The second Trump administration has presided over the greatest attack on scientific research since the end of World War II. It has frozen or terminated $2.3 billion in unspent funds at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and $700 million at the National Science Foundation (NSF) across thousands of grants. It has targeted research on cancer, vaccines, environmental protection, climate change, and public health as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It has overseen thousands of layoffs from key scientific agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And it proposed unprecedented budget cuts to both the NIH and NSF, promising to slash them by nearly half or more.

Though Congress rejected the cuts when it passed the 2026 federal budget, these moves have created a climate of such fear and confusion that three-quarters of scientists report they have considered leaving the United States. According to Science, the U.S. government has lost over ten thousand STEM PhDs since Trump took office. Faced with growing uncertainty, universities have paused hiring and curtailed PhD admissions in STEM fields. And the campaign to overhaul science policy hasn’t stopped. In May, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed sweeping changes to the federal grantmaking process, including mandatory pre-issuance review of all grants by political appointees; in late July, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, released a report calling for investment in AI-driven research, tighter integration with the private sector, a deprioritization of “legacy institutions,” and new funding mechanisms besides peer review.

As jarring as these developments are, many have deeper roots than Trump and his controversial appointees: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Jay Bhattacharya at NIH. Every year between 2009 and 2014, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma released a lengthy report arguing that a significant percentage of taxpayer money for science went to “fraud, waste, and abuse.” All the while, conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute have run reports and editorials on “How to Stop Wasting Money on Science,” “The Case Against Public Science,” and “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.” With guidance from Heritage’s Project 2025, the Trump administration is finally carrying out many changes that Republican policymakers, think tanks, and scholars have been advocating for decades.

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While these philosophical debates were unfolding, publicly funded science became increasingly vulnerable. The contention that it is wasteful, inefficient, and difficult to justify became an influential strand of the Republican Party’s rhetoric, sometimes with Democratic support. (It was in this context that the NSF began to evaluate grant proposals on the basis of “utility or relevance of the research”—alongside merit—beginning in 1974.) In the absence of a powerful rival vision, and in keeping with trends throughout the public sector in the early years of the neoliberal turn, American science became increasingly marketized, and its benefits were increasingly privatized. In 1980, private R&D spending overtook public spending for the first time since the end of World War II. That same year, the Bayh-Dole Act revised federal procurement regulation to allow universities to patent and commercially benefit from publicly funded research. Scientists and universities increasingly began to operate like businesses—focusing on technological applications for research, seeking private sources of funding, and pursuing projects with clear startup or profit potential. As Philip Mirowski argues in Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (2011), the result was a new model and ethos for science that has endured to the present: the scientist as entrepreneur, research findings as potential commodities, and the university as a partner to industry, run according to the same corporate logic.