America spends more on research than any other country, counting both taxpayer and industrial dollars. The federal government disburses around $120bn a year, of which roughly $50bn goes towards tens of thousands of grants and contracts for higher-education institutions. The remainder goes to public research bodies.
The current system was established soon after the second world war. Researchers apply to receive federal funding from grant-making agencies—principally the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as the Departments of Defence and Energy. Proposals are assessed by panels of peers and, once approved, the agreed money is paid out for a set period.
The NIH is the world's biggest funder of biomedical research and the largest biomedical research centre in America. It sits within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The NSF is a major federal funder of academic science across all disciplines.
NOAA carries out environmental and climate research. Its National Weather Service (NWS) offices launch weather balloons twice daily, carrying instruments that record atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity to inform storm predictions. NOAA also houses the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, described as "one of the best labs in the world for modelling the atmosphere."
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the American government to produce regular "National Climate Assessments"—scientific tomes detailing the impacts of climate change and advising on adaptation. The Trump administration stopped all work on the sixth assessment, fired some federal employees who would have worked on it, and terminated its consultancy contract. In July 2025 the government website hosting past assessments was taken down. Trump's proposed 2026 budget would cut NOAA's funding by $2.2bn (27%), functionally dissolving its research arm and threatening to close the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where carbon-dioxide measurements have been taken almost continuously for 67 years. The observatory's readings underpin the Keeling curve—the world's longest continuous measurement of atmospheric CO₂, which has risen from a bit under 320 parts per million to around 430 ppm. Congress has resisted cuts to the National Weather Service in particular. Cuts to a climate-modelling programme at Princeton were justified on the basis that it increased young people's "climate anxiety".
The CDC is America's public-health agency. It collects data essential to the effective treatment of diseases and funds clinics. Its Medical Monitoring Project, created in 2005, collected and analysed nationally representative data on people with HIV, informing state and local health departments' services.
The EPA was created in 1970. Since then, its regulations have led to an almost 80% decrease in common air pollutants, saving hundreds of thousands of Americans from early death each year. Its Office of Research and Development collates independent evidence on pollution, which informs the agency's guidelines and regulations.
For 17 of the past 19 years universities and hospitals in Boston have received more funding from the NIH than those anywhere else. Roughly one in eight of America's top 40 research universities are in the Boston area, clustered along the Charles river between Boston and Cambridge, alongside MIT, Harvard, world-class hospitals and venture-capital firms. Among the economies of America's 20 largest metro areas, none has a greater share dedicated to the sciences and related industries. The area is home to more biotech firms than anywhere else in the world.
Federally funded academic research and serendipitous encounters among researchers have long spawned innovation. Around 30 years ago a graduate student at MIT described a bottleneck to a Harvard student in a bar; their collaboration under Donald Ingber, a Harvard cell biologist, helped pioneer organ-chip technology. Dr Ingber went on to found a biotech firm in Boston that commercialised the technology.
The University of Massachusetts medical centre, 40 miles west of Cambridge, is a juggernaut in RNA research. It paused PhD admissions and laid off employees at its biomedical-sciences institute following the Trump administration's funding cuts.
Verve Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotech firm, expects to spend $2bn developing a drug to treat heart disease by turning off a cholesterol-raising gene in the liver. The technology relies on base editing invented at the Broad Institute in Cambridge in 2016.
Massachusetts's attorney-general has filed two lawsuits against the NIH funding cuts since February 2025.
Nearly three-quarters of America's college students attend public universities. Some of these institutions are among the country's most important research engines: of the ten universities that receive the most grant funding from the NSF, seven are public, including three in the University of California system. UCLA ranks 7th, Harvard 15th and Columbia 19th. An analysis by the Carnegie Foundation and the American Council on Education identified 478 "opportunity colleges"—places where a smart local student has a shot at admission and where earnings after graduation are high. None of the Ivies made the list.
In July 2025 the Department of Justice alleged that UCLA was "deliberately indifferent" to the antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students during campus protests. The Trump administration froze $584m in research grants from the NSF and NIH, hindering studies on Alzheimer's and opioids, among other subjects. To release the funding, the administration demanded $1bn (roughly 9% of UCLA's annual budget), a ban on overnight protests and other changes. The University of California's Board of Regents entered negotiations; Gavin Newsom, the state's Democratic governor, threatened to sue. Polling from Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies found that 58% of Californians would support increasing state funding for the UC system.
Scientific papers have become less disruptive and innovative than they used to be, and more money has not always translated into speedier progress. In the pharmaceutical sciences, new drug approvals have plateaued in recent years despite ever larger budgets. Researchers also spend too long writing grant proposals and completing administrative tasks, keeping them away from their laboratories.
Since Donald Trump's return to the White House, roughly $8bn in grants has been cancelled or withdrawn from scientists or their institutions, equivalent to nearly 16% of the yearly federal grant budget for higher education. A further $12.2bn was rescinded but reinstated by courts. The NIH and NSF cancelled more than 3,000 already-approved grants.
Trump's proposed 2026 budget would slash the NIH budget by 38% (almost $18bn), cut the NSF budget by more than 50% ($4.7bn), and scrap nearly half of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. All told, the proposed cuts to federal research agencies come to nearly $40bn. HHS announced the scrapping of 20,000 jobs (25% of its workforce). More than 1,300 jobs (over 10%) were lost at NOAA.
Most grant cancellations targeted research associated with DEI, climate change, misinformation, covid-19 and vaccines, or work conducted at elite universities. The administration also used grant terminations as leverage against universities it accused of failing to address antisemitism, cancelling more than 400 grants to Columbia University ($400m) and withholding $2.7bn from Harvard University.
The NIH, NSF, DoE and DoD launched restrictive caps on indirect grant costs, which help fund facilities and administration at universities; these limits were partly blocked by courts.
The budget passed by Congress on January 15th 2026 rejected $5.1bn in proposed cuts to the NSF and the EPA but hit renewable-energy funding allocated by the Department of Energy hard. Research into solar energy was cut by 31%, wind power by 27% and bioenergy by 11%. Funding for nuclear energy received a 6% boost despite the administration requesting a 19% cut. Investment in coal research swelled by 260%. Three months earlier the administration had cancelled $7.5bn of DoE research funding. Russell Vought, the White House budget director, posted on X that these grants were all part of the "green new scam funding to fuel the left's climate agenda". A federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled the cuts unlawful, noting that 314 of 315 cancelled grants were in states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
An analysis by The Economist of a decade's worth of data from the Federal Advisory Committee Act found that some 200 committees at science agencies were terminated, suspended or had their work delayed in 2025—a record number. The DoE and the Health Department were worst affected, each losing two in five committees. Grant Witness, a project that tracks federal research funding, reported that courts had overturned or paused some 5,000 of 8,000 grant terminations, although approximately $30bn remained cut.
In the first quarter of 2025 applications by researchers based in America for jobs in other countries rose 32% compared with the same period in 2024, according to Springer Nature's jobs board. Applications by non-American candidates for American research jobs fell by around 25%. Searches for American PhDs on FindAPhD were down 40% year on year in April 2025; interest from European students fell by half.
If the proposed budget cuts are enacted, more than 80,000 researchers could lose their jobs, according to The Economist's calculations, and American funding for academic science would fall significantly behind that of either China or the European Union after adjusting for costs.
Several Canadian universities announced funding worth tens of millions of dollars explicitly aimed at diverting researchers from America. On May 5th 2025 Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, gave a speech in Paris urging scientists to "choose Europe".
Absent, adj.: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered.