Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is my Forbes

colleague, senior editor Alex, Alex, thanks so much for joining me. Brittany, it's great to be here.

I'm really lucky in the last two months in my role. I've had many conversations regarding Doge and budget cuts on everything

it's impacting, like Social Security, like federal workers, veterans, the federal government,

politics, and everything in between. You are our leading expert in everything from

science and health care. So to start off the conversation, what is Doge?

What are budget cuts doing to these industries?

That's a great question.

The answer is a lot.

So initially, nearly as soon as the Trump

administration got going, they implemented a freeze

on a lot of federal contracts and

federal spending. That immediately, and there was a communications freeze as well, which kind of

immediately caused a cascading impact, delaying funds getting to essential research, like looking

for cures for cancer and things of that nature.

We've also seen cuts to other agencies like the National Science Foundation, the Department

of Energy, and then USAID, our main source of foreign aid is also a big and important institution

for a lot of biomedical research and biomedical spending.

And the impacts there have also caused a lot of issues.

I think most significantly with USAID, apart from the impact it's having around the world

where people who were able to get access to medication suddenly don't have it anymore.

Just right here in the United States, those cuts of force Johns Hopkins University, which is one of

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