By most metrics, 2025 has been the worst year for the American scientific enterprise in modern history.
Since January, the Trump administration has made deep cuts to the nation’s science funding, including more than $1 billion in grants to the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much of the basic research at universities and federal laboratories, and $4.5 billion to the National Institutes of Health. Thousands of jobs for scientists and staff members have been terminated or frozen at these and other federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Park Service.
To thousands of researchers — veteran scientists and new grad students at state universities and Ivy League institutions alike — these sweeping reductions translate as direct personal losses. Each may mean a layoff, a shuttered lab, a yearslong experiment or field study abruptly ended, graduate students turned away; lost knowledge, lost progress, lost investment, lost stability; dreams deferred or foreclosed.
“This government upheaval is discouraging to all scientists who give their time and lend their brilliance to solve the problems beleaguering humankind instead of turning to some other activity that makes a more steady living,” Gina Poe, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email.
Next year looks to be worse. The 2026 budget proposed by the White House would slash the National Science Foundation by 56.9 percent, the N.I.H. by 39.3 percent and NASA by 24.3 percent, including 47.3 percent of the agency’s science-research budget. It would entirely eliminate the U.S. Geological Survey’s $299 million budget for ecosystems research; all U.S. Forest Service research ($300 million) and, at NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, all funding ($625 million) for research on climate, habitat conservation and air chemistry and for studying ocean, coastal and Great Lakes environments. The Trump administration has also proposed shutting down NASA and NOAA satellites that researchers and governments around the world rely on for forecasting weather and natural disasters.
“The administration’s targeted cuts to waste, fraud and abuse in both research grant funding and visa programs are going to strengthen America’s innovative and scientific dominance,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, in an emailed statement. He declined to provide specific examples.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has estimated that if the administration succeeds in its plans to cut the 2026 federal science budget to $154 billion from $198 billion — a 25 percent reduction — it would represent the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century. The result “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, told The New York Times in July.
The Times has been asking dozens of scientists from across the country to describe what has been lost as a result of these changes. Their first-person accounts for this series, which you can read here, will appear regularly over the coming weeks, including in this newsletter.
Has your scientific work been cut? We want to hear about it. You can fill out the form at the bottom of this page or email us at [email protected]. You may be contacted by a New York Times journalist.
More from Lost Science:
“Our emphasis was primarily on heat in cities, which are getting hotter, not just because of climate change, but because of infrastructure, which creates an urban heat island effect. Fundamentally, we were trying to learn about these systems to prevent people from dying unnecessarily from heat.”
— Kevin Gurney is a professor of atmospheric science at Northern Arizona University. Gurney had grants to build greenhouse gas monitoring systems around three American cities. Read more.
“With this grant, I also wanted to understand which time window of exposure is most important for menstrual health — prenatal, childhood or adult. Our early results showed that the first trimester of pregnancy is a time to be especially concerned about air pollution and temperature.”
— Shruthi Mahalingaiah is an associate professor of environmental, reproductive and women’s health at the Harvard School of Public Health. She had a federal research grant to study how air pollution can affect fertility in women. Read more.
The Trump administration
Trump’s energy cuts punished mostly blue states. Red states might be next.
The Energy Department’s cancellation of $7.5 billion in Biden-era awards for clean energy projects is poised to cause significant job losses and disruptions, leaders of several states have said, even as internal documents suggest that the agency may be contemplating deeper cuts in the months ahead.
The agency’s termination of more than two dozen grants in New York State alone would threaten more than 1,000 jobs and nearly $500 million in investments in the state, according to figures compiled by the office of Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and reviewed by The New York Times.
At the same time, many lawmakers and companies fear that the Energy Department could soon cancel even more funding, including for projects in Republican-led states, such as funding for two large projects in Louisiana and Texas that aimed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. — Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer
In one chart
How much it costs to drive an E.V. and a gas car in every state
For The Upshot, Francesca Paris compared the costs of filling up a gas-powered car with the cost of charging an electric vehicle. Charging an E.V. battery is usually cheaper than going to the gas pump. But it depends on where you live.
Driving 100 miles in a typical gas car that gets 25 miles per gallon costs about $13 on average. In an E.V. you’d pay just $5, if you recharged at the average home electricity rate, which is cheaper than stopping at a fast-charging station.
More climate news from around the web:
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“A global benchmark of clean energy stocks is outperforming major equity indexes and even gold,” Bloomberg reports, “as investors respond to soaring demand for renewables needed to power the boom in artificial intelligence.”
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The Trump administration has hired more than 40 people who have directly worked for oil, gas or coal companies, The Guardian reports.
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Among the winners of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants”: Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who studies fungi. (In 2022, Somini Sengupta reported on Dr. Kiers’s work and its climate implications.)
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NPR reports on another MacArthur winner, Kristina Douglass, an archaeologist at Columbia University who is “investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability.”
Alan Burdick is an editor and occasional reporter of science and health news for The Times.
The post A Crushing Year for Science in America appeared first on New York Times.
