That's what the money's for
There has been no shortage of coverage of the funding cuts that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has demanded of US science. The NIH announced in February that it would slash the indirect costs it covers for academic research, which would result in a cut of some $4 billion from the NIH's roughly $50 billion budget; more cuts were announced later.
Hundreds of grants that go to research in fields the Trump administration seems to believe are controversial — like HIV — have been outright canceled. Thousands of government scientists in agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services have been fired. Universities are seeing hundreds of millions in grants for scientific research threatened over campus policies.
This is very bad. Sheer dollar power has always been a key ingredient in American scientific dominance, going back to the country's enormous advances during World War II. (As important as geniuses like J. Robert Oppenheimer were to the development of the atomic bomb, the US ultimately got there first because it had the resources, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, to turn the entire country into a factory for nuclear material.)
Universities have already resorted to hiring freezes to cope with the cuts, and some are even rescinding admissions offers to PhD students. Some young scientists may simply leave the field altogether, potentially robbing us of future Karikós.
But there has already been some success in pushing back against these cuts. On Friday, a federal judge permanently barred the Trump administration from limiting funding from the NIH to support academic research, though the ruling is almost certain to be appealed. And even if funding is cut, future administrations could restore it, while alternative sources of money can be found in the interim. What the Trump administration is doing with funding is a body blow to American science, but doesn't have to be a fatal one.
What is happening with immigration policy, however, is another matter altogether.
Killing the golden goose
The Trump administration has made no secret of the fact it is deliberately targeting foreign students in the US that have been involved — sometimes only peripherally — in pro-Palestinian protests.
Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder from Algeria who was a grad student at Columbia University, is currently sitting in custody in Louisiana after his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Another international student, Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts University, was arrested and scheduled for deportation, apparently for the crime of co-writing a newspaper op-ed criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza.
But those are just the most high-profile cases. The New York Times reported this week that nearly 300 international students at universities around the US have had their visas suddenly revoked and could face deportation. (That figure could be higher when you read this — every time I clicked on the headline yesterday, the number of visas revoked went up.) There have also been reports of harassment and detainment of foreigners legally crossing the US border, which adds to a state of fear for any noncitizens.
A few hundred students may not seem like that much, given that the US granted more than 400,000 visas in 2024 alone. But the message from the administration, which is also apparently scouring student visa applicants' social media for evidence of "hostile attitudes" toward America or Israel, is clear: We don't want you here. And students and scientists are listening.
In a recent poll by the journal Nature of more than 1,200 scientists in the US, three-quarters said they were considering leaving the country. This was especially true of the young scientists who are set to form the next vanguard of American research. Foreign scientists who might otherwise come to the US for conferences or short-term positions are rethinking those plans, afraid — with reason — they might end up inside an ICE detainment facility.
Other countries like China and Canada are already making overtures to scientists in the US, because they're smart enough to grab an opportunity when they see one. As one recent Times opinion piece put it, the Trump administration's actions "could mean America's demise as the most powerful force for innovation in science, health and technology in the 21st century."
Could they be replaced by American students? Don't bet on it.
