President Donald Trump and his administration have gutted science agencies, terminated research programmes and cancelled billions of dollars in grants to universities. What are the long-term impacts for the United States and the world?
By Jeff Tollefson, Dan Garisto & Heidi Ledford
In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. His administration has fired thousands of government scientists, bringing large swathes of the country’s research to a standstill and halting many clinical trials. It has threatened to slash billions in funding from US research universities and has terminated more than 1,000 grants in areas such as climate change, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and HIV prevention.
How Trump 2.0 is reshaping science
This looks likely to be just the beginning. Congress approved a budget bill on 10 April that could lay the groundwork for massive spending cuts over the coming decade. The White House is expected to propose a budget for 2026 that would slash investments in science across the federal government; for example, the Trump administration is considering cutting the science budget for NASA nearly in half and spending at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 40%. The administration has also begun implementing strict immigration measures that have left some students and researchers in detention centres, and many academics fear that these and future measures could spur researchers to look for opportunities outside the United States.
The dismantling of scientific institutions and of much of the research ecosystem has led increasing numbers of people inside and outside research to wonder how science will survive Trump. In March, some 1,900 members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which represent the country’s leading scientists, published an open letter, declaring:
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“We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”
