but two of our three grants were cut entirely as of last spring, so now I’m funded through SURF. If I exceed the amount of money that SURF gives me, I either have to stop working or my lab has to find the money somewhere else. I’m the only undergrad student working on my specific project so if I’m not being funded, then my project stops until I am funded again.

Moreno-Padilla: Do you know how difficult it is to find more grants?

Chang: I do know that our lab looks at both private and federal grants. We also apply for state grants but because federal funding has been decreasing, more people are applying for those grants; it’s becoming more competitive.

Not only are there significantly fewer federal grants available, but there’s also more people applying for them and not everyone is going to get it. So, it sucks because two researchers in the same building could be competing for grant funding and not both of them are going to get it in. One lab might have to completely shut down because of it.

It’s a really difficult situation in research right now. This administration doesn’t value research and the scientific process. It doesn’t have the patience to wait for results that could take years.

Unfortunately, these things aren’t intuitive either. You’re not just born knowing these things. You have to go through a systematic process, like school, for example, to learn how to interpret results. And even interpreting results can take months; science is purely experimental. You’re always changing your methods. So, the results, methods, conclusions, all of that takes a long time.

Moreno-Padilla: Because you have to take the time to be as accurate as you can be, right?

Chang: Exactly. It’s just frustrating as someone who’s heavily involved in science for people to be like, oh, this didn’t work, which means it’s not real. Science isn’t just about creating new tools. It’s also about creating better ways of understanding how the world works.

The school of Freshwater Science is not incredibly well funded in the first place. We just got a whole half of our school cut because the university refused to replace two professors that were of retirement age. And because the university refused to help fund their replacements, we had to cut out a whole major, minor, and graduate program. Everything atmospheric science doesn’t exist anymore because there’s just not funding.

Moreno-Padilla: I did hear about that one. They’re letting the people who were in it finish, right?

Chang: But it’s not the same quality either. It’s one of those things where you’re stuck in a bad situation. If you declared this major and they cut your program, your options are to transfer and possibly set yourself back a year or finish the program. But it’s not going to be the same experience or quality.

Moreno-Padilla: Do you feel like you like how the administration is leading our country in other ways apart from research?

Chang: I mean, there’s definitely nuance here. With schools just in general, there’s this push for reform in how the United States is teaching history. And I really, really disagree with some of the proposals that the Trump administration has come up with.
I feel like history is already so focused on the white perspective that we don’t need to glorify it further. And there’s this push for bringing back patriotism and American pride in our history texts when I think it doesn’t make a person not a patriot to look back at history and criticize the things that we’ve done and push our country to be better.

So, when I think about my own siblings, I am concerned for where their education is going to take them because I already felt so excluded from subjects like history. And I just feel like there’s not a lot of conversation about indigenous peoples, mixed children and mixed people and their experiences.

Moreno-Padilla: What implications do you feel like a lack of funding for research and also an inaccurate retelling of history has on our society?

Chang: I think to put it really bluntly, it makes us stupid and sheltered. I think it makes us more susceptible to the will of people in power because education and critical thinking are our biggest weapons as civilians.

Without things like chemistry or physics, we wouldn’t have a space travel, and we wouldn’t have bombs. Science goes hand in hand with the military. And I don’t love that, but that’s just a fact. That’s how people get their funding. In fact, today in lab meeting, we were talking about applying for a grant through the Department of Defense, which is the military.

Cutting funding for science make us more susceptible to things like illness. If we don’t have the science to create things like COVID vaccines, if we are not furthering cancer research or lesser-known illnesses that also need treatment, then we are killing people by neglecting to research treatments that could help them.

Moreno-Padilla: You mentioned your lab is thinking of applying to a Department of Defense grant. Did they just establish that?

Chang: My understanding is that because the military is so heavily funded, they have a lot of excess money, and they want to put that towards bettering their own weapons. The Department of Defense Grant is given to institutions so that they can share their research with the department of Defense which can be used in whatever ways they want to.

My lab does a lot of research with antibacterial resistance, specifically in microbial ecological communities so we’re looking at like the Great Lakes and rivers of Milwaukee and kind of being like, okay, how do these little microbial ecosystems differ from one another? Do we see more genetic resistance to certain antibiotics? It’s a big question. We don’t know the answer.

And so the Department of Defense is interested in that kind of research because biological warfare is a thing. China is this rising power and the U.S, at least in international politics, is considered a falling power. There’s a lot of papers I see coming out from China; their research is not stopping. They see value in scientific research. If the U.S. is like, no, we’re not doing scientific research, China’s still going to accelerate and is going to better their own weapons and their military capacity. And then the U.S. is going to be falling behind.

I don’t believe in militarization but one of the first questions that should be in the back of the mind of a country is national security. And China’s national security is going to increase because they believe in the strength of science.