These scientists were fired by DOGE. What are they doing now?

Here & Now Anytime

NPR

News

4.1 • 954 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tens of thousands of researchers are out of work amid President Trump's ongoing purge of the federal workforce. One of those workers is Peggy Hall, a biologist who worked at the National Institutes of Health. Hall joins us with freelance reporter Virginia Gewin, who recently wrote about fired workers for Nature. And, a study from the Rochester Institute of Technology estimated more than 10,000 tons of plastic enter the Great Lakes every year. Here & Now's Chris Bentley reports on efforts to curb pollution, including a robot that combs the shores for trash. Then, the North American prairie is biologically diverse, but it's rapidly disappearing. In their book "Sea of Grass," Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty unpack the threats to the prairie and profile the people trying to save it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken,
0:03.6	a podcast from BU's Mayrotra Institute that explores questions like,
0:08.3	why are executives paid so much?
0:11.0	Do they deserve it?
0:12.2	Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16.2	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:22.4	Universities across the EU, Hong Kong, Canada, all of these different countries see this
0:28.9	opportunity now to recruit some of our best scientists.
0:33.3	The Trump administration is concerned with trade deficits, but is it creating a knowledge deficit?
0:39.4	Cuts to the federal government might be driving international brain drain.
0:52.0	It's Friday, May 30th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBOR.
0:57.5	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:01.2	Today on the show, we've got a few stories of environmental degradation,
1:05.6	and some of the ways people are fighting back to save threatened ecosystems and themselves in the process.
1:11.5	From the shores of Lake Michigan, where researchers are deploying high-tech dune buggies
1:16.2	to scoop up litter.
1:17.7	I swear, the biggest question I get is, do you find a diamond ring?
1:21.1	It's the number one.
1:22.7	Never, never.
1:24.5	Not yet.
1:25.7	Not yet.
1:26.3	To the Great Plains, where North America's last great grasslands are vanishing.
	...

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