The White House Office of Management and Budget has proposed sweeping new restrictions on international research collaboration that could fundamentally – and adversely – reshape how federally funded scientists work with foreign partners. The restrictions are buried in its proposal to revise the Uniform Guidance – which is the standardized, government-wide framework for issuing federal grants and other forms of financial assistance.

OMB has framed the changes as necessary to protect national security and safeguard taxpayer dollars. However, AAU and other members of the United States’ research community have warned that the sprawling rule would prohibit important fundamental research collaborations in areas of science that pose no security risk whatsoever – undermining work that is essential to scientific innovation and advancement.

The proposed rule would prohibit the use of federal funds for bilateral or multilateral collaborations with “covered foreign countries” or “covered foreign entities” unless the collaborations have received prior authorization from a federal agency head or are expressly permitted by statute. The proposal would also prohibit collaborations with countries subject to sanctions or restrictions “relating to national security, defense, or intelligence activities.”

OMB’s proposal would expand the application of a provision inserted into the FY11 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill – commonly known as the Wolf Amendment – to all federal agencies. The Wolf Amendment currently restricts only NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from using appropriated funds for bilateral programmatic and research collaborations with China or Chinese-owned companies; OMB’s proposal would extend that prohibition across the entire federal grantmaking enterprise.

In addition, OMB is proposing to implement a “domestic-first” framework that would restrict federal awards to foreign entities. Agencies would be allowed to make awards to foreign entities only if those entities provide resources not readily available in the United States or if the awards are in the “national interest.”

Finally, OMB’s proposal would classify as unallowable several costs associated with doing research, including most costs associated with publishing the results of federally funded research. Costs associated with traveling to conferences would also need prior federal agency approval…

CONTINUE READING

Twenty-one universities in Canada announced on Thursday the hiring of dozens of researchers to join their top academic ranks, poaching the majority of the recruits from the United States.

Of the incoming 64 researchers, 48 will leave American campuses including Harvard, Yale and M.I.T., and the remainder are from Europe, Asia and Australia.

Turmoil in American academia, precipitated by a crackdown on prestigious universities by the Trump administration and attacks on scientific research groups, has allowed Canada a rare opportunity to lure some of those schools’ top minds north.

Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence. The program was announced last December as part of a broader $1.2 billion investment in Canadian innovation projects, with a second round of 63 academics to be hired next year.

While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration’s assault on science is behind their departure.

“I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world,” said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. “And I woke up one day and that wasn’t true anymore.”

He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal, which has also hired five other researchers, and will join the medical faculty.

“If scientists don’t stand up for truth, no one will,” Dr. Zamore said.

The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs.

Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist who left the U.S. National Institutes of Health last year, accusing federal officials of censoring his research on ultraprocessed foods, has been hired at the University of Ottawa.

“While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we’re doubling down on science,” Mélanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister, told reporters at the announcement, in Vancouver, of the new university hiring. She billed it as the world’s “largest talent attraction” project. The European Union has made a similar push…

CONTINUE READING

Apparently, the Trump administration has a new policy about policy-focused grant applications to the National Institutes of Health, But it hasn’t yet told those who will be most affected by this policy—namely the applicants, other researchers, patients, healthcare professional, the public, policymakers besides the Trump administration and, well, basically everyone else with a human body or head. Trump political appointees have been “flagging and freezing policy-focused grant applications,” in the words of Max Kozlov reporting for Nature, including applications that have already been approved by scientific peer reviewers and NIH staff members.

That suggests that the the Trump administration may be halting the NIH’s longstanding practice of funding scientific studies that produce evidence to guide how health policies should be designed and implemented. Without such scientific evidence, you’ve gotta then wonder how the Trump administration may be making health-related policies going forward. In other words, how much of it will be actually based on scientific evidence versus pulled out of you know where?

In fact, “policy” may have even become a p-word—meaning a policed word at NIH. Last year, I listed in Forbes 197 words—ranging from “clean energy” to “pollution” to “trans” to “bias” to “race” to “women”—that when appearing somewhere in your grant application to a federal agency like the NIH or the National Science Foundation could get that application flagged and further scrutinized under the Trump administration. That reportedly even got grant applications that included words like transgenic mice, disease transmission an signal transduction flagged.

It looks like a similar thing is now happening with the word “policy.” Kozlov reported how “Dozens of applications have since been sent back to NIH programme officers in charge of the proposals, instructing them to remove the word ‘policy’ and its derivatives and determine whether the proposals can be salvaged.” It’s not clear whether those derivatives are actual synonyms of “policy” like rule, guideline, procedure, law, regulation, strategy and custom or things spelled somewhat similarly to “policy” like police, polio and polka. Therefore, you may want to be careful if you reference polka dots in any way in your grant application.

Kozlov mentioned something else at stake as well: whether the NIH will even continue to consider policymakers as a relevant stakeholder group for health. In this case, stakeholder doesn’t refer to someone who holds a piece of meat in his or her hand. Dictionary.com defines stakeholder as “a person or group that has an investment, share, or interest in something.” Kozlov cited internal NIH documents obtained by Nature as stating the following: “Policymakers are not considered a stakeholder group within the scope of NIH’s mission. NIH-funded research must empower decision-making by NIH mission-relevant stakeholder groups.” The documents then listed such “relevant” stakeholder groups as being patients, health-care workers, hospitals and scientists. I have reached out to contacts at the NIH to get further clarification on all these aforementioned actions and the reasons behind them…

CONTINUE READING

The second Trump administration has presided over the greatest attack on scientific research since the end of World War II. It has frozen or terminated $2.3 billion in unspent funds at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and $700 million at the National Science Foundation (NSF) across thousands of grants. It has targeted research on cancer, vaccines, environmental protection, climate change, and public health as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It has overseen thousands of layoffs from key scientific agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And it proposed unprecedented budget cuts to both the NIH and NSF, promising to slash them by nearly half or more.

Though Congress rejected the cuts when it passed the 2026 federal budget, these moves have created a climate of such fear and confusion that three-quarters of scientists report they have considered leaving the United States. According to Science, the U.S. government has lost over ten thousand STEM PhDs since Trump took office. Faced with growing uncertainty, universities have paused hiring and curtailed PhD admissions in STEM fields. And the campaign to overhaul science policy hasn’t stopped. In May, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed sweeping changes to the federal grantmaking process, including mandatory pre-issuance review of all grants by political appointees; in late July, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, released a report calling for investment in AI-driven research, tighter integration with the private sector, a deprioritization of “legacy institutions,” and new funding mechanisms besides peer review.

As jarring as these developments are, many have deeper roots than Trump and his controversial appointees: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Jay Bhattacharya at NIH. Every year between 2009 and 2014, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma released a lengthy report arguing that a significant percentage of taxpayer money for science went to “fraud, waste, and abuse.” All the while, conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute have run reports and editorials on “How to Stop Wasting Money on Science,” “The Case Against Public Science,” and “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.” With guidance from Heritage’s Project 2025, the Trump administration is finally carrying out many changes that Republican policymakers, think tanks, and scholars have been advocating for decades.

To understand how we got here, we have to understand the unusual structure that has governed the allocation of U.S. public funding for the better part of a century. The prevailing system, established after World War II, combined the largest amount of public funding for basic research in the world—around $45 billion annually in recent years, or about 5 percent of federal, non-defense discretionary spending—with a high degree of autonomy to scientists in the distribution of funds. While the private sector has been the largest source of overall U.S. research and development spending since the early 1980s, the government remains the largest source of funding for basic research. And few areas of public funding, apart from central banking and certain areas of national security, have combined so much money with such high delegation to nongovernmental experts. While Congress controls total scientific budgets and agency structures, individual funding decisions—through agencies like the NSF—are effectively made by program officers who rely heavily on peer review by independent scientists, based mostly at research universities. Since 1997, the NSF process has evaluated proposals on the basis of “broader impacts” as well as intrinsic scientific merit, but it remains highly insulated from public input and deliberation.

This structure worked to the extent that the public accepted the idea that scientists pursuing their own curiosity brings about the greatest public benefit. But as American politics has become increasingly polarized—often around scientific issues, including climate change and vaccines—that conviction is less certain than ever. There is now a 25-point gap in Democrats’ and Republicans’ trust in scientists, and only 51 percent of Republicans say that science has had a mostly positive role in society, down from 70 percent before the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s not to say that all of Trump’s actions on science are popular, much less the result of a democratic mandate. A large majority of Americans continue to believe that government investment in science is worthwhile for society over time, and many of the administration’s attacks contravene areas of rare bipartisan agreement. To defend American science and chart a new vision for its future, we should build on the public’s enduring support for public funding while addressing real democratic deficits. The truth is, there never was a convincing democratic justification for the postwar scientific compact. But by learning from more democratic paths not taken, we can build a system that more fully serves the public…

CONTINUE READING

In mid-December, an assistant to President Donald Trump summoned officials from several federal agencies to a meeting so they could discuss what to do about Colorado.

Under the subject line “brainstorm call,” Emily Underwood asked officials from five agencies to join a call later that day “prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado.”

“The purpose of this call is to prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” Underwood, a deputy assistant to the president, wrote to officials from the departments of energy, transportation, interior and agriculture, as well as the Office of Management and Budget.

The email was sent at 2:43 a.m. on Dec. 15, hours before Trump publicly castigated Gov. Jared Polis as “weak and pathetic” over the continued imprisonment of former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters.

The Underwood email was disclosed publicly during a hearing in Denver on Tuesday as part of a Colorado lawsuit alleging retaliation by the Trump administration that state officials argue was motivated by the president’s frustration with Peters’ incarceration and by the state’s mail-in balloting system.

According to a transcript of the hearing reviewed by The Denver Post, a senior state attorney said the email amounted to a “smoking gun”: In the days that followed Underwood’s note, several agencies included in the email announced adverse actions against Colorado, canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and moving to close a renowned climate lab in Boulder.

“It’s extraordinary,” David Moskowitz, Colorado’s deputy solicitor general, said during the Tuesday hearing in U.S. District Court. The state had requested the hearing — and produced the email — in an effort to force the Trump administration to turn over more records. “And it’s extraordinary because the scheme was run directly out of (the Executive Office of the President).”

The White House on Thursday denied that the Underwood email was related to Peters. A spokeswoman did not comment on the record for this story, other than to direct questions about grant funding to the budget management office.

Throughout the fall, tension had mounted between the state and Trump administration.

In November, Colorado prison officials had rejected a request to transfer Peters, a Trump ally who was serving a prison sentence for facilitating a plot to give a third party access to secure election equipment. Trump had called Polis, demanding Peters’ release. (In May, Polis reduced her sentence and released her early.)

The Justice Department’s pardon attorney told Trump ally Steve Bannon that federal officials were putting “the right kind of pressure” on the state to secure Peters’ transfer; Trump had also promised “harsh measures” if the former clerk remained incarcerated.

Four days before Underwood’s email, the president publicly issued Peters a symbolic pardon.

Within days of that “brainstorm call,” a conservative media outlet reported that the Department of Energy was cutting $615 million in funding intended for Colorado. The Department of Transportation said it would end $109 million in grant funding to the state. The Office of Management and Budget moved to shutter the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Federal emergency officials rejected disaster relief funding for fire-scarred areas on the Western Slope. The Department of Agriculture ordered the state to swiftly re-certify 100,000 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients…

CONTINUE READING

The biopharma industry tipped the scales on cancer research years ago. Where the federal government once played a major role in determining what was studied in clinical trials, industry players took a commanding lead. And they’ve been expanding on that lead ever since.

Biopharma now recruits close to 10 adult cancer patients for every one that goes into a federally sponsored trial, according to a 2024 study led by Joe Unger, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. That’s twice the comparable rate of a decade earlier. And with the Trump administration continuing its assault on federally sponsored research, Unger and a group of researchers are back with a new study in JAMA Oncology aimed at offering lawmakers some added ammunition in their defense of the work undertaken by the National Cancer Institute.

Over the past decade, the NCI has carved out a unique path for itself. And it heads in a different direction than the one taken by biopharma players with their singular devotion to new drug development and blockbuster cancer therapies.

Examining a cluster of roughly 12,000 drug trials, Unger and his team found that federally sponsored trials were more likely to test combination therapies or add radiation or surgery to a therapy to gauge if it boosts efficacy. Pediatric cancer trials were three times as likely to be federally sponsored as industry sponsored.

Rare cancers with small patient populations like mine — Merkel cell carcinoma — are an afterthought in Big Pharma, where big markets like lung, pancreatic and breast cancer are in the center ring. But they can get backing at the NCI, which traditionally has also pushed hard for greater trial diversity, including more women and Black and Hispanic people in their research.

Any rules related to DEI at the NIH and the NCI were quickly scrubbed by the Trump administration last year.

“If a cancer research question involves a small-target population or it involves things like giving less of a drug, or it involves things like combining your sponsor’s agent with some other modality or some other agent, industry just doesn’t have the incentive to follow through on that nearly as much,” Unger tells me.

In short, there’s no money in it.

There’s also no mystery why Big Pharma has little appetite for voluntarily finding out if lower doses of their approved drugs work as well as the approved dose. It’s a guaranteed way to get your per-patient price reduced, often significantly. But it’s also an opportunity to see if you can reduce the toxicity of a drug without reducing efficacy — which is where the NCI has stepped in.

Where biopharma fears to tread, the NCI is the last line of defense.

Federal funding of drug research has stagnated in recent years, and has been steadily eroded by inflation. And it’s taken strong bipartisan support to protect the NCI’s budget. Early on in Trump 2.0, the government disrupted hundreds of studies with grant terminations and delays. Cancer research had been particularly hard hit as DOGE slashed the federal workforce.

In the summer of 2025, the Trump administration proposed a draconian cut of 37.2% from the NCI’s budget. That set off alarm bells in research circles which have no other place to turn. And even while Congress has so far handily thwarted the move, those bells are still ringing as lawmakers consider a new budget proposal with only a token increase for the institute, which won’t come close to covering the impact of inflation.

One scientist who’s had first-hand experience defending federal support for rare cancer research says the new study underscores just how important the NCI is — and why threats to funding have sent a chill through the ranks of scientists who depend on it.

“This study highlights why federal funding is irreplaceable: it supports important questions that simply don’t have a commercial incentive — in my experience, the support of rare disease research/trials,” notes Paul Nghiem, who chairs the University of Washington’s department of dermatology, in an email. “The recent uncertainty and delays in NIH funding have already disrupted our research and discouraged talented young people from entering or remaining in science. I worry that the long-term consequences will be much harder to reverse than the short-term funding cuts…”

CONTINUE READING

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) will award about 30% fewer new research grants this fiscal year than in the last one, Nature has learnt. The steep drop continues a pattern that began last year, after US President Donald Trump took office, leaving the NSF with the lowest number of new grants awarded in more than four decades.

A major funder of basic science, the NSF struggled to make awards this year with a workforce that has been cut by the Trump administration and uncertainty around the funds available for spending. But the decline in new grants in 2026 can now be attributed mainly to US$1 billion of the agency’s $8.8-billion budget being held in a central account, inaccessible to core grant-issuing programmes. Staff members, who spoke to Nature on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, say that much of that money is being allotted to a White House project called the Grand Research Challenges, which is aimed at scientific fields such as advanced materials and artificial intelligence.

The agency had issued 5,684 new grants as of 19 August, according to Grant Witness, a non-profit effort to track changes in US research funding. And internal NSF data show that there are around 400 grants waiting at its Office of Award Management (OAM) for processing. Staff members were required to submit all new proposals to the OAM by 3 August, so the final number of new grants issued for this fiscal year, which ends on 30 September, will almost certainly be about 6,100 (see ‘Grants throttled’). That’s 46% fewer than the average for 2021–24, before Trump took office. The last time this number was so low was in the early 1980s.

Many proposals that have been submitted by researchers and assessed by peer reviewers are in “pending purgatory”, says Jarett Wilcoxen, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The proposals have not been declined, but they haven’t been fully approved and awarded money either. He submitted a grant proposal in late 2024 for an instrument that would be used by his laboratory and 20 others in the region. “It’s disappointing to see that the funds aren’t being allocated,” he says. “It’s a big impact on student training, and that student training is going to have a ripple effect from academia to industry…”

CONTINUE READING

As the Trump Administration moves to slash federal funding and rewrite longstanding grant programs, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) convened California leaders to sound the alarm about the consequences for communities across the state. The roundtable included a discussion among leaders from California universities, nonprofits, childcare, food banks, immigrant-serving organizations, and philanthropy.

In California alone, the Trump Administration has CANCELLED $7.6 billion in clean energy funding, WITHDRAWN NEARLY $2 BILLION in research funding, and CONTINUES TO WITHHOLD overdue disaster relief funding for communities impacted by wildfires. New changes to federal grantmaking and regulations could put even more funding — and the essential services that depend on it — at risk.

“The Trump Administration is ripping away billions of dollars that California communities rely on to keep people safe, housed, fed and healthy,” said Senator Padilla. “These are not abstract budget numbers. It means childcare providers struggling to stay open, food banks facing greater demand, researchers losing support, and disaster survivors waiting for the resources they need to rebuild. I’m grateful to the leaders on the front lines who are fighting back, and I will continue doing my part in Congress to protect the critical programs that Californians depend on.”

Padilla’s roundtable featured a discussion about how interruptions or restrictions in federal funding could impact basic needs, public education, housing, healthcare, childcare, and immigrant and marginalized communities. The roundtable also highlighted the need for continued coordination and preparedness as organizations navigate an increasingly uncertain federal funding environment. Padilla and California leaders emphasized the importance of collaboration among philanthropy, nonprofits, public institutions, and government to keep essential services running and protect vulnerable communities.

In addition to Padilla, the roundtable featured remarks from the Chancellor of UC Davis Gary S. May, CEO of CalNonprofits Geoff Green, CEO of California Alliance of Child and Family Services Pete Weldy, President of Child Care Resource Center Donna Sneeringer, Executive Director of CalCAPA David Knight, Executive Director of California Immigrant Policy Center Masih Fouladi, Executive Director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) Angelica Salas, CEO of League of California Community Foundations Laura Seaman, and Director of Public Policy and Advocacy of California Food Banks Jared Call.

“The University of California urges Congress to provide a legislative fix that would prevent OMB’s detrimental changes to the Uniform Guidance from going into effect,” said UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May. “This fix would protect the merit-based research process that has allowed UC and the nation to lead the world in innovation.”

“California’s nonprofit sector is central to our state’s social, economic, and environmental well-being,” said Geoff Green, CEO of CalNonprofits. “At $450 billion in annual revenue, 110,000 organizations strong, and the third largest private employer, California’s nonprofits serve every community across the state. Working arm in arm with our public and private sector partners, we stand as a bulwark against federal attacks on our state’s people and values, and call on our elected representatives at all levels to defend the golden state’s 40 million residents.”

“The vulnerable families served by California’s community-based nonprofits are hanging on by a thread — and that thread is Medi-Cal. Cut a parent off from care, and kids get hurt too,” said Pete Weldy, CEO of California Alliance of Child and Family Services.“CA Alliance members thank Senator Padilla for fighting to protect the coverage our families – and our future – depend on.”

“Stable and reliable child care is critical to the well-being of our young children, their families and employers,” said Donna Sneeringer, President of Child Care Resource Center. “Repeated disruptions or threats to the funding that provides these services creates repeated stress and fear in our communities.”

“CalCAPA represents California’s Community Action Network, operating federally funded opportunities, including the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG), to help American families build toward economic mobility,” said David Knight, Executive Director of CalCAPA. “When final budgets get held up, OMB creates funding holds, leading to stalled programs, staff lay offs, and families paying for Washington’s delays.”

“Every dollar the federal government spends is a choice — and right now, it’s choosing detention and intimidation over health care, food, due process, and the nonprofits standing with immigrant communities,” said Masih Fouladi, Executive Director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. “We are grateful to Senator Padilla for his consistent leadership in defending immigrant families and his efforts to advance the right to legal representation for people facing deportation. Together, we must protect California’s safety net, sustain immigration legal services, defend the lawful work of community organizations, and ensure public dollars support families and due process, not detention and family separation.”

“CHIRLA is grateful for Senator Padilla’s leadership to ensure that all Californians have access to federal funding for basic needs and to address ongoing crises, including fires, and immigration enforcement. We know that budgets reflect our collective values. It’s unacceptable that billions of dollars are invested in agencies meant to harm the most vulnerable. That’s why we must fight to represent the most vulnerable while ensuring that due process is preserved for the countless families facing multiple crises at home, including food insecurity, natural disasters, arrests and detention, and family separation. We’re proud to be fighting alongside a true champion for California residents and values,” stated Angelica Salas, Executive Director, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA).

“Californians prove every day what’s possible when local generosity rises to meet a crisis, but the altruism of neighbors was never meant to replace federal investment in resilience, and it can’t,” said Laura Seaman, CEO of League of California Community Foundations. “As Washington considers even deeper cuts to the programs and infrastructure that keep Californians safe from all kinds of disasters and crises, we thank Senator Padilla and his colleagues for recognizing that while local communities can prepare for and respond to a crisis, only sustained federal investment can prevent the next one. Philanthropy and nonprofits are ready to partner with Senator Padilla and his colleagues in that work.”

“California Food Banks™ thanks Senator Padilla for his strong leadership on anti-hunger issues and standing with Californians who are trying to make ends meet,” said Stacia Levenfeld, CEO of California Food Banks. “We urge Senator Padilla and all members of the California delegation to stand firm in their commitment to aid farmers, and also support families who need help putting food on the table.”

Last week, Padilla joined his Senate colleagues IN DEMANDING the Trump Administration stop delaying Federal Transit Administration funding for public transportation projects. In July, Padilla BLASTED the Trump Administration for Trump’s supplemental funding request that did not include disaster aid funding for communities to rebuild and recover following natural disasters across the country.

The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America’s outstandingly poor healthcare system is “on the brink,” experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.

Whether the agency “will survive the second Trump administration is an open question,” health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, “Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems,” Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.

During Trump’s second term, DOGE cuts led to the firing or retirement of an estimated 75 percent of the AHRQ staff. In July, AHRQ abruptly sent grant cancellation letters to around 150 researchers. More than 100 research grants collectively worth over $250 million have been canceled. Although Congress appropriated $345 million for the 2026 fiscal year, much of it has gone unspent, with only $15 million going to grants so far. As such, scientists across over 30 states have halted research, laid off staff, shut down programs, and stopped pursuing new lines of research.

In addition to the losses in data and research findings, Carroll and Atkins lament the loss to the scientific community. “This is what it looks like when we stop developing the next generation of health services researchers.” Reversing the damage is doable, but will be difficult, they write, while calling on Congress to act.

Last week, 30 Democratic senators sent a fiery letter to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Noting the same series of events as Carroll and Atkins, they called Kennedy’s handling of AHRQ “sabotage” and an “outrageous abuse of administrative power that will leave Americans sicker, poorer, and dying from preventable causes…”

CONTINUE READING

President Donald Trump has spent more than 18 months demolishing Joe Biden’s expansive green agenda.

Yet pieces of the former president’s would-be legacy stubbornly cling to life — along with roughly $600 billion in congressionally approved spending that has so far escaped Trump’s wrecking ball, a new POLITICO analysis has found.

The breakdown sheds fresh light on one of the most endlessly repeated pledges of Trump’s second term: his vow to unravel the nearly $1.6 trillion in spending and tax breaks that Biden had set in motion for a sprawling array of climate, clean energy and infrastructure programs.

Trump and GOP lawmakers made good on a huge chunk of that pledge by wiping out more than $540 billion in Biden-era tax incentives for electric cars, wind and solar power and other climate-friendly technology.

But the spending portion of Biden’s legacy has proven more durable: Out of nearly $1 trillion in grants, contracts and other direct federal outlays provided by Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws, POLITICO found approximately $600 billion dollars remains available for recipients to spend or for federal agencies to award. Trump has attempted to cut at least 6 percent of that total $1 trillion — about $60 billion — though many of those cuts are still wrapped up in court challenges.

Now the fate of those leftover dollars is an emerging subplot in the November elections and in congressional efforts to prevent a government shutdown this fall.

It’s unclear how either party will treat the surviving money if they control Congress next year…

CONTINUE READING

Last month, a federal appeals court struck down Florida’s Stop WOKE Act as applied to colleges and universities. Meanwhile, an Ohio state senator introduced a bill that gives state-created civics centers sweeping authority over curriculum and faculty appointments.

These disputes illustrate a clear and present danger to academic freedom and institutional autonomy, as colleges and universities fight to retain control over the attributes that have made them internationally preeminent, including faculty hiring, research, curriculum and selection of undergraduate and graduate students.

PEN America notes that 2025 was a “year of catastrophe” for higher education. The Trump administration froze billions of dollars in research funding, pressured universities to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs, revoked at least 8000 international student visas, threatened universities’ tax-exempt status, and gutted the Department of Education. Red-state legislatures passed a spate of educational gag orders, restricting classroom discussion of race, gender and other supposedly divisive topics.

As courts struck down some of these measures, the administration and its red state allies acted aggressively, but quietly, to control teaching and research by revamping accreditation requirements, appointing partisans to governing boards, weaponizing compliance investigations, limiting tenureand the faculty role in governance, and leveraging federal control of financial aid and research funding.

More than ever, colleges and universities are divided over how to respond in what are likely to be no-win contests.

Florida defended the Stop WOKE Act’s authority over the workplace speech of faculty in public universities as a legitimate exercise of government authority over state employees. Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, rejected that claim in an Eleventh Circuit majority opinion, labeling it “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the state’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry.”

That ruling echoes decisions from five other federal appellate courts that have also rejected attempts at direct censorship of campus speech. No federal court of appeals has yet disagreed.

Judicial support for academic freedom seems to have convinced the Trump administration and red-state legislators to escalate indirect remedies that may prove more difficult to challenge in court. Twenty such measuresbecame law last year, almost three times the number of new gag orders adopted.

The administration has augmented such laws with scores of investigations, lawsuits, and other actions against individual universities. Harvard has been targeted at least a dozen times.

Alarmed by reports that Yale was negotiating a settlement of administration discrimination claims, the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors warned that it would sue the university if it made concessions that “compromise its commitment to academic freedom” and create “a blueprint for political pressure on colleges and universities across the country.”

It’s doubtful Yale’s AAUP chapter has standing to challenge a settlement, but its concerns are legitimate. Settlements with other elite universities contain intrusive provisions on curriculum, faculty hiring, and protest policies.

The proposed Strengthening Ohio Civics Act represents yet another front in the expanding war against university autonomy. The bill gives state-sponsored civics centers at five public universities unprecedented independence from traditional university governance and an exclusive mandate to provide the state’s required civic literacy courses. Center directors have full authority over hiring, salaries, rank, tenure and curriculum. Many red states have established similar centers.

Meanwhile, the administration is building a web of new mechanisms designed to encourage or compel compliance with its ideological goals…

CONTINUE READING

A federal judge in Boston on Thursday dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard University of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns said President Trump’s administration failed to prove an ongoing violation of federal civil rights laws. The judge said the lawsuit, filed in March, mostly focuses on incidents that took place in the 2023-24 academic year, with a few from March 2025.

The cases were “too isolated and episodic” to prove a persistent civil rights violation at the Ivy League campus in Cambridge, Mass., the judge said.

Harvard and the Department of Justice did not immediately provide comment on the decision.

The lawsuit accused Harvard of failing to protect Jewish students during pro-Palestinian demonstrations that roiled the campus after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. The Trump administration argued Harvard officials did nothing as Jewish students were “harassed, physically assaulted, stalked, and spat upon.”

In a statement after the lawsuit was filed, Harvard said it “cares deeply about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus.”

Harvard President Alan M. Garber says the university formed a task force to combat antisemitism. The university also hired a new provost and new deans and reformed its discipline policies to make them “more consistent, fair and effective,” Garber has said.

The government’s case sought to recover billions of dollars in federal research grants awarded to Harvard since October 2023. Trump officials argued they had a right to recoup the money under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law barring discrimination based on race or national origin.

The case shares similarities with one the government filed in May against the University of California, although that litigation is in earlier phases than the Harvard case and is assigned to a different judge in a Los Angeles-based federal district court.

The Harvard lawsuit is among several actions the government has taken against the university since the Ivy League school refused a list of demands made by the White House after Trump, a Republican, returned to office last year. Trump officials have separately sought to cut Harvard’s research funding and limit its ability to enroll foreign students and U.S. military members…

CONTINUE READING

America’s global leadership in science has been built over decades through bipartisan investments in research, universities and a federal workforce of scientists, physicians and public health experts whose work has led to major medical advances and protection against disease.

This foundation is now being weakened, with thousands of federal scientists and public health professionals having been jettisoned by the Trump administration during the past year and a half along with reductions in funding and the elimination of vital programs, research grants and clinical trials.

The costs of cutting American science are significant and will result in fewer life-saving treatments, diminished disease surveillance, slower responses to public health emergencies, reduced food and drug safety and a declining ability to protect Americans from threats we cannot yet foresee.

One of the most alarming consequences that cannot easily be repaired is the loss of scientific talent and expertise that has taken decades to build up - a major brain drain of accumulated experience and leadership that has disappeared.

Between September 2024 and May 2026, the arbitrary workforce cutbacks totaled 21.6% at the National Institutes of Health, 22.2% at the Food and Drug Administration, 28.1% at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35.3% at the National Science Foundation, and 72.1% at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, according to analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management. This loss of staffing includes senior leadership positions at many of these agencies, including the CDC and the NIH, where a majority of the top jobs have no permanent officials.

At the same time, morale at public health agencies has plummeted, with the Partnership’s Public Employee Viewpoint Survey showing that Department of Health and Human Services, where most of the public health agencies are located, registered an employee engagement score of just 20.4 out of 100 last year, placing it among the lowest-scoring large agencies.

This is because the day-to-day of the HHS employee has shifted from working to improve the health of Americans to censoring ideas, excluding already marginalized groups from the benefits of NIH programs, and endangering the American public. For many, whether to stay at the agency has become an impossible choice: abandon their mission and careers or risk degrading their integrity.

In addition, the Partnership analysis of USAspending data shows that project grant funding from public health and disease prevention agencies fell by 11.1% during fiscal year 2025. Even more striking, research and development contract funding from these agencies dropped by 49.4%. And at NIH, accounting changes—a shift to multiyear or forward funding, which puts the full grant amount on the government’s books in year one, instead of year-by-year as in the past—has resulted in NIH funding 24% fewer new research studies in 2025, with fewer scientists receiving project grants compared to 2024. All these NIH cuts also disproportionately affected women and racial, ethnic, and gender minority scientists who were already underrepresented in research…

CONTINUE READING

The federal government has unexpectedly ended two more research grants at the University of Pittsburgh, which in one case, upends 16 years of research in two of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

The cancellations affect Alzheimer’s researcher Ann D. Cohen, associate professor of psychiatry, and Tamara Dubowitz, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Pitt’s School of Public Health and researcher into the social determinants of health in Pittsburgh’s Hill District and Homewood neighborhoods since 2010. Their studies were complementary and the women are among the university’s most prolific researchers, with a dozen active projects between them and a combined grant value in excess of $21 million, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Cohen was also the recipient of the Department of Psychiatry’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion Award, a term widely reviled by the Trump administration.

But the recent cancellation of the NIH grants will only cost the university $5.04 million because the awards were spread out over five years and the terminations came in the ending years of projects. Cohen lost total funding of $3.5 million, which includes unspent money from prior years; Dubowitz’s grant was $1.54 million.

Dozens of Pitt, UPMC and Rand Corp. staffers worked on Dubowitz’s multiyear project, but the longer-term impact on university employment and neighborhood residents being studied was still being assessed, she said Thursday, adding that she was not speaking for the university.

“This is really an assault on our community and region and state from a science and economic perspective,” she said. “These were not small investments in science that they decided should be terminated.

“It’s both heartbreaking and anger inducing,” she said…

CONTINUE READING

In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities, after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.”

And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities, and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.

Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.

Some of those projects in ​“blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.

But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.

According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025, and has threatened to terminate 303additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

But the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. ​“Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding…”

CONTINUE READING

A proposed new rulemaking by the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) appears poised to dramatically diminish the role and visibility of American science, drawing sharp opposition from researchers and the scholarly publishing community.

Among the controversial proposed revisions to the Trump Administration’s Uniform Guidance for federal grants: provisions that would require political appointees to review grants for adherence to the administration’s policy priorities; a provision for early termination of grant awards; strict restrictions on international collaborations; and the erosion of support for academic societies, publishing, and the dissemination of scientific results.

Although many administrators would agree that the current Uniform Guidance could benefit from some clarification and revision, this was not what anyone had in mind—the OMB’s broad, and apparently politically-motivated suggestions have been met with widespread anguish. Nearly 500,000 public comments were filed by the July 13 deadline, the overwhelming majority of them critical, though only about 54,000 have been published on the docket thus far.

In the scholarly publishing space, the most significant potential impact comes in two subsections: one on “publication and printing costs,” (subsection 200.461); and another on “memberships, subscriptions, and professional activity costs” (subsection 200.454).

In a break from current guidance, the OMB’s proposed changes to the guidance on publishing would disallow “page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications.” Rather absurdly, the OMB states in their preamble that publication costs are “not inherently necessary to carry out the core programmatic objectives of most Federal awards.”

Beyond this potentially disastrous damper on scholarly publishing, the two permitted exceptions in the publishing section only serve to create confusion.

One exception pertains to publications approved in advance by the granting Federal agency on a case-by-case basis. However, it’s not clear what “case-by-case” means: such language could refer whether an agency (such as the National Institutes of Health) has explicitly authorized support for author processing charges (APCs). But more ominously, it could be read to mean that individual publications would have to be approved one at a time by the funding agency—a prospect that would create an incredible burden on publication of research that arises from federal grants. Since publishing is the primary way that research results are communicated within the global academic research community, such a slow walking of publications could sink the visibility of U.S. research.

The second exception would apply when publication is required by federal statute. Once again, it is unclear what “required by federal statute” means. The new OMB guidance states that the “general requirement to make results publicly available must not be construed as authorizing publication costs.” But if other federal research apparatuses have adopted open access publication mandates for dissemination of research results funded by federal dollars, how can the resulting circle be squared? Who would bear the cost of publication, especially at a time when library and university budgets are being impacted directly by other Federal policies?

CONTINUE READING

A new White House report argues that eight decades of science policy that helped make the United States the world’s scientific leader is too bureaucratic, too focused on institutions rather than individual researchers, and too slow to translate discoveries into economic and technological advantages.

Supporters see it as a needed modernization of American science policy. Others argue that it places insufficient emphasis on the universities, laboratories and federal agencies that enable and sustain U.S. scientific leadership.

Research affects health, prosperity, quality of life and national security. The technologies that shape modern life, from GPS navigation and weather forecasting to cancer therapies and cellular communications, all rely on scientific discovery.

The debate raises a broader question: What created American scientific leadership in the first place, and what will be required to sustain it?

During World War II, Vannevar Bush, who coordinated much of the nation’s wartime research effort, led federal programs that created new technologies such as radar and mass-produced penicillin. In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Bush to develop a blueprint for how science could contribute to national health, economic prosperity and job creation after the war.

Bush’s 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, established a framework in which government, universities and industry played complementary roles. The federal government would invest in research and scientific talent. Universities would perform research while educating future scientists and engineers. Industry would transform discoveries into products and services.

The model worked.

The postwar research system laid the foundation for innovations ranging from microelectronics and biotechnology to the internet. Its success can be measured not only in discoveries but also in outcomes: scientific leadership, a highly skilled workforce, innovation clusters of new firms centered on universities that discover new knowledge via research, jobs and long-term economic growth.

The United States did not become a scientific superpower by chance. It built institutions that repeatedly generated both new knowledge and new talent…

CONTINUE READING

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from rescinding $20 billion in climate grants.

In a three-page unsigned court opinion, a divided court overturned a panel’s earlier decision, saying the Environmental Protection Agency likely violated the Inflation Reduction Act when it attempted to terminate and claw back Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants awarded to Climate United and other nonprofits.

The grants were being used to fund “projects across the United States that support domestic clean energy development, build healthy and affordable housing, accelerate American-made electric vehicle manufacturing, and save hard-working Americans money on their bills,” Climate United said in a March 8 lawsuit filed after EPA froze the funding.

Six of the court’s 10 judges upheld a preliminary injunction rejecting the EPA’s attempts to terminate the grant program “based solely on a policy disagreement” with the statute and take back $6.97 billion in funds disbursed to Climate United. The judges said the EPA has not indicated it would not continue to take steps to repeal the funds if the injunction were lifted.

Congress authorized $19.97 billion through the IRA in 2022 to support beneficiaries — including local governments — in achieving climate, clean energy, infrastructure and equity goals, according to an amicus brief filed Feb. 9 by the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Local governments have suffered, and remain at risk of further suffering” because they planned for projects and made budgetary decisions based on the grants, the brief states…

CONTINUE READING

Senate leadership on Sunday released the text of a bipartisan government funding stopgap measure that would block the White House’s proposal to give political appointees control over federal research grants.

The continuing resolution would fund the government until Dec. 11. It would only block the Trump administration’s new grants proposal until that time, but it will be more difficult for Republicans to allow the White House’s plan to take effect now that they’ve agreed to blocking it, even if temporarily.

The provision emerged from bipartisan discussions in the Appropriations Committee, to which Republican leadership agreed. The Senate is expected to consider the funding bill this week, after which it will break for August recess. The government funding bill that the House passed two weeks ago does not include a similar provision blocking the grant rule. The House already is in recess. Once it’s back, the two chambers will need to work out their differences before government funding expires at the end of September, and the president would need to sign it…

CONTINUE READING

Many scientists were among the 500,000 people who submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget during the six-week public-comment period following the posting of newly proposed rules on federal science funding that would drastically alter how grants are reviewed, awarded, and administered. In the future, this may be the touchstone event we recall and say, “Scientists finally arose from their civic slumber.”

One of us specializes in the math that describes molecules traveling through the human body. The other specializes in the math of what makes molecules tick. Like most scientists, we have spent our lives achieving an extraordinary level of expertise on a technical matter — sometimes by ignoring the world around us. Neither of us was trained in science administration or national science policy. And yet, our professional careers are heavily influenced by both. While we have many colleagues who see themselves as above politics and abjure all political affiliations, we have come to believe that when scientists remain outside the arena that sets policy — i.e., the democratic process — they do so at their peril.

Over the past few years, some of us have become increasingly alarmed by the politicization of science administration and science policy. Politicization has come from both the left and the right. In 2024, one of us wrote about the perversion of science funding by the Biden administration, ostensibly to achieve its social-justice goals. Now, we have written a follow-up paper that calls out the dangers of the politicization of science funding that’s being embraced by the Trump administration, this time in the name of improving efficiency and reversing ideological distortions by the previous administration. Whether political control comes from the left or the right, the result will be the loss of our technological supremacy, with devastating consequences for industry and society at large. Moreover, the volatility in how science is prioritized and funded is itself damaging to the scientific enterprise.

The politicization of science need not reach the extremes of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union — in which bogus, state-mandated agricultural science led to death and destruction — to do serious damage to science and public trust. Although less cataclysmic, U.S. history also offers examples of political influence distorting the scientific process. The case of stem-cell research illustrates how politicization can pit one political side against another to skew government policy and reward complicity within the scientific community. In the early 2000s, federal regulators imposed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. In subsequent years, unconditioned support for stem-cell therapies — often ahead of conclusive evidence — became a political litmus test on the left. With scientific scrutiny suppressed in the name of political alliances, wildly optimistic claims about imminent breakthroughs, such as treatments for heart failure, outpaced available data. Substantial public funding was directed to these efforts at the expense of alternative approaches to cardiovascular disease. Subsequent investigations led to the retraction of several highly cited studies, making it clear that scientific rigor and oversight had been compromised.

Today, according to some surveys, only 28 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests, down from 39 percent in 2020. Trust in higher education is even lower — more than two-thirds of Americans say colleges are “headed in the wrong direction.” Much of the public has come to see science as just another cynical political grab for power and money. Politicization is partly to blame.

Politicization is distinct from politics and the political process, which are both part and parcel of a functioning democracy. The public elect representatives who, in turn, set the priorities for the allocation of public monies. That’s as it should be. Politicization, by contrast, is something both more subtle and more sinister. What made Lysenkoism so devastating in the Soviet Union was not just that the Communist Party set unrealistic agricultural goals or imposed disastrous policies such as collectivization. Rather, it was that the Communist Party claimed the authority to adjudicate scientific truth…

CONTINUE READING