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This is Science Friday. I'm Flor Lickman.

Five weeks into the Trump presidency, federal science funding in the U.S. is in a state of confusion.

Executive orders that have halted grant funding at the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, have faced court challenges.

Last week, a federal judge lifted a freeze on some NIH funding. So is the NIH making new grants?

What's the directive? It's opaque from the outside. Is it any clearer on the

inside? Catherine Wu, staff writer for the Atlantic, talked to nearly a dozen former and current

NIH officials to find out what's happening on the inside of the NIH campus. She's here to catch

us up on that and other science stories of the week. Katie, welcome back to Science

Friday. Always good to be here. So there's a lot going on and you actually spoke to NIH

workers about what it is like to try to do their jobs. What did you find out? Yeah, I think it is

fair to say that this has been one of the worst five-week stretches

in a lot of NIH officials' career.

It is just a mess in there.

I think they are battling a lot of really conflicting things.

They are telling me that they are caught between their duty to their direct leaders,

including their acting director, what is legal,

according to the literal law in this country, and their duty to the American public to protect

and preserve and promote their health. Who is the acting director? Who's running the NIH show right now?

Right. So for the past few weeks, it has been a flu researcher named Matt

Memoli, who was kind of picked out of a part of the NIH that does not typically yield acting

directors. There actually usually is a deputy director who typically steps into that position

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