The first 100 days of the second Trump presidency were traumatic for many Americans, given that the president’s approval rate has already fallen to historic lows (just 41%, a new negative record for a newly elected since Eisenhower’s times, it seems). But despite the earthquake that led to finance and foreign policy, perhaps no one has grossed the blow as the scientific community with stars and stripes. Indiscriminate cuts, retaliation, threats, are dismantling what has been a flagship of the United States to date 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 magazines such as Nature, begin to ask themselves aloud if something of American science will remain after the passage of Trump 2.0.
The cut study, indeed no, indeed boh
A good example of what is happening in recent weeks is the story that involved Women’s Health Initiative, a federal research program that since 1991 has enrolled over 160 thousand American women to study the health problems related to menopause, and the possible therapies with which to deal with them. The results were manifold, and of maximum relevance, and led the evolution of international guidelines for the management of cardiovascular, oncological and musculoskeletal risks related to menopause.
However, many successes did not prevent the dark of the cuts of the new American administration from falling on the Women’s Health Initiative, perhaps judged too inclusive for the anti-wake agenda of Trumpism. It does not matter that the health problems to which this research program is dedicated to more than half of middle -aged adults (women are more numerous than men going forward over the years): in recent weeks, in fact, the National Institute of Health has notified to the project coordinators that the funding would have been suspended starting next September. Being the wider study on the female health of the world, the news obviously aroused sensational, especially since the annual costs for the Federal Government do not exceed 10 million dollars. So much to push the agency to return to its steps, and announce that the funding will be restored (circumstance of which, at the moment, official confirmations are missing).
Demolite government agencies
Meanwhile, the program of the new administration proceeds shipped, and aims to drastically reduce the expense of the federal government to raise the funds necessary for cutting taxes of five thousand billion dollars promised by Trump to its voters. In April, Chamber and Senate approved the budget program for the next few years that commits the country to reduce the expenses of the federal agencies by a minimum of four billion, leaving the door open even much more demanding cuts, which the administration thinks of elaborating in the coming months.
The plans that emerged in recent months speak of a reduction in federal expenditure that could reach a thousand and five hundred billion dollars in 2026, and which would fall as a dark on research investments: there is talk of a scientific budget halved for NASA, and a 40 percent reduction of that of the National Institute of Health, the US agency that plays a role similar to our Higher Institute for Health for Health for Health. public funding of medical research.
To put the numbers in perspective, the Nih in 2024 had a budget of approximately 48 billion dollars (the most full -bodied outside the military sphere for the United States), and financed research projects on average over six thousand every year. These financial resources have fueled scientific studies that have contributed to the development of 99 percent of the drugs approved in the United States (and therefore more or less all over the world, given that the decisions of the Food and Drugs Administration influence those of all the main regulatory agencies) in the last 10 years. With an almost halved budget, it is evident that the cuts threatened by the Trump Administration could produce a tangible and catastrophic effect on medical innovation and health of all, American citizens, and not, in the coming years.
University research
Another sore point concerns the great American universities, targeted by the president not only for the desire for savings, but also in an arm wrestling with which the president would like to bring these private institutions under the control of the government, which have always been independent and often the outbreak of dissent towards the policies of American rulers. To date, they have already been cut or frozen research calls addressed to the main American universities for at least six billion dollars.
Harvard saw himself suspending about two billion dollars of federal funding, in retaliation against protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza in his campus. Same thing at Columbia, where the locks blocked amount to about 400 million dollars. At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the blocking of funding was motivated by the participation of two transhitions transsexuals to the activities of the university’s women’s swimming team, in 2022 It is clear that it is a move that wants to eradicate what the administration has called “far -left ideologies” from the major higher education centers of the country.
At the moment it is impossible to know who will have won it. In the meantime, the entire American scientific community remains with suspended breath, waiting to find out if and how the government’s policy will evolve towards research in the coming months. With fear, more and more concrete, that things will never be the same again.