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 investigations launched into more than 50 universities, slashed funding for science agencies and cancelled research grants.

‘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.’

Just days after Trump’s 20 January inauguration, researchers were blindsided  when he signed dozens of executive orders that led to the cancellation of all grant vetting at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Peer review at the country’s largest funder of biomedical research was indefinitely suspended.

Soon after, Trump’s presidential directives barred federal funding for certain diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and related research. This led to an immediate freeze of an estimated 1800 NIH research grants that contained some component of DEI within them – or apparently even contained certain keywords such as ‘women’ or ‘biases’ – worth about $8 billion (£6.1 billion).

In late January, the National Science Foundation (NSF) – the major funder of fundamental, non-medical research – also paused its grant review panels, as well as new grant awards and disbursements. A few months later, the NSF cancelled hundreds of research projects that had already been approved, and by May an estimated 1600 of the agency’s research grants worth more than $1 billion had been terminated. 

Research funders hit by cuts and redundancies

Mass firings have also occurred at key research agencies. More than 1000 employees at the NIH were laid off in February, about 6% of the agency’s workforce. ‘The NIH workers sacked since the president’s inauguration include senior scientists and research support staff.’ However, a court order compelled the agency to rescind some of these terminations.

By the numbers: The first year of Trump’s second presidency

An initial round of about 170 layoffs, including scientists and research grant managers, also took place at the NSF in February. This represented about 10% of the agency’s workforce, but a judge later directed the agency to reinstate about half of those jobs. In July, a union that represents NSF employees estimated the agency had lost one-third of its staff  since January.

In addition, the White House has released proposals for the 2026 financial year that would devastate the budgets of research agencies. Trump’s budget request, issued in May, would slash funding for the NSF by 55%, equating to the loss of billions of dollars, and cut the NIH’s allocation by about 40%, representing a reduction of tens of billions of dollars.

Under the president’s budget request, federal government funding for basic research is expected to fall by more than a third. Further analysis revealed that funding for chemistry research through the NSF’s maths and physical sciences programme would plummet by 75%. During the first Trump administration, Congress repeatedly stepped in to prevent significant cuts to research agencies, however it’s unclear that this will happen this time around but recent signs are promising.

On 5 January, House and Senate leaders put forward a bipartisan package under which the NSF and Nasa science programmes would be funded at amounts much closer to their current levels, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would actually see a tiny increase. In addition, the EPA’s research programmes would face a much smaller budget reduction under this agreement. Meanwhile, Congress is continuing to craft their funding bills for other key research agencies like the NIH, facing a 30 January deadline to avoid another government shutdown.

The president has also issued directives seen as allowing handpicked representatives undue control over the use of scientific data that the administration might dispute or find inconvenient. These include an executive order requiring political appointees to review  federal research grants and funding opportunities to ensure their alignment with administration priorities.

Science agencies voice displeasure

Discontent brewing within federal science agencies eventually bubbled over and employees working at the NSF, NIH and Environmental Protection Agency signed separate public letters of dissent  in the summer.

Things got even worse for the research community when the government shut down on 1 October  after Republicans and Democrats in Congress failed to reach agreement on a spending bill for 2026. During this government closure, which lasted 43 days, all new federal research grant awards and application reviews were paused. Although institutions with existing federal research awards could technically still spend previously allocated funds, most agency support staff were furloughed so technical assistance was largely unavailable. The shutdown is estimated to have cost the country around $11 billion.

This was the longest US government shutdown in history, second only to one in late 2018 during Trump’s first term, which lasted for 35 days  and resulted in the loss of about $3 billion, or 0.02%, of the country’s GDP.

Universities in the crosshairs

The Trump administration has also taken aim at academic research institutions. These confrontations, which began in March, are part of a White House campaign against universities it claims have a left-wing bias and are not tough enough on antisemitism. President Trump’s administration has used the threat of withholding grant funding as leverage, and has targeted research projects in areas related to climate change, vaccines including mRNA technology, and those focused on LGBTQ+ or other diversity and inclusion topics.

Uncertainty around federal funding has prompted universities to scale back graduate admissions, and many expect this will continue in the upcoming academic year.

‘It is very clear that PhD admissions will be significantly reduced to chemistry programmes in autumn 2026 and likely for the foreseeable future,’ says Chemjobber, a Chemistry World columnist and long-time watcher of the US chemistry job market in academia and industry. ‘That is very bad news for the long run for the American chemical enterprise, both academic and industrial.’

At Harvard, for example, in October the number of science PhD students was slashed by more than 75% for the next two years. Faculty indicated that the molecular and cellular biology department would drop to four new students, and chemistry and chemical biology would shrink to four or five. Chemjobber points to estimates that about 30 PhDs join Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department on average each year, meaning that about 25 of these graduate students will have to look for another PhD programme, or a job elsewhere. ‘And ultimately, that will have a cascading effect,’ he states. The typical number of first year chemistry PhDs across the US is about 3300 students, Chemjobber calculates, predicting ‘significant reductions of 10 or 20% in admissions for such chemistry doctoral programmes across the country’.

‘I think the outcome is likely to be a setback of a decade or more in the attractiveness of the US as a place to receive your graduate advanced training in any discipline, not just the sciences,’ Hoffmann warns.

Hiring freeze at universities

In the weeks following Trump’s inauguration, faculty at Cornell understood that major funding reductions were coming. By mid-March, the university paused hiring and graduate admissions. This meant that the chemistry and chemical biology department was forced to rescind more than half of the PhD offers it had extended.

‘It was a devastating decision,’ recalls Nozomi Ando, director of graduate studies in Cornell’s chemistry and chemical biology department. ‘But we felt in the end that it would be more irresponsible to admit the students and allow them to enter into an extremely unstable and potentially financially unsustainable situation,’ she says. For the upcoming academic year, the chemistry and chemical biology department will only admit 28 first-year PhD students.

Meanwhile, chemistry research grants at Cornell have also been affected by the Trump administration’s ‘stop work’ orders that have paused or terminated various federal projects and grants, according to Brian Crane, former chair of Cornell’s chemistry and chemical biology department where he is currently a professor.

He says these ‘stop work’ orders at science agencies, which have been issued for various reasons including claims projects don’t align with White House policy goals, ‘have affected research all over campus, including individual grants in, for example, the chemistry department and in materials science’.

In addition, it does not appear that Cornell is getting reimbursed for research grants, including over $1 billion in federal funding that the administration froze in April. Other US universities appear to be in the same situation.

‘When we request the drawdowns for the payments [for grants], they are just being rejected, so right now Cornell is largely covering those costs but they’re very large and may be on the order of hundreds of thousands to $1 million a day,’ Crane says.

Fears for the future

At the same time, under Trump mass student visa revocations, expanded visa screening for overseas students, suspended and delayed interviews for visas at US embassies and consulates, and a $100,000 application fee  for new technology and research visas have combined to make the US a much tougher destination for international students and faculty. 

Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian–American biochemist who shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2023 for her work on mRNA vaccines, recalls being ‘shocked’ to see people cheering on social media when iconic institutions, such as Harvard, were being ‘dismantled’.

‘For decades, bright young people pursuing chemistry and other scientific fields travelled to the US and wherever they could do the research. Now, if they cannot do that in the US then they will travel to China, Europe or somewhere else,’ she says. ‘From a US standpoint this is not good news, but sooner or later everything works out and then major discoveries will come from some other corner of the world.’

Karikó believes the damage is done. ‘When people cannot see there is a future, then they will move,’ she states. ‘Chemistry at one time thrived in Germany, and even the publications in the field were in German in the 1900s, but then it shifted to the US and now it will shift somewhere else – this is not a terrible thing.’