The Trump administration’s cuts to health research will shorten life expectancy and threaten the lives of all Americans, according to university union leaders and scientists.

Lab leaders and researchers said they’re already seeing PhD students not getting admitted, research being delayed or cancelled, and longtime colleagues getting fired as President Donald Trump executes his promised cuts to government spending.

U.S. taxpayers fund an estimated $81 billion in academic scientific research and development annually, more than twice the next-highest country, according to the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

A group of universities last week won a temporary restraining order blocking the federal National Institutes of Health from halting some of the funding, but scientists and union leaders say the impacts are still being felt via job losses, cancelled scientific reviews and delayed basic research. How much has been cut or halted remains unclear. The Trump administration has not released a comprehensive, reliable accounting of job cuts or funding halts.

“They are making America sick again,” said Rutgers University Prof. Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors. “They will have drastic effects on all of us. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.”

Speaking to reporters Thursday alongside a group of researchers and other union leaders, Wolfson said the spending reductions will have untold implications for generations. Some funding has been put on hold because it mentions “diversity,” or “climate change,” while in other cases federal counterparts have stopped communicating or required meeting notices aren’t being posted to the Federal Register.

The impacts are being felt in communities across the country that have universities or academic medical centers, Wolfson and others said, as well as clinical training, basic scientific research and patient care.

Margaret Cook, a union leader for the Communications Workers of America who represents about 130,000 members in healthcare and education, said the public needs to understand what’s at stake.

“This is so much bigger than what any of us do in our individual clinic…” Cook said.

Annika Barber, who researches the circadian rhythms of fruit flies, said basic research like hers helps “fill the pipeline” of scientific knowledge, allowing scientists 20 years from now to develop treatments for things like traumatic brain injuries, which affect soldiers as well as large numbers of older Americans who fall inside their homes.

Barber, an assistant professor at Rutgers, said her best friend recently died from cancer at 38, and noted that it was research on fruit flies that revealed how genetic mutations cause cancer.

“There are so many more discoveries we need to make,” Barber said. “What will clinicians draw from in 20 years?”

She also worries that her students and colleagues will move to other countries where the funding is more stable, in what will be a “long-term loss for the United States.”

Many university researchers are deeply skeptical or critical of new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who before joining the administration campaigned for president on a platform of “Make America Health Again.” Mainstream researchers say Kennedy’s longtime opposition to scientifically developed vaccines, for instance, risk harming public health, not improving it.

“Letting the American scientific well run dry by cutting off basic research and talent will not make America healthy again,” Barber said. “It will only make us sicker with every passing day.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump cuts to science, medicine will hurt everyone, researchers say