Congress kept federal research spending at about $200 billion this year. The Trump administration cut the scientists who turn that money into discoveries and the loss will not show in the budget for years.
Congress kept federal spending on research at about $200 billion this year, close to what earlier administrations spent. It did so against the White House. Last year Russell Vought, the budget director, asked Congress to cut research at the National Institutes of Health by 41 per cent and at the National Science Foundation by 55 per cent. No earlier administration had asked for cuts that deep. Congress refused them.
The money survived and the people did not. Within a year of Donald Trump's return, the NIH lost a fifth of its staff and the NSF lost a third. The Energy Department has lost about a quarter of its staff, more than 1,000 of them scientists and technical workers. NASA lost a fifth of its employees with doctorates. One of them was its chief scientist, whose job the administration abolished. The Pentagon's research laboratories lost about 14 per cent of their staff.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency did much of the cutting. It fired staff, pushed others to resign and told agencies to search grant descriptions for words that suggested diversity, equity and inclusion. In August the NIH ended a five-year study of Alzheimer's at the University of Pittsburgh on the grounds that it was about structural racism. Vought found other ways to slow the money Congress had approved. His budget request labelled the NSF division that funds social science as woke and the division soon began to cut its grants.
The cuts also stopped work the administration says it wants. Randall Engle, a psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, built tests to help the Navy choose air traffic controllers. The Navy trains about 1,000 of them a year at about $100,000 each and nearly a quarter fail. Engle's tests did a better job of finding the trainees who would pass. The Office of Naval Research cancelled his grant while he was still refining them. He says the project had nothing to do with diversity.
The next generation is shrinking too. Applications from foreign students to doctoral programmes at leading American universities fell 21 per cent this year. The universities admitted fewer doctoral students and blamed the uncertainty over federal money. Other countries have started to hire. Canada set aside more than $1 billion to bring in 1,000 researchers from abroad. A winner of last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry left Berkeley to run an institute in Beijing.
The White House says most of the scientists who left resigned and were not fired. It says the universities chose to cut admissions. May Mailman, who helped run its campaign against the universities, said there is "more spent on research than comes out of it." The administration now wants to decide who gets the money. A rule it proposed in May would let Trump's political appointees approve grants and turn down projects they judge to be anti-American.
Research pays back slowly. Federal work on atomic clocks began in the late 1940s and made GPS possible decades later. A lab that loses its people this year loses work that would have paid off long after this administration has gone.
The budget will read about $200 billion again next year. It will not show what stopped.
Sources
Christopher Flavelle, Irena Hwang, Adam Sella, Alan Blinder, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Benjamin Mueller and Michael C. Bender, "How Trump Is Dismantling America's Scientific Research Machine", New York Times, 31 October 2026. The Energy Department staffing figure comes from the Times's own analysis of federal data, and the doctoral application figure from data gathered for the Association of American Universities.