In just the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration embarked on making radical changes to US science.
Officials appointed by the new president started firing thousands of researchers and other government employees. At the same time, it cut billions of dollars of US support for global-health programmes, including dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID). It arrested some scholars from outside the United States as it stepped up efforts to restrict entry into the country and limit political speech. Over the next few months, the US government took steps to exert unprecedented control over universities by withholding federal research funding. The administration cancelled tens of billions of dollars in research grants to universities to force the adoption of policies on hiring and admissions, policing of campuses, curricula and other factors.
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The administration has justified its actions by saying that they were necessary to improve science and innovation. “The Trump administration is committed to cutting taxpayer funding of left-wing pet projects that are masquerading as ‘scientific research’ and restoring the American people’s confidence in our scientific and public-health bodies that was lost during the COVID era,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement to Nature.
But critics of the administration see these actions as part of a broader plan to bend science for political purposes. “The attack on science must be seen as one component of a larger attack on information, on facts, on independent analysis,” says John Holdren, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who worked as the science adviser to former US president Barack Obama. “I think Trump sees science as the fortress of the opposition.”
During Trump’s previous term in office, he encountered resistance from people in his own administration as well as from members of his own party in Congress, which rejected his calls to slash funding for science agencies. This time, that kind of opposition has been more limited, even as his administration ignored spending laws enacted by Congress, which holds the power to decide government funding.
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But some people and institutions have fought the government over such changes. Harvard University sued the Trump administration after it cancelled billions of dollars in grants amid claims that Harvard had failed to combat campus antisemitism. Several lawsuits have been filed challenging both the administration’s firing of employees and its cancellation of grants. Climate scientists pushed back against the administration’s efforts to deny the threat of global warming. And six former surgeons general who served during both Republican and Democrat administrations published an article in The Washington Post criticizing Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They wrote that he was “endangering the health of the nation” by amplifying misinformation and undermining public confidence in medicine and the very public-health agency that he oversees — the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest biomedical funder.
“The consequences aren’t abstract,” the surgeons general wrote. “They are measured in lives lost, disease outbreaks and an erosion of public trust that will take years to rebuild.”