Videos by Salwan Georges For The New York Times
Science
Under Siege
How Trump
Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine
The
system that has driven life-altering discoveries and helped make the United
States a superpower is now under intense strain.
Videos by
Salwan Georges for The New York Times
2.2k
By Christopher FlavelleIrena HwangAdam SellaAlan BlinderSheryl Gay StolbergBenjamin Mueller and Michael C. Bender
This is
the first in a series of articles examining how the Trump administration has
upended the pursuit of science.
Oct. 31,
2026
The
warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.
The
Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose
scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even
the computer mouse — was in trouble.
The labs
lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the
Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving
difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be screened
for their loyalty
to his goals. The report, issued by the Pentagon, pointed to
“potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense.”
The
turmoil inside scientific research has extended beyond the Pentagon. The Energy
Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000
scientists and technical staff. The National Science Foundation, for decades a
primary backer of long-term, foundational research, has withheld more
than $1 billion in funding. And at the National Institutes of Health, the
biggest funder of medical research, officials delayed
or canceled more than 2,000 grants to biomedical researchers focused on
topics such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.
Under Mr.
Trump, the federal government is still spending roughly as much on research —
about $200 billion this year — as the administrations that came before.
Scientists across the country are still receiving grants; universities are
still being funded. But beneath the surface, the system of federally funded
science that helped make the United States a global superpower is under intense
strain from Trump policies, jeopardizing the nation’s advantages in defense,
medicine and technology, a New York Times examination has found.
The White
House regularly proclaims that it is advancing American interests. Yet its
actions are eroding the country’s scientific edge as global rivals challenge
U.S. dominance in fields that will help define the 21st century, according to
interviews with scientists, university leaders, government officials and
analysts and a review of documents and budgets.
The
damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.
One is
the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the
so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that
viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still
reverberating across the bureaucracy.
A second
is the administration’s continued pressure on research universities, in which
the White House used funding cuts to push schools into adhering to its demands
for ideologically driven policy shifts.
The third
is a campaign by Mr.
Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, to impose more political
control over how the government spends money appropriated by Congress, further
infusing politics into decisions around scientific research.
Michael
Kratsios, Elon Musk and Russell T. Vought have played key roles in shaping the
Trump administration's approach to science.Credit...New York Times photographs
by Eric Lee, Haiyun Jiang and Kenny Holston
If not
for the courts curbing the administration’s campaign against universities and
lawmakers in both parties rejecting cuts to research funding, the impact on
science would have been far deeper. Still, the effects of the broader agenda
have rippled through nearly every facet of the nation’s research machine.
Aspiring
scientists have seen their career paths thwarted, with fewer available spots
for Ph.D. students. The number of Ph.D. applications from foreign students,
typically a significant share of U.S. science programs, shrank by 21 percent
this year at leading universities, according to data gathered for the
Association of American Universities. Total Ph.D. admissions at those schools
have dropped as universities try to make do with less resources.
Even the
agencies working on topics that Mr. Trump and his aides have called priorities
— including national defense, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and
nuclear energy — have been depleted.
Taken
together, the changes underscore how Mr. Trump’s policies have disrupted
scientific research beyond the areas the administration has targeted more
directly, such as vaccines and climate science, endangering U.S. power and
pre-eminence.
By many
measures, China is closing the gap with the United States as the world’s
research leader. Some organizations that rank global universities show China’s
best schools increasingly
displacing American universities at the top. And the impact of Chinese
research papers, as measured by citations from other scientists, has caught up
with the United States, according to Clarivate, a data and analytics company.
By the
time the full consequences of the administration’s actions become apparent,
experts warn, it could be too late to fix. That’s because basic research funded
by federal grants often takes decades to mature into the technology, medical
treatments and consumer products that change American life.
Federally
funded work on atomic clocks starting in the late 1940s, for example, paved the
way for GPS technology. In 1976, federally funded research yielded a major
discovery about the origins of cancer-causing genes, which led to a Nobel Prize
and, two decades later, lifesaving cancer drugs. Some of the early precursors
to artificial intelligence date to U.S.-backed research in the 1980s, which
used an algorithm to teach neural networks to learn from mistakes.
Image
Harold
Lyons, right, explaining the operation of the atomic clock at its unveiling to
Edward Condon, left, director of the National Bureau of Standards, and Commerce
Secretary Charles Sawyer in January 1949.Credit...Bettmann Archive, via Getty
Images
“Science
is the long game,” said Marcia McNutt, who was president of the National
Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific advisory body, until this
summer. “By the time we no longer win any Nobel Prizes, we will have lost the
capacity to ever recover.”
In
response to The Times’ reporting, officials from the White House, Pentagon and
other science agencies disputed that administration policies were hampering
science. Rather, said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston, the administration is
reinvigorating American science by transforming organizations in need of
change.
“President
Trump is ushering in a new golden age of American science by modernizing our
research institutions, refocusing on ambitious national missions, and fully
leveraging super intelligence for scientific discovery,” Ms. Huston said in a
statement, using Mr. Trump’s preferred term for artificial intelligence.
“Revitalizing our national scientific enterprise requires supporting the best
American scientists and funding the best research based on merit.”
The White
House said the administration has expanded a number of programs that support
young researchers, and noted that the decision to reduce Ph.D. admissions this
year was made by the universities themselves. The Association of American
Universities said schools’ decisions to reduce admissions were largely the
result of “federal research funding uncertainties.”
The White
House also said that most of the scientists who have stopped working for the
federal government since Mr. Trump came back to office were not fired, but
instead left voluntarily. And it noted that the methodologies for ranking
universities, such as comparisons between the United States and China, are
limited.
The rest
of the world now sees an opportunity.
Australia,
for example, announced its “global talent attraction program,” calling it “an urgent
and unparalleled opportunity to attract the smartest minds leaving the United
States.” Canada dedicated more than $1 billion to bring in 1,000 international
researchers, drawing
American leaders in fields such as biochemistry and neuroscience.
Even
China, a country not known for academic freedoms, has been luring researchers
away. A winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry left the University of
California, Berkeley, to lead an institute in Beijing using artificial
intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials — two fields the
Trump administration has said it wants to dominate.
A Postwar
System Shaken to Its Core
Image
President
Harry S. Truman, seated center, congratulating scientists for their work in the
Office of Scientific Research and Development, including director Vannevar
Bush, rear third from left, author of the landmark report “Science: The Endless
Frontier.”Credit...Byron Rollins/Associated Press
The roots
of the United States’ science empire can be traced to a landmark 1945 report
issued during the Truman administration, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” It
described a vision, inspired in part by the Manhattan Project that led to the
atomic bomb, for how science would power U.S. dominance in the world.
Image
The
report laid out a vision for how science would power U.S. dominance in the
world.
The
federal government went on to establish a network of science agencies with
distinct missions. The National Science Foundation supports theoretical or
experimental work, which often lays the groundwork for future technologies
years or even decades later. The Department of Energy was established to pursue
advances related to power generation, as well as managing the nation’s nuclear
arsenal. NASA, created in response to Soviet advances in space, put a man on
the moon. The National Institutes of Health, which traces its roots to 1887,
funds biomedical advances.
The
federal government also provides tens of billions of dollars each year to the
nation’s research universities while funding national labs, private industry
and other institutions — a system built up over 80 years by presidents and
lawmakers from both parties.
For
decades, the United States has funded research at top universities
American
universities spent $65 billion in federal money in 2024, accounting for more
than half of their total research and development spending.
Stimulus
bill increases
funding
for basic research
Note:
Fiscal year numbers, adjusted for inflation. Numbers after 2009 include
research and development funding for non-scientific fields, which represents a
small amount of the total. Source: National Center for Science and Engineering
Statistics. Arfa Momin/The New York Times
In less
than two years, Mr. Trump has shaken that system to the core.
The
upheaval began early in the administration.
DOGE
engineered staff firings, and encouraged others to resign across the federal
bureaucracy. Within a year, N.I.H. staffing had shrunk by one-fifth. The
N.S.F.’s ranks were reduced by a third. Even NASA, which shrank less than other
science agencies, lost 20 percent of its employees with Ph.D.s. Those who left
included its chief scientist, a climate science expert whose
job the administration eliminated.
NASA said
it will keep recruiting staff as needed. In a statement, Nicky Fox, the
associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the agency
is working to get “more science into space for lower cost.”
Image
People
gathered in March 2025 for a rally in Washington to protest the Trump
administration’s cuts to scientific research.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York
Times
DOGE and
the White House directed agencies to search for terms in grant descriptions
that might reveal science the administration viewed as liberal, including
anything that appeared to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
The cuts
cascaded through the country.
Ann D.
Cohen, a neuroscientist who co-directs an Alzheimer’s research center at the
University of Pittsburgh, had been working on a five-year study looking at how
people’s exposure to stress and health problems earlier in life can affect
their odds of developing the disease.
The
research was critical to developing better treatments and health interventions,
Dr. Cohen said. “If the triggering event is poor cardiovascular health in
midlife, we can actually deploy public health strategies to improve those
things, and potentially have an effect on Alzheimer’s,” she said.
Recruiting
people from different backgrounds was difficult, because people who volunteer
for scientific studies tend to have higher than average incomes and education
levels. So Dr. Cohen and her colleagues recruited from rural Western
Pennsylvania, whose residents were more likely to be white and low-income, as
well as from Black communities in Pittsburgh.
Image
Ann D.
Cohen, a neuroscientist who co-directs an Alzheimer’s research center at the
University of Pittsburgh, had a grant to study how exposure to stress and
health problems can affect people’s chances of developing the disease. The
N.I.H. terminated the grant in August.Credit...Stephanie Strasburg for The New
York Times
This past
August, the N.I.H. terminated the grant, effective immediately, on the grounds
that the project was focused on structural racism — an argument that
fundamentally misunderstood the work, Dr. Cohen said.
Emily
Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
which includes the N.I.H., did not comment on specific grants. In a statement,
she said N.I.H.’s commitment to Alzheimer’s research has not decreased.
“N.I.H.
is focused on funding innovative projects led by a new generation of health
researchers, and on allocating funds for research that will lead to better
health for the American people,” Ms. Hilliard said.
Some
researchers who lost funding acknowledged having framed their projects in the
language of D.E.I. But, they argued, that was what the Biden administration had
emphasized.
Jessica
L. Rosenberg, director of education for the Quantum Science and Engineering
Center at George Mason University, had received N.S.F. funding to research ways
to encourage more American students to seek careers in quantum technology, an
emerging field that has led
to innovation by vastly expanding computing power.
The
N.S.F. canceled the grant last year, about four months after the project
started. Dr. Rosenberg said she suspects the grant was targeted because her
application mentioned students from diverse backgrounds.
“That was
what we were supposed to be doing at the time,” she said in an interview.
Trump
administration officials argue that the push to incorporate D.E.I. degraded
science, and that scientists who embraced the approach had themselves to blame
for losing support.
“We
cannot afford for America’s scientists to be in the business of scoring points
for an ideological agenda,” Michael Kratsios, Mr. Trump’s science adviser, told a meeting of scientists last year.
A Dilemma
for Universities
Harvard
sued the administration after its federal funding was
frozen.CreditCredit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Mr. Trump
and his aides returned to the White House wanting to punish elite schools like
Columbia and Harvard, ostensibly for transgressions like tolerating
antisemitism.
But when
cuts to research funding became the White House’s weapon of choice, professors
and administrators had to decide whether to fight or acquiesce.
Harvard
sued. Other schools negotiated. And even at universities that were not
explicitly targeted, researchers made changes in hopes of keeping federal money
that was foundational to their work — softening the language in their
proposals, narrowing their projects and debating the line between fair-game
government oversight and improper political interference.
The cuts
fell across disciplines. Projects on epilepsy, Lou Gehrig’s disease,
tuberculosis and even astronomy outreach and education sputtered. Work on
cancer and heart rhythms was imperiled.
The
administration ultimately restored billions of dollars in funding, either
because of court orders or settlements with universities. But researchers said
the interruptions and changing priorities delayed or derailed experiments.
“You
can’t run a research operation when you have to constantly pivot,” said Dorota
Grejner-Brzezinska, vice chancellor for research at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, which was swept up in the administration’s funding cuts and
participated in more than a dozen legal challenges.
Image
Dorota
Grejner-Brzezinska on the campus of University of
Wisconsin-Madison.Credit...Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
“The
current state of affairs is that it’s really very hard to plan long term,” she
added, “and research is a long-term kind of enterprise.”
May
Mailman, a former White House aide who helped lead the pressure campaign
against universities, said the administration wasn’t overly concerned about the
effects on research. Funds taken away from one university could eventually make
their way to other schools whose behavior and ideology the White House approved
of, she said. In the meantime, Ms. Mailman said, the administration tried to
minimize the disruption to fields of research it supported, including
artificial intelligence and some types of energy.
But much
of the work coming out of universities, she said, may not have merited the
taxpayer money going into it.
“There’s
a feeling that there is more spent on research than comes out of it — that the
system is a little bit broken,” Ms. Mailman said.
Image
May
Mailman in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington last
year.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
The Hunt
for Woke
The
administration also sought deep funding cuts to federal science agencies. Last
year, when Mr. Vought presented the administration’s annual budget request to
Congress, he called for reducing research funds at the National Institutes of
Health by
41 percent; cutting the National Science Foundation by 55 percent; and
reducing NASA’s budget for science by almost half. No previous administration,
from either party, had sought such deep cuts.
Congress
rejected those cuts. But Mr. Vought began finding novel ways to slow grants and
redirect funds.
One of
the offices that Mr. Vought targeted in his budget request was the N.S.F.’s
“woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences” — an apparent reference to an
N.S.F. division that funded social science. Not long after, the division began
reducing its grants.
An N.S.F.
spokesman, Michael England, said in a statement that the agency’s funding
decisions “reflect a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal
environment.”
The loss
of those funds affected researchers like Priti Shah, chair of the University of
Michigan’s psychology department. Dr. Shah had applied for a grant to study how
people evaluate and make decisions based on scientific information. In the
summer of 2025, the N.S.F. told her that her application had been put on hold
because of funding issues. It was later rejected entirely.
“It is so
important to understand what people assume and what errors they make when
they’re thinking about science,” Dr. Shah said. “People are very poor at
reasoning about scientific evidence.”
An
Innovation Engine ‘at Risk of Stalling’
Image
A report
released by the Pentagon this summer pointed to “potentially grave consequences
for the future of national defense” after its network of research laboratories
lost staff last year, largely as a result of the Trump administration’s efforts
to thin the federal work force.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The
administration’s actions also hurt agencies central to its political agenda.
The
Defense Department’s assessment of science and research capabilities published
this summer said changes during the first year of the Trump administration had
degraded the department’s highly regarded network of research laboratories, due
largely to DOGE cuts and obstacles to hiring.
“Without
a swift and sustained reversal of these policies,” the report warned, the
Defense Department’s “innovation engine is at risk of stalling.”
The labs
lost about 14 percent of their staff, the report found. Among those mentioned
were the Naval Sea Systems Command, charged with developing ships and weapons;
the Air Force Research Laboratory, which helped develop stealth aircraft and laser systems; and the Army’s Aviation
& Missile Center.
External
research laboratories, which are funded by the Pentagon but staffed by civilian
researchers and develop technology for use by the military, were also suffering
from the administration’s policies, the report said.
Much of
the work at those labs, some of which are attached to major research
universities, is classified, and the report did not disclose specific examples
of research that has been affected. But it warned that staff departures inside
the labs and among agency employees who coordinated with them “jeopardized the
execution of critical defense research.” Without key points of contact between
the agency and the labs, the report said, efforts that support “time-sensitive,
real-world operations are in some cases at a standstill or delayed.”
Because
the labs aren’t financially connected to defense contractors, they play an
added important role helping the Pentagon objectively evaluate contractors’
claims about new technologies, said Heidi Shyu, who oversaw the Pentagon’s
research operation as under secretary of defense for research and engineering
in the Biden administration.
A
Pentagon official acknowledged that, during the first year of the
administration, there was a “retraction in the number of scientists and
engineers across the research enterprise.” But, the official said, the agency
has “hired to fulfill the mission and mitigate any impacts from the loss of
personnel.”
Defense
Department funding changes also affected university researchers.
Randall
Engle, a psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was working on
ways to help the Navy select air traffic controllers, pilots and other
applicants for complex jobs.
Image
Randall
Engle, a psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, at his cabin in
Ellijay, Ga.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times
The Navy
needs to train roughly 1,000 new air traffic controllers each year, Dr. Engle
said, at a cost of about $100,000 per trainee. But because the job requires
intense focus in difficult conditions, nearly a quarter of trainees typically
fail.
So he
received funding to develop diagnostic tests to determine a person’s ability to
maintain focus.
Dr. Engle
tested his new approach at the Navy’s air base in Pensacola, Fla., and found
that it did a better job identifying people likely to succeed as air traffic
controllers. He was in the midst of refining those tests, when the Office of
Naval Research told Georgia Tech that the grant was canceled.
Dr. Engle
said he believes the grant was canceled simply because it was happening at a
university.
“There
was no wokeness,” Dr. Engle said of his project. “There was no diversity,
inclusion.”
A New
Agenda
Image
Darío
Gil, far left, under secretary for science at the Energy Department, Mr.
Kratsios, rear center, and Mr. Vought, far right, attending an executive order
signing in the Oval Office in June.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The
uncertainty over the future of American science is reflected in the events that
have unfolded at the Department of Energy.
The
agency is a critical engine for research in the physical sciences, and it
houses the Genesis Mission — a marquee Trump administration initiative that
officials say will drive discoveries across a range of topics, from quantum
computing and particle accelerators to microchips that can operate in outer
space. In an executive order, Mr. Trump called it a “dedicated,
coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation
and discovery.”
But the
Energy Department’s central role on a Trump-driven project came with a glaring
contradiction: It was also hammered by DOGE.
The
agency has lost about one-quarter of its staff since the start of the
administration, according to a Times analysis of federal data. And the amount
of grant money awarded by its two major science offices dropped by more than
one-quarter during the administration’s first year, before Genesis began — a
reduction of more than half a billion dollars.
Darío
Gil, the agency’s top science official, rejected the idea that its science
mission has suffered, noting that much of the department’s work is done by 17
national laboratories, where most staff are not federal employees and so not
affected by DOGE’s staff-reduction programs. He said the agency is hiring.
“Staffing
is always a challenge” Dr. Gil said. “We continue to recruit good people.”
He added
that the goal of Genesis is to double the productivity of America’s science
industry within a decade. The program has selected almost 300 projects to fund
at universities, private companies, national labs and other research
organizations.
“The
outcome we seek,” Dr. Gil said, “is that this transformation impacts the entire
American economy.”
In July,
just a few weeks after the Pentagon published its warning about defense labs,
Mr. Kratsios, the White House science adviser, issued a report of his own.
Image
Mr.
Kratsios issued a report proclaiming that the Trump administration was renewing
the country’s dominance in research and development.
The
document emphasized many of the administration’s goals: Increasing the role of
private industry in federal research. Bypassing the traditional peer-review
process for deciding who gets research grants, instead giving individual
reviewers the chance “to make bold scientific bets” on researchers of their
choosing. Redirecting more money toward younger researchers.
Mr.
Kratsios barely mentioned a crucial part of the administration’s agenda: a proposed rule issued by the Trump administration this past
May, which would require that Mr. Trump’s political appointees approve
which researchers get funding — taking power away from nonpartisan science
officials who have typically been the deciders.
Under the
proposal, researchers seeking funds “should commit to complying with
administration policies.” Officials would screen and reject applications for
projects that “promote anti-American values.”
The day
after Mr. Kratsios released his report, he appeared before the House science
committee to discuss it. Some committee members seemed
perplexed by his promise to usher in a scientific golden age, given the
tumult over the previous year and a half.
“All I
see is tarnish and deterioration,” said Representative Gabe Amo, Democrat of
Rhode Island. “Do you commit to not leaving our scientific apparatus in
shambles?”
“I don’t
think, sir, I would be doing my job if I wanted to leave the scientific
enterprise in shambles,” Mr. Kratsios responded. “So I will commit to not doing
that.”
From the
comments
Climate
Domestic Correspondent
The
Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more
than 1,000 scientists and technical staff.CreditCredit...Salwan Georges For The
New York Times
Reporting
was contributed by Mark Arsenault, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang, Carolyn Y.
Johnson, Sarah Kliff, Ryan Mac, Katrina Miller, Brad Plumer, Tony Romm and
Theodore Schleifer. Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett,
Alain Delaquérière, Georgia Gee, Sheelagh McNeill and Kirsten Noyes.
Christopher Flavelle
is a Times reporter covering how President Trump is transforming the federal
government.
Irena Hwang is a data
reporter at The Times, using computational tools to uncover hidden stories and
illuminate the news.
Adam Sella covers breaking
news for The Times in Washington.
Alan Blinder is a national
correspondent for The Times, covering education.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg
is a correspondent based in Washington for The Times, covering Health Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump’s health agenda.
Benjamin Mueller reports
on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a
police reporter in New York.
Michael C. Bender is a
Times correspondent in Washington.
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