Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.
In an open letter to the American people, more than 1,900 scientists sent an “SOS” that the Trump administration’s actions have “decimated” the nation’s scientific enterprise and censored scientific work. “We see real danger in this moment,” the scientists wrote.
Each of the scientists who signed the letter are elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a congressionally chartered group of non-profit organizations that provide expertise to the federal government and the public on scientific and technological issues. The letter stated that the signatories hold a range of political beliefs. Signatories represent a range of scientific disciplines, from cell biology to planetary science to economics.
The letter emphasized the need for U.S. scientists to retain their independence and ability to explore scientific questions without the influence of special interests or the limitations of censorship—that ability now in question due to the administration’s cuts to scientific funding, firings of scientists, removals of public data, and pressure for researchers to abandon certain work.
The Trump administration is “using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yield results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends,” the letter stated.
“We have spent 80 years in this country building up our scientific infrastructure,” Steven Woolf, an author of the letter and professor of family medicine at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine told PBS. “That’s enabled our country to make remarkable scientific discoveries that have made the United States the envy of the world. In a matter of weeks, the Trump administration has pursued a set of policies that are basically removing the capacity of our country to do this kind of research.”
Woolf also said he was concerned that the attacks on U.S. science, and in particular, cuts to health research and vaccine regulatory work, would affect the health and life expectancy of U.S. residents.
Scientists who haven’t been directly impacted by funding cuts or firings are still facing a “climate of fear,” Woolf said. In the letter, he and other signatories wrote that the Trump administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities as part of an anti-DEI effort send a “chilling message” to scientists that their research is in danger of being censored on ideological grounds.
Firings of scientists have continued since the letter’s release: Today, the Department of Health and Human Services began sending notices of termination after announcing a plan to cut 10,000 employees from the agency. Federal scientists at other agencies such as NASA, USGS, NOAA, and the EPA have begun similar terminations, though federal judges have ordered some of these firings to be reversed.
“We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed,” the letter stated.
—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer
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