Trump slump? Attendance plummets at some science meetings, but others hold steady

From ScienceMag:

When the Entomological Society of America decided years ago to hold its 2025 annual conference in Portland, Oregon, organizers had no inkling of the headwinds they’d be facing. In the weeks leading up to the November meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered National Guard troops be deployed to “War ravaged Portland” amid a flurry of protests outside the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Then, the federal government started what would become the longest shutdown in U.S. history, leaving many federal scientists—including those at the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which typically send many insect experts to the gathering—officially barred from presenting their research.

Conference organizers saw more cancellations than usual, most of them coming from federal employees. But the meeting still drew more than 3400 attendees—only a few percentage points lower than in 2024. A few months earlier, the society had been projecting the meeting would be its largest since before the COVID-19 pandemic, but its staff were satisfied with their final tally. “We still consider it a healthy turnout,” says Chris Stelzig, the society’s executive director.

The same scenario played out at the annual meetings of many other scientific societies, an investigation by Science has found. Following concerns reported last year that attendance at U.S.-based conferences would drop sharply in 2025, Science contacted two dozen U.S. societies to find out how those numbers actually shifted. Of the 16 that responded, only five reported that attendance had gone down by more than a few percentage points.

Those statistics are only part of the story, however. About one-third of the societies contacted by Science did not provide information about attendance trends, and it’s possible those societies didn’t want to advertise declining numbers. One society representative who spoke to Science on the condition of anonymity said they had heard of drops as large as 30% at other meetings. “If I’m at a society that has a 30% cut, I’m not going to be very proud of that.” And because annual meetings are often a crucial source of a society’s revenue, some scientists are worried that, if sustained over several years, drops in attendance could leave organizations in a precarious position.

Of the five societies that did experience a drop in numbers, most reported declines in attendees coming from both inside and outside the United States. “We lost some of the federal [employee] registrations we would have had,” Ronald Wasserstein, executive director at the American Statistical Association (ASA), says of his society’s August meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, which had a 14% drop in overall attendance. “There’s no doubt that we also experienced significantly fewer international attendees.”

At the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans in December, one senior academic scientist says he had to pivot at the last moment to give a presentation prepared by a collaborator at the U.S. Geological Survey. The federal shutdown was over by then, but—like many federal scientists who had planned to travel to the AGU meeting—the colleague had run into problems getting official clearance from agency officials to attend, says the academic, who requested anonymity to protect the collaborator’s identity.

The AGU meeting ended up drawing just over 21,000 attendees, which was a far cry from the 31,000 attendees at its 2024 meeting in Washington, D.C., but roughly on par with attendance at its 2017 meeting in New Orleans. “There are many variables that affect participation in any given year,” an AGU spokesperson wrote to Science.

Scientists who participated in meetings with reduced numbers say they didn’t notice sparsely attended presentations or poster sessions. “Someone later told me [the AGU conference] was smaller—but it didn’t feel that way,” says University of Vermont geoscientist Paul Bierman. “It felt like a very dynamic meeting.” Chrystal Starbird, a biochemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), felt similarly about the American Society for Cell Biology’s (ASCB’s) December meeting in Philadelphia, which saw a 17% decline in attendance compared with 2024. “I had a wonderful experience,” she says.

Starbird’s reasons go beyond the science: She says social events, panel discussions, and other opportunities provided a space for important conversations about challenges facing the community, including funding cuts and changes in faculty hiring. “I left the conference knowing that others were also deeply concerned about what the events of the past year would mean for science,” she says.

Still, reduced attendance numbers can cause financial woes for the scientific societies that put on meetings. Wasserstein says the ASA conference didn’t lose money, but it pulled in about $600,000 less than it would have if attendance numbers had held steady relative to 2024. That puts a financial strain on other programs the nonprofit organization offers that don’t have their own source of revenue, he says. And because scientists often renew society memberships so they can get reduced rates on conference registration fees, reduced attendance also impacts membership revenue. “Not only did they not come to a meeting, but we’re seeing membership decreasing,” says Kevin Wilson, vice president of ASCB. “That’s difficult.”

The societies Science spoke with didn’t report being in dire straits financially. But many scientists worry they could be hit harder in the years to come if federal funding were to drop precipitously or if international researchers are increasingly put off by—or prevented from—traveling to the U.S. “One bad year could kill one of our favorite scientific societies,” says UNC cell and developmental biologist Mark Peifer.

Staff at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) are among those who are worried. Their membership includes scientists and public health professionals in about 100 countries, many of whom were affected by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and other changes last year. “The community at large has been quite demoralized,” says past ASTMH President David Fidock.

The society’s 2025 meeting didn’t have the massive drop in attendance that organizers had braced for, according to CEO Jamie Bay Nishi, in part because it was held in Canada—a country that many international members felt comfortable traveling to. But this year their conference will shift to Washington, D.C. “We aren’t facing an immediate existential risk,” Nishi says of her society’s financial outlook. “But our annual meeting is our flagship activity each year and diminished participation for a prolonged period puts significant financial strain on our organization.”

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