Jack Lewellyn: Highlighting recent collaboration within the Daily Texan and concerns over the National Institute of Health policy changes from UT’s own medical researchers. I’m your host this week, Jack Llewellyn, and this is the Texan Recap.
UT medical professionals discuss their uncertainty with new NIH policies and what went into making this collaborative article. Senior news reporter Diego Hernandez is here with their part of the story. Thank you for being here, Diego.
Diego Hernandez: Nice being here, too.
Jack: So, just starting off, how was this story settled on?
And did the collaboration angle change the process behind making it? And if it did, how so?
Diego: So, the timeline of this story was actually very interesting. So, originally, my coworker at the Daily Texan, also a senior news reporter, Isaiah Williams, He originally wrote the story, I want to say maybe like a month ago, specifically on new policies implemented, I believe, by the Trump administration on the NIH, which they froze hiring.
Yeah, they froze hiring until I believe sometime in early February. They stopped travel funding, unless you know you were going back home or somewhere where you needed to be, and holding of meetings to renew grants. And he had already been doing the story, but around a little bit before he was supposed to send it in.
The NIH announced a new policy, which was supposed to be cutting indirect costs, but I pitched that story, and so did he. And it was kind of a weird situation because in the news department, every senior news reporter has their own beat, right, and he’s the legislative beat reporter. He does, you know, law and policy.
I’m the campus life reporter. I report on things that, you know, impact student life or faculty or teachers here. And this was kind of a mixture of both, you know, it’s going to be affecting faculty and researchers here, but at the same time it has to do with legislative policy at the national level. And so, I, I pitched that story and originally it seemed like the editors wanted us to do the story separately.
Isaiah would release his, and then He and I would collaborate on this new one on the indirect cost, but I believe a day into the story, we get a message from our editor, uh, Vivian, saying, So we talked to management, turns out they’re thinking about combining both of the stories, and me and Isaiah were like, that sounds pretty ambitious, but we’re down, we’re down to do this.
And yeah, that’s kind of how it happened.
Jack: I was not expecting that much behind it. I mean, that is, that is a, a whirlwind of stuff, not to mention, you know, already essentially having a finished product, but then actually, but okay, sweet. I mean, you kind of already went over this a bit just in, you know, saying that, but I’ll go ahead and ask anyway, just, could you tell us about how, you know, your own work sort of went into this, but then working with others to.
Change it, combine it, and make this, you know, new project, essentially.
Diego: So, I will admit, Isaiah probably wouldn’t admit this, but this is a bit more his story. Naturally, he had written, you know, essentially, the original story, which is kind of the half of it. And then we were supposed to work on the second half together.
But specifically, uh, what I was writing about was the indirect cost funds. So, uh, the way Isaiah actually explained it to an editor very well, essentially when you get a grant from the NIH, right, let’s say it’s about $100,000 into, uh, I don’t know, cancer research, right, you’re also given an extra amount of funds.
Those direct, those, that grant you were given is called a direct fund or direct cost. And you’re also given an extra percentage of that amount called the indirect cost or facility and administrative costs. Now, say for example, you need pencils for this research, right? That doesn’t include the part of the cancer research, but you still need a pencil.
So, they give you extra money for that stuff and that goes into salaries, uh, uh, electricity bills, you know, those, those things that aren’t included directly in the research. Now, it depends, uh, you know, sometimes by institution. The average is about 30 percent of the original, so I believe I said $100,000 for the original cancer research.
Most institutions get about an average of $30,000 extra. But the new NIH policy was supposed to essentially gut that and cap it at 15%, so they would only get $15,000. Now, the, the reasoning was they wanted to put, invest in more into research, but these are really necessary funds. I mean, these are pretty much, you know, a third of what they need to, uh, continue this.
Now that was my part. Isaiah can probably delve a little more deeper into the hiring freeze because that’s the part that he wrote.
Jack: Once again, that was senior news reporter Diego Hernandez. Thank you so much for being here today.
Diego: Thank you, Jack.
Jack: Continuing our talks on this collaboration, senior news reporter Isaiah Williams is here to tell us more. Thank you for being here, Isaiah.
Isaiah Williams: Oh, thank you for having me.
Jack: So just to begin, how did the collaboration part of it change how you went about it?
Isaiah: Well, it really changed how the writing process went, right? Writing a story with two people is always going to be different than writing a story with one person. Because we have different strengths, different weaknesses when we’re going out and writing. In fact, I think the combination story was specifically very amenable to Diego’s writing style. So it was really interesting to collaborate, both because, you know, sometimes I get a little bit lost in only telling my portion of the story.
But it was also good to collaborate just to hear, like, his perspective on it and get an outside look. That really makes it better when, like, we’re going in for edits. Right? Because by then we have already had two people look at it, and that just makes the whole process a lot easier.
Jack: I mean, this is just kind of like a perfect storm of just what you ended up having your focuses on, your stories about, but shifting from this to the story itself.
So your article mentions the NIH with like the job freezing or the hire freeze, you know, however you, you know, put it in there.
Isaiah: Yeah, it’s a very interesting part of the, of executive history, is that when a new presidential term comes, it is quite normal for presidents to implement what’s called a hiring freeze throughout all the departments.
And this is what we saw here, except that With the National Institutes of Health, it seemed that this hiring freeze was a lot larger, right? It also included a good amount of communication, not getting to researchers anymore. And so, these researchers, they rely on this communication from the National Institutes of Health.
So that they can figure out how much money they’re going to get from various grants. So when that freezes up, it’s really difficult for researchers to plan for future research because they’re not able to quite figure out where they’re going to get the funds to do that. And that’s really what the hiring freeze has to do with UT.
Jack: And that’s actually a perfect segue, uh, with, you know, what it has to do with UT because you spoke to, you know, people here, researchers from here about that hiring freeze and, you know, how that affected them. So could you elaborate on some of what they said in this story?
Isaiah: So, I mean, let’s just start with basic funds, right? UT gets around 150 million in federal funds from the National Institutes of Health alone. Uh, and so when the researchers lose access to this kind of stuff, It really just makes it more difficult to do their jobs. So, when I was talking to one of the researchers, she had told me that it was this communication freeze that had gotten her the most, because there’s just so much uncertainty there, right?
These are the livelihoods of these professors. This is important to them. And so, whenever they get this kind of uncertainty, it’s always just difficult to deal with. I will say. And this is something that I had heard throughout the process, is that the University of Texas itself did a pretty good job of keeping researchers informed and keeping them confident that their futures were secure.
Jack: Very nice. Well, once again, that was senior news reporter Isaiah Williams. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And that’s the Texan Recap for the week of February 17th. I’m Jack Llewellyn.
The Texan Recap is a production of the Daily Texan Audio Department. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe to the Daily Texan on your streaming platform of choice, and follow us on Twitter, at Texan Audio. This episode was hosted and edited by me, Jack Llewellyn. Special thanks to Diego Hernandez and Isaiah Williams for their reporting.
Cover art is by Emma Burke, and music is by Top Flow Productions. To read the news stories in this episode, or see more from the Texan, head on over to www.thedailytexan.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next week.
