When Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November 2024, Nature asked six leading biomedical researchers to outline their priorities for the incoming administration (A. Clark et al. Nature 635, 812–814; 2024). Here, those same researchers reflect on the first year of Trump’s presidency and chart ways to protect crucial areas of science and health in the future.
AMANDER CLARK: Reimagine higher education
For those of us who teach, work and learn on a university campus, fatigue and burnout are taking their toll. The past year has seen an onslaught of executive orders aimed at universities: changes to policies on immigration, student visas, transgender rights, student-loan forgiveness, admissions practices, free speech and academic freedom. Every aspect of my professional life — from research and teaching to mentoring and outreach — has been affected. In each of these areas, I have found myself censoring topics that touch on reproduction and reproductive technologies that could one day be of benefit to people from sexual and gender minorities (the LGBTQ+ community).
How Trump 2.0 is reshaping science
For people like me — the first in a family to attend university — higher education provides the ladder to a well-paying job, to which our parents had no access. I had hoped that the incoming administration would help low-income students to find debt-free paths through university. But the executive orders focused on higher education, along with policy changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that lower federal aid for students and staff lay-offs at the US Department of Education, will instead widen inequities by making it even harder for low-income students to afford a university education.
One light at the end of the tunnel is the possibility that — after researchers build back from the current crisis — higher education might be reimagined to serve the public good in a better way, with research findings made more accessible to people outside the academic elite. Those of us working in the sector should reflect on the purpose, mission and vision of universities. It’s crucial that educators and researchers listen to the public on whether university visions align with public needs, values and the jobs that will be needed in the future workforce. And scientists must be provided with federal research funding to mentor and inspire the next generation of scientists and critical thinkers.
In the meantime, university faculty members can use the US justice system to protect the first-amendment right to freedom of expression and to restore suspended research funding. In November 2025, a coalition of plaintiffs led by university professors and faculty associations filed a lawsuit in Northern California’s District Court to block the Trump administration from taking unconstitutional actions against the University of California, where I am a professor. I am one of 74 people who made a declaration of harm in support of the case, discussing my right to talk about the science of reproduction using inclusive language. The plaintiffs were granted a preliminary injunction in November and our freedom to operate has been restored — for now.
HANK GREELY: Tackle health-care problems to stop the chaos
At the end of 2024, I worried that the incoming administration might decide to protect company profits over the interests of people receiving medical care. Sure enough, the protections for patients provided by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been weakened in 2025 — not so much by commercial interests as by ideology and chaos. At one point, the FDA lost almost 20% of its staff members, and the CDC about one-third. And much of the data needed for public-health research have been removed from websites. As a law professor, it’s hard to know what I will be able to teach in my FDA law class this year.
‘Shattered’: US scientists speak out about how Trump policies disrupted their careers
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