‘A disaster for all of us': US scientists describe impact of Trump cuts
Donald Trump's assault on science – but particularly climate science – has led to unprecedented funding cuts and staff layoffs across federally funded agencies and programs, threatening to derail research tackling the most pressing issues facing Americans and humanity more broadly. A generation of scientific talent is also on the brink of being lost, with unprecedented political interference at what were previously evidence-driven agencies jeopardizing the future of US industries and economic growth.
Johnson was among scores of scientists conducting vital research across a range of fields from infectious diseases, robotics, education, computer science and the climate crisis, who responded to a Guardian online callout to share their experiences about the impact of the Trump administration's cuts to science funding.
Many said they had already had funding slashed or programs terminated, while others fear that cuts are inevitable and are beginning to search for alternative work – either overseas or outside science. So far, the cuts have led to a 60% reduction in Johnson's team, and fear is mounting over the future of 30 years of climate data and expertise as communities across the country are battered by increasingly destructive extreme weather events.
'We won't be able to afford to continue providing the free and quality tools and services to make our data stores searchable, viewable, usable, and accessible. We might not even be able to afford to keep all the data … this will mean worse forecasts and less effective search and rescue responses leading to unnecessary and avoidable loss of life,' said Johnson (not her real name).
Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Obbba) calls for a 56% cut to the current $9bn National Science Foundation (NSF) budget, as well as a 73% reduction in staff and fellowships – with graduate students among the hardest hit.
The NSF is the premier federal investor in basic science and engineering, and more than 1,650 grants have also been terminated, according to Grant Watch, a non-profit tracking federally funded research grants under the Trump administration. At the behest of Trump, the hardest hit are studies aimed at addressing the unequal impact of the climate crisis and other environmental hazards, as well as any projects perceived to have a connection to diversity, equity or inclusion (DEI).
An anthropologist who researches the impact of floods and cyclones on public health and food supplies in Madagascar, which is among the most vulnerable nations in the world to the climate crisis but contributed virtually nothing to the catastrophe, is leaving Johns Hopkins for Oxford University after funding for the remainder of her fellowship was threatened.
'I am devastated to leave family, friends and the grad students I am mentoring in the US, but this seemed like the only way to continue work I've been pursuing for 10+ years. I am working on improving climate mitigation and adaptation in an African country. After Trump was elected, the writing was on the wall. There is no way I can write grant applications that will be acceptable to this government.'
A veteran infectious diseases researcher at Ohio State University was forced to abandon a clinical trial for a new medication to treat hypoxemic respiratory failure in Covid patients after the National Institute of Health (NIH) terminated funding midway through the study.
The decision will save $500,000, but $1.5m had already been spent on the trial which researchers hoped would lead to new treatment options for the million or so people hospitalized with respiratory failure each year as a result of flu, Covid and other infections. The trial would have to be repeated from the start, in order to seek approval from the FDA.
'This is a disaster for all of us. We're all depressed and living on a knife-edge, because we know we could lose the rest of our grants any day. These people really hate us yet all we've done is work hard to make people's health better. A flu pandemic is coming for us, what's happening in cattle is truly scary and all we have is oxygen and hope for people,' said the Ohio scientist.
Between 90 and 95% of their lab work is funded through the NIH. So far, more than 3,500 grants have been terminated or frozen by the NIH. Trump's budget proposes slashing NIH funding by more than 40%.
The majority of scientists who got in touch described feeling anxious and despondent – about their own work if the cuts continue, but also about what seems an inevitable loss of talent and knowledge which could upend the US position as a global leader in scientific endeavors and ricochet for years to come.
The brain drain is real. The Australian Academy of Science is leading the country's efforts to proactively recruit top US-based scientists, creating a new global talent program that includes research funding, access to Australian research infrastructure, fast-track visas and a relocation package. At least 75 scientists applied in the first three months of the program, the AAS told the Guardian.
The Trump administration has accused universities, without evidence, of promoting leftwing radical thinking and research, but federal funds train scientists who go on to work for the oil and gas, mining, chemical, big tech and other industries.
Several respondents said the private sector was also starting to feel the knock-on effect of Trump's cuts and tariffs. Wessel van den Bergh, a materials scientist with a PhD, was working on battery storage technology for a Chinese-owned renewable energy company in Massachusetts. He was laid off in early June amid Trump's tariff chaos and attacks on science and renewables, and is struggling to find work.
'When I started my PhD program, America was at the leading edge of batteries/energy storage but this is no longer true due to tariffs, funding cuts, and aggression towards green alternatives. Rather, the US has ceded its hard-earned expertise to other countries such as Korea, Japan and China,' Van den Bergh said.
Trump supports the expansion of fossil fuels and has received millions of dollars in campaign donations from the oil, gas and coal industry, while his budget legislation terminated incentives for solar and wind energy.
'It's crushing, I don't see a clear path ahead any more. I no longer feel this country values science. It's genuinely heartbreaking to build your vocation to something that could genuinely benefit the world for it to be quashed for imagined political victories … especially at a time where these kinds of technologies are the only way out of the climate crisis,' said Van den Bergh.
Separately, the Nuclear Physics Laboratory (NPL) at the University of Illinois got in touch after the Guardian's recent investigation into the chaos at the NSF. For almost 100 years the NPL has been at the forefront of cutting-edge science in drug discovery, cancer treatments, PET scans and other medical diagnoses, and semiconductor testing, with researchers playing a key role in world-renowned institutions like Cern and Los Alamos. It's a major hub for nurturing and training future talent, and at least 50 students have graduated with PhDs in the past 20 years.
It was here that Rosalind Yalow got her PhD in nuclear physics in 1945, and then went on to invent radioimmunoassay – a technique to detect minute amounts of hormones, viruses and drugs in the blood which revolutionized medical testing for conditions such as diabetes. Yalow was awarded the Nobel prize in 1977, only the second woman to win it.
The lab was recently informed that the NSF will reduce funding that supports graduates students from $15m for four years to $1m for one year.
'Our group in nuclear physics at Illinois actually predates the founding of the NSF in 1950, and we have a long history of both producing scientists and accelerator technologies that have had an impact on huge numbers of people,' said Anne M Sickles, professor of nuclear physics.
'If you cut the funding to the people who are doing the work right now, you don't know what they would have innovated in 10 years or 15 years or 32 years like Rosalind Yalow. We don't know what we're losing.'
The NFS declined to comment, while the office of management and budget and NIH did not respond.
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But this isn't really what the inevitabilists are saying. Instead, the message tends to be: AGI is imminent. Resistance is futile. But whether we build AGI in five, 20 or 100 years really matters. And the timeline is far more in our control than the boosters will admit. Deep down, I suspect many of them realize this, which is why they spend so much effort trying to convince others that there's no point in trying. Besides, if you think AGI is inevitable, why bother convincing anybody? We actually had the computing power required to train GPT-2 more than a decade before OpenAI actually did it, but people didn't know whether it was worth doing. But right now, the top AI labs are locked in such a fierce race that they aren't implementing all the precautions that even their own safety teams want. (One OpenAI employee announced recently that he quit 'due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI'.) There's a 'safety tax' that labs can't afford to pay if they hope to stay competitive; testing slows product releases and consumes company resources. Governments, on the other hand, aren't subject to the same financial pressures. An inevitabilist tech entrepreneur recently said regulating AI development is impossible 'unless you control every line of written code'. That might be true if anyone could spin up an AGI on their laptop. But it turns out that building advanced, general AI models requires enormous arrays of supercomputers, with chips produced by an absurdly monopolistic industry. Because of this, many AI safety advocates see 'compute governance' as a promising approach. Governments could compel cloud computing providers to halt next generation training runs that don't comply with established guardrails. 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But most of the world's roughly three-dozen nuclear programs were abandoned. This wasn't the result of happenstance, but rather the creation of a global nonproliferation norm through deliberate statecraft, like the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the few occasions when Americans were asked if they wanted superhuman AI, large majorities said 'no'. Opposition to AI has grown as the technology has become more prevalent. When people argue that AGI is inevitable, what they're really saying is that the popular will shouldn't matter. The boosters see the masses as provincial neo-Luddites who don't know what's good for them. That's why inevitability holds such rhetorical allure for them; it lets them avoid making their real argument, which they know is a loser in the court of public opinion. The draw of AGI is strong. But the risks involved are potentially civilization-ending. A civilization-scale effort is needed to compel the necessary powers to resist it. Technology happens because people make it happen. We can choose otherwise. Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist
