The Trump administration is gutting science. Here's why that matters for all of us.

Technical.ly

15-06-2025

Chinese Admiral Zheng He was as imperialist as any. Half a century before the Europeans began their transatlantic age of conquest, he led the world's most sophisticated maritime expeditions, backed by China's superior technology and a centralized state.
But after Zheng He's final voyage in the 1430s, political leaders fearful of external influence shut it all down. Shipbuilding ceased. Scientific knowledge stagnated. Poised to shape the modern world, China turned inward — and missed its moment.
In 2025, America may be risking the same fate.
Since returning to office in January, the Trump administration has cancelled more than 3,000 already-approved federal research grants totaling over $8 billion, according to the Economist. That includes more than $750 million in NIH biomedical research and $1.5 billion in NSF grants affecting topics from clean energy to cybersecurity education.
The consequences aren't abstract. Researchers across the country are abandoning promising work on Alzheimer's, pandemic prevention, HIV treatment, mental health, teacher training and clean water. In many cases, the research was nearly complete, with data collected but no funding left to analyze or publish it.
'You can't tell me this is about efficiency,' Caroline Hardin, a professor whose $230,000 NSF grant to expand computer science teaching was abruptly terminated, told NEA Today. 'It's so profoundly inefficient.'
'You can't tell me this is about efficiency. It's so profoundly inefficient.'
Caroline Hardin, Western Washington University
In Atlanta, an HIV clinic is shutting down parts of its operation. At Western Washington University, researchers studying how to recruit women into cybersecurity can no longer publish what they learned. At UMass Amherst, a $6 million clean-energy initiative designed to ensure low-income communities aren't left behind is gone.
Meanwhile, elite institutions like Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania are seeing grants revoked not over questions of scientific merit but for political reasons. Columbia alone lost over 400 NIH grants in retaliation for campus protests. NIH staff received direct orders to cut any projects using phrases like 'Latinx,' 'gender minority' or 'climate justice.' More NIH grants were terminated in four months of 2025 than in the previous 12 years combined, per ProPublica.
The result is a quiet collapse of America's scientific engine — and the clearest sign yet that scientific inquiry, once seen as apolitical infrastructure, is now a target.
'We're in for multiple pandemics,' epidemiologist Ralph Baric, whose COVID-era vaccine work was defunded, told the Economist. 'I guess we'll have to buy the drugs from the Chinese.'
Critics say these cuts amount to a de facto purge — gutting research related to diversity, climate, public health or anything that challenges the administration's worldview. But even 'neutral' science isn't safe. The National Weather Service has halved its weather balloon launches. NOAA staff have been slashed. NASA's Earth observation satellites may soon be defunded. The CDC has paused all HIV research. Across federal labs, basic supplies like gloves and reagents are running short.
'It feels like a ship going down,' UMass professor Krista Harper told NEA Today.
On Saturday, in more than 2,000 U.S. towns and cities, Americans gathered for 'No Kings Day,' a protest movement against Trump's authoritarian impulses — including his attacks on science. Organizers say the military parade in Washington DC wasn't just a spectacle but a symbol of power replacing process.
'We don't do kings in America,' Ezra Levin of No Kings –organizer Indivisible told ABC News. 'We don't let one man decide what truth gets funded.'
The science community agrees. A letter signed by over 20 Nobel laureates and thousands of global researchers this week urged the NIH director to reverse the cuts. Lawsuits are mounting. But in the meantime, damage is being done — not just to labs and careers, but to the very idea that facts should guide policy.
In 1433, China's rulers shut down their navy to control their narrative. The decision helped them keep power — but it ceded the future. What kind of country are we becoming if we let ideology sink our science?