At universities, spring is a season of faculty hiring, Ph.D. acceptances, and postdoctoral appointments. But this year has become a season of turmoil and trepidation at institutions that rely on federal funding for science and technology research, as the Trump administration wages a highly publicized war on government waste that feels, to some in academia, like a war on publicly funded science.
Bipartisan support for basic science and the discoveries that it has yielded, from space probes and touch screens to vaccines and genome sequencing, was once seen as impregnable. Dominance in international scientific research was a national priority that underpinned U.S. economic and military prowess. But under President Donald Trump, partisan battles over politicized science and institutional calcification have begun to throttle the federal spigot that funds researchers.
“I’ve never seen anything even remotely similar to what’s going on,” says Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York and a Democrat who previously worked on science policy and funding on Capitol Hill. “The science community is in a state of shock.”
Why We Wrote This
Publicly funded research has long fueled U.S. leadership in the sciences. The Trump administration calls for reforms in this arena, but many researchers say funding cuts are putting a national strength at risk.
The policy changes include a near-total freeze on funding and grant approvals by the National Institutes of Health, which provides more than $35 billion in annual grants that flow to more than 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. NIH also said it would cut overhead payments as a percentage of grants to 15%, down from an average of 40%, a potential shortfall of billions of dollars. (A federal court in Boston put a temporary halt to this new funding formula last month.)
The National Science Foundation, which supports academic research in physics and chemistry, has cut its workforce and is reportedly targeted for deeper cuts. Federal grants have been halted due to alleged noncompliance with Mr. Trump’s executive orders to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. And biologists, engineers, and other scientific experts are leaving or being forced out of federal agencies.
The Trump administration defends cutting the “indirect costs” that NIH pays to grantees as in line with private funders of scientific research, and it argues that universities should pare their bloated bureaucracies. Researchers say the extra money pays for equipment, lab space, waste disposal, and other common costs shared across projects.
Beyond cutting spending, the administration hasn’t outlined an overall science strategy. Mr. Trump has nominated Michael Kratsios to direct his Office of Science and Technology Policy. Mr. Kratsios has no science expertise; he is a technology investor who worked in the first Trump administration. He told a Senate hearing that steep cuts to science-agency budgets was a matter for the White House and its budget unit.
The administration has yet to fill out the top ranks of science agencies, and a broader strategy may emerge once it does, says Anthony Mills, who directs the Center on Technology, Science, and Energy at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank.
In a confirmation hearing last week, Mr. Trump’s nominee to head NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, sketched a vision for the agency that includes both research funding and reforms that he said are needed. Pledging that scientists supported by NIH will “have the resources they need,” he said his priorities would include fighting chronic disease, regulating research that might unintentionally cause a pandemic, and improving reliability to address a decline in public trust in science.
“Dissent is the very essence of science,” he said in an opening statement that complained of a culture of intolerance and conformity at NIH.
Dr. Bhattacharya himself was affected by that alleged intolerance – and has been labeled by some a “fringe” scientist – for views he expressed during the pandemic.
For now, the direction has been set by Elon Musk as he tries to shrink the federal bureaucracy, including NIH and, by extension, the elite universities it funds. Behind this effort is a deep animosity among some Republicans toward these institutions since the COVID-19 pandemic, says Mr. Mills.
“The response [by the administration] is not to take a look at what we’re funding and to make a set of decisions, but to punish those institutions,” he says.
Russell Vought, the White House budget director, has long criticized the federal government as “woke and weaponized” and has proposed deep cuts to agencies, including scientific institutions. In 2023, he warned that a “small scientific elite” had politicized research and medicine.
Every administration applies its own priorities to science, says Kirstin Matthews, a fellow in science and technology policy at Rice University. Under President Barack Obama, brain science got extra attention. In his first term, Mr. Trump put artificial intelligence on the front burner. The difference in the past, she says, is that science was in a “nice spot of being nonpartisan. It’s data and facts.”
Facing a squeeze on federal grants, some researchers may find alternative funding from foundations or industry. But many fields are too far removed from commercial applications to interest the private sector, says Ms. Matthews, who had a National Science Foundation grant approved in January and is waiting to hear if her funding is affected. “Nobody funds basic science research like the government does,” she says.
Funding freeze has immediate effect
The turmoil at NIH has choked the pipeline of grant applications and approvals. Researchers who were waiting to present their projects to review panels have had meetings canceled, while many existing grants have been frozen. Clinical trials of some medicines have been paused, while staff turnover has added to the confusion over grant eligibility.
Even a temporary pause on federal funding has consequences for research institutions, says Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The uncertainty over grants, and the possibility that NIH imposes a 15% cap on indirect costs, creates financial risk that has led some universities to freeze all hiring.
In 2017, Mr. Trump asked Congress to cap NIH overhead funding at 15%, but he was rebuffed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who inserted a safeguard into an appropriations bill. Still, that hasn’t stopped the second Trump administration from trying to rip up the formula, says Professor Kelchen, who studies the financing of universities.
The bulk of science research dollars goes to around 150 universities that include private institutions with large endowments, such as Harvard. In 2024, it received $686 million from NIH and other federal agencies for research. Republicans have introduced two bills that would tax universities’ endowments and potentially hurt their finances more than cuts to science grants.
Public support overtaken by partisan divide
After World War II, public support for science remained rock solid for decades, says Professor Lubell, a former lobbyist in Washington for the American Physical Society. American technology had helped the United States and its allies to win the war and was a bipartisan priority for Congress. “If you were interested in national security, you had to be supportive of science and technology,” he says.
This meant investing in research at universities, including in complex and specialized fields that required expertise in federal agencies that oversaw funding. It also required the public to believe that taxpayer money was being spent wisely, says Professor Lubell.
Trust in scientists and their role in policymaking took a major hit during the pandemic among Republicans, according to Pew survey data. Eighty-two percent of Republicans in 2019 had confidence that scientists acted in the best interests of the public. That dropped to 66% in an October 2024 poll. Nine out of 10 Democrats expressed confidence in scientists acting in the public interest, barely unchanged over the same period.
This partisan divide, and conservative concerns about federal spending in general, have put scientific agencies and their research budgets in the administration’s crosshairs. Analysts of science policy say the biggest cuts are likely to fall on basic science that doesn’t have immediate medical or engineering impacts. What chemists and physicists study today can take decades to produce results in applied science and technology.
Cutting off the pipeline means those results may not be discovered, at least not by U.S.-based scientists, in fields ranging from health to agriculture.
To take one example, biologists studying the venom of a Gila monster found a hormone that is the basis of the new generation of weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic. To take another: U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded studies into the sexual reproduction of flies in the 1950s led to the introduction of sterile screwworms, eradicating a pest that killed livestock in the South and cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
For research institutions that rely on federal science funding, losses will be felt by graduate students and junior faculty members who are starting their careers. Some “will vote with their feet. They’ll find other things to do,” says Professor Lubell.
An exodus of talent “won’t be felt in the four years of this administration,” says Ms. Matthews at Rice. But it has consequences for future leadership in science. “As we lose more early-career investigators and our workforce in science ages, we’ll have no one to fill the gap.”
