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Trump promised scientific breakthroughs. Researchers say he’s breaking science.

In his presidential campaign last year, Donald Trump vowed to supercharge U.S. scientific research efforts, pledging to “unleash the power of American innovation” to combat cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

But Trump has instead unleashed cuts and chaos that are paralyzing ongoing research, prompting layoffs and threatening America’s perch as a global scientific leader, researchers and scientists warn.

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The brunt of the pain stems from changes at the National Institutes of Health, which provides the bulk of biomedical research funding in the United States and supports more than 300,000 researchers across the country. Since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, NIH funding has dropped by more than $3 billion compared with grants issued during the same period last year, according to a review of publicly available grant data. The slowdown represents an almost 60 percent decline in NIH funding, touching all corners of the American science establishment - and going far beyond areas that the White House has focused on for cuts, such as transgender health.

In interviews, more than a dozen scientists in fields ranging from cancer research to mental health described canceling planned studies, furloughing staff and rescinding job offers. All said that the U.S. research community has been hit with a bigger shock than the Great Recession in 2008 or the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, and that the resulting damage could linger for years.

“It’s already pretty dire,” said Dino Di Carlo, a UCLA bioengineering professor and entrepreneur, warning that the research pipeline and talent pool is drying up as laboratories shrink and students are turned away. He pointed to his own lab: Di Carlo said that for the first time in almost 20 years, he is not recruiting PhD students to work with him, given the funding uncertainty, and he knows other researchers making similar decisions.

“I talked to our industry advisory board, and I told them, five years from now, you’re going to have 50 percent less PhD students from bioengineering that you can potentially recruit to your companies,” Di Carlo said.

The blame rests squarely on the Trump administration, which has disrupted a federal funding model for U.S. scientists that dates to World War II, said Stuart Buck, the executive director of the Good Science Project, a nonpartisan initiative to improve federal science policy. More than 2,500 universities, medical schools and other research organizations in every state receive NIH funds.

“There are many opportunities for reform. But everything that they have done with regard to science - it’s just approaching it from the wrong way and doing things that are counterproductive,” Buck said. “Most of the actions today seem to be more in the vein of punishing scientists, punishing universities.”

The White House has countered that too much federal funding has propped up left-leaning college professors and their initiatives, and that its moves are part of an initiative overseen by Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service to rein in wasteful government spending. The administration has terminated at least 300 grants, including many focused on LGBTQ+ health issues, coronavirus vaccines and other research areas that leaders say are not priorities.

In interviews, Trump officials said the funding slowdown reflects the time needed to transition to a new leadership team and to review grants issued under the Biden administration. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford researcher who was Trump’s pick to lead NIH, was confirmed Tuesday night.

“This is not a researcher entitlement program,” said a White House policy adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss federal funding decisions. “This is a program to make sure that the best science is funded. And to just expect us to continue to rubber stamp what was coming down the pike before we even get our people in, I think that’s a little unreasonable.”

Trump officials also said they were in the process of streamlining NIH systems to improve data sharing.

“It will make science better, not worse,” Brad Smith, a top DOGE deputy, said in a Fox News interview Thursday.

The administration’s initiatives include an effort in February to abruptly redirect about $4 billion in NIH funding for universities, arguing that the schools were using the funds to inflate their overhead expenses; while a federal judge blocked the order, NIH funding has remained largely frozen, and some affected universities have paused hiring or cut staff. Trump officials this month also halted hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds for Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania on grounds that the schools did too little to combat antisemitism and too much to support transgender athletes, respectively.

Meanwhile, the administration has canceled studies and initiatives that officials say run afoul of executive orders, such as research into minority populations’ use of coronavirus vaccines, and postponed decisions on funding new research. NIH officials this week were directed to also review grants for studies that could be used to “manipulate” the public, such as research into coronavirus vaccines, masks and social distancing, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post. Researchers say the news of their canceled studies often arrives with a five-word justification: The grant “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

The decisions to pause funding, cancel studies and take other actions affecting research have been made collectively, Trump officials said.

“We’re a team that is very interested in improving the way that government functions and has been disappointed with how the NIH has functioned for some time,” the White House policy adviser said.

NIH didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Trump administration on Thursday also announced a restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services that is intended to cut NIH’s workforce by 1,200.

While Musk and his DOGE allies have touted short-term cost savings from some of the moves, scientists say they’re haunted by the long-term implications: clinical trials that could be interrupted, research projects that don’t take root and young scientists whose careers might not begin.

Rachael Sirianni, a bioengineer at U-Mass. Chan Medical School working on treatments for pediatric brain cancer, said her lab is among the many teams that have been effectively paralyzed as funding has dried up. In an interview, she listed the ramifications: no new supplies; no new experiments; no guarantee that she can retain her staff, let alone recruit new team members.

“It’s unbearable,” she said, adding that the consequences of the research slowdown will eventually affect all Americans. Sirianni pointed to paused studies and clinical trials that she said offered hope to cancer patients and their families. “Right now, what’s happening is that hope is being yanked away,” she said.

Officials inside the federal government described their own painful reckonings, with several describing “heartbreaking” decisions as they were ordered to cancel research projects that their teams had decided to fund.

“Imagine if this were happening during the breast cancer research boom 30 years ago, where we were finding better ways to identify subtypes of breast cancer and targeted treatments,” said a senior NIH official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. “More women would be dying now of breast cancer, left and right. Same thing with prostate cancer. You stop the pipeline, you pay with access to fewer cures later.”

The NIH official said they had put in paperwork to leave the agency. “I don’t want to be part of the dismantling of American science,” the official said.

The consequences go beyond biomedical research and affect broader U.S. competitiveness and innovation, said Mark Horowitz, a Stanford University engineering professor. He pointed to a programming language called CUDA that he said grew out of research conducted by a Stanford student and is now key to the success of Nvidia, one of America’s hottest technology companies, in AI computing platforms.

“That process took many years,” Horowitz said. “I’m very worried that if you kill those kinds of small investments now, the ramifications of it will be very visible in the future.”

Some outside observers ask whether anyone in the Trump administration is contemplating the lasting implications of disrupting the decades-long relationship between federal funding and U.S. scientific organizations.

“It’s shock and awe. It’s punching the bureaucracy in their mouth, so to speak,” said Caleb Watney, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank focused on innovation. “But the big uncertainty is, does the dust clear?”

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A federally funded research model in peril

Many U.S. scientists concede that the current federal funding model is imperfect, with researchers required to submit reams of paperwork to win and retain grants. Some share the Trump administration’s skepticism of whether universities’ budgets are bloated by high overhead costs. Experts also say that existing incentives can reward caution, not courage; Bhattacharya, the incoming NIH director, has called for the agency to fund more cutting-edge science.

But few saw the Trump administration’s crackdown coming, with many researchers now issuing pleas to their personal networks in increasingly desperate emails, videos and presentations.

“You can call, not write, your elected representatives. Tell them that every day we halt scientific progress in biomedical research, American lives are at risk,” Leslie Phillips, a Seattle-based epidemiologist, said in a video posted this month.

The model that underpins NIH and other federal agencies was conceived by Vannevar Bush, a scientist who helped oversee efforts to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. As he turned his gaze to a postwar environment in 1945, Bush urged President Harry S. Truman to spur innovation by funneling grants to universities and research institutions, calling for an “endless frontier.”

The strategy positioned the U.S. to achieve breakthroughs in drug development, computer technologies and numerous other fields; the nation’s ample resources also helped lure scientists from around the world to work in its laboratories. The approach also had staunch bipartisan support, with Republicans arguing that scientific innovation was an economic and national security imperative. A half-dozen buildings on the NIH campus bear the name of GOP lawmakers who helped secure federal funding for the research institutes, including former senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who retired in 2022.

But backlash to the U.S. scientific community increased during the pandemic, with some Americans blaming federal officials for what they saw as an overly harsh response to the public health crisis. And as Musk’s team has questioned whether federal funds can be better spent, researchers have struggled to explain that their process can be slow, tedious - and uncertain.

“These products don’t come fully formed,” said Di Carlo, the UCLA professor. “You have to do basic research that lays the foundation. Then you have iterative developments as you’re pushing the boundaries of understanding. And then you have commercialization processes, where universities play a big role … founding start-up companies and training students to lead these companies. And then finally, over many years, you get the products that end up helping folks.”

Other scientists pointed to the unexpected beneficial consequences of some studies. Federally funded research into Gila monster venom in the 1980s and 1990s laid the eventual groundwork for weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic.

Scientists also rejected the Trump administration’s suggestions that universities could turn to private foundations or dip into their endowments to fund research efforts. Officials at private research foundations have said that they have been deluged with requests and cannot replace the funding that the government has historically provided. University leaders have said that their endowments would be quickly sapped and that donors often restrict their gifts to specific purposes.

Some researchers said they are still waiting on funding decisions that were supposed to be made in January but were canceled amid a broad freeze in external communications.

“There’s a huge cash flow problem that is affecting things here and now,” said Jeremy Berg, a scientist who led one of the NIH institutes before stepping down in 2011. In an interview, he compared universities’ precarious position to a landlord who suddenly stops getting rent checks. “That obviously is going to throw off the books and cause some panic as you try to figure out how to make things work,” he said.

In-progress studies have also been interrupted, such as a decades-long initiative to study patients with diabetes that Columbia is helping manage, and researchers are warning that such work cannot easily be resumed.

“The whole value of these longitudinal studies is the fact that they’re happening over the course of 30 years,” Watney said. “Unless you can pick them back up quickly, it’s going to be a really major source of lost value.”

Scientists said they hope that funding freezes will soon be lifted and that NIH will resume its traditional operations now that Bhattacharya has been confirmed. But many said they’re pessimistic about a quick fix.

One researcher whose team studies human gut bacteria - with implications for treating obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and depression - described how some of her lab’s research has been “in limbo” because of months-long NIH delays on funding decisions and other uncertainty sparked by the Trump administration.

“The amount of chaos that has been created, you can’t snap your fingers and make it all right in a day, a week or a month,” said the researcher, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution. She compared the current NIH cuts and funding delays across the research community to how covid shutdowns led to long-term learning loss across America’s educational system. “Even if by some small miracle, the NIH gets back up and running again by July, that six-month delay has real long-term consequences,” the researcher said.

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Graphics:

https://washingtonpost.com/documents/25a22bc6-c344-4fe9-9ba3-7d20829baff1.pdf

https://washingtonpost.com/documents/9ba8b572-ba7b-4875-887d-aa0d3579fdb0.pdf