Trump’s attack on science is growing fiercer and more indiscriminate

Trump hopes to slash the NIH budget by 38%, or almost $18bn; cut NSF budget by $4.7bn, more than 50%, scrap nearly half of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA are used to being the best. The country is home to the world’s foremost universities, hosts the lion’s share of scientific Nobel laureates and has long been among the top producers of influential research papers. Generous funding helps keep the system running. Counting both taxpayer and industrial dollars, America spends more on research than any other country. The federal government doles out around $120bn a year, $50bn or so of which goes towards tens of thousands of grants and contracts for higher-education institutions, with the rest going to public research bodies.

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Now, however, many of America’s top scientific minds are troubled. In the space of a few months the Trump administration has upended well-established ways of funding and conducting research. Actions with the stated goal of cutting costs and stamping out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are taking a toll on scientific endeavour. And such actions are broadening. On May 15th it emerged that the administration had cancelled grants made to Harvard University for research on everything from Arctic geochemistry to quantum physics, following a similar action against Columbia. The consequences of these cuts for America’s scientific prowess could be profound.

Under the current system, researchers at universities apply to receive federal funding from grant-making agencies, namely the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Department of Defence (DoD) and the Department of Energy (DoE). Once a researcher’s proposal has been assessed by a panel of peers and approved by the agency, the agreed money is paid out for a set amount of time.

This setup is facing tremendous upheaval. Since Mr Trump’s return to the White House, somewhere in the region of $8bn has been cancelled or withdrawn from scientists or their institutions, equivalent to nearly 16% of the yearly federal grant budget for higher education. A further $12.2bn was rescinded but has since been reinstated by courts. The NIH and the NSF have cancelled more than 3,000 already-approved grants, according to Grant Watch, a termination-tracking website run by academics (see chart 1); an unknown number have been scrapped by the DoE, the DoD and others. Most cancellations have hit research that Mr Trump and his team do not like, including work that appears associated with DEI and research on climate change, misinformation, covid-19 and vaccines. Other terminations have targeted work conducted at elite universities.

Much more is under threat. The president hopes to slash the NIH budget by 38%, or almost $18bn; cut the NSF budget by $4.7bn, more than 50%; and scrap nearly half of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. All told, the proposed cuts to federal research agencies total nearly $40bn. Many have already gone under the knife. In March the Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, announced it would scrap 20,000 jobs, or 25% of its workforce. According to news reports, about 1,300 jobs, or more than 10%, have been lost at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which carries out environmental and climate research. Staff cuts were reportedly also due to start at the NSF, but have been temporarily blocked by courts. To save more money, the NIH, the NSF, the DoE and the DoD have launched restrictive caps on so-called indirect grant costs, which help fund facilities and administration at universities. (These limits have also been partly blocked by courts.)

The administration says it has a plan. Mr Trump entered office on a mission to cut government waste, a problem from which the scientific establishment is not immune. On May 19th Michael Kratsios, his scientific adviser, stood up in front of the National Academies of Sciences and defended the administration’s vision. It wants to improve science by making it better and more efficient, he said—to “get more bang for America’s research bucks”. To do so, funding must better match the nation’s priorities, and researchers should be freed from groupthink; empowered to challenge each other more freely without fear of convention and dogma.

Shaking things up

He is right that science has a number of stubborn problems that can hardly be solved by a business-as-usual approach. Scientific papers are less disruptive and innovative than they used to be, and more money has not always translated into speedier progress. In the pharmaceutical sciences, new drug approvals have plateaued in recent years despite ever larger budgets. Researchers also spend much too long writing grant proposals and completing similar administrative tasks, which keeps them away from their laboratories.

Some of Mr Trump’s proposals are, in fact, overdue. Many NASA watchers, for example, would agree with his plan to find commercial alternatives for the Space Launch System, a giant rocket being built to take people to the Moon and beyond but which is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

It would be hard, if not impossible, to improve the science funding system without some disruption. The problem, however, is that the administration’s cuts are broader and deeper than they first appear, and its methods more chaotic. Take the focus on DEI, which the administration bemoans as a dangerous left-wing ideology. The agencies are targeting it because of an executive order banning them from supporting such work. But DEI is notoriously ill-defined. Programmes that are being cancelled are not just inclusive education schemes, but also projects that focus on the health of at-risk groups.

Though it is mostly unclear why specific projects have been cancelled, Grant Watch keeps track of words that could have landed researchers in trouble. “Latinx”, for example, is a term for Hispanic people flagged as a telltale sign of DEI by Ted Cruz, a Republican senator. The NIH has cancelled a project on anal-cancer risk factors, the abstract of which uses the word Latinx. Another cancelled project concerns oral and throat cancer, for which gay men are at higher risk. Its abstract uses the phrase “sexual minority”. There are many such examples.

Other cuts may do more damage. Some NIH-funded research on vaccines has been cancelled, as have $11bn-worth of special funds from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for pandemic-related research. In March Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who helped test the Moderna mRNA vaccine for covid-19, had several vaccine grants terminated. One project aimed to develop broad-spectrum vaccines for the same family of viruses that SARS-CoV-2 comes from; scientists fear other strains might cross from animals to humans. Both the CDC and NIH justified such cuts by saying that the covid-19 pandemic is over. But this is short-sighted, argues Dr Baric, given the number of worrying viruses. “We’re in for multiple pandemics” in the future, he says. “I guess we’ll have to buy the drugs from the Chinese.”

Even for scientists who have not been affected by cuts, other changes have made conducting research more challenging. For example, the NIH and NSF have both delayed funding new grants. Jeremy Berg, a biophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh who is tracking the delay in grant approvals, wrote in his May report that the NIH has released about $2.9bn less funding since the start of the year, relative to 2023 and 2024. According to media reports, the NSF has stopped approving grants entirely until further notice.

At the NIH itself, the largest biomedical research centre in the country, lab supplies have become more difficult to procure. Department credit cards have been cut back and the administrative staff who would normally place orders and pay invoices have been fired. Scientists report shortages of reagents, lab animals and basic equipment like gloves. All these factors are destabilising for researchers—labs need a steady, predictable flow of cash and other resources to continue functioning.

If next year’s cuts to federal agencies are approved, more pain could be coming (see chart 2). The NSF’s budget cuts, for instance, will hit climate and clean energy research. And, according to leaked documents, the research arm of NOAA would most probably cease to exist entirely. That would almost certainly mean defunding the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, “one of the best labs in the world for modelling the atmosphere”, says Adam Sobel, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. NASA’s Earth-observation satellites would likewise take a beating, potentially damaging the agency’s ability to keep track of wildfires, sea-level rises, surface-temperature trends and the health of Earth’s poles. Those effects would be felt by ordinary people both in America and abroad.

And as Mr Trump increasingly wields grant terminations as bludgeons against institutions he dislikes, even projects that his own administration might otherwise have found worthy of support are being cancelled. Take his feud with Columbia. His administration has accused the institution of inaction against antisemitism on campus after Hamas’s attack on October 7th 2023 and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. On March 10th the NIH announced on X that it had terminated more than 400 grants to Columbia on orders from the administration, as a bargaining chip to get the university to take action. Some $400m of funding has been withheld, despite Columbia having laid out how it is acting to deal with the administration’s concerns. Those grants include fundamental research on Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and HIV—topics that a spokesperson confirmed to The Economist represent priority areas for the NIH.

Columbia is not alone. The administration is withholding $2.7bn from Harvard University, which has responded with a lawsuit. Within hours of Harvard refusing the administration’s demands, scientists at some of the university’s world-leading labs received stop-work orders. The administration has since said that Harvard will be awarded no more federal grants. Letters from the NIH, the NSF, the DoD and the DoE sent to Harvard around May 12th seem to cancel existing grants as well.

While it is too soon to say exactly how many grants are involved, 188 newly terminated NSF grants from Harvard appeared in the Grant Watch database on May 15th, touching all scientific disciplines. A leaked internal communication from Harvard Medical School, the highest-ranked in the country, says that nearly all its federal grants have been cancelled. Cornell University says it too has received 75 stop-work orders for DoD-sponsored research on new materials, superconductors, robotics and satellites. The administration has also frozen over $1.7bn destined for Brown, Northwestern and Princeton universities and the University of Pennsylvania.

As these efforts intensify, scientists are hoping that Congress and the courts will step in to limit the damage. Swingeing as the budget plan is, the administration’s proposals are routinely modified by Congress. During Mr Trump’s first term, similar proposals to squeeze scientific agencies were dismissed by Congress and he might meet opposition again.

Susan Collins, the Republican chairwoman of the Senate appropriations committee, which is responsible for modifying the president’s budget, has expressed concern that Mr Trump’s cuts will hurt America’s competitiveness in biotech and yield ground to China. Katie Britt, a Trump loyalist and senator for Alabama, has spoken to Robert F. Kennedy junior, the health secretary, about the the need for research to continue. (The University of Alabama at Birmingham is among the top recipients of NIH money.) When on May 14th Mr Kennedy appeared before lawmakers to defend the restructuring of the HHS, Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate health committee, asked him to reassure Americans that the reforms “will make their lives easier, not harder”.

Courts will have their say as well. On May 5th 13 universities sued the administration over the NSF’s new indirect-cost cap, and the American Association of University Professors has likewise sued Mr Trump over his treatment of Harvard and Columbia. Harvard’s suit is ongoing. Dr Baric is one researcher who has had his grant terminations reversed in this manner. His state of North Carolina, alongside 22 other states and the District of Columbia, sued the HHS over the revoked CDC funding for vaccine research. On May 16th the court ruled that the federal government had overstepped and not followed due process, and ordered the HHS to reinstate the funding.

Reversing more cuts will take time, however. And the uncertainty and chaos in the short term could have lasting effects. A country where approved grants can be terminated before work is finished and appealing against decisions is difficult becomes a less attractive place to do science. Some researchers may consider moving abroad. American science has long seen itself as the world’s best; today it faces its gravest moment ever.

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