The Trump administration swept into office determined to undermine the postwar model of research spending that made the United States the world’s great engine of scientific discovery.
Much of that agenda — canceling studies, slashing scientific staff, imposing greater political oversight on grant making — went into effect without the cooperation of Congress, which even in Republican hands resisted the White House’s efforts to retool the country’s research machine.
Now Democrats are set to take control on Capitol Hill, and some are already promising to do more than play defense. They hope to begin reversing changes implemented under President Trump.
Whether that ultimately happens is unclear.
“The reality is, most of the shenanigans have been coming from the administration,” said Jeremy Berg, a former institute director at the National Institutes of Health, or N.I.H. “And that will likely continue.”
From artificial intelligence to space exploration to the research juggernauts at the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. scientific enterprise is vast. Here are some trends to watch.
The Grant-Making Machine
Over the past two years, a Republican-led Congress rejected steep proposed cuts to the N.I.H. budget, blocked plans to formalize political control of the grant-making process and limited health officials’ power to more aggressively reduce the number of medical research grants.
But the Trump administration nevertheless turned to executive orders, staffing cuts, new layers of political review and obscure bureaucratic maneuvers to slow or impede some scientific research spending.
After this week’s election, Democratic lawmakers vowed to take back powers over federal spending that they said should have been exercised long before now.
“The power of the purse belongs to CONGRESS!” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, wrote on X. “It’s NOT Trump’s money. Taxpayer dollars belong to the American PEOPLE.”
She and other lawmakers could, for example, ramp up oversight of the funding that the Trump administration has withheld. Congress could also more sharply limit reductions to the number of research grants being awarded.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, who is seeking to lead the House Science Committee, said in an interview on Wednesday that lawmakers needed to be more “prescriptive,” and start delineating exactly how Congress intends for federal money to be spent.
“In some cases, the damage can’t be undone,” Ms. Lofgren said, noting that many younger scientists had left their fields or moved abroad because of the funding disruptions. “But we can prevent it from continuing.”
Equally consequential were the administration’s efforts to remake the process of vetting and awarding scientific grants. Under President Trump, the overall dollar figures for research spending have remained about the same. But his administration has exercised more discretion over how that funding is spent, changes that are mostly beyond Congress’s power to undo.
“The upheaval and damage has come from the White House,” said Sudip Parikh, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a major scientific lobby. “The change in Congress isn’t necessarily going to fix all that.”
Grants are now are screened for disfavored terminology, vetted in some cases by political appointees, and overseen by scientists sympathetic to the priorities of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other political leaders.
Under new processes, it has become harder for labs to predict when, or whether, their research proposals would be funded.
Ryan D. Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, said that American science has prospered in part because of how much federal funding had flowed to basic research at universities after World War II and during the Cold War.
But labs also depended on that funding remaining stable and predictable. And those norms have been so thoroughly shaken, Dr. Enos said, that a single election would not restore them.
“It’s a very different world right now,” he said.
New Investigative Targets
As the majority party in Congress, Republicans had the authority to hold oversight hearings and subpoena witnesses, a power they sometimes used to scrutinize scientists, including a contentious Senate committee hearing with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci this summer.
Those efforts may not end entirely with a new Congress. As chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, led an investigation into Dr. Fauci. He could continue to release damaging documents that he received from the administration while Republicans controlled the chamber.
But Mr. Paul is set to be replaced as committee chair by Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, a fierce Trump critic who has defended Dr. Fauci. She and other Democratic lawmakers will be in a position to end those hearings and investigate the Trump administration instead.
“A lot of how the new majority will try to drive change is through investigations and hearings,” said Mitch Benzine, senior counsel in the congressional investigations practice at the law firm Eversheds Sutherland.
Dr. Parikh said that could include investigations into the administration’s withholding of funds appropriated by Congress and changes made to the grant review process.
Lawmakers could even look to scrutinize universities that settled federal civil rights investigations or funding freezes with the Trump administration, even if only as a way to dig up evidence about the White House’s attacks on federal research funds.
Yet the elections also ushered out some stalwart defenders of medical research on the right, including Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a longtime champion of N.I.H. funding. Some scientists have already begun discussing the need to cultivate a new generation of supporters among Republicans in Congress.
Roger Severino, a vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a health official in the first Trump administration, said that the election had hardly represented a rebuke of the administration’s efforts to cut medical studies related to race or gender.
“Trump had effectively won on this issue because the Democrats were petrified of pushing for a return to the halcyon days of D.E.I. funding and research during the election,” he said.
The White House Office of Management and Budget, he added, was “already very deeply involved in reviews of N.I.H. grant making,” and was already working to even more firmly establish the federal government’s power to terminate research grants.
A.I. Guardrails
On Tuesday, voters passed 40 out of 41 ballot initiatives that aim to halt or limit the development of the computer data centers used to build and deploy artificial intelligence.
While these measures are unlikely to have a major effect on the progress of A.I. in the near term, they could shift the direction of the field two to three years down the road.
Over the past several years, companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google could not have pushed A.I. forward as quickly as they did without the arrival of many massive new data center facilities designed specifically for A.I.
Building the most advanced A.I. systems typically requires thousands of specialized computer chips packed into a network of data centers in one location.
Increasingly immense facilities built for A.I. training are now coming online. But if some states push back on their development, it could increase the gap between the leading A.I. companies and the smaller players, said Harry Sudock, chief business officer at the data center developer CleanSpark.
“The bigger the company, the bigger the research lab, the more they will be able to navigate in what will be more constrained waters,” he said.
In other words, companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta will continue to have an advantage over everyone else, simply because they have more money and more leverage to build new facilities.
But mostly, these and other companies are building new data centers so that they can deliver their A.I. technologies to people across the globe. Scientists call this “inference,” as opposed to training.
If it becomes more difficult to build new data centers in certain parts of the country, Mr. Sudock said, the cost of using A.I. may rise even higher.
Separately, a Democrat-led Congress could introduce bills that restrict the development of the most powerful A.I. systems in the name of safety, something the Trump administration has been reluctant to do. Many experts worry that these systems are a threat to cybersecurity and could help build dangerous bioweapons.
These bills could also create new protections for copyright holders, which could affect the cost and the difficulty of training A.I. systems.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Safe Space
For NASA, the switch to Democratic control of Congress is unlikely to lead to significant changes in the nation’s space program, which has received steady bipartisan support.
Indeed, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have long been more likely to agree with one another about NASA than with the president.
When President Obama in 2010 canceled Constellation, a program started under President George W. Bush to send astronauts back to the moon, Congress pushed back and instructed NASA to develop the Space Launch System, the giant rocket used for Artemis, the current return-to-the-moon program.
When President Trump last year and this year sought to slice NASA’s robotic science programs by nearly half, Congress ignored the request and continued financing the space agency at roughly the same level as in earlier years.
Today there remains strong bipartisan consensus support for the Artemis missions and concern that the United States should not yield the moon to China.
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