THE ANNUAL meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science afford researchers a chance to show off what they do best. Those roaming the corridors in Boston between February 13th and 15th were treated to talks on everything from plate tectonics and ancient DNA analysis to gene editing and nuclear power. All represent the cutting-edge research to be expected in a country that has long prided itself on, as per this year’s theme, producing the “science shaping tomorrow”.
At the moment, though, it is science itself that is being shaped. Mere weeks into the second Trump administration, scientists worry that their flagship institutions are under assault. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example, have been told to prepare for hefty reductions to their budgets and staff cuts of up to 50%. Across several federal agencies, mass firings of thousands of “probationary” workers, meaning those recently hired or promoted, have already begun. Research institutions reliant on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, have been warned of restrictions on how they can spend their money.
These moves are part of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s aspiration to cut $2trn from the annual federal budget of approximately $7trn. This has put all the government’s outgoings, including the roughly $160bn spent every year on basic and applied research, under the microscope. Another motivation is a suspicion that scientists and their research have become tools of a “woke ideology”. Precisely which of the administration’s changes will survive legal challenge is still unclear. But the scale of the cuts and the manner in which they are being introduced could seriously damage American science.
The deepest slashes proposed so far concern the $44bn in grants allocated by the NIH. Many institutions routinely use NIH funds to cover between 50% and 70% of their “indirect” costs, which includes things such as laboratory maintenance, equipment provision and salaries for support and administrative staff. The administration sees that share as too high, and wants to cap indirect costs at 15% of the grant total, in line with similar limits set by private organisations, forcing institutions to pay for the remainder themselves.
Reforms to the nih have been proposed before. The growth of indirect costs was highlighted by the Government Accountability Office during Barack Obama’s presidency, leading the administration to consider a cap of its own. But one of 15% is seen by many as too restrictive. Part of the reason that private funding can be so targeted is that many of its grantees can make use of equipment, such as mass spectrometers and lab benches, at their home institutions that has been paid for with federal dollars. The government’s proposal of a 15% cap undoes the social contract “for institutions and the federal government to co-build the infrastructure for American science,” says Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals.
Analysis by The Economist finds that a total of $6.3bn in NIH funding could be at stake. Studies of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism would see cuts of almost a fifth of their total budget (see chart). This could have serious consequences for medical research. It may also backfire politically: many of the institutions hardest-hit would be in Republican states. Universities in Alabama, for example, received $386m in funding from the NIH in 2024, supporting more than 4,700 jobs and $900m-worth of economic activity.
Wait and see
Whether the cap will come into force, though, is still unclear. Federal judges have put the proposal on hold, in response to lawsuits filed by 22 states, plus national associations representing medical schools and some hospitals. Congress has passed several bills which specifically prohibit the NIH from changing the provisions related to indirect costs, meaning that the matter will be hashed out in the courts. For now, the atmosphere of uncertainty is unlikely to be conducive to progress in a field where researchers prioritise long-term stability.
Another prong of the administration’s actions is an attempt to influence what research is funded. Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, has previously suggested cuts as a way of ensuring scientific institutions like the NSF cannot “propagandise for woke ideology”.
Federal agencies are now required to review all grants in light of an executive order terminating programmes aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which Mr Trump has argued has made government less meritocratic. As evidence of DEI’s malign influence Ted Cruz, the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, released a database that identified 3,476 NSF grants—roughly 10% of those awarded during the Biden administration—as being unacceptably “woke”. One analysis of a randomly chosen subset of these grants by Scott Alexander, a blogger, found that only around 40% were actually related to DEI (an analysis of all 3,476, conducted by The Economist with the help of an artificial-intelligence model, found the figure was 44%). Of the remainder, the vast majority briefly touched on potential impact or outreach activities. A smaller group used disfavoured homonyms of scientific terms, like one grant concerning earthquakes and tsunamis, which cited “trans-crustal processes”.
Removing boilerplate language from future grant applications will be time-consuming but doable. Getting exemptions for research that has been wrongly flagged may also be possible, though no process to do so has yet been made public. But some valuable research may be dropped.
It is research on climate change that faces the most pressing and concrete threats. Almost all mentions of climate change and programmes to combat it have been scrubbed from federal websites, and the National Nature Report—the first assessment of nature and biodiversity across the government, produced by more than 150 scientists and funded with government money—was cancelled weeks before the first full draft was due. One researcher who studies how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide says he envisages a future in which his team removes references to climate change in order to get grants approved.
The status of many other scientific projects related to climate change and the environment now seems uncertain—not least because plenty are funded, at least in part, by appropriations set out in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate legislation passed by the Biden administration, and which Mr Trump’s officials hope to unpick.
Much of such funding is administrated through NOAA, the federal agency which oversees atmospheric science and environmental monitoring, including weather forecasting and making projections about climate change. NOAA itself is squarely in the cross-hairs. “Project 2025”, a set of campaign proposals for how Mr Trump should reform the federal government (and to which Mr Vought contributed), described NOAA as a major player in the “climate-change alarm industry” and called for it to be “broken up and downsized”.
That would have consequences beyond America’s borders. Several media outlets, including the Washington Post and Wired, reported internal emails to some NOAA staff instructing them to pause “all international engagements”. Many meteorological and climate agencies around the world rely on the observations and data collected by NOAA. The worst affected will be agencies in poor countries, which often do not have the money or infrastructure to make their own detailed weather forecasts and climate projections, says one top scientist at an international organisation, who could speak only anonymously.
Climate science in America is “possibly the strongest in the world”, the scientist points out, and reductions to it will “take out the foundations from others’ work”. Other organisations abroad will have to step up to compensate for the loss. But, the scientist notes wryly, that creates an opportunity to chip away at America’s long-standing scientific hegemony. Those gathered in Boston to celebrate America’s “advancement of science” might feel that promise ringing a little hollow. ■
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