"For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country's research enterprise made it through somewhat ... okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health's $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it."
"And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky."
"Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, "all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint," Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made."
Federal actions in 2025 disrupted research funding across multiple agencies, including termination of billions in grants, threatened university funding cuts, and a proposed NIH budget reduction. Judicial rulings and negotiated deals helped reinstate contracts and preserve some university funds, and Congress pledged to maintain the NIH budget. Many researchers stayed in the country while some left. Notable scientific advances occurred, including a personalized gene therapy treatment for an infant and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's first sky images. Overall federal research footprints have shrunk, reducing capacity for discovery and weakening trust in government as a stable research partner.
Read at The Atlantic
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