The Cost of the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Research Funding

In late April 2026, the Trump administration abruptly removed all members of the board of advisers that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the nation’s premier science agencies. Its grantmaking had already slowed to a crawl since the start of the new fiscal year, and these removals cast the agency’s future further into doubt. Far from an outlier, the move represents just the latest in a series of unilateral and unprecedented policy changes that have thrown American scientific research into chaos at a critical time, undermining Congress’s authority over federal spending and jeopardizing the nation’s economic future in the process.

Publicly funded scientific research drove historic progress in science and technology between World War II and today, defining the modern economy and reshaping everything from medicine to information technology. During this period, congressional support for scientific research remained bipartisan and consistent — reflecting a broad public understanding of how scientific progress benefits American life.

Donald Trump upended this consensus when he returned to the White House in 2025. In his first weeks back in office, he sought to freeze or terminate billions of dollars in congressionally approved spending, singled out research institutions for deeper cuts, and dismantled vital federal science agencies. These dramatic actions were scattershot, arbitrary, and driven by political goals rather than scientific merit or a desire to bring about legitimate, long-needed reforms to science funding. Critically, they were also accomplished with little input from the legislature. Slowed NSF grantmaking, for example, runs directly counter to Congress’s continued support for public funding of scientific research.

Such momentous choices are not for the president to make alone. The Constitution gives Congress the power to raise revenue and decide how to spend taxpayer dollars, including on scientific research. The president’s job is to implement Congress’s spending decisions fully and even-handedly, not to cut, freeze, and threaten billions of dollars in funding on a whim. Tellingly, Congress has largely rejected Trump’s cuts to science funding every time it has considered them.

This analysis seeks to provide a partial accounting of what has been lost through this misuse of executive power — and who has borne the cost. It draws on conversations with practitioners and policy experts, as well as academic research, court dockets, and media reports.

To be sure, it can be difficult to identify all the research that has been undermined or canceled in this manner. And no statistic can adequately capture the effect of the uncertainty that continues to hang over the scientific community, even amidst legal victories and partial funding restorations. That chaos alone threatens the country’s economic growth and prosperity for years if not generations to come. Estimates of economic impact presented here — which stretch into the tens of billions of dollars — should therefore be treated as conservative.

In the words of Arati Prabhakar, the former head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, who was consulted for this analysis:

Ignoring congressional authority over publicly funded research means that even in areas where lawmakers or the courts have directed the restoration of funding, that is only part of the story. By then, multiyear clinical trials have seen years of data collection invalidated, and patients who need lifesaving care have been abandoned. Canceled grants have in many cases still not been restored even after court action, and the message has been sent to students that open inquiry is no longer tolerated, and to foreign-born researchers, women, and people of color that contributions are not welcome. And the consequences of all that for our future health, security, and prosperity are profound.

While some interviewees contacted for this publication were able to speak on the record, many were not, as they continue to rely on federal funding for their research. Their names have been withheld accordingly.

For this analysis, we examined measurable changes in federal science policy, focusing on a series of real or attempted cuts to government funding of scientific research during 2025. That year, the Trump administration:

• Cut or froze over $3 billion in previously approved research grants from the nation’s leading science agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation, according to reports compiled by independent researchers at Grant Witness. Around $1.4 billion remained frozen or canceled as of the beginning of 2026.
• Sought to go around Congress to cap reimbursements for “indirect costs,” such as laboratories, staff, and maintenance, a move that administration officials at the NIH expected to further reduce funding by $4 billion.
• Asked Congress to cut scientific research by an additional $44 billion (22 percent) in a single year, as estimated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• Froze, terminated, or cast into doubt other grants through a mass funding freeze that sought to pause “all Federal financial assistance.”

Many of these policy changes were prevented from going into effect through litigation, and others were quietly abandoned. For example, a federal appeals court ruled in March 2026 that the administration’s mass funding freeze was arbitrary, capricious, and likely to result in widespread harm to state budgets and basic social services. And Congress largely refused to ratify the president’s proposed spending cuts to science agencies in FY 2026.

But these victories leave an uneasy peace, especially as the president’s budget request for FY 2027 again seeks deep cuts to science funding, including to the NIH (13 percent) and NSF (55 percent). The net effect is a level of uncertainty that, according to conversations with stakeholders, makes it impossible for people, organizations, and businesses to plan and commit to long-term research and development projects.

Over the course of the 20th century, American taxpayer investments built the largest research and development funding enterprise in world history, totaling nearly $200 billion dollars annually. With the support of members of both parties, Congress has raised funding levels every year, on average, at key agencies such as the NIH and NSF, such that the budgets of both have doubled since the 1990s. Today, the NIH and NSF oversee more than $50 billion annually in federal grants for medical and scientific research, comprising half of government research and development spending outside the Department of Defense.

Leaders in both major parties recognize the value of these investments. At the start of his second term, President Trump set a goal of “cement[ing] America’s global technological leadership and usher[ing] in the Golden Age of American Innovation.” In hearings on science policy throughout 2025, Republicans and Democrats alike framed federal research funding as “the foundation on which major technological innovations are built,” the source of “America’s economic strength, national security, and quality of life,” and a “force multiplier” that “guarantees U.S. leadership for decades to come.”

In 2025, however, according to an independent data project, the Trump administration froze or slashed $2.3 billion in previously approved grants from the NIH and another $700 million in NSF grants, defunding research that was already underway. Some researchers were also caught or threatened by a mass funding freeze ordered in the first week of the administration. That policy asserted the federal government’s power to immediately pause federal grant dollars en masse.

Superficially small, these midstream freezes and cancelations have ripple effects far beyond the nominal dollars involved, prompting layoffs, interrupting careers, and destabilizing the budgets of research universities. While some funding terminations arose out of the president’s attacks on universities such as Columbia or Harvard, an analysis leveraging government data suggested that two-thirds of all terminated research funding was destined for public colleges and universities.

Research institutions also faced another $4 billion in threatened funding as the administration initially sought to cut reimbursement rates across the board for “indirect costs.” Reimbursements for those costs, awarded on top of the dollar value of a grant, cover expenses such as real estate, computing power, and the crucial personnel that innovators rely on for their day-to-day work. These costs are more than just overhead; one study showed that higher reimbursements were associated with increased publications and patent filings. Experts have long floated ideas for reforming these reimbursements, but unilaterally capping them amounts to another reduction in scientists’ ability to perform research.

Trump’s FY 2026 budget proposal made clear his administration’s intent to neuter federal science funding, not improve it. The proposal sought cuts totaling $44 billion (or 22 percent) across all agencies engaged in scientific research, including reductions to the NSF (57 percent), the NIH (41 percent), and NASA (24 percent). Congress refused, largely holding nondefense research and development spending stable. But the administration’s latest budget request, for FY 2027, again seeks similarly sharp reductions, including an across-the-board cap on indirect costs.

Agencies have also worked to quietly reshape their spending. Although the NSF and NIH ultimately spent much of their FY 2025 budgets, they did so by quietly paying off more multiyear grants and funding fewer new grants than usual, reducing support for new areas of inquiry. The NSF closed a social science directorate in April 2026, seemingly to comply with the president’s budget proposal — which Congress had not yet debated, much less enacted. And as of May 2026, uncertainty continued over whether funding appropriated by Congress would be honored by the administration or slow-walked through a politicized review process.

In the case of the NIH, grant funding terminated in 2025 initially affected nearly 2,500 individual grants for medical research that had already been approved by federal panels. Those cuts have had an immediate and painful impact on medical research. According to one senior health sciences researcher consulted for this analysis:

It is a disheartening time to be a biomedical researcher. Colleagues have lost their funding for no clear reason. Training programs to produce the next generation of researchers have been slashed. The program officers at NIH who traditionally help us to craft and submit fundable proposals are losing their jobs and feeling demoralized due to the frequent leadership changes, addition of suspicious new layers of bureaucracy, and delays. Universities with strong biomedical research enterprises are wondering how they will fund their infrastructures and continue their cutting-edge scientific work.

The impact on patients is more dire still. Lost funding halted or interrupted active trials of promising new medical treatments. These clinical trials give patients access to cutting-edge therapy and represent the gold-standard method for testing new treatments and medicines. According to a study by the American Medical Association’s peer-reviewed journal of internal medicine, grant terminations during 2025 initially halted funding for 383 of these trials — or 1 in 30 such experiments. Roughly 74,000 patients may have been exposed to uncertainty or even lost access to treatments from funding disruptions. That is before accounting for clinical trials funded by the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies.

For individuals, the consequences of these disruptions can be catastrophic. One mother with stage 4 colon cancer waited weeks for treatment after her clinical trial was delayed by NIH cuts. Cuts to another study meant 21 new mothers lost access to mental health professionals trained to prevent postpartum depression. In addition to putting patients at risk, arbitrary funding cuts make future research more difficult by destroying data that has already been collected and eroding trust among trial participants.

The impacts extend beyond individual patients, as federal science funding forms the backbone of American medical and biomedical research. Over its history, the NIH has driven the development of drugs for diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and sickle cell disease. It has also funded pioneering technologies, including gene and RNA therapy. Between 2010 and 2019, the NIH provided foundational funding for all but two of the 356 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The benefits of this research funding are substantial. One study estimated that research through the National Cancer Institute between 1980 and 2020 extended Americans’ lives by an aggregate of roughly 14 million years, at the cost of just $326 per year of a patient’s life. But these gains are often clear only over the long term, underscoring the importance of stable year-over-year funding. GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, for example — now used by 12 percent of Americans for weight loss and diabetes treatment — emerged from research conducted decades ago by a Department of Veterans Affairs scientist.

Unilateral funding cuts threaten that work over the short and long terms. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office leveraging studies of the drug development pipeline, a 10 percent reduction in NIH funding would mean a 4.5 percent cut in drugs eligible for clinical trials, or 30 fewer drugs available for public use over the following three decades. Another paper using the same body of research estimated that a one-third cut in NIH spending, consistent with the Trump administration’s proposed FY 2026 budget, could mean 15 percent fewer patent filings related to new treatments and a reduction in American life expectancy. A policy article published in Science came to similar conclusions, linking grants that would have been “at risk” under a much smaller NIH to patent filings and drug developments that might not have happened without those grants.

Investments in scientific research have also created entire industries. As just one example, NSF and Defense Department research funding made possible almost every part of the modern smartphone, from lithium-ion batteries, for which NSF-supported researchers shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2019, to touch screens, where NSF dollars underpinned the invention of “multi-touch” technology.

Experts broadly agree that taxpayer investments in science can yield substantial economic returns by supporting new technologies and encouraging private investment. For example, a Brookings Institution analysis cited one recent paper showing that federal research and development investments have “been responsible for at least one-fifth of overall postwar growth of total factor productivity in the United States.” Similarly, a 2019 study found that every dollar spent on NIH grants leads to $2.34 in drug sales alone, before accounting for broader social benefits. Collecting the evidence, the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that every dollar of federal nondefense research and development investment creates as much as $12.50 in economic growth over the following 30 years by encouraging capital expenditures and job creation.

These benefits tend to be broadly shared. In a March 2026 working paper published at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of economists estimated that the midcentury buildout of national laboratories led to substantial gains in the surrounding areas, including increased wages and educational attainment among residents. Similar effects persist to this day. According to a 2022 survey, 41 percent of people working for life sciences companies in the Boston area held a bachelor’s degree as their highest educational attainment; another 16 percent had not completed a four-year degree.

Even if the administration could claim to be economizing or pursuing necessary reforms, doing so unilaterally, without regard for Congress’s role, undercuts the stability that creates these economic returns on investment. Robert E. Rubin, a senior counselor at Centerview Partners who served as the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999, told us:

Separation of powers and the rule of law are more than abstract concepts; they’re a powerful competitive advantage for the United States in the global economy. Unpredictable, unilateral presidential decisions risk undermining that great strength. The sciences are one particularly strong example where taxpayer-funded research created and now helps power the American economy. Deep cuts to that funding inject uncertainty into American business and risk depriving us of billions of dollars in future innovations, medicines, and consumer products.

How could the administration’s funding cuts to the sciences, real and proposed, affect the economy? Fiscal multipliers in economic research offer one way to create a conservative estimate. By the Congressional Budget Office’s metrics, the administration’s proposed $44 billion (22 percent) cut in science funding in the FY 2026 budget could have translated to a reduction in future economic activity of half a trillion dollars. That figure is consistent with other research. A report by researchers at American University estimated that slashing public research and development funding by the comparable figure of 25 percent would reduce the country’s gross domestic product by 3.8 percent, nearly matching the decline experienced during the Great Recession.

Smaller cuts are damaging on their own. Based on the Congressional Budget Office’s figures, the administration’s initial $3 billion in frozen or canceled grants risked undercutting economic growth over the following 30 years by as much as $37.5 billion. Another study estimated that capping reimbursements for indirect rate costs — before accounting for frozen and terminated grants — would destroy $16.6 billion in growth nationwide across thousands of counties.

Destabilizing American research funding also risks permanently damaging the United States’s ability to train, attract, and retain top doctors and scientists. Universities are already responding to uncertainty around the future of American scientific funding by rethinking how many early-career scientists they can support. In biology alone, PhD programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University cut admissions by 20 percent in 2025 and others paused faculty recruitment and laid off hundreds of employees. As a result, The Boston Globe found, two-thirds of research scientists they surveyed were advising promising students to avoid academic careers. Similarly, in 2025 the NIH issued nearly a thousand fewer grants for early-career scientists than in recent years.

“The downstream effects” of these policies “are not limited to academia,” wrote Sandra Barbosu of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science and technology think tank with deep bipartisan connections. On the contrary, she concluded:

Biotechnology start-ups, private sector R&D, and clinical innovation pipelines all depend on federally funded basic research and a steady influx of NIH-trained scientists. Without that flow of talent, the entire U.S. innovation engine—from basic discovery to commercial drug development—risks slowing down, jeopardizing progress on diseases that affect millions of Americans.

The nation’s competitors will capitalize on these mistakes. Chinese universities had already begun to displace American institutions in terms of global research output, and 2025’s retreat from scientific investment risks accelerating that process. Indeed, there are early signs that top scientists can and will build careers in other countries with more reliable institutions, prompting a “brain drain” of cutting-edge research away from the United States. According to one study, American scientists submitted 32 percent more applications to jobs abroad this year compared with the same period last year. Eighty-five rising and established U.S. scientists, including an NIH neurobiologist and a Princeton nuclear physicist, moved to China in the past year. And in May 2025, the European Union launched a €500 million package to attract scientists to Europe.

American science policy could benefit from thoughtful reforms, carefully negotiated by leaders in Congress and the White House. But that is not what has happened over the last year. Instead, unpredictable policy changes have compounded the effects of arbitrary funding cuts, making it more difficult for any political process to play out while threatening the stability that researchers need to do their work.

The rule of law exists to prevent such erratic changes and insulate long-term public investments, like federally funded scientific research, from political instability. Those safeguards must be strengthened. To be sure, courts have intervened to protect these values, and many of the administration’s unilateral funding cuts now face serious legal challenges. Two federal courts separately concluded that mass grant freezes, for example, may constitute an unlawful attempt to “impound” funds allocated by lawmakers. While litigation continues, an appeals court largely affirmed one of those orders in March 2026.

Another court found that the efforts to cap reimbursements for “indirect costs” represented a clear case of the president trying to go around Congress. Legislators have debated reforming indirect cost reimbursements for years, the court noted. But, it held, Congress had gone to “great lengths” to prevent the executive branch from unilaterally cutting or capping such costs. (As mentioned earlier, the administration has since abandoned this litigation and turned to Congress — where the debate should have unfolded in the first place.) Similarly, the NIH recently agreed to review some grant applications without relying on politicized funding criteria.

But the law is inherently reactive, slow to intervene, and imperfect. As a case in point, late last year the Supreme Court allowed the administration to proceed with more than $750 million in NIH grant cancelations while litigation continues, citing procedural requirements.

Other legal issues also remain unresolved. Congress balked at and then rejected the administration’s proposed budget cuts for FY 2026, instead increasing NIH funding in a January 2026 appropriations bill. But it remains to be seen whether the NIH and NSF will spend the money as Congress directed. Early signs are not encouraging, prompting continued uncertainty even if funding eventually materializes in full.

Restoring the rule of law as a guarantor of stability for American research institutions and businesses will not be easy. Rebuilding the vital trust between the government, the scientific community, and the private sector innovators, students, workers, and grantees who benefit from that relationship may take years. But both are possible.

At a minimum, Congress and the courts should reject the administration’s effort to usurp the legislature’s power of the purse. Specifically, lawmakers should continue to deny the administration’s attempts to cut research funding and watch carefully to ensure that appropriated funds are spent fairly and fully. Beyond that, leaders in both parties should seek to ensure that federal support for scientific research is properly structured to best promote the security, health, and prosperity of all Americans for the decades to come.

With research support from Maryjane Johnson, Katya Abazajian, and Grady Yuthok Short.