‘A huge rupture in everything’: US science faced major upheaval in 2025

The Donald J. Trump administration’s array of policy and funding actions in 2025 amounted to one of the biggest upheavals in the US federal government’s approach to science in the past 80 years, analysts tell C&EN.The administration began acting almost immediately upon taking office, ultimately canceling grants; releasing executive orders requiring political review of research; appearing to ban certain words, such as diversity, Black, and abortion, from research proposals; and proposing budgets with massive cuts to research, among many other actions.The administration’s moves were in stark contrast to the government’s approach to science since World War II, when President Harry Truman’s administration began to set up a structure to fund basic research, says Arthur Daemmrich, director of the Arizona State University Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, based in Washington, DC.Administrations have always imposed changing policies and philosophies on science, but this year saw scrutiny of processes that have always been taken for granted, he says.“Now we have an administration that doesn’t have sacred cows,” Daemmrich says. “They have really caused a huge rupture in everything.”Much has changed since the postwar era, a spokesperson from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) says in a statement to C&EN. “The private sector, philanthropic community, and federal government have different roles in the ecosystem than seventy years ago. The era of unfocused bureaucratic bloat that has stifled discovery and eroded public trust in recent decades is ending.”Collectively, though, the administration’s actions in 2025 have led to huge amounts of