James' World 2

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When Emma Scales decided she wanted to be a scientist, it seemed logical—simple, even. She’d grown up in coastal New Jersey, attended a high school that emphasized marine biology, and learned about the connections among sea creatures large and small. She felt a calling to better understand and protect a world she loved.

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, Scales is studying symbiosis, specifically the way bacteria can grow inside fungi and create a mutual-use arrangement. It’s what she calls a “Russian nesting doll” system. But these days, little seems simple or logical. Scales’s research is aimed largely at protecting food crops, and at Cornell, she’s recently watched laboratories shut down because of federal funding cuts, including labs running practical programs meant to help strengthen U.S. agriculture. Since 2025, the Trump administration has cut more than 7,800 grants, removed 25,000 scientists and related personnel from their jobs, and, as of January 2026, proposed budget cuts equaling about $32 billion. Cornell has recovered its funding, but doing so came with its own heavy costs, and warning signs are still flashing.

Scales is one of thousands of early-career researchers in the U.S. trying to make sense of how the current tumult in American science will shape their professional paths. Between lost funding and stalled programs, the young scientists of today are facing uncertainty in the job market and the possibility of having to leave the U.S. or, in some cases, leave science completely.

But Scales has decided to fight back, joining with other graduate students trying to protect universities. “They are scrubbing science of the influence of some of its most brilliant scientists. Work that has taken decades to build is being wiped out,” she says. When the research community gets a chance to rebuild, she wonders, how long will it take to regain what’s been lost?

Julia Menzel, an American early-career science historian currently at the University of Toronto, has similar questions. “There has got to be some way to dull the negative impact this has on people trying to start their careers in science,” she insists. “If we lose a generation of scientists, we are going to see very negative consequences.”

Menzel’s research, which she began while completing a Ph.D. in the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us that the country has faced these kinds of challenges before. Administrations hostile to evidence have previously worked to dismantle the U.S. scientific enterprise. And history is cyclical—many science historians point to similarities between the eras of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon and the ways these presidents sowed distrust of science among Americans to push their agendas. For example, in an echo of today, Nixon imposed widespread cuts to research funding while redirecting money to his chosen science projects. In subsequent administrations, science regained both money and status, in part because of strategic advocacy by scientists. Will such a pattern repeat this time around?

David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at M.I.T. who mentored Menzel, believes that the past tells us to hold on, that we don’t yet know the end of the story. But the solution may come from young scientists like Scales who take on the task of rebuilding science as a profession. They may need to use a new blueprint. They may need to invent their future. But first, they need to survive the present. “There’s now a deeply felt uncertainty about science,” Kaiser says with a sharp edge of worry. “There are so many students, so gifted and earnest, who go into research because they want to help the world. And they are marching toward a future that looks nothing like what I had hoped for them.”

The U.S. has long been committed to supporting R&D. In 2023, the country’s investment in research was about 3.45 percent of its gross domestic product, making it the fifth-highest worldwide. The National Science Foundation says the total amount spent on science in 2024 was $993 billion. Of that, almost 19 percent came from the federal government. Nearly 76 percent came from industry. In 2024, federal research dollars went mostly to federal agencies and certain public-private research partnerships (43 percent), then universities (31 percent) and businesses (19 percent).

The return on investment for science is equally enormous. The National Institutes of Health alone provide more than $69 billion toward the U.S. GDP through research, and a medical-research advocacy group reports that every NIH dollar spent on research returns $2.57 in new economic activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has found returns of up to 300 percent from government research and development since the days after World War II.

Science itself is not partisan, and research is supposed to inform policymaking. Yet science funding in the U.S. has long been a political pinball.

President Barack Obama promised that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology” were over in 2009, saying he hoped to double federal research spending during a time when federal spending was in a minor upswing. But a Congress dominated by the Tea Party thwarted him. In the end, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, congressionally approved funding by federal agencies instead dropped a full 10 percent, when adjusted for inflation.

The first Trump administration immediately sought to deepen those cuts. This move, too, was stymied by congressional resistance. The budget of the NIH—the largest supporter of research at U.S. universities—went from about $30 billion in 2015 to more than $48 billion in 2025, in part because of President Joe Biden’s call for greater investment in research. Biden, in fact, campaigned on a promise to respect scientific advice; Trump responded by mocking Biden for listening to scientists.

The second Trump administration has further targeted science funding. It has frozen grants and other money across the spectrum of research. The proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 asks to reduce the amount earmarked for nearly every federal science agency, including a 55 percent cut to the NSF. And although Congress has voted to restore much of the funding and federal judges have tried to intervene, the administration has used internal agency decisions and presidential memos to slash budgets as often as possible—and, on occasion, simply held back money authorized by Congress. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the aggressiveness and suddenness of the cuts,” says University of Maryland, College Park, historian of science Melinda Baldwin. “I can’t really think of a similar moment in the past where funding has been cut off that fast.”But government hasn’t always been the primary funder of science. In the 19th century, research was largely practical, seen as the purview of independent businesspeople. Take Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which revolutionized the mechanical aspects of farming in the early 1800s, or Alexander Graham Bell’s commercial development of the telephone later that century. Both men had benefactors supporting their efforts.

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Pepe Serra

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