"It didn’t take long after Trump’s second presidential inauguration for Sara Reardon to find herself back on the policy beat. Over her 15-year journalism career, Reardon — who once dreamed of being a neuroscientist — has chased stories from Capitol Hill to Montana, covering subjects spanning health policy, brain research, the environment, and more. She has worked both as a staff reporter — at Nature, Science, and New Scientist — and as a freelancer, writing for publications like KFF Health News, Scientific American, and Alzforum.
Reardon has covered policy under four vastly different administrations, but she recalls those first months covering the second Trump administration as especially challenging, filled with uncertainty, misinformation, and sourcing difficulties. Frequently, the worlds of politics and research collided, such as when she reported that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had made misleading claims about the money it was saving through its cuts to biomedical research.
I sat down with Reardon, who is now spending the year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, and we spoke about the pressures of covering science in ever-changing political landscapes, the challenges of reporting on agencies that spread misinformation, and the importance of reporting with rigor in the face of uncertainty.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Zoe Beketova: Over your career as a journalist, you’ve reported both as a staff member in newsrooms, and as a freelancer. What were the main differences you experienced between the positions? Did you prefer one over the other?
Sara Reardon: I was in newsrooms for a long time before I freelanced, and what was cool about that was there was camaraderie. I’ve worked with amazing people and had really close relationships with my editors. You get to know what they like, what they don’t like. I think a negative about freelancing is that when you’re on staff, you do your daily news, but you also have some time to develop long stories that are something you’re interested in. As a freelancer, your time is your money, right?
The pro of freelance, though, is you’re not beholden to one editor. I can just turn around and give my pitch to someone else if one editor doesn’t want it. There’s a lot of flexibility. I can go skiing in the morning and write in the afternoon. I schedule my interviews just around what I want to do. You get to write in a lot of different styles and for a lot of different people.
You had to be a little bit more careful about who’s telling you things. What do they stand to gain when you can’t put their name on it?
ZB: You’ve also reported on science under multiple different administrations, from Obama to Trump. What kinds of similarities and differences have you seen in terms of topics of coverage?
SR: I started covering policy under the Obama administration. There are so many different offices across way more agencies than you would think that have some sort of finger in biomedical research, including the White House. It was good to see how the sausage gets made, and then Trump came in, and you get to see how the sausage gets unmade. I think biomedical research wasn’t high on the priority list during the first Trump administration, so what I did a lot was covering the impacts of other things that were affecting science. A lot on shutting down immigration from Muslim countries and how much that was affecting research: science reporting, but through that lens.
ZB: What unique challenges did you face, and continue to face now, in covering the Trump administration’s impact on science?
SR: It was really hard to cover the first few months of NIH because I was getting a lot of anonymous sources. That brought about a lot of reporting challenges because you have to verify who they are, what they’re talking about. They’re all suspicious of not just me but of each other. And there’s these mass firings going on, so it was impossible to get any sort of information while having to protect people’s identities. That was a bit of a journalistic crisis. You had to be a little bit more careful about who’s telling you things. What do they stand to gain when you can’t put their name on it? How much of my time should be spent checking whether this is actually happening or not?
ZB: As a journalist, how do you think the media can help rebuild public trust in science?
SR: Honestly, I’m not sure. I mean, what we have been doing is our jobs. We have been verifying things, taking the time to make sure that we have multiple sources for information or named sources, which is best journalistic practice. You don’t report on rumors, you put things in the correct context and give everyone the chance to tell their side of the story. I think a lot of it is going to come down to generational change, to education. Something that we, as the media, need to keep in mind is that it’s more important than ever that we get things right, and that we don’t spread misinformation unknowingly, that we don’t try and be first instead of being right.
You’re not doing it for yourself. You’re not doing it for your sources. You have a duty to your sources, but ultimately, your duty is to your readers and to the publication.
ZB: Can you share a specific example of how you’ve covered misinformation about science?
SR: So, DOGE was tweeting up a storm about how much money they were saving, and they had this whole website that was the running tally of thousands of grants they’d canceled and how much they’d saved. And it was very clear to me, just knowing the NIH and knowing how grants work, that they don’t just hand you a check for 1.4 million dollars. Instead, they give you 140,000 dollars per year for ten years. So that money has mostly already been spent when you look at the dates of the research — some of the grants were about to run out. Even so, I was kind of surprised that no one had done this, gone through and figured out how much are they saying they’re saving versus how much is really being saved.
I contacted DOGE a couple of days before we were going to run the story like, hey, what’s up here? And I don’t know if it was because of my contact or something else, but they changed the website right before we were about to run the story to say, here’s the total amount of the grant, here’s how much has been spent. They basically added a column. The website was still unsearchable and downloadable. It was incredibly hard to use, which I think is deliberate, honestly.
ZB: Do you have any advice for other journalists who are covering science in today’s politicized atmosphere?
SR: I think it’s something that you really have to love. This is not a job anyone does for money. You have to, and I’m really bad about this, develop a thick skin for criticism — people being mad at you and you may or may not have done anything wrong. And remembering kind of why you’re doing it, that you’re doing it for the readers. You’re not doing it for yourself. You’re not doing it for your sources. You have a duty to your sources, but ultimately, your duty is to your readers and to the publication.
Zoe Beketova is a master’s student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Outside of MIT, she reports on mental and public health systems.