Thousands of US scientists warn of federal attack on scientific enterprise

Research funding cuts, canceled programs, abandoned studies, and young scientists' careers jeopardized — those are the realities that have emerged in the months since US President Donald Trump took office, according to thousands of scientists who have signed open letters warning that the administration is undermining US science and higher education.

"We see real danger in this moment... We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation's scientific enterprise is being decimated," says a national open letter signed by nearly 2,000 prominent US scientists, including numerous Nobel Prize winners.

Since taking office, Trump and his team have dramatically altered the country's scientific research infrastructure — cutting funding, terminating grants, defunding laboratories and impeding international scientific collaboration, according to the letter shared on Monday. The funding reductions have forced institutions to pause research, including studies of new disease treatments, dismiss faculty, and halt graduate student enrollment.

In recent weeks, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has suspended consideration of new grant applications and delayed decisions about disease research funding. As of March, NIH funding had decreased by more than $3 billion compared with grants issued during the same period last year — representing an almost 60 percent decline, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Daniel Cox, distinguished professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Davis, has witnessed the disruptions firsthand.

"A colleague on another University of California campus was supposed to receive the second installment of his NIH R01 award on Feb 1, and it has not arrived. At my home department, the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program was slated to receive renewal funds for this summer, but they were canceled," Cox told China Daily.

His department has hosted this National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded program for decades, through which "many dozens of wonderful young students have passed through and gone on to extraordinary careers", said Cox. Among them are a former student who is now an assistant professor at Yale and another who has become a national leader in fusion energy research.

"This has happened to around a dozen or more programs around the country. This is murdering the hope of young scientists," Cox said. "My daughter's boyfriend, a molecular biology undergraduate hoping to go to graduate school, has put his plans on hold as many of the programs he applied to canceled or limited admissions because of the freezing and cuts to NIH and NSF support. Some programs were forced to rescind offers already made."

Regarding the startup company he co-founded with a colleague, Cox expressed "little confidence that the company can receive any form of Small Business Innovative Research funding in the coming months and years".

Cox is a signatory of another open letter launched by a group of faculty members last month in response to the Trump administration's investigation of 60 universities related to alleged antisemitism and other civil rights violations. This letter has collected almost 4,000 signatures from faculty at more than 375 institutions.

"The Trump administration is weaponizing these legitimate investigations as a pretext for an unprecedented federal attack on higher education. The administration's recent actions — including its letter to Columbia University's Board of Trustees and its illegal detention and threatened deportation of a student green card holder who has not been charged with a crime — go far beyond enforcing civil rights law," the letter states.

Columbia University was recently informed that $400 million in federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration.

Last week, more than 600 faculty members at Harvard University signed a letter to the university's governing boards urging the university to publicly condemn federal attacks on universities and defy orders that interfere with its independence. The letter followed shortly after Columbia University made broad concessions to the Trump administration.

"Research universities are an American crown jewel, a way to network internationally through peaceful scientific collaborations, and the Trump administration is deliberately trying to break them," said Cox.

He viewed the suspension of previously approved grant funding to institutions such as Columbia as potentially unlawful government overreach to exert control over university operations.

Monday's open letter also warns that "destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education — and the research those institutions conduct". It accuses the Trump administration of "using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published" and "blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends".

As a result, "a climate of fear has descended on the research community", the letter states. Researchers, fearing loss of funding or job security, are abandoning studies, removing their names from work, or eliminating scientifically accurate terms from papers and grant proposals that federal agencies have identified as problematic.

"These drastic actions in just over two full months of the second Trump administration will have dramatic repercussions for years if they are not reversed soon," warned Cox.