America’s compact between science and politics is broken

Last year Christopher Reynolds started to worry that his space telescope was going to be killed.The mission had started taking shape nine years earlier, a billion-dollar orbiting observatory that would look back in time into the early universe to study the first black holes, the formation of galaxies, and more. Eight teams of researchers pitched NASA their ideas; Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was part of a group that wanted to deploy a new technology: x-ray mirrors made of single-crystal silicon. It sounded promising enough that in October 2024 Reynolds’s group got a $5-million grant from the agency to refine the idea—the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite, or AXIS. The scientists teamed up with spacecraft builders at the nasa Goddard Space Flight Center. “Everything seemed to be going pretty well,” Reynolds says. “And then we started to get hit by programmatic chaos.”Last June the budget hawks in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed NASA into offering a broad package of buyouts, paid leave and early retirement. Over the next few weeks nearly 4,000 NASA employees—about a fifth of the workforce—took the deal. Reynolds’s AXIS team lost 20 people. The engineer designing the heaters to keep the x-ray mirror at a constant temperature: gone. The lead project manager: gone. William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope’s mirror technology: gone. “We were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they’d done and where we were with aspects of the design,” Reynolds says.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Around the same time President Donald Trump’s budget proposal came out—with massive cuts to science funding. In the U.S., private money funds vast amounts of scientific development research, and philanthropy contributes a bit, but something like 40 percent of all the funding for basic, blue-sky, exploratory research comes from the federal government. The program that would have funded AXIS was zeroed out entirely.That was just the request, Reynolds figured at the time; Congress still has to do the actual appropriation. “In any normal year, that’s what would have happened,” he says. “

But the center leadership started quite quickly aligning their priorities to the president’s budget request.”Goddard reassigned engineers to projects that would be funded if Congress approved the budget as written. Reynolds’s team lost its systems engineers, which in turn delayed sharing of AXIS’s proposed design with Goddard’s cost analysts and schedule specialists. “We got our very first cost estimate in the middle of September 2025,” Reynolds says. “We were 10 percent over budget.” He started trying to find things to cut. But then, in October, the federal government shut down. “The whole center just stopped,” he says. “Everything stopped.”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.Now, Reynolds says, he’s fine, mostly. He’s a tenured professor and has other research to work on. “The jobs that are lost are the future jobs,” he says. “And there’s an entire field of study in which U.S. leadership is at stake.” 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.”Countless scientists around the country are going through the same thing. Thousands of federal grants have been frozen or canceled, with perhaps 2,600 still in limbo—about $1.4 billion worth. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are awarding three quarters of their usual number of grants. Fewer people are entering graduate programs. Nearly 95,000 scientists have left federal government employment. The NIH used to issue as many as 850 “Notices of Funding Opportunity” every year—requests for proposals that sought specific kinds of research. In 2025 the agency issued 120.

By mid-March of 2026, the NIH had sent 14.What’s going on is nothing short of a generational change in how the U.S. organizes its scientific enterprise. More than that, science feels different. Its purpose, its existential vibe, seems to have shifted. The cultural status of the people who do it has changed. And they don’t understand why.The prevailing emotions among scientists right now are rage and shock. A survey conducted by science news website STAT found that more than half of researchers with grants from the NIH—once a reliable source of $40 billion a year—reported some level of disruption to their funding: a total freeze, a delay in disbursement or a reduction in amount. And 81 percent of researchers in tenure-track positions said they were concerned that funding disruptions could affect their productivity enough to jeopardize their chances of getting tenure.Now, to be sure, the end product of science is supposed to be science, not grants or tenure. Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. 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.When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”Mari Fouz (illustration); Getty Images (photographs featured in illustration)Political operatives at the NIH passed around lists of words that grants weren’t allowed to use—in either applications or existing, funded projects.

Program managers across the NIH and the NSF were told to ask affected researchers whether they’d care to change the language in their research descriptions or risk losing their funding. Some researchers whose grants Norton managed at the NIDDKD called her to say they wanted to preemptively change the language in their grant applications—before they’d been dinged. Norton complained so much that she was placed on administrative leave, although she has since been reinstated.Of course, not all lost science had obvious political implications. As Reynolds, the AXIS lead researcher, puts it, “whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue.”These kinds of obstacles are a new experience for most researchers. Getting into a career in science was already hard—students often undertake intellectually taxing and physically grueling academic work lasting years longer than most people spend in school, with limited remuneration. The people who do it tend to be mission-driven: they want to help others, learn something about the universe or invent something new. If they consider the political implications, it’s because they’re intrinsic to the work. “It’s not just that people feel their career is under attack,” says one longtime public health researcher. “They feel they personally are under attack.”DEI associations aren’t the only topics that get captured by the new political filters. Now, for the first time, grant recipients aren’t allowed to subcontract to collaborators on projects overseas. “That’s obviously a problem when you study nasty diseases such as Lassa fever and Ebola, because they’re not in this country,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif. “That’s my whole career. This is why I came to the United States.”Most years, when Andersen advertises a postdoctoral research opportunity in his laboratory, he gets up to 200 applicants with perhaps a third of them from Europe. This year he had 100 applicants and none from Europe. Typically his lab would apply for two or three so-called center grants every year. This past year there were none in virology, immunology or viral immunology to apply for. So what’s next? Andersen, who’s Danish, says that “for people like myself, I think the best option is probably to leave and do science elsewhere.” And he isn’t the only one thinking of getting out.

Of about 1,650 scientists who responded to a poll by the journal Nature, 75 percent said they were considering it.“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.” Their work was, if not above politics, at least outside it—essential to everyone, regardless of where they were on the political spectrum.Now they see things differently. “The big eye-opener for me this past year is how quickly things can change,” a NASA climate scientist says. This shock at the ease with which the government can rewrite the system came up in multiple interviews. “Is your grant going to be frozen? Is it going to be terminated? Is it going to be reinstated? Is it going to be delayed because you’re required to change the wording?” asks Scott Delaney, a former Harvard University epidemiologist who co-created the watchdog group Grant Witness. “The reality is, because of what happened and what’s happening now, the trust between researchers and the federal government is completely broken.”Without that trust, the entire system could blow apart. “Laboratories are going to close. Trainees are going to go to other countries or pursue nonscience careers,” says Carole LaBonne, a developmental biologist at Northwestern University. “This compact that has existed since World War II, that made the U.S. the successful, prosperous nation that it is, is being dismantled.”What broke the compact? Several researchers identified the response to the COVID pandemic as a flash point. Public health guidance flailed initially on questions of masking, school closures and frontline drugs. It also produced a good vaccine in under a year, an unheard-of success. Ultimately around a million people died of the disease within the first two years.The experience damaged trust in science and scientists. It’s still high—the number of people saying they have a lot of trust in science has hovered around 77 percent for years. But it was 10 points higher before COVID, and it now splits hard along lines of political affiliation. “Especially in the U.S. and with social media, all of a sudden everybody was an expert on COVID. So much of it was just bullshit,” Andersen says. “