The American scientific community is in chaos due to President Trump's policies.
In 2025, President Donald Trump's massive budget cuts through the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) caused chaos at science agencies like NASA. Science journalist Adam Rogers explains what happened.
America's compact between science and politics is broken | Scientific American
The example Rogers cited was a nine-year project to build an observatory by Christopher Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues. This observatory would observe the early universe to study the first black holes and galaxy formation, and in October 2024, Reynolds' team received a $5 million grant from NASA to further refine this idea.
Reynolds and his team were working with the spacecraft development team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and everything was going smoothly until a wave of budget cuts by the Department of Efficiency hit NASA. In the following weeks, approximately 4,000 NASA employees resigned, resulting in Reynolds' team losing 20 members. The engineer who was designing the heaters to keep the giant mirror at a constant temperature resigned, as did the lead project manager, leaving only PowerPoint documents. Reynolds and his team were then forced to sift through the documents to determine how far the design had progressed.
Around the same time, President Trump announced a plan to drastically cut the science research budget, and the program that was supposed to fund Reynolds' team was completely canceled. Reynolds and his team tried to negotiate with NASA by revising their budget cost estimates, but the plan they submitted was too expensive and had too long a timeframe for completion, so they did not receive funding, and Reynolds' team was disbanded.
According to Rogers, countless scientists in the United States are experiencing a similar situation to Reynolds. Thousands of federal grants have been frozen or canceled due to budget cuts, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are providing only about three-quarters of their usual funding. Fewer people are pursuing graduate studies, and approximately 95,000 scientists have left their federal government jobs.
The chaos at the time was considerable, to the point that some American scientists were seen trying to emigrate abroad.
Furthermore, President Trump implemented budget cuts that were strongly politically motivated, including a ban on grants that included references to 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI),' which also sparked backlash. Some scientists even changed the wording of DEI before being criticized. In addition, President Trump's 'America First' stance was evident in other measures, such as cutting funding for research on epidemics that do not exist in the United States.
Rogers pointed out that 'basic research that may seem to have no practical significance is the foundation that leads to new drugs, communication satellites, or improved crops. Not all government support leads to groundbreaking discoveries, but the majority of groundbreaking discoveries come from government support,' and introduced that there are movements within the scientific community to raise their voices against President Trump.
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1p_kr