This post discusses the current political situation's impact on science funding. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the current state of the world, this isn't the blog post for you. Take care of yourself.
Being a scientist has always been a lot of work.
That is fine and expected. One time last year, I signed a contract for a few months of work, and the contract dictated that I would work 40 hours a week. I was going over it with more senior scientist who would be my co-worker after the contract was signed, and when we got to that line, we both chuckled before going on to the next part.
A new hire once asked my boss in a meeting what the hours were like, and he said he didn't know how to answer. You worked until the work was done, that could be 40 hours a week or 80 depending on how well you did. You finished the work and then went home for the day. The new guy asked if that meant you could leave early if all the work was done, and another person responded that that didn't really happen. There was always more work.
My former boss and CTO, Dr. Paul Cohen, wrote an article, What Professors Do, which describes the life that most professors live. I'm not a professor so my work is actually considerably more fun (in my opinion) as I only need to worry about science and research, and not the sort of thing described in the following quote from the above linked article:
"Funding is a continuing headache. The national funding picture is changing so rapidly that it's a full-time job to keep current. We spent an hour meeting with Paul's lab manager, who is coordinating a series of proposals to NSF, NASA, NIH and private foundations pertaining to science education for women and minorities. Paul spent two additional hours in funding meetings, two hours on the phone with funding agents and colleagues, and an hour in email. This was a slow week; the next major proposal isn't due until Feb. 15. We have submitted or coordinated three proposals, two preproposals, and two fellowship proposals since mid-December, but funding is so tight that Paul will be lucky to see one proposal in four funded. Funding is even more limited in Carole's field (perhaps 5% of psychology proposals submitted to federal sources are funded), so she does not realistically expect any of the six proposals she has submitted so far this year to be funded. Paul must maintain funding for four staff and five graduate students, a medium-size lab for Computer Science."
The phrase 'funding is a continuing headache' was written in 1995, under Clinton. I don't have any strong opinions on Clinton as I was not born until after his administration. However I can tell you that what is going on right now with funding makes 1995 look like an idealistic fantasy.
Since taking office in 2025, Trump has cut over 3,800 research grants from the NIH and NSF, giving 1.8 billion less than was expected. Things are really, really bad.
A few years back, UC Davis was remodeling an engineering building, Bainer Hall. They had representatives meet with the leaders of clubs who had been using that building for club activity to ask what they needed to give us so that our clubs didn't shut down. I had to explain to him that OneLoop, the club I ran, was already operating within the confines of the absolute minimum space we could possibly operate within. If they decreased our recources further, we would simply have to cease operations.
The world of academia was not working particularly well even before the funding cuts. The fact that we decided to enmesh our health and medical research apparatus within a system where certain people are basically impossible to fire, which is runs on the backs of people in their 20s working 80+ hour weeks for stipends barely above the poverty line, which is funded based on grants allocated via a complex system requiring immense time and effort to apply for probably wasn't a fantastic idea.
A graduate student is typically paid under 40k a year. This makes it seem like they are cheap, and easy to fund, but it isn't that simple. Firstly, the university takes a cut of every grant awarded, for example CMU takes 51%. Secondly, the professor must pay the university for the student to be permitted to take classes (which is typically a graduation requirement). And finally, they are paid in grant dollars which are a time consuming commodity to obtain, but are the only way to pay a graduate student. As such it is actually hard to get a grad student employed. I've always kind of wondered if it would be more efficient for a professor to work a side gig in which they charge their consulting rate, and use that money to pay their graduate students.
When funding is cut to this extent, there aren't any 'emergency measures' we can take to help us through these difficult times. We were already taking all of them. The head of my institute famously gets up at 4:30AM every day and reads papers until 6:30. He works all day and goes to bed at 11:00PM. He did this all before the funding cuts, and my boss works similar hours.
One time I stayed up until 2:00AM on a Sunday and sent an email with my data, and the statement that while I should show up for the 8:30AM meeting, I wouldn't be able to make the 8:00AM because I was just getting to sleep. That morning, my boss said he saw the email and asked 'how much sleep do you guys need?' He wasn't upset, but he also wasn't joking. He would have been able to get by on 4 hours, I know he often does. We do this willingly because that is just how science works, but we are already all working at our limits. We have no more energy to give.
Let's say a professor used to expect 10% of their grants to get funded, and now expect 1% of their grants to get funded.
They are going to have to submit 10 times as many grants as they did in the past in order to continue to pay the number of employees that they had hired pre-Trump. That grant submission time comes from the time they would have spent studying and researching.
Submitting 10 times as many grants as normal is pretty unrealistic, so they will probably have to fire some junior reserachers. Sometimes they have to fire senior reserachers as well. We have some newer hires in our institute coming from departments that have just had to simply shut down and fire all their employees.
A major university department, especially one at a prestigous university, disappearing from the face of the Earth, is not normal.
Many of the top surgeons and medical specialists out there do research as well. I know many folks at my institute who are MD/PhDs, meaning they have both a medical degree and a research degree. The head researcher in my lab (my boss) is a surgeon and spends some of his time every week in the clinic.
If you go in for surgery in the coming years, consider the fact that your surgeon might be under more stress, and operating with less sleep, than they would have been in the past.
I had a friend apply for PhD programs this year, and was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins that he really wanted to hire her, but would have to let her know later if he would actually have the funding this year to take her on.
A Professor at Johns Hopkins University being uncertain as to whether they could accept a graduate student due to lack of certainty in funding is not just alarming for me, who plans to apply next cycle, but to any human with a body in this country who may benefit from the medical research coming out of Johns Hopkins.
Money, especially for a junior employee, is really, really, really, really, tight.
I am being paid like a graduate student, except graduate students have their student loans put on hold, and I do not because I'm not technically enrolled. I can't get a side job because I'm working 80+ hour weeks to ensure that the project I'm working on doesn't get shut down. This seems like as good a time as any to plug my patreon.
You know how when you are a nerdy kid in highschool, adults sometimes tell you that it's okay things are tough now, because one day you will grow up and be the boss of all your bullies?
That didn't happen. The kids who were bullies in high school all work for DOGE now and are now cutting all of our funding. This is not just a disaster for scientists, it is a disaster for anybody who benefits from scientific research and I assure you this includes you. Do you have a body that gets sick and needs medicine? Do you eat proccessed food that you really hope doesn't contain outright poison or get exposed to chemicals that may or may not be extremely toxic? Do you want crops to grow at a rapid enough rate to continue to support a population of humans that has only expanded to the size it is at after we learned how to make crops grow artifically quickly and plentifully? Do you want the standard of living for humans to go in a roughly positive direction in future years?
You won't see the impacts right away, in many cases. If we don't fund, say, spectroscopy studies, nobody will notice for 5 years or so. In fact, we will probably never really 'notice' because you don't observe a discovery that isn't made. But many biomedical breakthroughs have been made with spectroscopy tech, and if we don't fund them, we will absolutely miss out on ones that could perhaps happen in the future. We won't know what we won't know.
Every Monday, the entire McGowan Institute has an 8:30AM meeting. Typically, we just talk about what is going on in the institute. However, as of late there has regularly been a 20 minute or so interlude where we discuss the political updates. They have become so dire that one of the institute heads has started asking people to bring up what wins they have had this week to offset the depression caused by the devastation being wrought across the scientific community.
I was at a zoom meeting where two scientists, one who was an immigrant and the other who was trying to get a visa, discussed how to navigate the bureaucracy of the English language requirement for people coming in from countries that didn't have English as the national language. As far as I could tell, English (and possibly another language) was both of their first languages.
The issue isn't even just the funding cuts. The issue is that the rules are changing by the day. Do you want to bring students from a different country? Do you want to do something mildly interesting that isn't normally done? Do you want to pay your employees? If so, you are going to have to look at this week's new NIH updates written by a 19 year old DOGE worker who has never studied science in their life.
Many of the new rules are psychotic. My friend who studies FMRIs just got a list of words which are banned on papers because apparently forbidden words are now a thing. Among those words on the list are 'they/them', which is typically how people refer to their rodent population if you have male and female rats together. It's also, y'know, a targeted attack on certain people.
But even if the rules weren't psychotic, the simple fact that they are new represents a huge amount of work for everybody. I don't have the full picture, or even the half picture, because I am a mere plebian who concerns themselves only with the software, math, and research rather than the august and elite task of grant applications. But I do know some basics.
Bascially, grant apps are like resumes. You don't lie on your resume, but you do personalize it depending who is going to read it, and your understanding of what they are looking for. There used to be a standard way of getting grants evaluated, and now that method is completely different. This is like if they suddenly revised the SAT a week before you had to take it, and now it asked completely different types of questions. This is a huge pain.
I really want to learn from my professor so I can someday be as great of a scientist as he is. I now get less time working with him because of the sheer amount of hours he has to spend studying this week's new absurd and arbitrary edict coming out of the federal government. This sucks for him, for me, and for you if you benefit from science which I established already you do.
That quote from Jurassic Park about how scientists are so focused on if they can, rather than if they should, was silly when it was written and is painfully absurd now. Scientists are not, and have never been, mad wizards of hubris. They are just a bunch of hard working nerds keeping humanity from backsliding into antiquity. Now, they are hard working nerds who need to read pages of regulations explaining why they don't have the money they were promised.
I banged this article out in a little over an hour on a Sunday, and am about to get back to work so my whole project doesn't get shut down, so please excuse if this isn't up to my normal standard of writing. There used to be some leeway for juniors, because it was expected that we would screw up a bit in the learning process. That is mostly gone, not because our PIs are suddenly evil and want us fired, but because the funding buffer incredibly small and allows for hardly any screw ups.
I know that I could quit my job tomorow and make a ton of money working for some stupid chatbot AI and pay off my student debt, but instead I'm doing this because I genuinely do think that science is the way to make the world a better place. That is what the vast majority of scientists are trying to do, and now we can barely do it.