Imagine trying to water a thriving garden during a drought. You’ve nurtured it for years, but now the faucet is turned off. The plants wilt, the soil dries, and the promise of a bountiful harvest fades. This is what science in North Carolina feels like today.

As a scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill, I’ve witnessed firsthand how federal funding fuels innovation, education, and public health in our state. But recent decisions to slash this funding are threatening to uproot decades of progress.

The Hidden Costs of Science Are Being Cut Off

Science can’t happen with test tubes and bright ideas alone; it needs electricity, safe labs, working equipment, and people to keep everything running. These behind-the-scenes expenses are called indirect costs, and they’re essential to every scientific discovery.

But in early 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)––a government agency that uses your tax dollars to fund biomedical research––announced a 15 percent cap on indirect cost funding , down from an average of 28 percent. That’s like funding a restaurant but refusing to pay for rent, electricity, or kitchen staff. Research institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and NC State—where rates were previously higher—are already feeling the hit, with hiring freezes and delayed projects.

And it’s not just the NIH. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is facing a proposed 50 percent budget cut—over $4.7 billion. These aren’t just numbers. They represent real setbacks in the science that fuels medical breakthroughs, economic growth, and public health in North Carolina and beyond.

If we want innovation, cures, and progress, we have to fund all of science—including the infrastructure that makes it possible.

What This Means for Durham

Durham is part of the Research Triangle, a hub of discovery where research doesn’t stay in the lab; it fuels your hospitals, your schools, and your jobs.

When science funding is cut, it’s not just the lab faucet that runs dry—it’s every stream that flows from it. It means fewer clinical trials for therapies designed to cure or alleviate symptoms of rare diseases. It means fewer breakthroughs in cancer research at Duke and UNC that could give your family member another year of life.

It means that when you go to the doctor, they may no longer have access to cutting-edge diagnostic tests because the research fueling them was paused.

It means that when the next pandemic arrives, it will hit North Carolina harder because our state public health lab’s renovations and upgrades were halted due to federal budget cuts.

It means local community health centers—like those in Durham County that serve people without private insurance—are already facing a $230 million federal funding cliff. That might be the only place a neighbor of yours gets their annual check-up or prenatal care.

Science isn’t some abstract thing that lives tucked away in some research lab. Science is in your backyard, growing like a plant for your benefit. If we don’t water it, it will die. It’s the reason a COVID vaccine made it to you in under a year. It’s the reason your child’s asthma medication keeps them out of the ER. It’s in every blood test, MRI machine, and air quality report. It’s in the supercomputers you carry in your pockets. When we lose funding, we don’t just lose data. We lose time. We lose jobs. We lose lives.  

NSF cuts have terminated nearly 1,400 grants, with more than half of those slashing funding for education and outreach programs. As someone who’s benefitted from these programs, I know what it means when they disappear: fewer Durham Public Schools students see someone like them in science. Fewer Black and Brown students learn that STEM is for them too.

A Call to Action

Science doesn’t live in a vacuum. It lives in Durham. In Chapel Hill. In Asheville. In Charlotte. In North Carolina. And it’s time we treated it like the essential service it is.

Turning off the faucet doesn’t just dry up research labs—it trickles down into our classrooms, our hospitals, our homes. We must demand that Congress restore funding for NIH, NSF, and public health infrastructure. That means calling your representatives, sharing your story, and refusing to let this moment pass quietly.

Because if we let science dry up, we’ll feel it in every corner of our lives—and we’ll wonder why we didn’t speak up sooner.

JP Flores (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology at UNC Chapel Hill studying how, when, and why genes turn on or off in human disease. He is the host of the “From Where Does It STEM?” podcast, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Science For Good, and a part-time bartender at Steel String Brewery in Carrboro.

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