One year on, Trump’s second term has upended US science

When Donald Trump became US president for a second time a year ago, there were widespread fears that his administration would be catastrophic for the nation’s research community. These fears have been realised, with funding freezes and cuts to federal research grants, proposals to slash the budgets of science agencies and attacks on major academic research institutions.

‘The Trump administration has put in a set of policies that have created a significant decrease and a near paralysis in the funding for fundamental and applied scientific research,’ states Roald Hoffmann  , a theoretical chemist who received the 1981 Nobel prize in chemistry  and is professor emeritus at Cornell University. ‘ In the six decades I’ve been at Cornell, I have not seen anything like this.’