There is a word for what the federal government has done to American science during the past year and a half: sabotage. Not reform. Not streamlining. Not the "realignment of priorities" the White House prefers to call it. Sabotage — the deliberate, systematic destruction of one of the most productive enterprises in the history of human civilization, inflicted at a time when the nation can least afford it, for reasons that range from the ideological to the incoherent.
Let's start with MIT. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the foundational engines of American technological power, the place where radar was developed during World War II, where strobe photography was perfected, where the modern internet took shape, where Nobel laureates mentor the scientists who will produce the next generation of breakthroughs.
I experienced that education firsthand. As an MIT undergraduate in the 1960s, two of my microbiology professors were Nobel laureates and three physics professors were veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that ended WWII. As a graduate student (at the University of California, San Diego), I was the co-discoverer of two important enzymes: Ribonuclease H, which plays a critical role in DNA replication; and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in influenza virus that enables it to replicate. Decades later, the latter would be the target of anti-flu drugs.
"A striking loss"
When MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, stepped in front of a camera to address her community in May, her message was not a complaint. It was a warning. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to a year ago. New federal research funding has decreased by more than 20 percent. Even accounting for non-federal sources — the industry partnerships and philanthropic gifts MIT has scrambled to find — total campus research funding is now 10 percent smaller than it was just twelve months ago. "That is a striking loss," Kornbluth said, "for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world."
And it is only the beginning. Graduate student enrollment will decline by roughly 20 percent in the coming academic year — approximately 500 fewer students — because the funding that would support them has evaporated. Senior faculty with decades of distinguished grant records are being forced to cut doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, and abandon entire lines of inquiry. The damage is not abstract. It is being measured in the laboratories that are going dark, in the careers that are being derailed, in the discoveries that will not happen, in the applications based on those discoveries that will not materialize.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, listened to Kornbluth's remarks and lamented, "This is the first of many of these kinds of alarms that will be ringing." I concur. MIT, with its $27 billion endowment, is better positioned than nearly any other research university to absorb a shock like this. If MIT is struggling, what is happening at the hundreds of schools with fewer resources and smaller margins for error?
Cancelled funding
The numbers across the broader federal research enterprise are stunning. More than 7,800 NIH and NSF grants were cancelled or suspended in 2025. The NIH awarded 24 percent fewer grants last year than its recent ten-year average. The administration has proposed cutting the NIH budget from $47 billion to $27 billion — a 40 percent reduction. NSF funded 25 percent fewer new projects. The proposed cut to the NSF, relative to its 2023 funding, represents 61 percent. The CDC would lose 44 percent of its budget. NASA's science directorate would be cut in half. The administration proposed returning non-defense research spending to levels last seen in 1991 — erasing three decades of accumulated capacity in a single budget cycle.
The cruelty of the cuts is matched only by their capriciousness. A study reported in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2025 found that 383 NIH-funded clinical trials lost their grant funding following the administration's cancellations — affecting more than 74,000 trial participants. The administration used keyword searches to identify grants for termination — a method so blunt (and idiotic) that grants were killed for containing the prefix "trans-" in terms like "transgenic material" or "signal transduction." Northwestern University's Lurie Cancer Center, a national hub for cancer research and care, had $77 million in funding frozen. The NIH cancelled subscriptions to Springer Nature journals — home to more than 3,000 publications, including the highly respected flagship journal Nature — with an HHS spokesperson calling them "junk science." Scientists at agencies across the government were fired in mass layoffs, or quit through buyout programs, leaving a reported exodus of more than 25,000 federal science workers, many at the early-career stage.
Let's talk about China
What makes this catastrophe particularly inexcusable is the geopolitical context in which it is being inflicted. The administration claims to be hawkish on China. It speaks constantly of competition, of national security, of "winning." And then it methodically dismantles the infrastructure that would allow the United States to compete. According to a March 2026 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, China's investment in research and development has now reached parity with that of the United States. In 2019, China overtook the U.S. in its share of the most-cited scientific papers. By 2022, it led globally in most-cited papers overall. In 2024, it surpassed the United States in total scientific publications for the first time since the U.S. itself displaced the United Kingdom in 1948. Also in 2024, Chinese entities filed roughly 1.8 million patent applications, compared to 603,000 from the United States.
The scientific talent picture is equally dire. At least 85 established and rising scientists working in the United States joined Chinese research institutions full-time beginning in 2024, with more than half making the move in 2025, according to a CNN tally. In a 2025 Nature survey of 1,600 scientists, 75 percent said they were considering leaving the United States, with Europe and Canada top destinations. The European Union launched its "Choose Europe for Science" initiative, backed by €500 million in grants and fellowships explicitly designed to attract scientists disillusioned by U.S. policy. The world is watching what we are doing to ourselves and moving to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds.
Political spitefulness, fiscal irresponsibility
The administration justifies all of this with the language of fiscal discipline — cutting "waste," redirecting money away from ideologically disfavored research, and so on. But the fiscal argument collapses under even modest scrutiny. Scientific investment is not a cost to be minimized; it is an engine of national wealth. Federal research and development investments have accounted for more than 20 percent of all U.S. productivity growth since World War II. The internet, mRNA vaccines, human gene therapy, GPS, the transistor — all emerged from the sustained public investment being dismantled today. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimates that a 20 percent cut to federal research spending would shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade and reduce tax revenue by roughly $250 billion. The administration is trading a trillion dollars in future prosperity for the political satisfaction of slashing budgets that its base can be told represent elite liberal excess.
Brain drain
What is being lost is not merely research output. It is the pipeline — the long, slow accumulation of trained minds that makes discovery possible in the first place. A doctoral scientist represents a decade or more of training. Laboratory knowledge lives in working research groups and the relationships among them. It does not reside in spreadsheets that can be reactivated when a future administration changes course. Eric Lu, a third-year MIT PhD student in bioengineering, put it simply: The United States has become "a pretty unfavorable environment for students who see themselves as doing research in the U.S."
As a result, the U.S. is losing significant intellectual capital as students, postdocs, and junior professors opt to go elsewhere.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who has navigated this crisis with admirable diplomatic restraint, framed the bottom line plainly: "When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures — and you shrink the supply of future scientists." This is as clear a statement of the stakes as any politician or pundit could offer. And it is being articulated not by an activist, but by the president of the institution that helped build the modern technological world.
Bonfire of the vainglorious
The United States did not become the world's scientific superpower by accident. It took deliberate, sustained, bipartisan investment across decades — in universities, in federal laboratories, in graduate education, in the culture of open inquiry. What the second Trump administration has done in under a year and a half is begin to dismantle that inheritance with the gleeful efficiency of an arsonist who mistakes the blaze for proof of his power. The fire is real, and so is the carnage. And the scientists who might have rebuilt what burns are already boarding planes for Beijing, Berlin, London, and Toronto.
History will assign responsibility. The only question is how much America will have lost before it does.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. An official at the FDA for 15 years, he was the founding director of its Office of Biotechnology.