Ten-year research initiatives have been cancelled, subsidies for dissident colleges have been suspended, and the budgets of NASA and the National Institute of Health have been reduced in half. With 100 days until his inauguration, the American scientific community is beginning to question if it will survive Donald Trump’s second term.

As the president’s approval rating has already dropped to record lows (only 41%, apparently the lowest for a newly elected politician since Eisenhower), the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have been unpleasant for many Americans. His impact on international policy and economics has been seismic, but maybe no one has been hit as hard as the renowned scientific community.

Indiscriminate cuts, retaliation, and threats are dismantling what until now has been a jewel in the crown of the United States and, at least since the end of the Second World War, one of the engines of its technological, economic and military primacy. So much so that many, even in important journals like Nature , are starting to wonder out loud whether there will be anything left of American science after the passage of Trump 2.0.

Research programme cuts

A good example of what is happening in recent weeks is the story involving the Women’s Health Initiative, a federal research programme that since 1991 has enrolled over 160,000 American women to study health problems related to menopause and possible therapies to address them.

The results have been multiple and of the utmost importance and have guided the evolution of international guidelines for the management of cardiovascular, oncological and musculoskeletal risks related to menopause.

So many successes have not prevented the axe of cuts from the new American administration from also falling on the Women’s Health Initiative, perhaps judged too inclusive for Trump’s anti-woke agenda. It does not matter that the health problems to which this research program is dedicated concern more than half of middle-aged adults (women outnumber men as they get older): in recent weeks, in fact, the National Institute of Health notified the project coordinators that funding would be suspended starting next September.

Since this is the largest study on women’s health in the world, the news obviously caused an uproar, especially since the annual costs for the federal government do not exceed 10 million dollars. So much so that the agency has backtracked and announced that funding will be restored (a circumstance of which, however, there is currently no official confirmation).

Government agencies destroyed

The new administration’s programme, meanwhile, is moving forward quickly and aims to drastically reduce federal government spending to raise the funds needed for the five trillion dollar tax cut promised by Trump to his voters.

In April, the House and Senate approved a budget plan for the next few years that commits the country to reducing federal agency spending by a minimum of four billion, leaving the door open to even more significant cuts, which the administration plans to develop in the coming months.

The plans that have emerged in recent months speak of a reduction in federal spending that could reach one thousand five hundred billion dollars in 2026, and that would fall like an axe on investments in research: there is talk of a scientific budget cut in half for NASA and a 40 percent reduction in that of the National Institute of Health, the US agency that plays a role similar to our Istituto Superiore di Sanità for the public funding of medical research.

To put the numbers into perspective, the NIH had a budget of about $48 billion in 2024 (the largest outside of the military for the United States) and funds an average of over six thousand research projects each year.

These financial resources have fuelled scientific studies that have contributed to the development of 99 percent of drugs approved in the United States (and therefore more or less all over the world, since the decisions of the Food and Drug Administration influence those of all the major regulatory agencies) in the last 10 years.

With a budget almost halved, it is clear that the cuts threatened by the Trump administration could have a tangible and catastrophic effect on medical innovation and on the health of everyone, American citizens and non-Americans, in the coming years.

University research

Another sore point concerns the major American universities, targeted by the president not only for the mania for savings but also in a tug of war with which the president would like to bring these private institutions, always independent and often a hotbed of dissent towards the policies of American governments, under the control of the government. To date, research grants addressed to the main American universities for at least six billion dollars have already been cut or frozen.

Harvard has had about $2 billion in federal funding suspended in retaliation for protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza on its campuses. Columbia has seen the same thing, with about $400 million in funding blocked.

At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, funding was blocked because two transgender athletes participated in the university’s women’s swimming team in 2022.

At Cornell in Ithaca, New York; Princeton; and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, cuts were announced without giving specific reasons, but it is clear that this is a move aimed at eradicating what the administration has called “far-left ideologies” from the country’s major centres of higher education.

It is currently difficult to predict the winner. The whole scientific community in the United States is watching impatiently to see whether and how the government’s approach to research will change in the upcoming months. The dread that things will never be the same again is becoming more tangible.