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The anti-scientific revolution: Trump’s policies are reversing America’s global dominance in academic research
In the spring of 2025, dozens of graduate students, professors, and other staff members at leading American universities received letters from the National Science Foundation (NSF) informing them that funding for their projects had been terminated. In the case of Dr. Casey Fiesler, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Colorado, the letter did not even offer a formal reason.
“My grant proposal to the National Science Foundation for AI education was rejected,” Fiesler wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Losing this funding means the work won’t be completed, the graduate student won’t have research support next year, and the students who were supposed to take part in the project will lose the opportunity to gain experience.” Fiesler suspects the grant was withdrawn because of a single sentence in the introduction to her paper containing the word “disinformation.”
The Fiesler case was not a one-off mistake; it was part of the systemic approach that NSF has adopted toward grants under the current administration. The sweeping cancellations of 2025 have affected thousands of other projects and tens of thousands of researchers.
Budget cuts and revoked grants
Federal agencies from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to NASA have come under mounting pressure due to political appointments and historic budget reductions across nearly all areas of federally funded research. To date, more than 1,900 NSF grants have been terminated, many of them related to climate or social sciences, and 4,000 NIH-funded projects ranging from cancer and Alzheimer’s research to HIV prevention have been abruptly canceled.
According to Nature, in three months following inauguration this past January, the Trump administration dismissed “thousands of government-employed scientists,” halted clinical trials, and slashed more than a thousand research grants in fields from vaccine development to neurobiology.
Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, a public health expert at Yale University, sums up the action as a sweeping purge of agencies, universities, and professionals. He compares the new Trump policy to Soviet-era “Lysenkoism” and the approach taken by China’s “Cultural Revolution.”
“We’ve lost an entire generation of experts,” Gonsalves says, warning that even if policy shifts after the 2028 elections, rebuilding the field could take decades.
Closed institutions
Not only individual projects but entire institutes have been affected. The Arctic Research Consortium of the United States — a nonprofit with a 40-year history that coordinated dozens of scientific projects in the polar regions — announced its closure after the NSF decided not to renew its grant.
NASA has also suffered significantly from budget cuts. The position of the administration’s chief scientist was abolished, prominent climatologists were dismissed from both NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, and their teams were disbanded. Funding for attendant scientific programs has been cut in half.