RIP America (or at least the American ideals)

The "Big Beautiful Bill" destroys science, freedom, equality, democracy, and collective progress.

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Independence Day is supposed to honor the American ideals set forth by our founding fathers—freedom, equality, democracy, opportunity, and collective progress.

Last July 4th, I wrote about how The United States of America would not exist if it weren’t for adopting science and public health as a civic duty.

George Washington mandated smallpox variolation for Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War. It was the first instance of evidence-based public health policy in the nascent USA, and it was a major reason our troops survived and ultimately gave us this independent country. (read the full article, below)

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That was the type of forward-thinking that propelled the USA into a leader globally. That country is no more. This Independence Day, many of us are rightfully mourning a country we were striving to be. A country that valued evidence over ideology. A country that understood that real freedom included freedom from disease, from pollution, from ignorance, from unfettered control by a ‘king.’

This Independence Day feels like a postmortem instead.

Yesterday, July 3, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA)—a legislative abomination that will benefit the ultra-wealthy and certain corporations, but otherwise guts science, erases public health, and destroys social safety nets.

Not enough people truly understand the devastating impact this bill will have on all of us—and the planet. Many of the effects will be irreparable as critical pieces of infrastructure will be destroyed. I wish today felt like a celebration of a country that once led the way in innovation, science, and health. But instead, it feels like a eulogy for a country that lasted 249 years.

For those of you who may not realize the scope of what’s to come, I hope to lay out some of the key details here—and make some connections as to how this will impact all of us when that connection doesn’t seem obvious.

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$1 Trillion dollars cut from Medicaid will cause 51,000 deaths every single year.

OBBBA slashes $1 trillion dollars from Medicaid over the next decade, with an additional $295 billion ripped from SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program).

Medicaid is public health insurance program that supports low-income adults and their children, pregnant people, seniors, and people with disabilities. It provides coverage for doctor’s appointments, hospital care, long-term medical care (like skilled nursing facilities and nursing homes), prescription medications, mental healthcare, and prenatal and maternity care.

Medicaid covers 25% of all Americans. Medicaid is the largest provider of long-term nursing care and birth-related healthcare in the US. 40% of births in the US are covered by Medicaid.

Gutting Medicaid will cause 12 million Americans to lose their health insurance.

With additional changes to Affordable Care Act (ACA) provision in the OBBBA, an additional 5 million Americans will lose health insurance. Collectively, 17 million Americans will lose health insurance from this portion of the bill.

How will the bill do this?

Medicaid recipients will fall off coverage because this bill makes an already convoluted and complicated process even more complicated. As someone with good science and health literacy who was navigating all of this for my ‘stepdad’ Bill, I can say firsthand, it is near impossible to begin with. That’s even more so for people with little health literacy and computer literacy.

The amount of paperwork, documentation (financial records, bank statements, asset lists, etc), interviews with Medicaid employees, follow-up materials — it’s a mountain of work. If I hadn’t been helping him (which truly, was like a full-time job), there is no way he would have been able to access the benefits he was rightfully entitled to.

The bill adds work requirements for Medicaid recipients 18-64 for the first time in Medicaid’s history (it was created in 1965, btw). It also requires eligibility verification every 6 months for a process that takes months to complete. The bill also adds additional paperwork for both recipients and states to remain on Medicaid.

OBBBA bans Medicaid from covering services at providers like Planned Parenthood that provide abortion care. Ironically, 96% of care Planned Parenthood provides is not related to abortion. It’s STI testing and treatment, contraception, cancer screenings, HPV vaccinations, UTI testing and treatment, and fertility and family planning services.

Prohibiting Medicaid coverage for Planned Parenthood will disproportionately impact rural communities, women of color, and young people. When I was raped as a teenager, I went to Planned Parenthood. They saved my life. I got STI testing, pregnancy testing, and general healthcare. I think of the millions of people that will be prevented from these life-saving resources because of this bill.

Some proponents might say, oh, well they reduced the Medicaid prohibition for Planned Parenthood to a year, that’s not so bad, right? Wrong. Because once these facilities close, they are not going to reopen. This loophole just shows how intentional these Congress members actions are. They know this will eliminate these health clinics.

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Basic survival with dignity is under attack

This bill is a literal middle finger to millions of Americans. It’s a slap in the face to people who simply want to live with a shred of dignity.

SNAP (food assistance) now comes with mandatory work requirements and will penalize people with chronic illness or caregiver responsibilities.

OBBBA has also eliminated SNAP Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Grant Program (SNAP‑Ed). This program, which focused on providing education about healthy and cost-effective food choices for lower-income families is now gone.

Housing assistance programs (section 8 housing) is being replaced with a ‘housing savings account’ which won’t do anything to help those experiencing homelessness. Childcare, eldercare, and more are all being threatened.

The “MAHA” movement claims they want to improve health. Erasing food security, healthcare access, nutrition education, and housing will do the opposite.

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51,000 people will die preventable deaths every year because of this.

The cuts in OBBBA will directly cause an additional 16,642 preventable deaths every year among those who lose their ability to access and pay for healthcare. But these Medicaid cuts will also lead to closing of healthcare facilities: hospitals, nursing homes, Planned Parenthood clinics.

If healthcare facilities close, those healthcare providers are out of jobs too. Our country already faces staffing shortages and provider burn out—and this will make that dramatically worse.

Those facility closures, the loss of healthcare providers, and the inability to access care for well visits, cancer screenings, prescriptions and treatments for medical issues will lead to a collective death toll of over 51,000 every single year.

This bill is a literal death sentence, especially for our most vulnerable.

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Science and public health will cease to exist as we know it.

It isn’t just providing healthcare that is impacted—the science and the educational programs that leads to these healthcare measures is being destroyed too.

Student loan programs are being capped, effectively preventing lower-incoming individuals from being able to attain higher education, including graduate programs in science and medicine.

Unsubsidized student loans are capped at $100,000 lifetime, and $20,500 per year for graduate students. It also caps professional degree loans for medical school, law school, and similar at $200,000 lifetime ($50,000 per year).

What does that mean? Lots of people won’t be able to become scientists or physicians, especially those that aren’t wealthy.

Think about how that will erode our science and medical institutions.

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OBBBA sets the stage for the proposed cuts in the upcoming Presidential 2026 budget request, which aims to destroy federal research.

The proposed 2026 budget will further slash funding for basic science research, more than the cuts that have already taken place in the last 6 months. These institutions are already woefully underfunded, and these cuts will effectively destroy scientific research infrastructure in the US.

The 2026 Presidential budget proposal includes:

A 40% cut to The National Institutes of Health budget.

A 50% cut to the CDC budget.

A $7 billion cut to National Science Foundation budget.

If this goes into effect, that means over 1,600 research grants, primarily at public universities, will be gone. 75% of early-career science fellowships will be gone. Even more layoffs at public research labs. That’s years of work lost, overnight.

No support for vaccine infrastructure, food safety, epidemic and pandemic preparedness, maternal health. Preventive services research.

This comes on the heels of indirect cost caps for NSF and NIH funding, which I wrote about earlier this year:

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If Trump gets his 2026 budget approved, it will effectively eliminate ongoing research for cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, climate change, infectious diseases will be halted, with no restart in sight.

All those fellowships and grants that won’t exist anymore? Those scientists won’t have jobs. They will likely leave the country to find work elsewhere, continuing the brain drain that this administration started with the early administration guts to NIH and CDC funding and staffing (read more below)

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Oh, and for those who want to scream about “toxic” pesticides and food ingredients? These proposals erase federal pesticide reporting and environmental surveillance. We won’t have to worry about false fears about red dye 40 or fluoridated water when lead and asbestos regulations are gone.

Is this the land of the free?

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Without scientific research, we will end medical and technological progress

This hits home. I work full-time in life sciences biotech, and previously in academia. My job, my career, my life’s work—has been about understanding fundamental science concepts and applying them to improve health. My last several peer-reviewed papers were focused on novel immunotherapies to combat cancer, latent HIV, and genetic diseases.

Working in industry doesn’t mean I’m safe, either. Our projects—every project in science—is interdisciplinary. We have ongoing collaborations with every government research institute. With academic institutions around the country. All of them focused on improving treatments and intervention that improve outcomes.

For pediatric brain cancer. For emerging infectious diseases. For antimicrobial resistance and new antibiotics. For novel monoclonal antibody therapies. For cancer vaccines. For newborn screening for genetic disease. For new diagnostic tests for cancer and infectious disease.

Everyone benefits from scientific research, directly and indirectly. Including the Congress members who voted for this bill.

Without scientific research, there will be no medical treatments. No ways to improve outcomes for challenging diseases. No ways to address climate change and the multifactorial consequences of that (increased infectious disease, morbidity and mortality, food shortages, agriculture challenges).

Closing research institutes will destroy local economies. It will impact every single one of us. For generations.

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Science is a national security issue.

People don’t seem to realize that science creates everything. Science is infrastructure. Science is national defense. Science is leading the world. Science is human rights.

Without Federal funding and safety oversight for science, we won’t have:

• Safe vaccines

• Clean drinking water

• Food that is not contaminated with pathogens

• Accurate climate predictions

• Equitable medical trials

• Early outbreak detection

• New medical treatments and diagnostics

• Education

This bill destroys human infrastructure. It destroys American ideals.

And it is a deliberate move to erase democracy and give control to the wealthy, while removing regulations that keep us safe and healthy.

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This bill is the opposite of American Patriotism

This bill was passed under the guise of freedom, opportunity, and American greatness. It’s anything but.

• Freedom isn’t cutting healthcare for cancer patients.

• Opportunity isn’t preventing poor kids from eating if their parents are unemployed.

• Greatness isn’t erasing data, defunding science, and deregulating ethics.

Science is the embodiment of democratic ideals: transparency, inquiry, accountability, and the pursuit of truth. This “Big Beautiful Bill” is putting to death the American ideals in favor of ideology, greed, and corruption.

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The Declaration of Independence stated that if the government becomes destructive to these rights, the people have the right to alter or abolish it.

I get it. I’ve been struggling myself. It’s why I haven’t been writing as much lately. It all feels ineffectual. But complicity is how this wins. So we all have to drum up some energy to demand accountability. It’s our duty and our right as Americans, put forth by the Declaration of Independence that we are supposed to be celebrating today.

Here are some actions you can take:

1. Call your representatives and ask how they voted. Give them these statistics. Ask them if they realize they are sentencing people to death. Hold them accountable at every single turn.

2. Learn how our government works and help educate your friends and family. Local elections matter now more than ever when our Federal institutions and government is being corrupted.

3. Support institutions that are conducting independent, community-driven science—university research programs, public health departments, and science journalism. Don’t support media outlets that have been complicit and have contributed to this.

4. Stay loud. This bill was passed because Congress—who are supposed to represent US—believed no one would fight back. Prove them wrong.

And finally:

Share my newsletter with your friends and family, or better yet, add their email to the list.

I started ImmunoLogic to help drown out the noise. To improve science literacy and help everyone understand how disinformation impacts our lives. How pseudoscience impacts policy, which we are seeing in real-time.

That mission matters now more than ever. Because when science is silenced and public health is politicized, truth is the resistance. My promise to you:

I will continue to speak boldly, cite fiercely, and fight for a world where objective reality matters and science-based policies serve the many—not just the privileged few.

We are all tired. They want us to give up. Don’t give in. Stay informed. Stay skeptical. Stay in the fight.

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Now, more than ever, we all must join in the fight for science.

Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.

More science education, less disinformation.

- Andrea

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ImmunoLogic is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has had a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation as far back as her childhood. This newsletter and her science communication on her social media pages are born from that passion. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing below: