Trump’s Cuts Are Hitting Philly Hard. Can the City Hold On?

Can Philly survive Trump? / Illustration by Leticia R. Albano

I.

The letter informing Penn researcher Aaron Richterman that his multiyear, multimillion-dollar NIH grant was being terminated came at the very end of May, 131 days after Donald Trump and his team took control of the federal government and the dismantling began.

Actually, calling the correspondence Richterman received a “letter” is a little insulting — to letters. What showed up in Richterman’s inbox was a 10-page document so filled with opaque, technical language that it could only have been written by a team of government bureaucrats possessing a little knowledge of science and a big love of contract law. That said, there was, on page six of said letter/document/whatever, a fairly straightforward explanation of why Richterman’s study — he and a team were looking at the health impact of a city of Philadelphia program that stabilizes housing for people with HIV — was being defunded.

“DEI,” the missive said. “Research programs based primarily on artificial or non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to science inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce sickness.”

Now, you are of course entitled to your own opinion of DEI — love it, hate it, fall somewhere in between. But for the Trump administration to deep-six Richterman’s funding on DEI grounds was a stretch, to say the least. To begin with, people with HIV are hardly a nonscientific or artificial group. In fact, they’re the very definition of scientific — human beings infected with a virus, no different from human beings sick with Ebola or smallpox or the flu or COVID or scores of other illnesses. What’s more, to suggest that the study had no potential to enhance health, or that it wasn’t worth the money, completely missed the point of what Richterman was doing. Evidence has already shown that housing-unstable HIV patients — Philadelphia is home to about 4,000 of them — are less likely to get treatment, which only makes them sicker and ends up costing the overall health system far more. If, by stabilizing their housing, the city reversed that outcome, this might be a program that could be scaled nationally, ultimately saving the system many, many millions of dollars.

Richterman put a version of this argument in an appeal he filed with the federal government in late June, and six weeks later got a reply. The Trump-led NIH told him — I’m paraphrasing here — to pound sand.

In the time since then, Richterman — who’s 38 and a graduate of Penn’s med school — has scrambled to keep the study going. The city found some money to pay one of his project coordinators through next May, but unless something changes, there’s no guarantee the work will be completed.

When we talk one recent morning, Richterman is, to put it mildly, frustrated. Researchers get used to rejection — applying for grants and running studies and getting things published is difficult and intensely competitive, because that’s what leads to top-flight science. But this rejection, Richterman confides, “feels like a gut punch — a betrayal of the underlying scientific process we’ve all committed to.”

Beyond that, he’s now become concerned about his own career. Richterman is precisely the kind of person Philadelphia has benefited from attracting in recent years — young, accomplished, highly educated, earning good money. He has no plans to leave the city, but for the first time he wonders if the career path he’s chosen is even viable. And he has the same fear for the folks just a few years younger than he is.

“The people a little behind me, they are just screwed,” he says. “If they don’t have a foot in the door, the door is closed.”

When it comes to the impact of the Trump administration’s funding cuts on Philadelphia, Richterman and his scientific colleagues at Penn, CHOP, Jefferson, Temple, etc., aren’t the only local people who’ve taken body blows. Indeed, across the city, in an array of fields, there are now deep pockets of anxiety about what the Trump team has done, and what it will do next. And with good reason: Philadelphia is remarkably — perhaps uniquely — vulnerable.

The number of ways Trump’s policies are hitting Philly is vast. DOGE firings. The government shutdown. ICE raids. (The Chinatown Stitch project, which would have covered parts of the Vine Street Expressway, has also been defunded.) But the city is particularly exposed in two crucial areas. One involves cuts to social programs and the safety net. Philadelphia no longer holds the title of “poorest big city in America” — as of late summer, Houston is even poorer — but we should hardly be puffing out our chests with pride: There are still hundreds of thousands of people in Philadelphia who live below the poverty line, and hundreds of thousands more just one rung above them on the economic ladder. Shrinking the number of people who get SNAP (the current version of food stamps) and Medicaid benefits will only make their lives — and our city — less stable.

But it’s not just the vulnerable in Philadelphia who are susceptible to what Trump is doing. The Trump team is also coming for the engine that’s driven our economy over the past three decades: higher education and health care. Eds and meds, as they’re snappily called, account for an estimated one in three jobs in Philadelphia, and they’re in the Trump administration’s crosshairs in an array of ways, from program rollbacks that will affect how hospitals, nursing homes, and home health care providers get paid to slashed funding for new drug trials and the kind of frontline research that Aaron Richterman is doing.

This is not just a D.C. story. It has a disproportionately high impact in the Philadelphia area. What’s happening in D.C. really does matter.” — U.S. Representative Brendan Boyle

“I think the alarm should be blinking red,” says U.S. Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat whose district includes Delaware County and portions of Montgomery County and the city. That’s an assessment shared by her Democratic colleague Representative Brendan Boyle, whose Philly-based district has one of the highest levels of SNAP enrollment in the country. “This is not just a D.C. story,” he says. “It has a disproportionately high impact in the Philadelphia area. What’s happening in D.C. really does matter.”

Longtime city leader and public finance expert Sam Katz is even more blunt. “The consequences are mind-boggling,” he says when I ask him one day what the cuts could do to Philadelphia. Katz goes on to talk not just about the impact on individuals, but about what he calls the “cascading effect” all the defunding will cause — a reduction here causing a bigger problem there, which leads to another, even larger disruption further down the line.

Let me be abundantly clear: Much, if not most, of what the Trump administration is doing is both cruel and stupid. But the actions it’s taken also reveal an uncomfortable truth about Philadelphia: Over the past several decades we’ve not only built an economy in which far too many people struggle to make it through the month; we’ve built an economy barely capable of standing on its own two feet.

“Band-Aids” is the phrase former City Council member and mayoral candidate Allan Domb uses for the way Philadelphia often approaches solving problems. That is, when we see an issue, we tend to treat the symptoms, not the cause. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Band-Aids — when you’re bleeding, it’s pretty swell to have one — but at some point you’d be smart to step back and try to understand why you’re bleeding in the first place.

Like it or not, the time for that approach might finally have arrived.

II.

Men Who Care of Germantown’s Keith Pate / Photograph by Hannah Yoon

The bad news, Keith Pate is telling me, is that once again he and his fellow volunteers don’t have any meat or dairy to provide to people. The good news: They’ve at least managed to get their hands on some fresh fruit.

It’s a warm Saturday morning in September, and Pate, the 71-year-old pantry director of Men Who Care of Germantown, a community group, is overseeing the organization’s weekly food pantry. As cars line up on narrow Tulpehocken Street in front of Men Who Care’s headquarters (a former bar), Pate greets each driver warmly, then asks them to sign some paperwork. When they do, they move forward, where workers load a bag or two of groceries, along with a box of fruit, into the car. On a typical Saturday, says Pate — a retired home remodeler who lives around the corner, in the house in which he grew up — Men Who Care serves more than 300 recipients. “We’re getting people from all around Philadelphia,” he tells me. “We don’t turn anyone away.”

If you want to understand the impact the Trump cuts are having, or will have, on the day-to-day existence of people in Philadelphia, food is a good place to start, given the large number of Philadelphians who rely at least partially on government assistance to feed themselves and their families. At any given moment, nearly 475,000 Philadelphians — almost one in three city residents — are enrolled in SNAP. Now, if some small voice in your brain is wondering how many of these people are just looking for an easy government handout, allow me to clarify: More than half of SNAP recipients in Philly are children, seniors, and disabled adults, while the majority of the rest are people who work but simply don’t earn enough money to cover all the basics. I should add that, even with that large enrollment number, SNAP still doesn’t meet all the need that exists in Philadelphia, which is why the city and region also have a network of food pantries — like the one run by Men Who Care — that supplement what people put on their tables.

This morning, for instance, the volunteers on Tulpehocken Street are handing out bags filled with spaghetti, pancake mix, oatmeal, and canned goods. That Men Who Care doesn’t have any meat or dairy to give away today is not its fault; its supplier, the large Philadelphia food bank Share Food, didn’t have any meat or dairy to give to Men Who Care. And Share Food didn’t have any meat or dairy to give away because earlier this year the Trump administration ended two federal initiatives — the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program (LFPA) — that essentially paid American farmers to share their excess food with food banks.

“They canceled out about $7 million worth of TEFAP expenses we were looking at for this upcoming year,” George Matysik, Share Food’s executive director, tells me one late summer day as we sit inside the organization’s warehouse on Hunting Park Avenue. The shuttering of LFPA, he adds, cost Share Food another $1.5 million in provisions. (The two programs accounted for about 20 percent of what the organization has distributed in recent years.) “They gave us two days’ notice,” Matysik continues. “Sent us an email on a Friday, and said by Monday the program no longer exists.”

The cuts were jarring, but they’re hardly the only disruptions that Share Food — which helps feed 600,000 people in the greater Philly region every month — has faced thanks to the new administration. A large portion of the food the organization distributes is donated by local food purveyors, but Trump’s tariffs and trade policies have made what kinds of food those purveyors are getting from Central and South America unpredictable. (“Do you have any beef? No. But we’ve got lots of black beans,” Matysik says the day I’m there.) The Trump administration also shuttered the federal SNAP Ed program, which will force Share Food to cancel the nutrition classes it runs. The federal VISTA program — which paid for a couple of Share Food staffers — got whacked as well. And then there’s the impact from the ICE raids; in certain neighborhoods that Share Food serves, immigrants are afraid to even come out to the food pantries.

Matysik, who’s 44 and grew up in a union household in Philadelphia before graduating from Penn, sounds both incredulous and defiant as he talks about all of this. He’s spent much of his career in hunger relief — including the past six years as head of Share Food — which means he’s been through crises before. But this one feels different. “What we’re dealing with now is in many ways worse than the pandemic or the ’08 recession or any other time,” he says. “Because it’s like a horror movie where the call is coming from inside the house.”

As we talk, Matysik is steeling himself for things to get worse. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — passed by Congress and signed by the president this summer — changed eligibility requirements for SNAP and shifted costs to states. As a result, an estimated 43,000 people in Philadelphia — 145,000 across Pennsylvania — are likely to be booted off the rolls.

Matysik adds it to the list of challenges. “Not only are we going to have less food to feed the line,” he says, “but now the lines are getting significantly longer.”

Less access to food, of course, is just one of many ways the Trump cuts will affect Philadelphians who live close to the economic edge. Another is housing. According to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, 80,000 Philadelphians get some form of federal housing assistance. Unfortunately for them, the Trump administration is pretty much blowing up the way the Department of Housing and Urban Development operates, consolidating and shifting to states most federal rental assistance programs while cutting funding 40 percent. Although the changes don’t necessarily mean tens of thousands of Philadelphians will suddenly find themselves homeless — the state could theoretically step in to bridge the funding difference — any reduction in assistance will only add to the housing anxiety many people already feel. (According to a study by Econsult Solutions Inc., roughly half of Philly rental households in 2023 were “cost-burdened” — meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing.)

Meanwhile, the administration has also proposed eliminating the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), the federal initiative that helps qualifying households pay utilities, as well as Community Block Grants, which Mayor Cherelle Parker is banking on to fund a portion of her plan to build or rehab 30,000 housing units in response to the housing crisis.

How about health care? Philadelphians are likely to feel the effect of Trump’s cuts in at least a couple of ways. One involves the much-publicized changes to Medicaid, which more than 30 percent of Philadelphia residents rely on to cover health expenses. Thanks to tightened eligibility requirements and increased paperwork mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill, some 70,000 of those residents are predicted to lose their coverage beginning in 2027.

Also at risk on the health front: public health initiatives overseen by city government. In 2024 the city got $2.2 billion — about 20 percent of the total municipal budget — through federal grants, but those grants weren’t spread evenly across departments. The vast majority went to the Department of Public Health, which operates city health centers, and the Department of Behavioral Health, which provides mental health and substance abuse treatment for lower-income people. How much of that funding could disappear is tough to say, but there are ominous signs. The Trump administration’s budget proposes slashing 40 programs and $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And it’s already frozen $1 billion in federal grants nationally that school districts were using to hire mental health professionals.

Okay, let me pause here to say two things. First, while what I’ve laid out is a lot, a full list of cuts potentially affecting Philadelphians is all but impossible to compile because the government is so large and the cuts are so wide-ranging: City arts organizations are seeing grants canceled. Nonprofit organizations have been forced to shutter programs. The School District of Philadelphia could lose a tenth of its budget — $450 million — if it doesn’t comply with a Department of Education directive to end DEI programs. (The directive is being challenged in court.)

But here’s the thing: Even if I could list all of the cuts being made, doing so the way I’ve done it — category by category — doesn’t fully capture their impact.

Start with the fact that many of these reductions will fall on the same people, folks whose lives are already teetering economically, and perhaps in other ways. “Anyone who’s eligible for one of these programs” — SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance — “is basically going to be eligible for all of them. It starts stacking,” says Bill McKinney.

McKinney would know. For the past five years he’s been the executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, which provides social services in one of the city’s most challenged neighborhoods. It’s difficult work, and it’s given McKinney a front-row seat when it comes to human need.

“In Kensington, the median income is $29,000 per year,” he tells me one day in his office. “So that means almost everyone up here is housing-unstable. Everyone up here is dealing with instability around food access. Everyone here is sort of underemployed.”

Keeping your head above water on $30K per year — particularly if you have kids — is no easy feat, which is, of course, why elected officials (of both parties, over many decades) put government assistance programs in place to start with. So what happens if you take away one or two or three of those supports?

The question leads to the second important thing we should keep in mind when trying to grasp the impact of the Trump cuts — what Sam Katz called the “cascading effect.” Begin on an individual level. As we talk, McKinney mentions the still-active drug corners in Kensington. “After you cut things, do you think there’s going to be more or less guys on that corner?” he asks. “Do you think there’s going to be more or less violence?”

The same equation applies to the customers those dealers are selling to. Take away addiction funding, and will you see more or fewer of them? And what impact will that have on their health? The decisions they make? Their families?

The cycle goes beyond individual people — it also affects businesses and institutions and systems. If we have more addicts and dealers and violence, for example, we’ll almost certainly need more funding for public safety and prisons. But where will it come from? An analysis from the state, for example, shows that the money people receive through SNAP helps support 12,000 jobs in the grocery industry in Pennsylvania. Reduce people’s eligibility, and how many of those grocery jobs disappear?

The same holds for health care. You can cut Medicaid benefits, but people who no longer have insurance will still need care — and hospitals are mandated by law to treat them. “The risk is that you end up cutting payments to hospitals,” says Paula Chatterjee, a researcher and assistant professor of medicine at Penn who specializes in the health care safety net. There’s been a lot of coverage in the media of the threat Medicaid cuts pose to rural hospitals, but Chatterjee says urban hospitals, which also treat a lot of Medicaid patients, are bracing for pain as well. While bigger systems like Penn Med don’t face an existential threat, they could be forced to tighten their belts, resulting in the elimination of even more jobs. (Signaling what’s ahead, in October Jefferson Health laid off hundreds of employees. “Like many organizations in health care and higher education, we are facing significant financial headwinds,” CEO Joseph Cacchione said of the cuts.)

As the waves caused by the cuts ripple outward — as that cascading effect intensifies — you can start to see something more clearly: a city that increasingly feels less stable. It’s a place where more people are homeless, addicted, sick, or suffering mental health crises; where crime and violence are increasing while education solutions and economic opportunity are fading. That’s not the kind of city most people want to live in or work in or visit, of course, which will drive folks away or prevent them from coming in the first place, which will only intensify the cascade.

As I talked to people about the impact of all of these cuts on Philadelphia, I found myself thinking about the dark parts of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, where a distraught George Bailey gets to see what the world would be like if he’d never been born. You know the scenes as well as I do. George’s mother ends up a bitter old woman. His wife ends up a dour old maid. Thousands of sailors aboard a ship are killed, because George wasn’t there to save his younger brother, Harry, who saved the sailors. Vibrant, wholesome Bedford Falls becomes dark, licentious Pottersville, because George wasn’t there to counter Old Man Potter’s power.

“Each man’s life touches so many other lives,” George’s guardian angel, Clarence, tells him. We’re interconnected.

Share Food executive director George Matysik / Photograph by Hannah Yoon

III.

How did we get to this point, where so many lives in Philadelphia are touched by, if not reliant on, the federal government? The full answer is long and complex, but the short answer is this: The city has never really recovered from losing its manufacturing base.

In 1960, Philadelphia had a population of about two million people, with roughly 40 percent of jobs in the region coming from manufacturing. I think in recent years we’ve romanticized what those jobs were like — more than a few were dirty, dangerous, and tedious. But broadly speaking, they did provide a decent living to people who didn’t necessarily have a lot of education.

As it happened, by 1960 we’d already hit the high-water mark when it came to making things in Philadelphia. Over the next couple of decades the city — ahead of the curve, in a perverse way — would give a glimpse of what was coming elsewhere in America during the Rust Belt ’80s and China Shock 2000s, as manufacturing jobs either moved elsewhere or were automated out of existence. By 1970, manufacturing accounted for just 26 percent of jobs around here, while the number of city residents fell to 1.85 million.

Of course, the ’60s were the same decade in which the federal government — in the form of Great Society programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps — made a concrete effort to lift Americans out of poverty. The endeavor, aided by a booming postwar economy, did what it was designed to do: At the end of the ’50s the poverty rate in America was 22 percent. A decade later it was just 13 percent.

Unfortunately, in Philly things just kept getting worse as the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s rolled by. Not only were we continuing to hemorrhage manufacturing positions, but, thanks to corporate consolidation, now company headquarters were disappearing too. Between 1979 and 1994, the city of Philadelphia lost an astonishing 250,000 jobs. By the mid-1990s, one in three Philadelphia residents was getting some form of public assistance.

It was around that time that the federal government began to make its impact on Philadelphia felt in another important way: by subsidizing higher education, where the region has long been strong. (The city and suburbs are home to more than 100 colleges and universities.) One avenue was federally backed student loans, which brought more kids to our colleges, which allowed those colleges to expand and hire more people. The other was a dramatic increase in government research funding for universities, which more than doubled nationally in the late 1990s and early 2000s and continued to rise steadily in the years afterward. Among those benefiting were institutions like Penn, whose NIH grants climbed from $140 million in 1996 to $500 million in 2010 to more than $675 million in 2024. (Penn hasn’t been the only local winner; CHOP, Jefferson, Temple, Drexel, and other institutions have also benefited. All together, Philly pulled in $1.2 billion in NIH money in 2024.)

That influx of government cash, along with the ever-growing role health care played in the American economy (even adjusted for inflation, health care spending per person has more than quadrupled since 1990), basically helped save Philadelphia from going down the dark path of a city like Detroit. We became an “eds and meds” town. More and more of the bright young kids who came here to study stayed, getting good jobs and attracting their friends to do the same. Center City flourished. Neighborhoods like Northern Liberties, Fishtown, and Point Breeze were transformed. National publications spread the word about how cool we were.

The problem was, not every problem was solved. One issue was that our economic growth wasn’t being spread evenly among Philly residents. Yes, we were adding jobs again — including a decent number of really good ones — but on the whole the positions we were generating were low-skill and low-wage. Between 2009 and 2018, 29 percent of the jobs created in the U.S. were at the lower end of the economic scale, paying $35,000 or less. In Philadelphia, the share was twice that‚ 60 percent. Is it any wonder we claimed the title “poorest big city in America” for so long?

Another issue: While we were pretty good at cultivating the eds and meds sector, we were absolutely lousy at attracting and supporting any other industries. One major issue has been the city’s business tax structure, which is among the most onerous in the country. If your politics fall to the left, you might be screaming right now: Hey! What’s wrong with taxing businesses? Shouldn’t corporations pay their fair share? On a federal level, I’m with you. (If we put the corporate tax rate back to what it was in the 1980s, we would take a big bite out of the federal budget deficit.) But it’s a different story on a local level, because it’s pretty easy for companies to move to wherever the tax rates are lower, whether that’s Boston or San Francisco — or even just Conshohocken.

It’s a huge problem for Philadelphia, which has pretty much become the City That For-Profit Companies Avoid. Of the 20 largest employers in the city, only four — American Airlines, Comcast, Universal Protection, and Moravia Health — are for-profit companies. All the rest are either government entities (like the school district and SEPTA) or nonprofit organizations (like most of our eds and meds) that don’t care about business taxes because they mostly don’t pay them. Contrast that with a city like Charlotte, North Carolina, which is home to Bank of America, Truist, and Honeywell.

Of course, perhaps the biggest issue with our postindustrial economy is that, while we’ve been good at eds and meds, we haven’t been great — at least not in the way that a city like Boston has. Thanks to breakthroughs coming out of MIT and Harvard — as well as deliberate strategies to commercialize those breakthroughs, turning them into companies and jobs — Boston built the strongest life sciences ecosystem in America (if not the world). In fact, they created a pretty cool flywheel: Research breakthroughs generated new companies, which generated new, well-paying jobs, which generated robust tax revenue that helped transform Massachusetts public schools into the best in the country. Which drew more people, breakthroughs, companies, etc.

Philly has never been able to fully mimic what happened in Boston. And, unfortunately, the chances of our doing it now look grimmer than ever.

IV.

One morning this fall I’m sitting with Dan Kessler — a longtime Penn associate dean and researcher who currently oversees more than 1,000 Ph.D. students in the school’s biomedical graduate studies program — listening to him talk about how U.S. science became the envy of the world.

An important factor, says Kessler, who’s 61 and has the sort of calm presence stressed grad students no doubt appreciate, is the freedom American researchers have had to explore questions of basic science — even when it’s not clear where those explorations will lead. A second factor has been patience; the government has provided funding to many research teams not for a year or two, but in some cases for decades. “You need a thousand people working in all different directions for 10 years just to have the opportunity to find that one leverage point,” Kessler says.

To an outsider the approach might seem inefficient, but the breakthroughs speak for themselves. And that’s why Kess­ler is, as he puts it, so unbelievably frustrated. “You can’t argue with the success of the model,” he says. “Yes, there’s always room for improvement. There’s certainly going to be some waste from time to time. But to undermine the model just seems like a tragedy.”

Unfortunately, undermining the model is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. For starters, there was the termination last winter and spring of all those grants on so-called DEI grounds. Philadelphia institutions alone saw at least $33 million in funding either canceled or frozen. Even more chilling is what comes next: The administration has proposed slashing the NIH budget by 44 percent and changing the funding formula for how schools like Penn get paid, which could cost Penn at least $250 million. Per year. And all of this is on top of the way the administration is using the threat of reduced funding to get Penn and other elite schools to change their behavior. (Penn gave in to a demand regarding trans athletes in the summer, but in the fall declined to sign an agreement that would have given the Trump team unprecedented control over hiring, curriculum, and admissions. If you think this won’t reduce the number of grants Penn gets, I will respectfully call you delusional.)

I ask Kessler about the broad impact of all of this funding instability, and he makes clear it’s devastating. He points to two of the biggest breakthroughs Penn has seen in recent years — Carl June’s ground-altering work using gene and cell therapy to treat cancer, and Drew Weissman and Kati Karikó’s efforts developing mRNA technology, which led to a vaccine for COVID.

“When Drew and Kati’s work earned the Nobel Prize, that was a decades-long project, which at the outset no one thought would ever have any significance,” he says. “It was a fringe thing — don’t do it, it’s not going to lead to anything.” As for June, Kess­ler says, “that’s a lifelong project punctuated in unexpected ways with moments of breakthrough. If, 10 or 15 years ago, this had happened to Carl June, where would we be now?”

But it’s not just soon-ish breakthroughs that could be at risk. Even worse could be next-generation breakthroughs from the next-generation researchers — people like Aaron Richterman, whom I introduced at the beginning of this story. Kessler notes that, in response to the uncertainty created by the Trump folks, Penn’s biomedical graduate studies program reduced its new Ph.D. class by 30 percent. Meanwhile, even people who’ve been in the program for a few years are questioning their futures. “We’re hearing that a lot now,” says Kessler. “Should I stay in graduate school? Should I pursue another career? Should I go to Europe because there’s more stability and support there?”

Penn researcher Aaron Richterman / Photograph by Hannah Yoon

Finally, and most significantly when it comes to Philadelphia’s future, Kessler brings up the economic aspect of all of this. As with the safety net cuts, these cuts have their own cascading effects. Ph.D. students don’t come to Philly and spend money living and working here. Institutions like Penn — which has grown so much physically over the past 25 years — stop building new buildings, hobbling the construction industry. We generate fewer breakthroughs, which means fewer start-up companies like Spark Therapeutics (which grew out of research at CHOP).

“The less research Penn does, the less well-off Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania are,” says Kessler. “I mean, it’s really undeniable.”

All of this, I’ll remind you, comes on top of whatever hit our eds and meds sector will take from safety net cuts. Unfortunately, the lost momentum comes at a particularly bad time for Philadelphia as it tries to create that Boston-like flywheel effect by doubling down on cell and gene therapy. (“Cellicon Valley” is the marketing term being used.) Even in the best of times, that was going to be a big challenge, in part because Boston essentially got a two-decade head start on creating a robust life sciences ecosystem. But significantly reducing research funding means this is anything but the best of times.

Also not helping is the fact that Pennsylvania isn’t flush enough to replace what might be lost on the federal grant front. Earlier this year Massachusetts rolled out a public-private innovation fund of at least $400 million. The money won’t completely replace the federal grants schools like Harvard and MIT might lose, but it will cushion the blow, and it signals that Massachusetts intends to remain a serious player. Because we’ve had less success, we’re not in the same position.

None of this is to sound ungrateful about what eds and meds have done for Philadelphia. In many respects, the sector has been our George Bailey. Who knows what we’d look like if they’d, well, never been born? Eds and meds have also been the source of some recent good news. In September the Center City District shared statistics showing that, after years of lagging behind other cities when it came to job growth, over the past four years Philadelphia has been ahead of the pack — with health care jobs paving the way.

Unfortunately, just a few days after that report came out, the U.S. Census Bureau released some new data too. It showed that Philadelphia still has the lowest median income level of America’s 10 largest cities — and that incomes here actually decreased in 2024.

It made me think about the most depressing statistic I came across in researching this story. Of the 50 largest metro areas in the country, the Philadelphia region ranked 50th — dead last — in economic mobility. Put another way, if you were born poor and for some reason want to stay that way, well, Philly is the place for you.

V.

I’ve found myself wondering lately whether there could have been a kinder, gentler version of Trumpism. For a decade the MAGA movement has been powered by the sense that things in our country are fundamentally broken. Everything costs too much. The working class is getting screwed. Institutions have ossified. People generally seem miserable. Trying to fix those problems in an orderly, rational way — what’s working? what isn’t? where do we want to go? — is something we might call “reform,” and America has had several great periods of it in its history.

But, of course, what Trump is doing isn’t reform. It’s an attempt at domination. He alone will decide what you’re allowed to say, do, maybe even think. He alone will decide your worth.

What was disturbing to most of the people I talked to for this story wasn’t just what’s being done by the administration, but the way it’s being done. When it comes to scientific research, for example, Penn’s Dan Kessler said that presidential administrations have frequently reordered priorities. “Programs came and went, funding moved from one area to the other or was reduced. But there was always sort of a rational, predictable process where changes were announced. What’s happened in recent months is sort of a wrecking ball to that tradition.”

In Germantown, Men Who Care’s Keith Pate shook his head about who’s winning and who’s losing in the second Trump era. “It’s the agenda they have — just being 100 percent about them, you know?” he said. “It’s hard for them to have the empathy they should have when they’re not familiar with the problem. It’s not like they have to worry about paying a bill. Or getting medical coverage. Or making sure their children can eat. That’s all taken care of with them. You have to have a whole different mentality — spiritually — in order to still have empathy when you’re in that position.”

But what’s happening is happening. So what can Philadelphia do about it? I offer no novel ideas in the short term. Speak up. Speak out. Vote. Those things matter, a lot. But that can’t be all we do, because the best-case scenario is that it just allows Philadelphia to maintain the status quo. And that’s not good enough.

My real point here is that Philadelphia, more than ever before, needs to start thinking long-term. And that begins with building an economy that works better for more people and that depends less on money we send to Washington being sent back to us. Two ideas stand out to me. One is raising the minimum wage. That’s easier said than done in Pennsylvania, where state law forbids municipalities from enacting their own minimum-wage laws and the statewide rate remains at $7.25 per hour — not a penny more than it was in 2009. Recently, the state House passed a law that would allow more flexibility based on population — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh could raise their rates to $15 per hour — but so far the Republican-led Senate has declined to vote on the bill.

The other idea is to reduce Philadelphia’s business taxes. That’s something the city’s most recent tax reform commission, which issued a report this summer, advocated strongly, arguing it would allow the city to attract more businesses and create more well-paying jobs. If we want to have more public money available for education, the only way we’re going to do it — especially at a time of unprecedented federal cutbacks — is to have a wider tax base. Unfortunately, Mayor Parker and City Council basically slow-walked the recommendations, laying out a plan that reduces business taxes over 15 years. We don’t have that kind of time.

But look, those are just two ideas. There are plenty of others out there, from a bigger state commitment to biotech to trying to capture some of those manufacturing jobs the Trump team believes it’s going to create (we’ll see). What’s needed most at this moment is strong leadership, but it’s hard to see much of it. The Parker administration has adopted a strategy of saying as little as possible about the cuts in order to avoid antagonizing President Trump. (The Parker team declined to make anyone available to talk to me for this story.) I understand the tactic, but I’m not sure that publicly pretending nothing dire is happening means that nothing dire is happening.

It’s not just the mayor, though. I talked to 25 people from various fields for this story, and I asked many of them if they’d been part of, or even heard about, any cross-sector talks taking place — with leaders in government, business, nonprofits, and academia coming together not to bitch about what’s happening, but to figure out what to do about it. Not one of them said yes. I got a sense that there’s lots of talking going on, but it’s mostly in silos.

The scarcity mindset does not encourage collaboration. It encourages the belief that there’s not enough, and so we all have to just look out for ourselves.” — Bill McKinney, executive director of New Kensington Community Development Corporation

This isn’t the first time Philadelphia has failed in this way. Over the years I’ve witnessed various people — heroically — try to get various factions in the city or region to work together. There are a few wins, but nothing has changed the culture of the way Philadelphia operates.

This subject came up when I spoke with Bill McKinney in Kensington, who offered an interesting take. Kensington, he said, has been disinvested in for decades. “It leads to a scarcity mindset,” he said. “And the scarcity mindset does not encourage collaboration. It encourages the belief that there’s not enough, and so we all have to just look out for ourselves.”

He sees the phenomenon not just among poor people in Philadelphia, but at the highest levels of the city, where leaders are often focused on protecting their own turf. “Philadelphia is full of talented, brilliant people and great organizations. But everyone ain’t at the table, right? And until everyone’s at the table, we don’t have a shot.”

McKinney’s comments make me think, again, about It’s a Wonderful Life — not the dark scenes near the end of the film, but earlier, when there’s a bank run and a crowd of depositors show up at the Bailey Building and Loan, demanding to withdraw their money. “You’re thinking of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe,” George implores them. “The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house … and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them money to build, and then they’re going to pay it back to you.” I can’t think of any better example of interconnectedness, of understanding how much we rise and fall together.

I’m not sure Bill McKinney and Allan Domb — who served on the tax reform commission I mentioned earlier, by the way — necessarily come from the same place politically. But I don’t see them as in opposition.

“We sort of cheer ourselves on for some Band-Aids that have been placed on problems, but we’re still not addressing any of these big things,” McKinney said. “We have accepted a very low bar, in a way.”

Maybe that’s just what happens when you’re been scarred by scarcity, as Philadelphia has been for 60 years. What’s happening now could make that mindset even worse — or it could finally force us to leave it behind. Philadelphia didn’t ask for this moment, but here it is. How are we going to respond?

Published as “Surviving Trump” in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.