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U.S. science is in chaos

873 points by presspot

by hgoel

1 subcomments

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.

by Rebuff5007

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> 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.

by okeuro49

9 subcomments

> 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.

by embedding-shape

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> 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.

by setgree

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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.

by dwa3592

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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.

by changoplatanero

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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.

by KolibriFly

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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

by softwaredoug

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The real issue here is impoundments.
Russel Vought thinks the President has the power to not spend funds allocated by Congress. They literally are acting as if the presidents budget request for NASA was approved, when Congress actually allocated NASA at the same level as prior years.
Science is particularly vulnerable. They can just not award the grants they’re supposed to.

by Schlagbohrer

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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.

by andyjohnson0

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https://archive.ph/zn6FI

by ck2

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and it's 100% Russell Vought
most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought
Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10
If 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...

by nickpeterson

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You probably don’t need the word science in the headline.

by stanford_labrat

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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.

by Havoc

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Administration remains undefeated - in its ability to score own goals

by croes

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> 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

by Varelion

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My wife has a Masters in Biotech and has presented in national conferences. Anyone has a good lead on where the next science hub would be? She is amazing at what she does, but the current status has her studying SWE so she can land a job, and that really kills me on the inside.

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by johnsmith1840

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Honestly its been a long time coming. Acting as if academia and ivy leauge level research isn't incredibly sick is dishonest.
The PRESIDENT of stanford was fired over forged research. I have personally worked very closely with 2 incredibly credentialed researcher leaders who were very very smart fudge their work.
The incentive structure for researchers is completely warped. The honest ones are there but from my experience this is all because the options a fresh PHD faces are.
1. Be a rockstar and make a breakthrough -> sucess 2. Be an honest nobody and don't get funding 3. Fudge your work -> become stanford president and make millions
Those who get caught get a slap on the wrist for reasons I hypothesize are because so many around them are the same.
The mechanism is not unique any SWE will personally know how easy it is to lie about their progress or work. Top researchers have the same effect but it's easily 10x easier for them. Which is also why I admire the good ones even more.

by schnitzelstoat

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It's crazy the science funding was cut so much, but I wonder if even after the cuts it might still be better than what we have here in Europe.
There's been a Europe -> USA brain drain for decades due to the better funding, salaries etc. they can get there.

by 1970-01-01

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(Biased) opinion is completely ignoring the crux of the issue! Cuts stemmed from the reproduction crisis, which is decades in the making. Politicians steering the field is a direct symptom from massive moral failures within. The bad apples have finally spoiled the entire harvest. Add-in the current administration's stupidity, with it's joy of heavy cuts everywhere, and the field becomes indefensible in the overall federal scope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

by api

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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.

by Balgair

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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

by ur-whale

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https://archive.ph/zn6FI

by fabian2k

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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.

by cucumber3732842

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A sociologist or historian who's funding has been cut all the same reads these comments, takes a drag of his cigarette and thinks to himself this all could have been avoided if they'd have paid attention to his field over the decades but deep down he knows that it was impossible all along.

by roysting

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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.

by slowpacket

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So maga actually means make china great again.

by zombot

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Chaos is putting it mildly. It's on the verge of non-existence. Can't have infrastructure nor propensities for investigating truths when the administration's most vital interest is the ability to tell lies about anything and everything.

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by tines

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Where do you go if you’re looking to leave the US with family and you only speak English?

by ETH_start

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Scientific American is not the organization to be providing commentary on this as it is in the center of the maelstrom and often cited as an example of the cultural shift that preceded the backlash.

by N_Lens

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No wonder Trump is referred to as “nation builder” in China since he’s building them up by tearing down America.

by WalterBright

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I've often idly thought that if I had a billion dollars in play money, I'd set up a copy of Bell Labs.

by newsclues

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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.

by epsteingpt

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This will get downvoted to oblivion, but it's not obvious to me this shakeup is a bad thing.
Some thoughts: 1. US Spending on R&D has gone up from $50B -> $1T annually, and from $3B -> $115B on purchasing power terms 2. The labs rely on government grants, which are hard to get and typically awarded 'equally' or 'by gatekeepers' 3. There is and have been massive scandals that question academic integrity - reproducibility, fake data. The scientific community has done almost nothing to change its mechanisms. 4. It's not clear to me what we've 'got' societally from these studies as a whole 5. The administrative burden to even do science has gotten too far out of hand 6. You can't 'fire' researchers
Research and science is a fundamentally 'good' thing; we should encourage it.
We may need to shake up the way that it's done. Yes science + R&D is long term focused, but it doesn't mean it can't be reformed.
That the article centers on hand-wringing over 'my government grant is gone!' instead of 'you're cutting this critical research that will save lives' without any discussion of 'science' needing to reform unfortunately highlights the core of the problem.

by gcanyon

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Of course it is, that's this administration's goal.

by deadbabe

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I think there will come a day, shortly after the arrival of “AGI”, that people will declare all the useful science humanity could possibly do has already been done, and there is no need for scientific research anymore. We solved everything that could be solved.
Science will become purely for recreational purposes, maybe funded by millionaires, billionaires or even trillionaires looking for a specific set of outcomes.

by dmfdmf

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>Now, to be sure, the end product of science is supposed to be science, not grants or tenure.
"To be sure" and "supposed to be" are doing some heavy lifting here. I am not so sure about that so I suppose that for many "scientists" the end product is not science at all. I'm not impugning the whole field as there are many good and honest scientists but the SYSTEM is corrupt. I think a significant portion are gaming the system for status or money or sinecures. P-hacking, fake data scandals, the replication crisis and various fake articles getting published in top journals are omens that something isn't quite right in the science world.
My own view is that it is all due to govt funding of science and especially the NSF which should be closed ASAP. Ayn Rand discusses the problem in her article "The Establishing of an Establishment" in her anthology "Philosophy:Who Needs It". Handing out govt grant money invariably locks in the status quo, i.e. an establishment. She also points out that under such terms it is impossible even for an honest man to make good choices which is why such rackets attract scammers and con artists, even fully credentialed PhD's.
Here is an excerpt from her article; https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government_grants_and_sch...
Or buy and read the whole article and the anthology.

by bufordtwain

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More scientists need to get into politics?

by ricksunny

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Commenters are taking seriously an article that quotes the guy who was literally the lead author of Proximal Origins about the state of science. No matter what good points the article brings up elsewhere, this one act alone places its entirety in the trash for me.
While the also-quoted Gonsalves was a lackey for the zoonotic side of the covid origins debate, he's allowed his opinion as an otherwise non-protagonist in the single most consequential event in history to put the scientific enterprise as it had been practiced to date on trial.

by testhest

1 subcomments

Nearly 40 trillion rollers in debt.

by Herring

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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...

by jschveibinz

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This will not be a popular comment, and I love science and scientists. I have spent my career working with scientists and investing in science. But the research community as a whole has a credibility problem. Does this problem merit financial cutbacks? I can't say, but it sure makes the rhetoric and justifications easier for those doing the cutting.
These stats have been reported by various legitimate media sources--and you can verify these for yourself on the web:
- Outright fraud: about 2% of scientists admit fabrication or falsification, while about 14% report knowledge of similar misconduct by colleagues.
- Image manipulation: roughly 4% of biomedical papers contain problematic image duplications, with some cases suggestive of deliberate manipulation.
- Questionable research practices: up to 33.7% of researchers admit at least one such practice, while up to 72% report seeing them among colleagues.
- Replication failure is serious: results can't be duplicated in more than 50% of major psychology and biomedical research projects.
- p-hacking: researchers can unintentionally or deliberately search across data until a result becomes statistically significant, increasing false-positive risk without necessarily committing outright fraud.
- Biomedical research waste: one landmark estimate argues that up to 85% of biomedical research investment may be avoidably wasted through poor design, non-publication, and incomplete reporting.
- Unpublished research: science is science, but many null or disappointing studies remain unpublished, distorting the visible literature and causing other labs to repeat failed work.
- ...And finally: a minority of funded research (much less than 50%) is reliable, novel, usable, and clearly reported scientific journals.

by khriss

1 subcomments

If there is a better way to hand the future to China on a platter, I honestly haven't seen it yet.
All of the other despicable stuff by this administration is easily reversible since nothing except tax cuts for billionaires (aka big beautiful bill) was passed by Congress.
But this wanton destruction of the US scientific capability for at least a generation is next to impossible to overcome. As they say, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.

by Covzire

1 subcomments

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.

by msie

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MAGA idiots think about nothing but owning the libs. The barbarians have taken over the country.

by dzonga

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envy is very destructive feeling.
the vc & tech bros while rich, felt envious of the power & respect the academics had. they backed the anti-science candidate, then got involved in useless schemes such as 'government efficiency' which didn't result in any efficiency.
so blaming this on the current admin, isn't enough. some of the people to blame live in SF

by NoImmatureAdHom

3 subcomments

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 )

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by iluvcommunism

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http://archive.today/zn6FI

by marsven_422

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[dead]

by crises-luff-6b

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[dead]

by themuskgpt2025

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[dead]

by priyankarr

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[flagged]

by Weallneedclima

1 subcomments

I looked at the greenland ice sheet website regularly and its defunded since last year:
https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today
There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s
I 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

by jimt1234

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The Dow is at 50,000! Why can't we all just be happy about that?! /s

by jdw64

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[flagged]

by spwa4

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[flagged]

by nkrisc

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[flagged]

by Tummler68

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Yes, the current pushback is crude. Yes, real science is being damaged. Yes, the people doing it are often stupid or vindictive. Also yes, the academy helped create the conditions for this. Also yes, almost nobody inside the system had the courage to object when the incentives favored them.

by phtrivier

1 subcomments

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

by panny

3 subcomments

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.

by Invictus0

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> 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

by alecco

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"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

by andrewla

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> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented
Is 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.

by auggierose

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Let's not pretend like research funding was money well spent before Trump. It wasn't. If tax payers actually knew how research funding works in practice, they wouldn't want any of their tax dollars to be spent on it.
If $50 billion are spent on research, maybe $1 billion of the spending is actually worthwhile (totally made that number up), and that is better than $0 spent on research from a certain point of view. Wouldn't be my point of view though if I had to pay for it.

by dbvn

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There's an emergency!!! To find out what it is, pay me!!!

by throwawaypath

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Fascist are defunding critical studies that would rocket the US ahead in science. Studies such as:
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
China won't stand a chance against us with studies like these!

by newaccount670

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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.

by neverrroot

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> How did we get here? Careful what you wish for, that’s how.
Just a simple example: when you play with firm biological facts, you might just open it all up to being bent. But then, wasn’t that maybe the goal all along?

by lenerdenator

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> How did we get here?
Because certain people don't like one or both of these two things:
1) Having to pay tax
2) Having to be accountable to someone, whether they be a government or anyone else
With this in mind, they illegally gutted a bunch of jobs.
They do this for the same reason a dog licks his balls: because he can and no one will stop him.

by AndrewKemendo

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Science has always been in Chaos. I know of zero laboratories doing “science” that isn’t biased or otherwise tainted with politics or money
The US public never cared about science anyway. Go read Carl Sagan’s 1996 demon haunted world and it’s only gotten worse from there
You could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing

by kittikitti

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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.

by EcommerceFlow

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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.

by Blackstrat

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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.