Punters and Pushers

Posted by Katherine J. Wu

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/american-science-2025-trump-ambition/685467/?utm_source=feed

For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health’s $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it. And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky.

Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.

In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”

Science has always required creativity—people asking and pursuing questions in ways that have never been attempted before, in the hope that some of that work might produce something new. At its most dramatic, the results can be transformative: In the early 1900s, the Wright brothers drew inspiration from birds’ flight mechanics to launch their first airplanes; more recently, scientists have found ways to genetically engineer a person’s own immune cells to kill off cancer. Even in more routine discoveries, nothing quite matches the excitement of being the first to capture a piece of reality. I remember, as a graduate student, cloning my first bacterial mutant while trying to understand a gene important for growth. I knew that the microscopic creature I had built would never yield a drug or save a life. But in the brief moment in which I plucked a colony from an agar plate and swirled it into a warm, sugar-rich broth, I held a form of life that had never existed before—and that I had made in pursuit of a question that, as far as I knew, no one else had asked.

Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.

The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.

Outside of the most obvious effects of grant terminations—salary cuts, forced layoffs, halted studies—the Trump administration’s attacks on science have limited the horizons that scientists in the U.S. are looking toward. The administration has made clear that it no longer intends to sponsor research into certain subjects, including transgender health and HIV. Even researchers who haven’t had grants terminated this year or who work on less politically volatile subjects are struggling to conceptualize their scientific futures, as canceled grant-review meetings and lists of banned words hamper the normal review process. The NIH is also switching up its funding model to one that will decrease the number of scientific projects and people it will bankroll. Many scientists are hesitant to hire more staff or start new projects that rely on expensive materials. Some have started to seek funds from pharmaceutical companies or foundations, which tend to offer smaller and shorter-term agreements, trained more closely on projects with potential profit.

All of this nudges scientists into a defensive posture. They’re compressing the size of their studies or dropping the most ambitious aspects of their projects. Collaborations between research groups have broken down too, as some scientists who have been relatively insulated from the administration’s cuts have terminated their partnerships with defunded scientists—including at Harvard, where Delaney worked as a research scientist until September—to protect their own interests. “The human thing to do is to look inward and to kind of take care of yourself first,” Delaney told me. Instability and fear have made the research system, already sometimes prone to siloing, even more fragmented. The administration “took two of the best assets that the U.S. scientific enterprise has—the capacity to think long, and the capacity to collaborate—and we screwed them up at the same time,” Delaney said. Several scientists told me that the current funding environment has prompted them to consider early retirement—in many cases, shutting down the labs they have run for decades.

Some of the experiments that scientists shelved this year could still be done at later dates. But the new instability of American science may also be driving away the people necessary to power that future work. Several universities have been forced to downsize Ph.D. programs; the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies have made many international researchers fearful of their status at universities. And as the administration continues to dismiss the importance of DEI programs, many young scientists from diverse backgrounds have told me they’re questioning whether they will be welcomed into academia. Under the Trump administration, the scope of American science is simply smaller: “When you shrink funding, you’re going to increase conservatism,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist at Yale University, told me. Competition and scarcity can breed innovation in science. But often, Ogbunu said, people forget that “comfort and security are key parts of innovation, too.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/american-science-2025-trump-ambition/685467/?utm_source=feed