Donald Trump and Elon Musk put science on the chopping block in 2025

One of the most enduring images of 2025 is the picture of billionaire Elon Musk, at the time serving as a special adviser to the administration of US President Donald Trump, wielding a shiny, red chainsaw as he crowed about cuts to the US federal government. It was a heavy-handed metaphor for the onslaught to come, and from cancelled space missions to a rejection of vital climate change and public health programmes, science felt the chop.

Trump’s dismantling of nearly a century of US leadership in the sciences was swift, and the effects may endure far longer than we can predict. It began in a frenzy – just a week after Trump was inaugurated in January, he signed an order to temporarily halt grants and loans made by US federal agencies. This disrupted or terminated thousands of grants overseen by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the largest funders of biomedical research in the world, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to Grant Witness, a website tracking federal grant funding changes under Trump, the cut in grants from the NIH and NSF amount to around $3 billion altogether.

In the months that followed, Musk led an independent task force called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on a mission to slash government spending. DOGE’s targets fell across the US government, but many of its decisions affected scientists. There were job cuts at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), among many others. And the hits keep coming. As recently as October, the Trump administration revealed that it planned deep cuts at the science centres of the US Geological Survey, which monitor the health of US agricultural and natural resources, and the National Park Service, which oversees federally protected land that serves as a refuge for animals and a living laboratory for biologists and ecologists.

It all adds up to one of the most drastic policy shifts of the Trump era. Since the second world war, the US has invested in scientific pursuits as a path towards progress and economic prosperity. It was an idea set out by the leader of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the 1940s, a predecessor to the NSF. This framework, called the “endless frontier”, was a pioneering approach to becoming a global leader in research and development of key technologies that changed the world. Trump has brought that crashing down.

Not only has he dismantled much of the research apparatus of the federal government, but his administration has also put pressure on universities to align their teaching and research with US government priorities. And he has gone even further in his repudiation of science. To no one’s surprise, Trump began the process of removing the US from the world’s premiere climate deal, the Paris Agreement, as soon as he took office. Later in the year, speaking at the United Nations, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and labelled renewable energy sources such as wind and solar “a scam”.

Not content with these proclamations, the Trump administration has also axed or undermined key climate databases and reports previously created by the US government. With fewer staff at many of the science-related agencies, monthly climate reporting calls at NOAA have been cancelled, for instance, and key reports such as the US National Climate Assessment have been terminated. The employees who are left are also toeing the Trump line: for example, NOAA scientists refused to link warming weather to climate change earlier this year, to the shock of independent climate researchers.

US public health data has also been gutted. The scientists running the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a crucial tracker for drug use, addiction and mental health in the US, were fired in April. A few months later, the government laid off employees at the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and ended reports that monitor food insecurity throughout the country, which help allocate funding for food assistance. Most recently, 100 positions at the National Center for Health Statistics were eliminated, including most of the staff who run the National Vital Statistics System, which tracks births and deaths in the US and monitors causes of deaths and maternal mortality. The National Death Index was also cut, eliminating a key source of information for public health researchers as well as those involved in long-term studies across agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Health policy has become particularly chaotic and evidence-free thanks to Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Kennedy, a long-time vaccine sceptic, has overseen the layoff of more than 10,000 people at the agency, and often clashed with public health officials, inciting a spate of resignations. He is the driving force behind the dangerous – and thoroughly debunked – claim that vaccines contribute to autism and even went so far as to promote an unfounded assertion that Tylenol (paracetamol) taken during pregnancy causes the condition. In June, Kennedy bypassed standard protocols and announced that the CDC would no longer recommend covid-19 vaccines for children and pregnant people. His tenure as head of HHS has made clear that the US anti-vaccine movement is now firmly embedded in the highest ranks of government and has eroded what little trust Americans had in the country’s public health agencies in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.

Under Trump, the US is also turning away from its leadership in space. The president’s budget request, delivered in May but still not signed into law, lays out a plan to cut 47 per cent of NASA’s science budget and eliminate dozens of missions, including some spacecraft and telescopes that have already been built or launched. Samples from Mars already collected by the Perseverance rover would never be returned to Earth. The DAVINCI probe, planned to be the first to enter the clouds of Venus in half a century, would never get off the ground. The OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft, which is already on its way to the asteroid Apophis, would be left to fly by it without learning what we can about asteroids on potential collision courses with Earth. NASA’s leadership has also been in turmoil, with the head of the US transportation agency acting as administrator while Trump has nominated, rescinded his nomination and then re-nominated the billionaire Jared Isaacman for the role. A leaked manifesto written by Isaacman suggests that if confirmed as head of NASA, he would oversee a massive outsourcing of NASA science and space activity to the private sector.

This isn’t the only area where the private sector has gained power under the Trump administration. Big tech has cozied up to the president, with a parade of billionaire executives attending his inauguration, bringing him lavish personalised gifts and using their firms to fund the president’s outlandish addition to the White House, a $300 million ballroom. They may be ingratiating themselves to the man who could help them manoeuvre around antitrust litigation, they may be hoping to avoid the worst of Trump’s reckless tariffs or they may simply enjoy the spoils of environmental regulation rollbacks that could allow for the building of massive data centres to fuel their AI products.

After almost a year of the second Trump administration, it is still impossible to say exactly how science will fare, not least because the 2026 federal budget is yet to be fully approved by Congress. But even if not all of Trump’s proposed cuts go through, the haphazard and at times hostile manner with which the entire administration has approached science and the people who do it will probably lead to more confusion, more scientists choosing to leave the US and less funding for work critical to the health and well-being of people and the planet. The end of the endless frontier has diminished the US’s global standing, and its effects will reverberate for many years or even decades to come.