The Trump administration is waging a, quote, wholesale assault on U.S. science, an effort that threatens the country's health, economic development, national security, and scientific preeminence.

That's according to an open letter published today by nearly 2,000 doctors, scientists, and researchers in response to the administration cutting tens of thousands of jobs

across the Department of Health and Human Services and scrapping billions of dollars in scientific grants.

We are joined now by one of the authors of that letter. Dr. Stephen Wolfe is Professor of Family

Medicine and Population Health at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.

Dr. Wolf, welcome back to the program.

Your letter cites a series of impacts, economic, technological, impacts on human health.

You write, quote, we are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning the nation's scientific enterprise is being decimated.

How so?

Well, we've spent 80 years in this country building up our scientific infrastructure.

Federal agencies have been investing in the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and that's

enabled our country to make remarkable scientific discoveries that have made the United States

the envy of the world. In a matter of weeks, the Trump administration has pursued a set of

policies that are basically removing the capacity of our country to do this kind of research.

And it has broad implications across many of the sectors that you mentioned.

I'm a physician, so it's of great concern that this is going to affect health and the life expectancy of Americans.

Devil's advocate, though, let's just say there are a few less thousand scientists at the NIH or the HHS.

How does that actually roll out into real people's lives?

Well, to start with, by cutting the funding for these agencies and dismissing thousands of federal

scientists from these agencies, we're also seeing a sharp reduction in the funding for the research that occurs at universities

and research institutions across the country.

The net effect of this is to slow the process of a discovery so that we're slower in identifying

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