How Trump’s moves could dramatically reshape the scientific workforce
From ScienceMag:
In some ways, Jessica* and her husband were ahead of the curve. Months before Donald Trump was elected U.S. president for a second time, the chemistry postdoc began to submit applications for faculty jobs in Europe. “We were noticing the momentum in Florida,” she says of the overhaul of public universities that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis had implemented in her home state. The pair was also “very concerned” about Project 2025, the blueprint of presidential priorities laid out by a conservative think tank. “That’s when we thought, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look outside the U.S.”
By the time she received an offer from a German university in March 2025, many of her worst fears had started to materialize. The Trump administration had begun to cancel grants touching on politically sensitive topics as part of a major shake-up at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), agencies she saw as potential funders of her work. The rise of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric also didn’t sit right with her as someone who wanted to form a diverse lab. She accepted the offer and moved overseas in September. “Our plan is to stay in Germany full time for the rest of our lives,” she said recently while walking to a German language class. (*Jessica requested Science not use her real name because her husband, who has yet to move to Germany, works for the U.S. government.)
It’s still not clear how much of the administration’s transformation of science will endure. And some researchers, especially established ones with large labs and multiple funding streams, may ultimately see little impact on their work. But the turmoil that has gripped the U.S. scientific community over the past year has led others to look abroad for opportunities, like Jessica, or to consider abandoning their STEM career ambitions entirely. “Some of my peers have left science,” says Emma Stauffenberg, a research technician at Stanford University who plans to apply to graduate programs in the fall.
Meanwhile, uncertainty about future funding has left university administrators and principal investigators, some of whom spoke with Science on the condition of anonymity, considering limits on hiring and grad school admissions that would squeeze the pipeline of new scientists. The composition of the people flowing through that pipeline might change as well with the decline in funding for diversity efforts and rising barriers to foreign students and researchers.
Just how many scientists have abandoned careers in the United States may not emerge for years. But to many, the administration has already dealt a major blow to the workforce by making it harder for many scientists to plan for the future—to envision the path forward for themselves, their labs, and their departments. “There have definitely been some cuts and delays in getting funded,” one chemist says of how her field has fared over the past year. But “what we’re more seeing is the toll of the uncertainty.”
Last year, the Trump administration stunned the scientific community with its swift and wide-ranging moves to upend federal funding programs that dole out roughly $60 billion in research support every year to institutions of higher education. Universities across the country were hit with pauses or outright cancellations of their grants. Harvard—one of several universities targeted with accusations of antisemitism—saw its entire $2.2 billion portfolio frozen. Some funding was later reinstated after a series of court cases and settlements, and the country’s two main funding agencies—NIH and NSF—spent their full budgets by the end of the fiscal year.
But U.S. scientists are fearful of what might be on the horizon. Last year, the Trump administration proposed slashing 2026 funding for many science agencies, including a roughly 40% cut at NIH and more than 50% at NSF. It also announced federal agencies would lower the indirect cost payments to universities that cover research overhead, such as building maintenance and administrative costs. The reductions, in some cases by 50% or more, could devastate universities’ ability to support research.
The U.S. Congress seems unlikely to go along with most of the proposed cuts. And the indirect cost cap is on hold as legal challenges work their way through the courts, several of which have already upheld challenges to the change. But in the meantime, it’s difficult for many labs to figure out how many trainees they can support in the coming years.
“On our campus we’ve had to have some very serious conversations about the size of our Ph.D. programs,” says Suzanne Barbour, dean of the graduate school at Duke University. “When our students are admitted, we promise them 5 years of support—and that’s stipend, it’s tuition, it’s fees, it’s health insurance, it’s dental insurance. And we have to make good on that promise.”
But admitting too few graduate students also carries risks. One department chair—who likened research teams to “massive locomotor trains” that, once slowed down, take time to get going again—has been advising faculty to continue to take on lab members as usual and reassess in a year or two. “Especially for early-career faculty, if they pump the brakes right now, that will have lasting impacts—they will be feeling that 5 or 10 years into the future,” she says.
For most STEM fields, graduate enrollment for the fall 2025 semester was roughly on par with what it had been the year before, according to a report released last week by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that looked at data from institutions across the country. But some fields saw declines, the largest of which was a 14% drop for the computer sciences. Enrollment of international graduate students was also down by 6%. That number had risen steadily over the previous several years, notes Matthew Holsapple, senior director of research at the Clearinghouse, “making this year’s downturn a pretty meaningful shift.”
It’s too early to tell what the numbers will look like this year. Some universities, including Harvard, plan to admit fewer students. But many academics told Science that final decisions haven’t been made, or that they’ll be made by individual departments and faculty members, rather than by the institution as a whole.
- Anonymous chemist
Positions further along the academic pipeline may also get harder to come by. Postdoc openings are difficult to track because many are filled by word of mouth and not posted publicly. But tenure-track job openings appear to be down at U.S. institutions in three fields for which crowdsourced tracking documents are available: ecology and evolutionary biology, where openings dropped by 18% during the fall 2025 semester compared with 2024; biomedical engineering, which dropped by 16%; and chemistry, which saw a 25% decline. “We’ll be right at or above COVID levels,” predicts Chemjobber, a chemist who anonymously blogs about careers in the field and maintains the chemistry job list. Fewer faculty positions could create a backup in the system, leading some promising early-career researchers to stay on in postdoc positions hoping they’ll land a tenure-track job the following year, the blogger notes. That could leave fewer openings for new lab members.
Some may pivot to industry, which has increasingly become the destination of choice for many Ph.D. graduates. But hiring is also slowing at some companies—notably those in the biomedical sector, which have been hit by changes in the federal funding landscape and a reduction in venture capital investment. And any early-career scientist coming out of academia will be up against applications from the flood of researchers who left the federal workforce over the past year. “It’s all a compounding effect,” the chemistry blogger says.
The complexion of the U.S. scientific community could also change as a result of an executive order the Trump administration issued in January 2025 that targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the federal government. Since then the administration has cut millions of dollars in funding for programs aimed at broadening participation in research. The loss of that funding could cause promising students from groups underrepresented in science to miss out on a career in the field.
Néstor Carballeira saw the impact of those funding cuts firsthand. In the spring of 2025, the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras chemistry professor received word that NIH was canceling two programs, known as URISE and GRISE, that helped institutions offer research, mentorship, and career development training to a diverse pool of undergraduate and graduate students, including racial minorities and those from lower income families. Programs Carballeira had overseen at his institution for more than 20 years were abruptly halted, meaning fewer internship opportunities, the loss of an invited speaker series, and no funding to send students to scientific meetings outside Puerto Rico. “You have the momentum going,” Carballeira says, “and then the momentum is lost.”
He says current grad students at his institution remain “quite committed” to pursuing careers in science, but he worries about undergrads who missed the chance to get their first taste of research. Many science majors start out with medical school in mind, he notes, so “they need to be hooked into the scientific enterprise very early.”
NSF has canceled similar funding streams, as well as research grants to develop STEM educational approaches that reach as many U.S. students as possible. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did not respond to a request for comment on the administration’s stance. In an address last year about the administration’s push to support “gold standard science,” its director—Michael Kratsios—said DEI initiatives “degrade our scientific enterprise” and represent “an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community.”
- Néstor Carballeira
- University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
Many in the scientific community see it differently. “It’s been a terrible loss,” laments one university administrator who has studied the STEM workforce. The eliminated programs aimed to “broaden who has access to science and the opportunities that come with a science career,” she says. “As a society, we would be better off if everyone had that opportunity.”
Brandon Jones, who until September 2025 worked on workforce development and broadening participation within NSF’s directorate for geosciences, says he was disappointed to see NSF shutter a program called Cultural Transformation in the Geoscience Community that helped institutions make their research environments more welcoming and supportive, including by improving mentorship, antiracism and antiharassment practices, and accessibility. The program “was supporting the transformations in the system that are necessary for individuals to thrive,” he says.
Jones, who took an early retirement from the federal workforce last year and serves as president of the American Geophysical Union, worries U.S. competitiveness will flag if the country fails to invest in supporting its pipeline of researchers. “We have global competitors who are doing that, and we are backing away,” he says. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”
Also at risk is the flow of researchers from outside the country. U.S. labs increasingly rely on early-career researchers born elsewhere: Temporary residents make up 41% of U.S. Ph.D. students and 58% of postdocs in science, engineering, and health fields, according to data collected by NSF in 2023. But many academics Science spoke with said they expect the numbers to contract—both because the administration has made visas harder to get and because working in the U.S. may simply become less appealing to international researchers.
“U.S. universities are [still] the place where top research is being done,” and they draw many talented early-career researchers from abroad, says Ina Ganguli, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies the scientific community. But in the years ahead foreign researchers may look at the volatile funding landscape and anti-immigration rhetoric and decide to apply for jobs elsewhere. “What would it take for the U.S. to lose its position as the leader in global science?” she asks. “I think that’s the question that we don’t know.”
A drop in international applicants could create openings for U.S. citizens. But one university administrator noted that unless salaries for early-career researchers go up at U.S. institutions, U.S. nationals may not rush to apply. “Graduate students have been really poorly paid for a long time. And a lot of international students are willing to take those jobs because they are a pathway to a life in America.”
Barbour says the squeeze on academic careers could lead to needed conversations about how to train scientists for nonacademic jobs. It’s not a new issue, she says: Most graduate students today aren’t aiming for a faculty position, and are instead interested in careers in industry and other sectors. “But up until now I’m not sure how attentive we’ve been to make sure students have the skills they need in that nonacademic workforce.” Trump may provide an additional spur.
Adjusting to a new funding landscape will inevitably be painful, Barbour says. “But I think there are things we can learn that will help us to be even more impactful for our students. It’s foolish to waste a good crisis.”
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