Fund care, not billionaires

Science and truth are under attack. What can we do? Stand up, fight back!

By Bonnie Castillo, RN, executive director of National Nurses United

National Nurse magazine - Jan | Feb | March 2025 Issue

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nurses respect science because we practice science. Biology, chemistry, physics, statistics, microbiology, pathophysiology, pharmacology — we learned it all to earn our license. Even the social sciences, including the economic and environmental conditions that govern our patients’ lives, are inseparable from our patients’ health.

So when science is under attack in our society, it feels personal. It’s an attack on our very profession. And union nurses will respond by doing what we do best: Standing up and fighting back.

Over the past few months, we have seen a disturbing trend of bans and severe cuts at the federal level, including a drive to gut the department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In addition to providing health coverage and long-term care for 170 million people through Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and CHIP (the children’s health insurance program), HHS also runs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to monitor, prevent, and contain the spread of infectious disease; funds groundbreaking research into diseases and cures through the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and ensures the safety of our food systems, drugs, medical devices, and cosmetics through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The current administration is putting HHS on the chopping block, bleeding Medicaid by $880 billion and wiping out up to half of departmental staff. (The drive to cut federal staff has been so haphazard that even our own VA nurses received emails urging them to resign, before that message was rescinded!) Make no mistake: The gutting of federal health agencies, including critical research staff, is a dire attack on the scientific health of our nation.

In addition to staff cuts, nurses have also been disturbed to see recent executive orders cancelling or freezing funding for research. Oppressive bans have been placed on critical studies that mention even a single word the current administration doesn’t like, including language describing our patients’ sex, gender, and race.

Having just endured the hardest years of Covid, seeing so clearly that our Black, brown, and indigenous patients and nurses got sick and died at significantly higher rates, it is appalling to witness a ban on the study of factors contributing to those outcomes. Covid will not be the last pandemic we face, and avian influenza is currently on the rise; banning words and all associated research only puts patients and nurses at greater risk.

A February 20 article in Reuters chronicles how U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists were told to stop using the words "woman," "disabled," and "elderly" in external communications. The word ban has created mass confusion in federal agencies, including NIH and the National Science Foundation, where research grants with similar language have been flagged, sparking fears that funding will be eliminated for research areas including racial health disparities and women’s health. According to a March 3 article in Stat News, CDC researchers have been locked out of PRAMS, a dataset which tracks factors impacting maternal mortality, while CDC officials try to bring it into compliance with arbitrary — and dangerous — federal word bans.

Nurses know that flouting science and ignoring reality does not lead to health. That’s true for an individual patient who puts on blinders to their own symptoms for so long that they are at death’s door by the time they seek care, and it’s also true for our country. We cannot simply censor words, stop speaking about certain concepts, gut and defund public health agencies so there’s no one left to conduct research, and expect that society will remain healthy. 

And nurses see clearly that the gutting of public health agencies, and the associated loss of all that science, is being done to fund the renewal of some $4 trillion in expiring tax cuts, which stand to benefit only corporations, billionaires, and the wealthiest among us. 

So what can we do? Nurses are already fighting back by using our extremely trusted voice to speak out. RNs across the country have been holding our representatives’ feet to the fire, making our voices heard in the media, and standing up for care, science, and public health at marches and protests. We’re also resisting by refusing to be divided, regardless of attacks on our various backgrounds. We know that the oldest play in our employers’ playbook is to try to crack our solidarity by pitting one group of nurses against another. We won’t fall for it. 

As registered nurses, it’s our sacred duty to use our trusted voice to guard the truth, and that’s exactly what we will continue doing. The health of our nation rests on our shoulders, and we will continue to hold our standards for science and public health sky high.