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Leading figures in US science are preparing for another budget battle for 2027 after fending off the Trump administration’s sharpest proposed cuts this year with the backing of Congress.
This year’s federal budget for non-defence R&D will be just 5 per cent less than last year, rather than being slashed by a third as the administration had wanted, according to analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
But the mood was far from celebratory at the annual meeting of the scientific organisation in Phoenix this weekend, as scientists lamented disruption caused by Trump’s attacks on fields such as climate and diversity research and attempts to penalise several top US universities whose policies he disliked.
“Tremendous damage has been done,” Sudip Parikh, AAAS chief executive, told the FT. “It was essentially a lost year for many scientists who faced great uncertainty in their work, particularly our early career researchers.”
“If you look at top line funding, we saw bipartisan champions of science in Congress coming to our aid, helped by powerful advocacy from the scientific community,” he added.
Alessandra Zimmermann, who analyses R&D spending for AAAS, expects the administration to propose big cuts again when it publishes the 2027 federal budget, probably next month.
“While they did not succeed in getting the cuts last time, they did succeed in making us OK with flat funding,” she said. “If you had told someone who advocates for the National Science Foundation two or three years ago that they’d be getting a 3.5 per cent cut, they would probably have had a heart attack on the spot.”
Parikh is more confident than he was a year ago about staving off big cuts, however.
“The difference is that this Republican majority Congress is on the record for its support for science and that gives me a great deal of confidence that at the top line level they will show up again,” he said. “My worries are about the policy in various fields such as climate, diversity and women’s health, about detrimental immigration policies related to science, about international collaboration.”
Gary Miller, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University in New York, said his institution’s dispute with the Trump administration last year over alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws had been “extremely disruptive”. As vice-dean for research, Miller had to handle the temporary suspension of federal grants, particularly from the National Institutes of Health.
Although the dispute was settled last July with a $221mn payment by Columbia to the federal government, the effects were “still lingering”, Miller said. “Junior people whose research may depend on a single NIH grant are much more vulnerable to the uncertainty than senior scientists like me who have diverse sources of research funding.”
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said Trump’s policies had affected the type of medical research that scientists carry out and submit to journals.
“I worry about a degree of self-censorship, of deciding we’re not going to do some things because they might be politically hot,” she said. “We’re not seeing an overall decline in submissions, but in certain fields there is a big drop off.”
In particular, she said, researchers were avoiding analysis of inequalities or differences based on gender, race or socio-economic status.
Parikh pointed to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s warning at Davos last month of “a rupture, not a transition” in the rules-based international order.
“There will be no return to the world we had before,” said Parikh. “We have to build differently for the future.”