ince January, President Trump has launched an unprecedented and illegal attack on science and scientists. He is not only denying scientific truth but actively seeking to undermine it. This is part of the aggressive movement toward authoritarianism his administration is pursuing. As of April 2025, the Trump administration has terminated at least $13.5 billion in health funding, including 1,660 grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and arbitrarily fired thousands of workers who ran America’s scientific infrastructure.
Government Affairs
Deconstructing Science
This is not fake news
BY The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Minority Staff.
In this first-of-its-kind analysis, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Minority Staff documented the far-reaching scope of Trump’s attacks on science and their impact on public health. His administration is deconstructing science by defunding research, silencing scientists, sowing chaos and spreading misinformation.
Defunding Research
In the first quarter of 2025, Trump officials have cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Heath (NIH). Among many other things, this translates a 31% cut in cancer research through March, compared to the same time frame last year. In addition, administration officials are weaponizing medical research for unrelated policy objectives, in part through terminating 715 NIH grants. These terminations include silencing scientists and suppressing what they can say. The administration is also controlling how scientists work together and make decisions. At least 108 scientific meetings have been canceled or delayed. For example, HHS terminated the Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders in Newborns and Children — a decision a patient group said “risks the preventable death and suffering of children with treatable rare disorders.” Worse yet, Trump officials are erasing scientific data. At least 175 public health datasets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website and 135 datasets from a central HHS data repository have been deleted. According to one doctor, “purging public health agency websites of data” has left physicians “without vetted guidance on how to treat patients.”
175 public health datasets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website and 135 datasets from a central HHS data repository have been deleted.
Undermining Truth
The administration has undermined the federal scientific research infrastructure. Nowhere is this more visible than at NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. They have seen unprecedented cuts in funding, terminated federal research grants, slashed indirect research support, and shut down labs.
NIH funding commitments in the first three months of 2025 dropped dramatically from previous years — reversing over a decade of investment in medical research. The agency has seen a 35% cut in funding through March compared to the same time frame last year. This sudden collapse in funding is the clearest sign of the administration’s effort to defund science. The number of new research grants has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade. These cuts halt the discovery of future cures and force early-career scientists out of the field. The funding freeze, however, does not just affect new research. Renewals of existing grants also plummeted, disrupting studies that have already gone through peer review, some of which had already started to produce results.
Slash and Burn Tactics
In February 2025, the administration proposed a 15% cap on NIH “indirect” cost reimbursements. These reimbursements support the infrastructure behind federally funded research: utilities, lab security, IT, animal care, biosafety, biological sample storage and more. Historically, institutions have negotiated indirect rates averaging 27% to 28%, with major research centers sometimes exceeding 60%. If this proposal were to be enacted, it would result in over $4 billion in annual losses to scientific research.
Universities and disease-advocacy groups have warned that this policy, if enacted, would force layoffs, facility closures and a reduction in the scientific workforce.
In addition to cutting grants to outside researchers, the administration has taken unprecedented steps to shut down labs run by federal scientists across NIH campuses. Among the terminated or frozen intramural programs:
- A lab advancing prenatal and fetal medicine to understand fetal development and working toward future prenatal therapies for Down syndrome.
- A team leading one of NIH’s few clinical studies on sickle cell disease. The study focused on leg ulcers and pain crises affecting hundreds of patients nationwide.
- A nationally recognized intramural program focused on Alzheimer’s disease and aging, which tracked biological and social drivers of dementia and helped develop predictive tools for long-term decline and disability.
Shutting down these programs discards decades of taxpayer investment and jeopardizes significant medical progress.
Silencing Scientists
Despite promising “radical transparency,” the Trump administration has radically restricted scientific speech. It has moved to suppress scientific communication, impose political control over the work of federal scientists and erase scientific data. Since January 20, 2025, scientific staff at NIH, CDC and other health agencies have been subject to restrictions requiring all public-facing communication to be cleared by political appointees. This includes responses to media inquiries, scientific presentations, journal submissions and conference attendance.
One HHS official said:
We get requests from the media to provide scientific expertise. Normally, [political appointees] would never get involved in this type of non-high-profile stuff but now they have to approve every single media request.
Examples include:
- A federally funded researcher was prohibited from attending a national conference and responding to a journalist because their study’s conclusions did not align with the administration’s views.
- A former CDC employee reported that during the administration’s first weeks, all scientific publications in process – including those already peer-reviewed – were frozen. Topics perceived as inconsistent with executive orders were blocked entirely.
- Multiple officials confirmed that scientific communication with the World Health Organization has also been severely restricted. In addition to broad clearance requirements, researchers across the federal science agencies report that certain scientific topics now trigger heightened scrutiny or political review before publication, presentation or grant consideration. Internal communications guidance at the National Cancer Institute, for example, requires political clearance for materials referencing “vaccines,” “peanut allergies,” “obesity,” and even “Cancer Moonshot.” Meanwhile at the National Science Foundation, internal lists show that grant proposals using words like “trauma,” “diversity,” or “women” are flagged for additional internal review. This restriction on the flow of ideas will slow new discoveries.
The administration has also revoked public access to important public health information. Since January 20, 2025, at least 175 public health datasets from the CDC’s website and 135 datasets from a central HHS data portal have been deleted. Also, it has removed websites and public health tools used daily by scientists, clinicians and state health departments. In February, The New York Times reported that over 8,000 HHS websites were offline. The administration also removed datasets on chronic disease, injury, disability, HIV and adolescent health, which providers and researchers used “to conduct groundbreaking research” to prevent and treat diseases and other conditions and inform public health officials at every level of government. Former HHS officials characterized taking down the datasets as an “erasure of science,” noting that the datasets were the products of years of work to study the health of Americans.
The administration has undermined the federal scientific research infrastructure.
Arbitrary Policy
The Trump administration has arbitrarily fired thousands of workers. HELP Minority Staff reviewed public records and spoke with former federal workers, industry officials and experts to understand the impact of the firings. According to public reports, at least 10,000 employees at HHS agencies have been terminated and an additional 10,000 have retired, quit or been forced out by the administration. In other words, the agency in charge of the health and well-being of all Americans may be cut down to less than one-half the size of Tesla, a car company.
HHS has not provided HELP Minority Staff with any details in writing about the mass firings at the agency level and the functions the employees served. Nor has HHS provided a full accounting of the branches and divisions at HHS eliminated in the agency’s restructuring.
Trump’s arbitrary firings of HHS workers is already threatening the health and well-being of tens of millions of seniors, children and working families. For example, HHS has fired:
- A division at FDA that helped millions of Americans get faster access to low-cost generic prescription drugs;
- A team at CDC that supported states responding to environmental health threats;
- Critical staff in NIH’s clinical cell-therapy program, delaying cancer treatment for patients with advanced cancer.
The chaos at federal agencies has impacted public health at every level. Multiple former HHS officials described how mass terminations and unclear guidance from the administration have made it nearly impossible for local, state, national and international partners to plan activities that rely on federal support. Data collection and public health programs have been plunged into uncertainty.
For example, Trump officials terminated the entire CDC team that supported state and local initiatives to monitor and respond to a range of environmental health threats: that directly impact residents, including pollution, wildfires, radon, harmful algal blooms and lead in drinking water. This will undermine how states understand and respond to these threats, making Americans sicker.
Additionally, the administration rescinded over $12 billion in public health and mental health funding for states that was provided by Congress to support COVID response and recovery activities as well as infectious disease and mental health programs. The decision to claw back funding from states has led to layoffs of public health department staff and cuts to funding in local communities.
This disruption has been severe at NIH, where the administration’s hiring freeze and termination of key personnel has halted core scientific operations. These impacts go beyond grant terminations. In conversations with HELP Minority staff, NIH staff reported:
“Initially, we had whole labs full of people that were fired. Complete chaos. Nobody had any idea if their tests were being run,” said staff at the NIH Clinical Center—the nation’s largest hospital devoted entirely to clinical research. Staff explained how clinical care had been abruptly stopped or interrupted. “This administration has a lot of blood on their hands. We’re not political people. We just want to take care of people.”
Without the ability to onboard new fellows, some labs are shrinking to two or fewer staff. One postdoctoral fellow warned that her lab — focused on brain function and disorders like autism — “will collapse” if the freeze continues. “This isn’t just a loss of momentum,” she said. “It’s wasted taxpayer dollars, lost discoveries, lost training opportunities and missed opportunities for treatments that could save and improve lives. Americans will die.”
Labs relying on central resources do not have the necessary reagents or equipment to conduct studies. A fellow who helps process donated human brains for Alzheimer’s research reported that funding freezes “have critically disrupted our work,” threatening decades of collaborative studies. “Thousands of studies are under threat.”
Raising Prescription Drug Prices
At a time when one out of four Americans cannot afford the prescriptions they are prescribed, cuts at FDA will further raise prescription drug prices by making it harder for low-cost generics to enter the market. According to one generic drug manufacturer:
These reductions in force (RIFs) are likely to have a profound impact on the ability of manufacturers to continue providing cost-effective essential medicines to Americans. Staff that were subject to RIFs included technical experts who write critical scientific and regulatory documents that provide roadmaps for product development. The lack of clarity that will result without these documents will undermine the efficiency and transparency of the drug development and approval process. This will directly result in longer, much more costly development plans for both brand and generic/biosimilar drug products, and raises the serious risk of fewer therapies on the market for American patients.
Cuts will also mean Americans will have to rely more on Big Pharma and Big Food’s claims about what is safe – instead of the judgment of independent public scientists. According to Friends of Cancer Research, “weakening [FDA] capacity puts American lives at greater risk.”
Conclusion
Trump officials have framed attacks on science as attacks against elites. But the truth is that undermining science will have devastating consequences for working class people who will be the hardest hit by the dismantling of critical health infrastructure.
This war on science will lead to preventable suffering, needless loss of life and an erosion of truth. Some consequences will be felt immediately. Other effects may be less apparent but no less devastating. These attacks will lead to fewer breakthroughs for diseases like cancer, a weaker public health response against future infectious disease threats and a continued decline in trust in public institutions. Far from making Americans healthier, Trump’s actions will only make people and our democracy sicker. This must end. Congress, the scientific community and the American people must stand up and fight back.
This article is excerpted, with permission, from a recent report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee Minority Staff dated 5/13/25. The entire transcription, with extensive footnotes and data citations, can be found online.
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