Since Donald Trump returned to office on 20 January, he has signed executive orders at a dizzying pace. Among them are many that affect—directly or through their enactments—the STEM research community, particularly in academia. At the federal agencies that fund the bulk of scientific research in the US, budgets are threatened, spending is on hold, jobs are being cut, funded grant proposals are to be scrutinized under new lenses, and grant review panels are being moved online, delayed, or canceled. Some of the orders and enactments are being challenged in court, but legal rulings are likely to take a while, and many scientists worry that lasting damage has already occurred.
The overwhelming mood on US university campuses is uncertainty, fear, and foreboding, according to the dozen or so researchers that Physics Today reached out to. Many of them requested anonymity out of fear of retribution; some tenured professors spoke on the record. “I see a lot of upset and outrage,” says Yale University astrophysicist Meg Urry. “People are shell-shocked. They don’t know what to do.”
Several senior faculty say they are especially worried about young scientists. Will principal investigators continue to win grants and be able to pay graduate students and postdocs? Will tenure-track scientists obtain the funding they need to advance their careers? Will universities be able to offer sufficient startup packages to new hires? Will young scientists leave research?
Recently, an undergraduate stuck his head into Urry’s office and asked if he should forget about grad school. “It would be terrible if bright young people decide not to go into STEM,” says Urry. “This country runs on scientific discoveries. Long-term investments pay off and are what have made and kept the US a world leader.”
Andrea Liu, a theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, says she is most worried about early-career researchers. “I have great graduate students and great postdocs. If funding is cut, what are they going to do? What’s going to happen to them?” Since the election, she invited two postdoc candidates for interviews. Both were “terrific,” she says. But she didn’t offer them positions. “Ordinarily, I would have taken the risk that I would get grants and be able to support them,” she says. Not so amid the current talk of slashing budgets.
Given the many executive branch actions assailing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), there was a widespread sense among those who spoke to Physics Today that access to federal funding will be at the expense of activities that include DEI goals. Phil Anderson, director of the William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, says that the understanding “is that grants with a DEI component will be on hold and investigated. We feel that as long as we don’t have DEI in our grants, we will be all right.”
For years, physical sciences communities have been working to increase participation of underrepresented groups. “I thought we had gotten past the fundamental misunderstanding that broadening participation lowers standards,” says Urry. “It’s the opposite. When you have a bigger pool, you raise standards. You extend the value of taxpayer dollars.”
Now, though, many universities have scrubbed their websites of references to DEI. Out of a similar sense of caution in response to the administration’s actions on environmental issues, biomedical research, and more, some scientists and institutions are downloading data in potentially sensitive areas to preserve access to them.
Some universities are advising their faculty to carry on with business as usual, whereas others are saying to stop spending except on existing personnel. Brian DeMarco, who works in quantum science and technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, notes that pulling the plug on spending, even temporarily, slows, and sometimes damages, research. It also affects international collaborations.
Scott Hertel, a particle physicist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that until recently, he was taking a relaxed wait-and-see approach. He reasoned that physics is in “less of a scary position” than some fields and that “Congress has trouble changing the budget, and that can work in our favor.”
Hertel’s outlook changed on 7 February, when the National Institutes of Health said it would cap indirect research costs at 15%. (The move is being challenged in court.) Such overhead is added to research awards, typically at around 50%, and cutting it would cause universities to collectively lose billions of dollars with consequences far beyond the life and medical sciences: Overhead keeps institutions humming by paying for maintenance, electricity, support staff, administrators, and more. “The plan to axe funding was anxiety-inducing, even for those of us not funded through NIH,” Hertel says.
But scientists are not just cowering and waiting. They are calling their representatives, protesting outside government buildings, posting photos on social media aimed at gaining public support for research, signing letters, and planning to rally for science on 7 March in Washington, DC, and state capitals.
Anderson, for example, is in a state that has traditionally supported space research. He has met with the staffs of Texas legislators and of US Congress members to advocate for continued federal support for science.
One letter, to “NASA leadership and our elected representatives,” had amassed, as of 14 February, 641 names plus an additional 225 anonymous signatures and 153 from outside the US. Among other things, the letter says, “We ask that all those in decision-making positions unequivocally condemn and act to reverse recent attacks on scientific integrity, federal grant funding for scientific research, and initiatives that broaden public participation in science.”
