The Science Capital That Cannot Be Rebuilt

Richard Pazdur spent more than three decades inside the FDA's Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research. He joined when Ronald Reagan was president. He outlived the agency through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, surviving the kind of institutional churn that would swallow lesser bureaucrats whole. In December 2025, he retired. He was the fourth CDER director to leave in less than a year.

The revolving door at the top of the FDA is not merely a leadership problem. It is a knowledge problem. The people walking out the door are not interchangeable. They carry with them decades of judgment about which clinical data packages support approval, which trial designs are sound, which signals in adverse event reports warrant concern. That judgment cannot be written into guidance documents. It is built through years of sitting across the table from sponsors, reading between the lines of an incomplete application, knowing when a deficiency is fatal and when it can be remediated. The FDA staff who left the agency between January and March 2025 had an average of 21 years of experience, according to a National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition analysis of federal workforce data. Nearly 90 percent of senior leaders who were at the FDA a year ago are no longer with the agency. None remain from the Office of the Commissioner.

This is the hollowing out that cannot be reversed by restoring a budget line.

The numbers from the NIH are well known by now: more than 2,200 active grants terminated and another 1,500 frozen between February and August 2025. New research grants fell from roughly 5,000 in 2024 to 3,900 in 2025. Alzheimer's and aging research, already straining under the weight of a rapidly aging population, lost more than half its grant cohort in a single year. Jeremy Berg, who directed the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, put it plainly: this is the worst year he has seen, probably going back to the 1980s.

But the scale of the cuts understates the specific damage. The cuts did not fall evenly. According to a PNAS analysis published in March, women led 59.8 percent of the terminated grants held by assistant professors, 60.2 percent of affected doctoral candidates, and 48 percent of postdoctoral fellows whose funding disappeared. Among early-career investigators, the cancellation rates were highest. These are not mid-career scientists with accumulated institutional capital to weather a funding disruption. They are the people who were supposed to spend the next thirty years running labs, training students, and translating discoveries into therapies.

A survey of nearly 1,000 NIH-funded researchers conducted in early 2026 found that 27 percent had laid off lab members and 40 percent had canceled planned research outright. More than two-thirds had advised graduate students or postdocs to consider careers outside academia. That is not a funding dip. That is a voluntary contraction of the scientific workforce, guided by people who understand what the next few years look like better than any analyst does.

Former NIH director Francis Collins, speaking at a Brookings Institution symposium in March, described the cumulative effect as a slow erosion of the country's scientific capital that is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild once lost. He was not being alarmist. He was being precise. Scientific capital is not a line item. It is the accumulated knowledge of how to design a clinical trial, how to culture a rare cell line, how to read a genome, how to connect an observation in a petri dish to a mechanism that matters in a human body. These capabilities live in people, not databases. When the labs close and the postdocs scatter, the knowledge does not transfer to a replacement employer. It simply goes away.

The self-reinforcing mechanism is what makes this different from a typical budget cut. When experienced researchers lose their funding and leave the field, they are not replaced by equivalent people waiting in a pipeline. The pipeline is the graduate students and postdocs those researchers were training. Cut the senior people and you simultaneously hollow out the next generation's access to mentorship, infrastructure, and institutional continuity. A lab that closes does not reopen when a grant is restored three years later. The graduate student who left the field does not return. The collaboration network that took a decade to build dissolves faster than it took to form.

The FDA's parallel collapse compounds this. The drugs that emerge from NIH-funded labs in 2029 and 2031 will land at an agency that has lost most of its experienced review staff. The FDA eliminated 3,500 positions by July 2025 as part of cuts imposed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. New reviewers learn by doing, and the doing requires experienced judgment that cannot be accelerated by hiring more people or publishing better guidance. It requires time and mentorship and the kind of institutional continuity that does not currently exist inside the agency.

The biotech industry is not oblivious to this. Companies that have spent years developing drugs are already adjusting timelines, building internal regulatory capacity they once outsourced to the agency's expertise, and in some cases moving programs to jurisdictions with more predictable review environments. This is a rational response to an irrational situation. But it does not replace the public health infrastructure that the NIH and FDA represent. It migrates it.

Every generation of American science has assumed that the institutional capacity to respond to a health crisis would be there when it was needed. We built that capacity after Sputnik, after HIV, after the anthrax letters, after COVID. Each time, the investment was justified by the last crisis. The bet is always that the next emergency will arrive after the current political moment has passed. The current political moment is dismantling the very infrastructure that would allow the next administration to respond. When the next virus jumps species or the next antibiotic resistance gene spreads through a hospital ward, the scientists who would normally be on the front lines may simply not be there. Not because they never existed. Because they were here, and they left, and the pipeline that would have replaced them no longer reaches where it needs to go.