The left-leaning Center for American Progress estimated in April that “labor demand, proxied by job growth, suffered greatly from the Trump administration’s policies, down about 1.2 million jobs last year and two million jobs this year.” The low hire, low fire state of the job market and the general sense of economic instability is not entirely the administration’s fault — the uncertain future impact of artificial intelligence sure isn’t helping, for example — but Trump’s choices create fresh pain and disarray that are largely unnecessary.
The economic impacts of federal layoffs have been felt most acutely in the Washington, D.C., metro area, but Trump’s capriciousness is extending to other parts of the country. Even if you believe that the federal government should be smaller, these cuts have often been carried out in a maximally unpredictable way that leaves people on edge.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Kayla Yup published a story on July 22 that perfectly illustrates the harm that Trump has wrought. Multiple Philadelphia-based medical researchers had their grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which sits under the Department of Health and Human Services, cut with very little explanation. The total cuts are estimated at over $200 million, and Dr. Scott Halpern, who is the founding director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the grantees affected.
Halpern’s grant was funding research that trained clinicians on how to better care for patients so that their medical care can be more efficient, safe and equitable. “We look at ways to ensure that people, regardless of the color of their skin or the size of their pocketbooks, are appropriately referred for specialty services. For example, if they’re showing early signs of dementia,” he told me over the phone. Dr. Halpern said that PAIR also studies physician communication and burnout and quality of hospital care, so that it can ensure patients don’t get woken up in the middle of the night for no good reason or have other unnecessary and unpleasant experiences while they’re in the hospital.
This sounds like pretty important research to me, but earlier this month, Halpern received a notice that his $5 million grant, which was supposed to be paid out through 2028, was canceled, because it was no longer in “the best interest of the federal government.” He was not given any additional information. But the way the department of Health and Human Services has been operating under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was affecting PAIR’s hiring practices long before this latest blow. The center stopped creating new positions months ago, and put a pause on backfilling empty jobs. But now they’re starting to talk about layoffs, too.
