Protect LIGO's science and local impact from Trump's budget cuts
The Trump administration wants to slash funding for America's two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGOs) as part of broader cuts to the National Science Foundation.
That would be a devastating blow to the nation's global leadership in scientific research. When Congress writes its fiscal 2026 budget, it should ignore the president's anti-science request.
One of the LIGO sites is on the Hanford nuclear site. The other is in Louisiana. The White House proposes cutting 40% of their funding – $48 million to $29 million. And it also dictates how that cut should be made. It wants one of the two sites shut down.
Given that Washington is a blue state that is participating in multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration and Louisiana is a red state that voted for the president, the odds of LIGO Hanford surviving seem low.
Either way, scientists' ability to explore the universe by detecting gravitational waves would suffer significantly.
Shutting one site down would compromise scientists' ability to verify detections of cosmic events and weed out false readings originating from local disturbances.
It also would prevent the two sites from triangulating where an event occurred in the sky, allowing telescopes that rely on light for observations to also find and research them. The two LIGOs work in tandem.
In 2015, the Hanford observatory and its sibling in Louisiana detected gravitational waves for the first time when they measured the ripple in space-time caused by two black holes merging 1.4 billion light-years away.
The findings provided fresh confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and earned researchers a Nobel Prize in physics. Since then, LIGO has detected hundreds of events, including black holes merging and neutron stars colliding.
The Hanford site continues to refine its tools and push science forward. An upgrade a couple of years ago installed quantum squeezing technology that allows scientists to detect 60% more events and probe a larger volume of space.
If funded, the observatories will continue to help humanity answer profound questions about the universe.
Projects like LIGO are expensive. The National Science Foundation has spent more than $1 billion on detecting gravitational waves over four decades.
At the start, skeptics deemed it risky, but it has provided tremendous return on investment. It epitomizes the sort of Big Science research that few institutions other than governments can afford. Think Europe's Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project and the international Human Genome Project.
Undercutting LIGO as it reaches its full potential and produces its most impressive results just to save a few million dollars would be a colossal mistake.
As one commenter on the Tri-City Herald's website put it, 'It would be like inventing the microscope, seeing a cell for the first time, and then discarding it.' The best is yet to come.
Even if a future administration were to restore funding, rehiring skilled researchers would be a monumental hurdle. A temporary shutdown will delay scientific progress and result in America losing ground to international researchers.
LIGO has a local impact, too, and not just that it is visible from outer space. Its presence helps the Tri-Cities and the Hanford nuclear site evolve their scientific narrative from Cold War-era nuclear development to 21st-century astrophysics.
It is a symbol of progress, diversification and positive global contribution that is invaluable for regional identity and attracting future talent and investment.
LIGO staff go the extra mile by working with local STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. They speak in classrooms about science careers and explain the complex workings of the observatory in a way that young people can understand.
An $8 million LIGO Exploration Center, which opened in 2022 and was funded by Washington state, further enhances that public-facing mission. Such direct engagement cultivates future STEM talent and inspires the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The proposed cuts to LIGO would lead to an irreversible loss of U.S. leadership in gravitational wave astronomy and an immense loss to the Tri-Cities.
The Trump administration must reconsider. If it does not, Washington's congressional delegation must convince their colleagues to preserve this cornerstone of American scientific preeminence.
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