Hundreds of projects are facing cuts, and American scientists bluntly say that ＂the future is scary.＂

April Day in Spring, National Science Foundation, USA（NSF）But there was a cold snap-the research funds for the new year were frozen.

Trump Administration Efficiency Department led by American entrepreneur and billionaire elon musk.（DOGE）The reason for this is to cut government spending and reduce staff. According to the latest report in Nature magazine, DOGE is reviewing the list of related research grants evaluated by NSF in February, and considering terminating more than 200 of them.

It’s not just NSF that is bleak. National institutes of health（NIH）Because of the lack of funds, some laboratories can’t even afford gloves, Petri dishes and reagents. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration（NOAA）, the US Food and Drug Administration（FDA）, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency（EPA）Scientists in other institutions are also facing the risk of "cooking without rice" and even being fired, and their morale is low and their work is paralyzed.

Many American scientists complain bitterly and bluntly say "feel helpless" and "the future is scary".

First, suffocating censorship

NSF, with a research budget of 9 billion dollars, is one of the largest funding institutions for basic research in the world.

However, since Trump took office as president of the United States this year, the agency has suffered a cold reception one after another: first, all funding was frozen; After that, I received a court unfreezing order in February, but I had to dismiss a large number of probation employees; At the beginning of April, the institution cut the postgraduate scholarship program by half, offering only 1,000 places instead of 2,000 in previous years.

In fact, the Republican Party of the United States has long been "disgusted" with the NSF funding method of the Democratic government. As early as during the administration of former President Biden, ted cruz was then a Republican senator from Texas and the current chairman of the Senate Science Committee.（Ted Cruz）My office once published a report that from January 2021 to April 2024, 3,483 research funds approved by NSF went to "promoting diversity, fairness and inclusiveness"（DEI）The principle of suspicious projects ",wasted $2 billion.

With the advent of the Trump 2.0 era, in February this year, NSF initiated a review of all funding, with the aim of ensuring that Trump’s executive orders on "radical and wasteful" DEI projects and "gender ideology" were not violated. Among them, there are hundreds of "sensitive words" that are thought to be related to ideology but not to hard science, such as "female", "black" and "inequality".

On April 14th, DOGE turned its attention to NSF funding again. Its staff entered the NSF headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia, and gained access to its funding management system, and used this access to prevent the disbursement of hundreds of research funds that had been approved in the multi-step review process and only needed to be finalized.

"This makes us feel scared." An NSF project official said.

It is reported that NSF’s research proposal has to go through several steps before it is approved: first, it is submitted to NSF project officials with professional knowledge. If it passes the review, it will entrust a third-party independent expert to review it, and the success rate is usually between 20% and 30%; Next, NSF department heads approve the funds and submit them to the appropriation and agreement department for final approval. However, DOGE’s intervention made the application for funding that had already reached the last step be returned.

It is worth noting that before DOGE was established in January this year, NSF’s new research funding rate has slowed down by half compared with 2024. As of April 16, the relevant funding has completely stopped.

US White House Spokesman Kush Desai（Kush Desai）The explanation given is: "The Trump administration is committed to ensuring that federal research expenditures meet the daily needs of the American people."

However, Democrats in the US House of Representatives believe that Cruz’s report and DOGE’s practice have major defects, which will "undermine the important work of researchers, educators and institutions" and will "endanger the US economy and national security".

According to statistics, at present, more than 200 proposals have been marked as "considering termination" by DOGE. Some of these proposals were marked because they contained wording about the "wider impact" of research on society-wording that Cruz did not like. Anthony Kit, a computational biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison（Anthony Gitter）It was "named" by Cruz. Kit said, "Cruz believes that universities are elite gathering places, accommodating scholars who do not engage in scientific research and are out of touch with reality. But his view is out of touch with the actual situation. "

In this regard, Zoe Lofgren, a senior Democrat of the Science, Space and Technology Committee of the US House of Representatives,（Zoe Lofgren）Turaman Panchanatan, director of NSF.（Sethuraman Panchanathan）"NSF must avoid being led by the nose and being forced to accept these empty findings and undermine its own audit procedures," wrote the letter.

Second, the "strangled" science

The Trump administration in the era of 2.0 not only made NSF tremble, but also made life difficult for many national scientific research and funding institutions.

NIH is one of them. As a large national biomedical research funding institution in the United States, its subordinate laboratories also employ thousands of scientists. The biggest dilemma faced by the scientists of this institution is "running out of ammunition and food".

In February this year, the Trump administration set the consumption limit of almost all government credit cards to $1 each, which brought a disastrous blow to NIH’s laboratory-it was impossible to buy gloves, pipettes, Petri dishes, reagents, storage bottles and other basic scientific research materials. For example, a laboratory ran out of chemicals used for cryopreservation and treatment of organ donors’ brains; Another key laboratory lost half of its staff in the wave of layoffs and had to "borrow" staff from other teams to continue the work of analyzing blood samples for more than 200 clinical trials.

"NIH can’t hire people, recruit students, travel and communicate with the outside world at present … It is completely paralyzed and can’t operate normally." A chief researcher of the agency said.

The FDA of the United States was also seriously affected by the layoff plan and was forced to suspend most of its food safety testing. As of April 18, the agency’s work on bird flu testing for milk, cheese and pet food has stopped. The same is true of NOAA. Many probationary employees who have been on the job for less than two years were fired first, then re-employed, and then placed on administrative leave, because their jobs were in jeopardy and people were worried.

Other actions of the Trump administration are also "overweight" the difficulties faced by scientists. NIH researcher strait Fowood(alias Straight Forward)It is said that Trump administration officials will put forward various "wonderful" requirements: such as collecting the list of all contract workers and issuing an ultimatum. If they fail to reply within 24 hours, they will be dismissed. "These endless demands are killing the function of a scientific research institution with red tape." Fowood said.

In addition, the Trump administration has also cut research funding for research projects such as vaccines and climate science, and the upcoming new round of layoffs has aggravated the current turmoil. "Everyone is working hard, but morale is really low." Fowood said.

The EPA has always been the target of the Trump administration, and it is forbidden to track the greenhouse gas emission reduction of clean energy technology projects. Those high-emission enterprises can apply for "presidential exemption" and are no longer bound by pollution regulations. This makes many employees lose confidence. An EPA employee bluntly said: "I like this job very much, but the actions of the federal government make EPA no longer a place where people want to work."

"In the past, the federal science policy was’ not perfect’, but before Trump took office, some reforms might be welcomed. But now, the government is’ destroying everything’ … We are constantly bombarded by a large number of arbitrary administrative instructions. " The aforementioned NIH chief researcher bluntly said.

Third, who wins and loses in the "tug-of-war"

Observers believe that the Trump administration’s new round of cold current of science and technology policy has not yet ended. For example, according to Washington post, the White House’s upcoming draft budget for fiscal year 2026 plans to cut 40% of NIH’s current budget of $47.4 billion, merge the original 27 institutes into eight, and cancel the Institute of Nursing and Minority Health. Therefore, the current American scientific community is still far from welcoming the coldest moment.

Many people believe that Trump’s intervention in the American scientific research system is not a temporary rise, but a continuation of his policy philosophy in the 1.0 era. At that time, Trump called climate change a "scam", repeatedly tried to cut the budgets of EPA and NIH, and appointed Scott Prut who had sued EPA.（Scott Pruitt）As the director.

Today, this kind of intervention is not only continuing, but also a systematic implementation path-"2025 Plan".（Project 2025）.

This plan was released by the Heritage Foundation of the Republican Party in April 2023. It is a 922-page "policy blueprint" aimed at providing detailed policy recommendations for the Trump 2.0 era.

Previously, the policy recommendations in the plan, including banning abortion, reforming the federal government and cutting funds for climate science, had aroused strong public opposition. Trump claimed not to know about the plan during the presidential campaign. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, more than half of Trump’s executive orders are consistent with the recommendations of the "2025 Plan", and most of the 40 authors listed in the plan are key figures in the Trump administration, and six of them are even nominated by Trump as cabinet members.

The "2025 Plan" defines many science-related policies. These include anti-diversification efforts, such as "canceling policies and procedures that promote gender, race and equality initiatives under the banner of science" and "canceling funding for climate science and green energy" on page 60; Cut university funds, such as "Congress should limit the indirect expenses paid to universities" on page 355; Reduce the size of the government, such as "permanently and substantially reduce the number of non-defense federal employees" on page 78.

The analysis of Nature magazine shows that the Trump administration is considering implementing some other suggestions in the "2025 Plan", including prohibiting fetal tissue research and canceling or greatly reducing the number of visas issued to foreign students. The analysis also shows that the Trump administration’s executive orders are not always consistent with the plan, and in many cases, even more extreme practices have been taken than the plan.

These political interventions make the American scientific community uneasy. At the end of March, about 1,900 members of the National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Engineering and the Medical College from more than 400 universities and research institutions in 38 States issued a joint open letter, pointing out: "At present, the American scientific community is shrouded in an atmosphere of terror … The Trump administration is dealing a heavy blow to the scientific cause of the United States by cutting research funds, dismissing scientists, revoking the public’s access to scientific data, and forcing researchers to change or give up their jobs for ideological reasons."

Some opposition voices have also entered the judicial process. For example, in mid-April, the American Education Research Association and the Education Effect Research Association jointly filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court of Maryland, demanding the restoration of scientific research funds and personnel allocation. In February this year, the attorneys general of 22 States in the United States filed a joint lawsuit against the Trump administration for cutting research funding in the medical and public health fields.

However, there are also many scientists who take a wait-and-see attitude towards the behavior of the Trump administration. Sasha gusev, a statistical geneticist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.（Sasha Gusev）It is believed that it may also contain reform opportunities, such as the reform of NIH structure and the reflection on the funding process, which will help to improve the efficiency of its capital use and the diversity of recipients. However, he also stressed that the reform should be optimized based on the existing system, rather than completely overthrown. If the strategy of "burning it and rebuilding it" is adopted, NIH, which is regarded as the "global biomedical laurel", may be hit.

Despite the persistent doubts, the Trump administration’s pace of scientific funding cuts and layoffs has not slowed down. Michael Loubere, physicist and researcher of science and technology policy at new york City University.（Michael Lubell）It is believed that the American scientific community is facing an unprecedented "uncertainty tug-of-war": "Some fields will become winners, such as the direction supported by Trump and Musk; However, under the premise of tight federal budget, there are also doomed losers. "

References:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01263-0

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01245-2

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00052-z

http://www.xinhuanet.com/20250401/b73c352eff4446f3b6ea2acfa5fea05e/c.html

This article comes from WeChat WeChat official account:Science network, Author: Song Shufei, Feng Lifei