‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels

From ScienceMag:

It was a conversation neither wanted to have. Last month, University of Maryland professor Anne Simon broke the difficult news to Xiaobao Ying that she didn’t have funding to extend his assistant research scientist position beyond July as they had originally planned. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had agreed last year to fund a field trial for their team’s work on citrus greening, an economically important crop disease, which would have covered his salary for 2 years. But after President Donald Trump’s administration took over, the funds were frozen. “It’s very hard because you’re devastating people’s lives,” Simon says of the conversation with Ying. “I’ve never had to do this in 38 years.”

Ying, a single father who has worked in Simon’s lab for 5 years, is now scrambling to find another research job. He’s only seen one position that he felt qualified to apply for. “I don’t think it will be easy,” he says. “Everywhere funding is short.” In the meantime, he plans to try to get by as an Uber driver.

Similar conversations are taking place across the country as the federal government has paused or terminated billions of dollars of grants, proposed slashing research funding by more than 40% for key research agencies in the next fiscal year, and tried—so far without success—to cut overhead payments to universities. In response, graduate schools have reduced the size of their incoming cohorts and faculty have been anxiously watching their budgets and worrying about their own careers. “My lab is definitely going to shrink,” says Arthi Jayaraman, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware, Newark.

So is U.S. academic science as a whole—perhaps dramatically. Numbers released in May by the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicate that if Congress approves the cuts to the agency proposed by the White House, the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%—from 95,700 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs during this fiscal year, to 21,400 in 2026. Young researchers supported by other agencies would also be hit, and even senior faculty worry about their future. “It’s a nightmare,” Simon says. “I really fear for the future of science.” (NSF declined to comment for the story.)

Multiple industry representatives tell Science they are seeing notable increases in the number of scientists applying for jobs, with Regeneron saying applications from people with doctorate degrees are up 20%. But it’s not clear that industry will be able to absorb all the Ph.D.s currently on the job market, especially given the flood of former federal scientists also looking for work.

For young researchers, “there is a lot of pressure to essentially leave the country or not pursue research,” says Emilya Ventriglia, a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Brown University who once thought she’d do a postdoc—but now isn’t so sure. “I’m looking at these people who … are extremely accomplished, some of the top in their field,” she says of the postdocs she knows, “and the door is closing on them.”

A prominent chemistry blogger who has tracked the faculty job market for 9 years wrote on his blog in April that he expects faculty job openings to be down by at least 20% over the coming year. “Universities are under tremendous governmental and financial pressure,” he wrote. Others note that if researchers begin to scale down their labs and take on larger teaching roles, teaching positions could decline as well.

Current junior faculty are also feeling nervous, fearing they will lack the money and the staff to get their research program off the ground and fulfill tenure requirements. Biophysicist Krishna Mudumbi, who began his position as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in January, has been carefully weighing how to spend his limited startup package, uncertain whether new sources of funding will materialize anytime soon. The anxiety, he says, “really reduces my ability to do high-risk, high-reward type of experiments” because by the end of a project, he wants to be sure he’ll have research findings to show for it.

Many academics Science spoke with said they hope universities will adjust tenure expectations, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic. Otherwise, some fear assistant professors will lose their jobs in the coming years simply because they did not have the funding to amass a strong research record. “It’s a very, very scary climate for a lot of junior faculty members,” says Barbara Landau, a cognitive science professor at Johns Hopkins University who is particularly worried that universities will see a reversal in recent gains in gender and racial diversity.

At Duke University, even some tenured professors are worried about their job security. In May, basic science researchers in Duke’s School of Medicine were told that if they don’t pull in enough external funding over a 3-year period, their salary could be adjusted downward. “It’s a creative way to go around the tenure system and force tenured professors to quit on their own,” says a Duke professor who spoke with Science on the condition of anonymity.

In an email to Science, Duke officials wrote, “We are looking at every aspect of our finances with the goal of preserving as many jobs as we can.” Faculty salaries is one aspect under consideration, they added, but no final decisions have been made.

If the policy does take effect, its staying power may depend on the outcome of an ongoing lawsuit filed by professors at the Tufts University School of Medicine against a similar policy enacted at their institution in 2017. That lawsuit is scheduled to be heard in court later this year.

Many are looking ahead, wondering what all this portends for the future of U.S. academic science. “The sands are shifting,” says Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who has spent decades studying the scientific workforce. “Academic science has become a much more risky career proposition in this environment.”

The situation could make it challenging for professors to recruit lab members—especially those coming from abroad. Temporary visa holders currently account for 41% of Ph.D. students and 58% of postdocs at U.S. universities, according to a 2023 survey of the science, engineering, and health fields. But that influx of talent could run dry if foreign candidates are alarmed by funding cuts and visa cancellations and decide to go elsewhere. Jayaraman, who was once an international student in the United States herself, says that under the current circumstances, “I probably wouldn’t come here. … I would invest my time in a place where there’s stability.”

Meanwhile, some U.S. students and researchers are weighing whether they’d be better off elsewhere. One university in Canada launched a program to attract 20 doctoral students whose acceptance into a U.S. graduate program had been rescinded or who were reconsidering attending. And in Europe, the newly created Choose Europe For Science program is poised to invest €500 million between now and 2027 to attract researchers at a variety of career stages.  

Ying, a green card holder originally from China, says he wants to find a research job in the U.S. But he’s not sure that will be possible anytime soon. “The situation is very stressful,” he says. “I have trouble sleeping.”

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