Michael Wagner on Federal Research Grant Cuts at UW-Madison

Frederica Freyberg:
Turning back to higher ed cuts. He calls it the Friday night massacre of the verifiable truth. A UW-Madison professor researching and amplifying accurate claims about vaccines saw his $5 million federal grant terminated a week ago. The National Science Foundation grant was axed “per the presidential action that the NSF will not support research with the goal of combating misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that could be used to infringe on protected speech rights.” Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications Michael Wagner is here. Ahead of this, we should note PBS Wisconsin is part of UW-Madison. Hi, Mike.

Michael Wagner:
Hi. Good to see you.

Frederica Freyberg:
How surprised were you, shocked, really, that your grant was terminated?

Michael Wagner:
Well, in the short term, I wasn’t shocked. I mean, we’ve been under scrutiny from the federal government and even the weaponization of a government subcommittee in the House for the last year and a half. And so we knew this day was coming and so on the one hand, it wasn’t that shocking, although we knew — we didn’t know exactly when it was going to happen, but more broadly, to say that researchers in the United States who made, you know, grant proposals and had them vetted by a series of experts that were blind to us, so we don’t know who was evaluating us, said, this is a project worth doing and that could really help people. And then to have the government say, we’re not so interested in sharing things that are true, that’s really shocking. And what’s even more shocking is that it’s not just happening to us. I mean, it’s a big deal to us and our team and the grant we have. But this is happening all across campus and all across the country.

Frederica Freyberg:
So describe your research, now that is on hold, what were you looking at and why?

Michael Wagner:
So we were really interested in ways that we could try and improve the information environment without engaging in content moderation. So one thing that’s really controversial, and there are experts who study this is to say if some things are false and especially if they’re dangerous, maybe platforms should be pressured to take them down. That’s not what we do. What we say is we want to identify networks of conversation online that are sharing information that might be false. Then we want to see are there independent fact checkers and independent research studies that have been done, at least three, that confirm this thing that’s being shared online isn’t true? If that’s the case, then we want to create messages that say, here’s the stuff that’s true, and then we want to use the platforms advertising mechanisms to buy ads and show them to the people who saw the false stuff. So put simply, if people are seeing things that aren’t true, we want to make a message about something that is true and share it with people so that the truth can compete with the falsehood. We don’t want to take any content down, we just want those two things to compete, and then we want to see, does sharing the truth make things better for people?

Frederica Freyberg:
So as you said, yours is not the only sizable grant eliminated at UW-Madison. At least $12.6 million in direct research funding has been canceled. What are you hearing from your colleagues about all of this?

Michael Wagner:
We organized a teach-in for our undergraduate students last week, and in that conversation, one faculty member from the School of Human Ecology noted, you know, more than a dozen grants related to Social Security studies. So this is not not just for seniors, but for lots of other folks who get Social Security benefits: people with disabilities, children of people who have died and don’t have parents anymore. All kinds of folks who need — we need to understand how well are these benefits helping them? Is it the right amount? Are they being, you know, distributed in the right way? All those kinds of things, all those got immediately killed. We’ve heard from people in the medical school that in some cases there are hiring freezes, even at the VA, so that new staff can’t be hired and new research assistants can’t be hired. This is especially hard for undergraduates who say they want to go to med school, because you really need to have experience in a lab to make your application to med school sing. And now it’s getting harder to do those kinds of things on our campus. So it’s happening all over: social sciences, hard sciences, humanities, everywhere.

Frederica Freyberg:
Can you begin to understand the motivation?

Michael Wagner:
There seems to be a coordinated war on universities and their mission, because universities are places where we have really hard conversations about complex things. They are places where the truth is iterative, and we learn more over time. And sometimes things that we thought were true change in the face of new evidence. Sometimes the new evidence turns out to be wrong, and the scientific process is slow and messy and controversial. And sometimes scientists don’t communicate it as clearly as they ought to. But I think there’s a coordinated war on folks who are interested in studying these kinds of things. And I think it’s worth citizens asking who is to gain by stopping misinformation research in the United States? Who is to gain by stopping Social Security research in the United States? Whose pockets are getting lined and whose are getting fleeced?

Frederica Freyberg:
So having just spoken to Congressman Tom Tiffany, he says that people upset about these kinds of cuts, all they have to do is make a case and maybe they can be restored. So what’s your case?

Michael Wagner:
Our case is that we have a scientifically vetted process that actually went through two phases. The NSF for our grant had a phase one that was a much smaller award, still a lot of money, $750,000, which is a lot of money, especially in social sciences. And it gave us a year to demonstrate a proof of concept that we can do this. We did that. We submitted our $5 million grant and the scientists who evaluated it said, yes, we think you can do this. We’ve also been making a ton of progress that we regularly share with the NSF every year. And so we turn in our yearly reports about, here are the new things we’ve learned. Here’s how we’re changing what we’re doing. And so we’re simply trying to learn things that are true and share them. And I don’t think it’s in the interest of the United States to stop doing that.

Frederica Freyberg:
Professor Mike Wagner, thanks very much.

Michael Wagner:
Thank you.