In a to Michael Kratsios, director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Trump administration said on 26 March that the US needs to revitalise its science and technology enterprise and accelerate research and development. But President Donald Trump has spent the early months of his second term dismantling the very research apparatus built for this purpose.
His latest directive invokes the idea of the “endless frontier”, a vision set out at the end of the second world war by technocrat Vannevar Bush, who led the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) starting in 1941. This model for investing in scientific pursuits has persisted through more than a dozen presidencies.
Now, that vision has come crashing down. The Trump administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force have terminated thousands of jobs across federal agencies and suspended or cancelled research funding worth billions of dollars.
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“Vannevar Bush’s framework has been the defining one for eight decades and it was foundational to the US becoming the global leader in science and technology,” says , a historian at the University of Washington in Seattle. “If the Trump Administration continues on the path of defunding university research and dismantling key research-related federal agencies, it will be hard, if not impossible, for that global leadership to continue.”
The post-war order
At OSRD, Bush led research on improving radar systems for detecting enemy ships and planes, the mass production of penicillin and the development of the first atomic bombs – all crucial to the war effort. But in late 1944, as the US and allied powers were grinding towards victory, he was already thinking about how to secure the peace that would follow.
In a report he released shortly before the war’s end, Bush envisioned the US government building on its unprecedented wartime investments in scientific research. The idea of the endless frontier spurred the formation of the US National Science Foundation in 1950 and led to expanded funding to other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.
And it paid off. In the following decades, the US landed astronauts on the moon, established weather and GPS satellites, created the modern internet and led the effort to complete the Human Genome Project. Each of those developments created thousands of new jobs and some even spurred entirely new industries.
After 1946, US government investment in research and development generally increased. By 1961, government science and technology funding had already hit $58 billion – even before the ambitious and costly moon missions began – and it continued rising, on average, until it reached a high point of $175 billion in 2009. Since then, it has dipped a bit, but remained around $158 billion in 2024, according to the .
A crucial part of that spending went to basic scientific research, such as the atomic physics that eventually led to medical imaging technologies. The government budget for basic science funding rose between 1961 and 2024 from $1 billion to $11 billion, while health research soared from $3 billion to $38 billion over the same period.
The economic payoffs for an investment this massive can be difficult to fully calculate, but they are considerable. A by the non-profit organisation United for Medical Research found that every dollar of funding from the National Institutes of Health has delivered $2.56 in economic activity. The agency also says every dollar of publicly funded basic research stimulates an additional $8 of private investment in R&D. These effects can last decades. For example, US counties that had double the average number of OSRD electronics patents in the 1940s saw as much as 65 per cent higher employment in this industry in the 1970s, according to a report.
Cataclysmic cuts
The extreme cuts to science funding this year are simply unprecedented. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that federal research funding has sometimes gone up and down over the years, but there is no comparison to what is happening now. Greider’s 1984 discovery of the enzyme telomerase – which plays a crucial role in ageing and cancer processes – won her the for physiology or medicine. As someone whose research has been steadily funded by the National Institutes of Health, she says the current moment is an “existential crisis” for her colleagues and students.
The future of US industry – including technology, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies – also hinges upon the students trained by research universities, says Greider. She says multiple universities have already rescinded offers to PhD programme applicants and laid off staff in response to funding uncertainty.
The Trump administration’s clampdown on research spending has also had global consequences. For example, Johns Hopkins University in Maryland from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Trump administration slashed USAID’s budget in February, which shut down Johns Hopkins research and public health projects focused on preventing or treating diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS while eliminating more than 2200 jobs across 44 countries.
And cuts to joint research projects with institutions outside the US have made waves around the world. Seven universities in Australia alone are facing the loss of US government funding worth up to $600 million, according to .
Projects both inside the US and out have been scrutinised to see if they align with the Trump administration’s climate scepticism and hostility toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Researchers in Australia, Canada, the UK and multiple European countries have received US government questionnaires checking whether the US-funded projects they work on ideologically align with those policies.
“The Trump administration is not just cutting funding across the board, but also effectively banning many types of research it does not like, while increasing funding in projects that align with its interests,” says at Yale Law School. “That has a profound impact in shaping the purpose and trajectory of scientific inquiry and technological development, both within the US and beyond its borders.”
Filling the gap
The widespread disruption of the US research system is an opportunity for China, European countries and other parts of the world to claim – or reclaim – global leadership in science and technology. China’s public and private R&D spending has grown 20-fold between 2000 and 2021, making it the second highest R&D spender after the US.
Meanwhile, the European Union is in third place for overall R&D spending, with member states having committed €93.5 billion to the flagship . Yann LeCun, a pioneer in artificial intelligence research and chief AI scientist at Meta, said in on LinkedIn that Europe has an opportunity to attract some of the best scientists in the world because “the US seems set on destroying its public research funding system”. European universities are now welcoming more US-based researchers with new programmes such as at France’s Aix-Marseille University.
Opportunities outside the US now beckon early-career researchers, says , a Brazilian-born neuroscientist at the California National Primate Research Center whose research with non-human primates aims to address neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. She says her lab had multiple federal grants that were either cancelled or trapped in suspended review – and she has encountered university hiring freezes while applying for other positions. Now she is preparing to move to Germany to continue her work.
“Imagine recruiting a scientist from Brazil, spending eight years training her in the US and when she is ready to become a principal investigator and have her own lab to advance important scientific questions, sending her to Europe,” says Beckman. “This is what is happening to me and others right now.”
żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs have always faced a choice of where to do their work, but the incentives for choosing the US are evaporating. , who won the Nobel prize in physics in 2001, says he faced a choice in 1998 between staying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or accepting an offer for work in Germany. He remained at MIT – but said he would have gone back home instead if faced with the uncertainty hanging over US researchers today. “Science needs continuity and reliable planning,” says Ketterle. “This is in danger now, and we will soon see the consequences that the US is no longer the place for the best scientists to be.”
