More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.

These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    5 days ago

    Fantastic article with great figures tho it is grim…

    I feel so sad, but at least I feel less crazy now for thinking science as a career in the US had gone off a cliff, people are being forced to reckon with the fact that this cannot be undone with a flick of a wand and that the damage will reverberate for decades… for one it will lead to there being no early career scientists or engineers to train into more experienced workers in the US because we all left or changed careers. This is an alarm younger people have been ringing for years now while older people condescendingly ignored it and now the consequences have become existential not just to younger people trying to enter a career…

    This is the collapse of science in the US, the general public will not care or understand adequately how to rebuild a robust culture and funding structure for science after conservatives have annihilated it and thus this is inevitably the beginning of a period of stagnation in US culture where the centrist, moderate position is halfway between a basic understanding of gradeschool level science and MAHA quack nonsense pseudoscience.

    …

    …ughhh

    Don’t know how many times people told me not to worry and that at the end of the day that valuable science will be funded blah blah blah…

    To those people fuck you for telling me to calm down and be less worried.