Trump roils U.S. science
President Donald Trump began to rewrite the playbook on how the U.S. government interacts with the research community within minutes of taking office on 20 January. Seemingly every week since then he has added a page, shattering decades-old norms that helped make the United States a scientific superpower.
The now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire Elon Musk, played a prominent role in the first few months. It forced the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to cancel thousands of existing projects, in particular those deemed to involve diversity, equity, and inclusion; climate change; or gender identity and sexual orientation.
Trump also used DOGE to spearhead another prong of the attack: shrinking the size of the federal workforce. Thousands of employees at science agencies were laid off, accepted buyout offers, quit, or retired sooner than planned, resulting in a significant loss of scientific experience. Many of those who remained are managing narrower portfolios after their agency pulled the plug on scores of programs the White House decided—suddenly, and without explanation—were “no longer aligned with the administration’s priorities.” NSF and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science have gone even further, revamping units to correspond more closely to those priorities.
Several of Trump’s choices to lead federal science agencies have triggered fierce opposition. Foremost among them is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer and longtime antivaccine activist. Kennedy has decimated senior management at NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with a vast network of advisory committees. The new heads of those agencies share some of Kennedy’s contrarian views on public health and have altered many existing policies. NIH, for example, added criteria that could politicize its choices about what grant applications to fund.
Protesters gathered at a Stand Up for Science rally in San Francisco in March.
PHOTO: GABRIELLE LURIE/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Claiming to find evidence of antisemitism, the Trump administration froze all federal grants to a handful of top-tier colleges and universities and threatened similar action at scores more. Some agreed to pay sizable settlements and allow greater federal oversight in return for lifting those freezes, while negotiations continue with other schools, notably Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
An aggressive campaign to detain and deport people alleged to lack valid immigration status has made graduate students on valid visas fearful that they may be detained after traveling abroad, and led to fewer new international students at most U.S. colleges and universities. In response, many institutions have reduced the size of their doctoral programs in science and engineering.
Research advocates have fought many Trump directives in court, with mixed success. Arguably the community’s biggest win to date was blocking attempts by four science agencies to slash payments to universities for so-called indirect costs—money spent on infrastructure and overhead that supports federally funded research. Another silver lining in this gloomy year was that both NSF and NIH managed to spend all the money Congress had given them this year despite the many disruptions to their grantmaking. And Congress appears likely to resist Trump’s request for sharp cuts in the 2026 budgets of most science agencies. Equally important, most of this year’s onslaught has been carried out not through permanent legislation, but through temporary executive orders that Trump’s successor could rescind. —Jeffrey Mervis
Global health in crisis
For decades, aid for global health had solid support across the political spectrum in many countries. But this year marked a dramatic turnaround as wealthy countries slashed billions in funding for organizations that fight disease and malnutrition in other parts of the world.
In January, after President Donald Trump took office, the United States froze all foreign aid, including more than $10 billion for global health, and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. The moves halted deliveries of food and drugs and triggered thousands of layoffs in the U.S. and abroad, although some of the funds were reinstated later in the year. Aid budgets in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland have tumbled as well, in part to make room for increased defense spending.
A July report from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that donations for global health would fall to $39.1 billion this year—a 21% drop. Groups such as the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria; the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS); and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance all have to tighten their belts as a result. The World Health Organization, in which the U.S. has canceled its membership, has been hardest hit proportionally and is going through a painful downsizing.
The cuts are already noticeable on the ground, and will get worse. In July, the Global Fund slashed existing grants for all three diseases it helps fight, forcing countries to scale back spending on commodities such as medicines, diagnostics, insecticides, and bed nets. UNAIDS has reported severe disruptions in HIV prevention and testing in many countries.
A mother cries after her infant son was diagnosed with severe malaria at a hospital in Guinea, where the freeze on U.S. aid has disrupted efforts to control the disease.
PHOTO: MARTA MOREIRAS
Studies modeling the effects of the recent cuts predict a surge in disease cases and deaths, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Some countries may mitigate the toll by shouldering more of the burden themselves, however, and new donors may step up. But because many poor countries don’t always record causes of death, the precise toll of the shifting political winds may never be known. —Martin Enserink
AI and fraud degrade the literature
This year several studies exposed how paper mills, artificial intelligence (AI), and research fraud are polluting the scholarly literature with trivial, shoddy, and nonsensical papers—and the pace is accelerating.
An unusually thorough analysis of this long-standing issue found that the number of fake papers—though still relatively small—seems to be increasing far faster than the scientific literature overall. At fault is a complex ecosystem of authors, editors, publishers, and others conspiring to pad authors’ CVs—and the pockets of editors and publishers who profit from article-processing fees for the fake papers and sometimes even take bribes.
The continued rise of AI is also shaping the literature. A massive, cross-disciplinary look at how often scientists turn to AI to help write their manuscripts found steady increases since 2022. Some uses may be legitimate—for instance, if they are disclosed to the journal upon submission and align with the journal’s policy. But disclosure may be the exception. The American Association for Cancer Research recently found that four times as many authors use AI as admit to it across the 10 journals it publishes.
The transgressions may go beyond nondisclosure. One study reported that unscrupulous actors were using publicly available health data sets—and likely generative AI tools—to churn out trivial papers exploring correlations between nearly every possible combination of condition, contributing factor, and population. Authors are also using AI to concoct letters to the editor and other simple commentaries that have little substance and are simply intended to inflate the author’s publication record, another team reported.
Some publishers are beginning to take aggressive countermeasures. In July, Taylor & Francis paused submissions to its journal Bioengineered so editors could investigate some 1000 papers suspected of containing manipulated results or coming from paper mills. And in September, PLOS and Frontiers announced they had begun to automatically reject the vast majority of papers based on those exploited public health data sets. But the arms race between publishers and AI-fueled malfeasance is sure to continue to escalate. —Rachel Bernstein