In the past two weeks, the news has been full of headlines and social media posts from American colleagues about sweeping cuts to staff at research agencies, termination of existing research grants, and funding that keeps university research going. Critics say the impacts of these cuts to American scientists and social scientists will likely affect the country for a generation or more–but they’re currently being delayed by a series of federal judges.
In order to comply with federal directives, employees at the National Science Foundation used a list of forbidden words was used to flag research projects, meaning new research projects could potentially exclude a large swath of study participants, including people of colour or those with disabilities. Environmental Protection Agency employees were asked to review webpages for terms like “environmental justice”. Center for Disease Control employees were told to remove terms such as “gender,” “transgender” or “pregnant people” from the agency’s webpages and references to diversity and gender were widely purged from the agency’s website. Hundreds of staff at the CDC were let go last week, NSF has been told to prepare for the loss of half of its staff and two-thirds of its funding, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association also received a similar warning. A federal judge in Maryland blocked key parts of two of President Trump’s executive orders to discontinue research on equity-related grants or contracts. Researchers in Canada and the US scrambled to repost 522 public health databases that were deleted from the CDC website, reposting them on other sites and the Internet Archive. A federal judge ordered the CDC and the Federal Health Administration to repost public information on their websites while the courts hear a lawsuit challenging its removal.
Medical research such as developing new cancer treatments, improving maternal health, and clinical trials for new drugs would be undermined by the proposed National Institutes of Health policy, which a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily halted on February 1oth. The proposed policy cuts (limiting costs for new equipment, maintenance, utilities and support staff to 15%) were so severe that 22 state attorney generals and a coalition of universities filed a lawsuit against them. The lawsuit claims that “the administration ignored the will of Congress, which has included a provision designed to prevent changes to indirect cost rates since 2018 and after President Donald Trump’s first administration tried to alter the process.” The American Association of Universities launched a separate lawsuit, saying that while large research universities like Johns Hopkins would lose $200 in funding per year, small universities would not be able to do research at all. Just halting research grants for 10 days meant that research institutions received about 3,600 fewer NIH grants and $1 billion less in total funding in comparison to previous years.
Astronaut Chris Impey argued on The Conversation that the proposed cuts pose a huge risk to the US, where science and technology advances have driven 85% of economic growth since 1945 and Americans have won 40% of scientific Nobel Prizes. Funding for basic research (unrelated to business) has already been stagnant since the 1990s, and the US ranks 12th in the world for research and development spending as a percentage of GDP. Physician Charles Hong noted in The Scientist that the NIH provided $32 billion in research funding for biomedical research in 2024, which led to $92 billion in new economic activity and half a million jobs. The massive layoffs of nuclear weapons workers, immediately flagged as a safety risk, left Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency flailing to reverse course.
As a STEM researcher myself, I can’t help but think of all the research I’ve done on housing and transportation policies and programs supporting affordable housing that would be eliminated if sweeping cuts to research like these were proposed in Canada. I was presenting at a conference on transportation equity when the news broke about the purged datasets on the CDC website. We need to do everything we can to support our American colleagues in the fight to preserve scientific research, databases, grants, and frankly, progress. We cannot fight diseases, develop new treatments, prevent harm to key populations, or foster collaboration on social benefits without research. Canadian researchers need to insist on funding for their research and dissemination on issues like homelessness, environmental justice, and advances in drug treatments. We must preserve valuable data that we and our American colleagues have assembled.
