The mystery of Trump's science cuts

Politico

22-05-2025

Presented by
What's really behind the Trump administration's massive cutbacks in research funding?
Since January, agency after agency has seen massive spending cuts — adding up to a historic slashing of the globally dominant American research apparatus. The White House's proposed budget would cut National Science Foundation funding by more than half. A Senate minority staff report cited a $2.7 billion drop in funding commitments to the National Institutes of Health through March compared to last year.
In states spanning the political spectrum — purple Virginia, red Texas, blue Massachusetts — the White House has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants.
Why? In a major speech this week, top White House science official Michael Kratsios laid out the rationale for the cuts: He framed them as part of a larger project to get American science on a more efficient, innovative track by de-emphasizing research perceived as overly ideological or non-scientific.
Kratsios, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, cited a NASA requirement for research proposals to 'include plans for furthering inclusion goals' as exactly the kind of effort the GOP wants to root out — an intrusion of progressive political goals into totally unrelated research.
To many people who have been watching these cutbacks, that doesn't come close to explaining the scale or sweep of what Trump is doing.
'If the administration has any goal other than to significantly hurt the U.S. science and research system, it will not achieve that,' Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told DFD. 'This isn't about cutting a few projects that embraced radical DEI, or making some changes to get a little bit more efficiency. This is actually cutting meat and bone from the entire research enterprise.'
According to a report published today by the New York Times, funding cuts extend far beyond eliminating allegedly 'woke' programs like the one Kratsios cited. The National Science Foundation, a key funder of basic scientific and technical research, has been rolled back to its pre-1990 size and ambitions. In perhaps the harshest blow to American researchers, the administration has eliminated more than 1,600 active grants.
Observers from the tech and research worlds have been left gobsmacked, wondering if the administration's stated rationale of eliminating 'wokeness' is a fig leaf for a far more destructive project.
As many people in the sciences will point out, if Trump officials really wanted to tear up the Biden-era playbook for federal grants — taking out diversity, improving accountability — they already have a tool to do it. Federal grants come with extensive requirements already, which are set by … the federal government.
'Having your grant reviewed is a bit like running a gauntlet,' University of Maryland associate dean Kelly Mix wrote in an op-ed published in The Conversation this morning seeking to demystify the grantmaking process.
Mix cites the merit review that grant proposals undergo, where at each round of funding the responsible agency assigns anonymous experts to review them for 'anything from innovation in the question posed to logical flaws in the hypotheses or technical problems with the planned data analyses.'
Of course, the Trump administration's very critique of American science is that progressive biases are too baked into that review process, funding 'woke' make-work projects at the expense of hard science. But federal agencies, as Mix points out, maintain sweeping power over what's in their RFPs, or requests for proposals, the document that tells researchers exactly what it is the government wants to fund.
So what's stopping the Trump administration from simply remaking the grant process in its own ideological image, rather than gutting research funding overall?
In response to a request for comment on the administration's rationale, a spokesperson for the OSTP referred DFD to an extensive FAQ on the NSF's website that states 'NSF is continuing to prioritize cutting-edge discovery science and engineering (S&E) research, advancing technology and innovation' and 'Awards that are not aligned with program goals or agency priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), environmental justice, and misinformation/disinformation.'
That sounds a lot like what Kratsios argues in his speech — but doesn't explain why the administration appears to be more focused on cuts than any particular requirements.
There's one possible explanation for the seeming disconnect between the Trump administration's chest-puffing about the importance of American innovation, amid its direct attack on the research behind that innovation.
Universities are prime recipients of federal research money. And in a March interview with the New York Times, right-wing gadfly and Trump ally Christopher Rufo described how conservatives angry about the liberalism of American universities might strong-arm academia into cultural compliance by cutting off their funding, forcing them to accept the Trump administration's policies and premises.
'A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, unless we change what we're doing, we're not going to be able to meet our budget for the year,' Rufo told the NYT's Ross Douthat.
Rufo isn't formally affiliated with the Trump White House, but his relentless culture-war ethos is a major influence on the far-right wonks, media personalities and political loyalists who staff it, and his extreme hostility to American universities is a major feature of Trump 2.0 policy.
For now, it seems clear that American researchers will have to do more with less in the manner the OSTP leader laid out, regardless of how, or why, the grant-making progress might change under the second Trump administration. The report today from the New York Times on NSF cuts identified a 67 percent overall cut in funding through May 2025 for math, physics and chemistry compared to last year; 57 percent to core engineering disciplines; and a 52 percent cut to biology.
'Because of these significant cuts to NSF, NIH, and perhaps other research funding agencies, there will be irreparable and probably permanent harm to the U.S. science research and innovation system,' ITIF's Atkinson said.
'There's really no way to spin that.'
an imperiled news partnership
California is reworking a major deal that would make Big Tech pay for news.
POLITICO's Christine Mui and Chase DiFeliciantonio reported today on threats to funding for the deal after Google announced Wednesday it would lower its contribution from $15 million to $10 million.
Former state Sen. Steve Glazer, who authored a failed bill that would have taxed digital revenue to fund newsrooms, said 'Google got almost everything they wanted,' and the downsized contribution means newsrooms will have to 'fight over crumbs.'
Additionally, the California State Library will host the fund after UC Berkeley's journalism school walked away from the program late last year. The agreement included an additional $12.5 million per year from Google for researching and developing AI tools, something they told Christine and Chase remains unchanged.
memecoin dinner
Who's attending today's memecoin dinner with the president?
POLITICO's Declan Harty reported on the roll call for tonight's dinner at President Donald Trump's golf club in Virginia, held for hundreds of the biggest investors in the $TRUMP memecoin. The top 25 investors, including crypto mogul Justin Sun and a Singapore-based startup called MemeCore, will have a special reception with the president beforehand.
The Trump family's bear hug of crypto has inspired a backlash in Congress among Democrats who have accused them of self-dealing (not to mention some in the crypto world who fear the Trumps' forays will give their utopian project a bad name).
'This is the Mount Everest of American corruption,' Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who will attend a planned protest outside Trump's golf club during the dinner, told Declan. 'This isn't about raising money for a campaign. This is about personal profit, and what he's selling is influence on himself and his Cabinet and the U.S. government.'
wright <3 lpo
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright stood up for an office at his department that's threatened by congressional budget cuts.
E&E News' Nico Portuondo, Brian Dabbs and Christa Marshall reported on remarks Wright made at a Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee hearing on the Department of Energy's budget request Wednesday, where he said the Loan Programs Office, which gives loans to experimental domestic energy projects, should keep its current levels of funding.
'It is really the most efficient tool we have in the department to help emerging energy technologies,' Wright said, touting 'Creative incentives to build nuclear reactors in our space … We do need to make sure we have funding available in the Loan Programs Office, because used judiciously it's a way to leverage private capital to make things happen fast.'
The LPO has become a cause celebre among a bipartisan coalition of wonks hoping to boost new energy projects, with the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation's Emmet Penney telling DFD last week the cuts would 'Really [hurt] nuclear' and 'threaten the bipartisan consensus.'
post of the day
THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS
Stay in touch with the whole team: Mohar Chatterjee ([e-mail]); Steve Heuser ([e-mail]); Nate Robson ([e-mail]); and Daniella Cheslow ([e-mail]).