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U.S. science is in chaos

U.S. science is in chaos

presspot

Comments (516)

  • dwa3592
    My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
  • Schlagbohrer
    My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
  • hgoel
    Last year, the mood in my field, that has been relatively isolated from many of these impacts, was still very "these are uncomfortable times, but it's still possible to pull through".Recently, you can cut the tension in a room with a knife whenever matters relating to government decision making come up. Some coworkers are leaving science, promising phds and postdocs leaving to other countries, many of the more established scientists are maintaining backup options.I too have re-evaluated my feelings and decided that while I am not yet at the point of actively looking to leave the US, besides the hassle of moving itself, I would be fine with having to do so.
  • setgree
    I work at a research lab that was previously supported by an R01 grant that did not get renewed last year. It’s been tough and the staff (including me) have been moved to part-time employment.However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.
  • Rebuff5007
    > whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue.Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
  • okeuro49
    > But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
  • embedding-shape
    > When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead.If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
  • changoplatanero
    I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
  • KolibriFly
    A research system can adapt to lower funding if the rules are stable. What it can't adapt to is grants being frozen, staff disappearing mid-project, forbidden vocabulary changing
  • andyjohnson0
  • dbvn
    There's an emergency!!! To find out what it is, pay me!!!
  • stanford_labrat
    the recent drama about science funding to me highlights one of the main problems with our grant-based distribution system: which is that it is unsurprisingly very frail to fast-moving changes in government and society at large.science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you could just as easily describe a scenario where the pendulum has swung left instead of right and a bunch of right-leaning research gets cut and people lose their jobs, we lose progress etc.these days i'm pretty in favor of a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.i naively think this would solve a LOT of the issues in academia currently, which already in the absence of the recent Trump shake-ups has devolved into a metric chasing, paper-mill, grant funding behemoth whose sole purpose is to churn out papers of dubious quality, game metrics, and bring in research funding to the university. the modern professor's job is not to advance our understanding of the natural world, but to generate positive KPIs and bring in as much revenue as possible to the university in the form of overhead costs (66% of all the federal funding we bring in at my institution goes directly to the school). it's a business, and that's not what basic science research is supposed to be in my opinion.
  • nickpeterson
    You probably don’t need the word science in the headline.
  • anon
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  • Balgair
    Academic Science in the U.S. was pretty ill and needed a lot of reforms. We can all admit that.But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia
  • Havoc
    Administration remains undefeated - in its ability to score own goals
  • anon
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  • throwawaypath
    Fascist are defunding critical studies that would rocket the US ahead in science. Studies such as:Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in BiologyStrengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative BiologyAn Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teachinghttps://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...China won't stand a chance against us with studies like these!
  • testhest
    Nearly 40 trillion rollers in debt.
  • fabian2k
    This administration is both fundamentally anti-science and wants to enforce political control over all government institutions. Science was never a particularly stable work environment, but the sheer insanity you have now makes it a deeply unattractive place. You have no idea if your grant might be denied, or even canceled at any point later by some political commissar that doesn't understand science.And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
  • ck2
    and it's 100% Russell Voughtmost people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell VoughtHeritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10If Vance somehow gets the reigns and/or 2028 it will be even worse because Vought will get even more power/control* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
  • ur-whale
  • api
    After the election my very first thought was that this is the start of the Chinese century, since America has voted to step down.Seems to be playing out.
  • phtrivier
    Many people became millionaires last week during SpaceX IPO.Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah
  • Invictus0
    > Political operatives at the NIH passed around lists of words that grants weren’t allowed to use—in either applications or existing, funded projects.Well well well. If it isn't the pot meeting the kettle
  • N_Lens
    No wonder Trump is referred to as “nation builder” in China since he’s building them up by tearing down America.
  • Herring
    Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
  • roysting
    The fact that people think the current state of chaos is a consequence of recent developments clearly tells us more about why it is in chaos than those types of people have the capacity to hear or understand.It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
  • croes
    > The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.More efficient than any foreign actor
  • AndrewKemendo
    Science has always been in Chaos. I know of zero laboratories doing “science” that isn’t biased or otherwise tainted with politics or moneyThe US public never cared about science anyway. Go read Carl Sagan’s 1996 demon haunted world and it’s only gotten worse from thereYou could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing
  • newsclues
    Currently there are lots of systems that are in chaos.Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
  • Covzire
    The article buried the lede. DEI was the bridge too far that lit a massive tinderbox among the electorate who wanted the vast majority of what happened with DOGE, to happen. DEI was the appetizer, and once the teeth starting biting it found a lot more than anticipated (USAID). The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.
  • kittikitti
    This article informs a good understanding and confirms the issues I've witnessed in academia. However, I found that it didn't cover the censorship of any criticism of Israel in science and academics. This was explicitly codified into law with respect to government funding and is a major topic of scientific funding in colleges and universities. Scientific grants and researchers often require a Zionist bias to get funding, something that is unacceptable.
  • jdw64
    Reading this article, I think Elon Musk is a genius. He's truly smart. He's cutting the budget of his smartest competitor, NASA, so that when national scientists and engineers are thrown out onto the streets, they'll end up at SpaceX.Not only that, but real innovations like cancer treatments require decades of unprofitable 'basic science' grunt work. Musk and his friends don't care about saving humanity 30 years from now. He talks about going to Mars with nonsense lies to fatten his own pockets. And by filling the science advisory committee with VCs instead of scientists, he has turned science in America from a 'pursuit of truth' into a 'Silicon Valley VC portfolio.'Elon Musk is a genius. He will destroy the growth engines that could produce his future competitors, and he will reign forever.The smart thing about Elon Musk and his friends is their ban on international cooperation among scientists and their word censorship. They seem to think that viruses like Ebola will enter the country by getting a Trump card issued. Clearly, smart people like them cannot understand ordinary people like us. To them, it's only natural that everything comes through a visa, so they probably think viruses come through visas too. Elon Musk's lecturing about border etiquette for viruses can be described as a kind of elite duty. Indeed, injecting morality into something immoral is 'noblesse oblige.
  • anon
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  • NoImmatureAdHom
    Am scientist. We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing.Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )
  • Tummler68
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  • iluvcommunism
    [dead]
  • crises-luff-6b
    [dead]
  • priyankarr
    [flagged]
  • jimt1234
    The Dow is at 50,000! Why can't we all just be happy about that?! /s
  • Weallneedclima
    I looked at the greenland ice sheet website regularly and its defunded since last year:https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-todayThere is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /sI hope the USA goes down, fast...Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure
  • spwa4
    [flagged]
  • nkrisc
    [flagged]
  • panny
    You guys can't see it can you? You're just in the filter bubble. Let's take this quote from the article, shall we...>“The most passionate and creative scientists are very intuitive and very driven by emotion and curiosity,” says Gregory Feist, a psychologist at San José State University who studies scientists. “Until Trump, they’d been able to keep political questions out of mind.”See, that's a filter bubble state of mind. "Driven by emotion" evidently means calling anyone who disagrees with you a "science denier." You were being politcal all along. Now that the people you spent the last 30 years insulting are in charge, they want blood for all the bad things you said to them. Only now is it "Oh no! I don't like being political!""Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences." You bit the hand that feeds you and you stopped getting fed. Whether you like it or not, both sides, the red and the blue, are your government. If you attack either, you're attacking your government. That's not a wise decision when your government pays your salary. You can't just let someone like James Hansen run off at the mouth for decades and not expect blowback.
  • alecco
    "The Cost of Excess" The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) (2021) https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-o..."How Much Is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs through Effective Oversight" (2017) https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/contro...For the past 20 years the budgets ballooned out of control (alongside the student debt). Yes, this WH admin is anti-science but US academia is due some introspection.Disclaimer: I'm not from US
  • andrewla
    > But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedentedIs it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.---It is hard to follow the point of the article. It appears to mostly be opposed to funding cuts. Obviously the current administration is cutting the grant budgets of these organizations. But that article seems to be making the claim that the method of selecting what to cut is being done in a particular "anti-science" manner.Given that there are cuts, are they doing a particularly bad job of choosing which projects to cut? I don't see an answer to that question in any rigorous way, just insinuations.
  • EcommerceFlow
    Private enterprise is vastly more competitive than public institutions in every single facet of society. Defund all public science funding so we can have another 50 SpaceXs.
  • newaccount670
    US Science needed this. Racism, sexism, plagiarism, and fraud were rampant in the academic community. It's going to take a long time to fully fix the problem, but we are on the right path currently.
  • Blackstrat
    The government can't fund everything. Too much of the budget is tied up in transfer and interest payments squeezing out other more viable research. The federal government doesn't have unlimited funds. Something has to give.