The administration of US president Donald Trump has proposed drastic cuts to science that would have severe consequence for physics and astronomy if passed by the US Congress. The proposal could involve the cancellation of one of the twin US-based gravitational-wave detectors as well as the axing of a proposed next-generation ground-based telescope and a suite of planned NASA mission. Scientific societies, groups of scientists and individuals have expressed their shock over the scale of the reductions.

In the budget request, which represents the start of the budgeting procedure for the year from 1 October, the National Science Foundation (NSF) would see its funding plummet from $9bn to just  $3.9bn – imperilling several significant projects. While the NSF had hoped to support both next-generation ground-based tele­scopes planned by the agency – the Giant Magellan Tele­scope (GMT) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) – the new budget would only allow one to be supported.

On 12 June the GMT, which is already 40% completed thanks to private funds, received NSF approval confirming that the observatory will advance into its “major facilities final design phase”, one of the final steps before becoming eligible for federal construction funding. The TMT, meanwhile, which is set to be built in Hawaii, has been hit with delays following protests over adding more telescopes to Mauna Kea. In a statement from the TMT International Observatory, it said it was “disappointed that the NSF’s current budget proposal does not include TMT”.

It is also possible that one of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities – one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana – would have to close down after the budget proposes a 39.6% cut to LIGO operations. Having one LIGO facility would significantly cut its ability to identify and localize events that produce gravitational waves.

“This level of cut, if enacted, would drastically reduce the science coming out of LIGO and have long-term negative consequences for gravitational-wave astrophysics,” notes LIGO executive director David Reitze. LIGO officials told Physics World that the cuts would be “extremely punishing to US gravitational wave science” and would mean “layoffs to staff, reduced scientific output, and the loss of scientific leadership in a field that made first detections just under 10 years ago”.

NASA’s science funding, meanwhile, would reduce by 47% year on year, and the agency as a whole would see more than 5500 staff lose their jobs as its workforce gets slashed from 17 391 to just 11 853. NASA would also lose planned missions to Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the asteroid Apophis that will pass close to Earth in 2029. Several scientific missions focusing on planet Earth, meanwhile, would also be axed.

The American Astronomical Society expressed “grave concern” that the cuts to NASA and the NSF “would result in an historic decline of American investment in basic scientific research”. The Planetary Society called the proposed NASA budget “an extinction-level event for the space agency’s most productive, successful and broadly supported activity”. Before the cuts were announced, the Trump administration pulled its nomination of billionaire industrialist Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator after his supporter Elon Musk left his post as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

‘The elephant in the room’

The Department of Energy, meanwhile, will receive a slight increase in its defence-related budget, from the current $34.0bn to next year’s proposed $33.8bn. But its non-defence budget will fall by 26% from $16.83bn to $12.48bn. Michael Kratsios, Trump’s science adviser and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, sought to justify the administration’s planned cuts in a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on 19 May.

“Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” Kratsios noted, adding that the country had received “diminishing returns” on its investments in science over the past four decades and that it now requires “new methods and approaches to supporting research”. He also suggested that research now undertaken at US universities falls short of what he called “gold standard science”, citing “political biases [that] have displaced the vital search for truth”. Universities, he stated, have lost public trust because they have “promoted diversity, equity and inclusion”.

The US science community, however, is unconvinced. “The elephant in the room right now is whether the drastic reductions in research budgets and new research policies across the federal agencies will allow us to remain a research and development powerhouse,” says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Thus, we are embarking on a radical new experiment in what conditions promote science leadership – with the US being the ‘treatment’ group, and China as the control.”

Former presidential science adviser Neal Lane, now at Rice University, told Physics World that while the US administration appears to value some aspects of scientific research such as AI, quantum, nuclear and biotechnologies, it “doesn’t seem to understand or acknowledge that technological advances and innovation often come from basic research in unlikely fields of science“. He expects the science community to “continue to push back” by writing and visiting members of Congress, many of whom support science, and “by speaking out to the public and encouraging various organizations to do that same”.

Indeed, an open letter by the group Stand Up for Science dated 26 May calls the administration’s stated commitment to “gold standard science” an approach “that will actually undermine scientific rigor and the transparent progress of science”. It would “introduce stifling limits on intellectual freedom in our nation’s laboratories and federal funding agencies”, the letter adds.

As of 13 June, the letter had more than 9250 signatures. Another letter, sent to Jay Bhattachayra, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), from some 350 NIH members, almost 100 of whom identified themselves, asserted that they “remain pressured to implement harmful measures” such as halting clinical trials midstream. In the budget request, the NIH would lose about 40%, leaving it with $27.5bn next year. The administration also plans to consolidate the NIH’s 27 institutes into just eight.

A political divide

On the day that the budget was announced, 16 states run by Democratic governors called on a federal court to block cuts in programmes and funding for the NSF. They point out that universities in their states could lose significant income if the cuts go ahead. In fact, the administration’s budget proposal is just that: a proposal. Congress will almost certainly make changes to it before presenting it to Trump for his signature. And while Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives find it difficult to oppose the administration, science has historically enjoyed support by both Democrats and Republicans.

Despite that, scientists are gearing up for a difficult summer of speculation about financial support. “We are gaming matters at the moment because we are looking at the next budget cycle,” says Peter Littlewood, chair of the University of Chicago’s physics department. “The principal issues now are to bridge postdocs and graduating PhD students, who are in limbo because offers are drying up.” Littlewood says that, while alternative sources of funding such as philanthropic contributions can help, if the proposed government cuts are approved then philanthropy can’t replace federal support. “I’m less worried about whether this or that piece of research gets done than in stabilizing the pipeline, so all our discussions centre around that,” adds Littlewood.

Lane fears the cuts will put people off from careers in science, even in the unlikely event that all the cuts get reversed. “The combination of statements by the president and other administrative officials do considerable harm by discouraging young people born in the US and other parts of the world from pursuing their education and careers in [science] in America,” he says. “That’s a loss for all Americans.”

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The Heisenberg uncertainty principle holds things together. Articulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg almost a century ago, it remains the foundation of the physical world. Its name suggests the rule of the vague and temporary. But the principle is quantitative. A high uncertainty about the position of, say, an electron is compensated by a low uncertainty in its momentum. The principle is vital in helping us to understand chemical bonding, which is what holds matter together.

The Trump uncertainty principle, which I hereby coin, does the opposite; it tears things apart. Having taken effect on the US president’s inauguration day back in January, it almost immediately began damaging scientific culture. Researchers can no longer be sure if their grants will be delayed or axed – or if new proposals are even in the ballpark of the potentially fundable. Work is being stalled, erased or doomed, especially in the medical and environmental sciences.

The Trump uncertainty principle, or TUP for short, is implemented in several ways. One is through new policies at funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those new policies, the administration claims, are designed to promote “science, national health, prosperity, and defense”. Despite being exactly the same as the old policies, they’ve been used to justify the cancellation of 400 grants at the NSF alone and hollow out the NSF, NIH and other key US science funding agencies.

The Trump administration has sought to terminate billions of dollars worth of grants at Harvard University alone. It wants to ban US universities from recruiting international students and has even been cancelling the visas of current students, many of whom are enrolled in the sciences. It also wants to vet what prospective students have posted on social media, despite Trump’s supposed support for free speech. Harvard is already suing the Administration over these actions.

Back in March the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education sent letters to Harvard and 59 other universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford and Yale, accusing them of what it considers “discrimination and harassment”. The office threatened “potential enforcement actions if institutions do not fulfil their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act”, which “prohibits discrimination against or otherwise excluding individuals on the basis of race, color, or national origin”.

“Saddening, traumatic and unnecessary”

But the impact of the Trump uncertainty principle reaches far beyond these 60 institutions because it is destroying the bonding of these institutions through its impact on the labs, institutions and companies that collaborate with them. It is also badly damaging the hiring of postdocs, the ability to attract undergraduates, the retention of skilled support staff, and laboratory maintenance. Most disruptively of all, the Trump uncertainty principle provides no explanation for why or where it shows up, or what it is going to be applied to.

The Trump uncertainty principle provides no explanation for why or where it shows up, or what it is going to be applied to

Stony Brook University, where I teach, is a research incubator not on the list of 60 institutions of higher learning threatened by the Department of Education. But many of my colleagues have had their NIH, NSF or Department of Energy funding paused, left unrenewed, or suspended without explanation, and nobody could tell them whether or when it might be restored or why it was stopped in the first place.

Support for 11 graduate students at Stony Brook was terminated. Though it was later restored after months of uncertainty, nobody knows if it might happen again. I, too, had a grant stopped, though it was due to a crude error and the money started up again. Everyone in the sciences I’ve spoken to – faculty, staff and students – is affected in one way or another by the Trump uncertainty principle even if they haven’t lost funding or jobs.

It is easy to sound hyperbolic. It is possible that Trump’s draconian cuts may be reversed, that the threats won’t be implemented, that they won’t stand up in court, and that the Trump administration will actually respect the court decisions. But that’s not the point. You can’t plan ahead if you are unsure how much money you have, or even why you may be in the administration’s cross-hairs. That’s what is most destructive to US science. It’s also saddening, traumatic and unnecessary.

Maintaining any culture, including an academic research one, requires supporting an active and ongoing dynamic between past, present and future. It consists of an inherited array of resources, a set of ideas about how to go forward, and existing habits and practices about how best to move from one to the other. The Trump administration targets all three. It has slashed budgets and staff of long-standing scientific institutions and redirected future-directed scientific programmes at its whim. The Trump uncertainty principle also comes into play by damaging the existing habits and practices in the present.

The critical point

In his 2016 book The Invention of Science, David Wootton – a historian at the University of York in the UK – defined scientific culture as being “innovative, combative, competitive, but at the same time obsessed with accuracy”. Science isn’t the only kind of culture, he admitted, but it’s “a practical and effective one if your goal is the acquisition of new knowledge”. It seeks to produce knowledge about the world that can withstand criticism – “bomb-proof”, as Wootton put it.

Bomb-proof knowledge is what Trump fears the most, and he is undermining it by injecting uncertainty into the culture that produces it. The administration says that the Trump uncertainty principle is grounded in the fight against financial waste, fraud and discrimination. But proof of the principle is missing.

How do you save money by ending, say, a programme aimed at diagnosing tuberculosis? Why does a study of maternal health promote discrimination? What does research into Alzheimer’s disease have to do with diversity? Has ending scientific study of climate change got anything to do with any of this?

The justifications are not credible, and their lack of credibility is a leading factor in damaging scientific culture. Quite simply, the Trump uncertainty principle is destroying the position and momentum of US science.

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Just over a week ago, US President Donald Trump released a budget proposal that would, if enacted, eviscerate science research across the country. Among other cuts, it proposes a 57% drop (relative to 2024) in funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), which provides the lion’s share of government support for basic science. Within this, the NSF’s physics and mathematics directorate stands to lose more than a billion dollars, or 67% of its funding. And despite the past closeness between Trump and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, NASA faces cuts of 24%, including 50% of its science budget.

Of course, the US is not the only nation that funds scientific research, any more than NASA is the only agency that sends spacecraft to explore the cosmos. Still, both are big enough players (and big enough partners for the UK) that I expected these developments to feature at least briefly at last Tuesday’s Royal Society conference on the future of the UK space sector.

During the conference’s opening session, it occasionally seemed like David Parker, a former chief executive of the UK Space Agency (UKSA) who now works for the European Space Agency (ESA), might say a few words on the subject. His opening remarks focused on lessons the UK could learn from the world’s other space agencies, including NASA under the first Trump administration. At one point, he joked that all aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. But as for the politics that threaten NASA in Trump’s second administration, Parker was silent.

Let’s talk about something else

This silence continued throughout the morning. All told, 19 speakers filed on and off the stage at the Royal Society’s London headquarters without so much as mentioning what the Nobel-Prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess called an “almost extinction level” event for research in their field.

The most surreal omission was in a talk by Sheila Rowan, a University of Glasgow astrophysicist and past president of the Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics World). Rowan was instrumental in the 2015 detection of gravitational waves at the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and her talk focused on gravitational-wave research. Despite this, she did not mention that Trump’s budget would eliminate funding for one of the two LIGO detectors, drastically reducing the research LIGO can do.

When I contacted Rowan to ask why this was, she replied that she had prepared her talk before the budget was announced. The conference, she added, was “a great example of how fantastic science benefits not just the UK, but society more broadly, and globally, and that is a message we must never stop explaining”.

What’s at stake

Rowan ended her talk on a similarly positive note, with hopeful words about the future. “The things that will fly in 2075, we are thinking about now,” she said.

In some cases, that may be true. However, if Trump’s budget passes both houses of the US Congress (the House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would enact most of the administration’s wishes), the harsh reality is that many things space scientists are thinking about will never fly at all.

Over at Astrobites, a site where PhD students write about astronomy and astrophysics for undergraduates, Arizona State University student Skylar Grayson compiled a depressingly long list of threatened missions. Like other graphics that have circled on social media since the budget announcement, Grayson’s places red X’s – indicating missions that are “fully dead” under the new budget – over dozens of projects. Affected missions range from well-known workhorses like Mars Orbiter and New Horizons to planning-stage efforts like the next-generation Earth-observing satellite Landsat Next. According to Landsat Next’s live-at-the-time-of-writing NASA webpage, it is expected to launch no earlier than 2031. What does its future look like now?

And NASA’s own missions are just the start. Several missions led by other agencies – including high-profile ones like ESA’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover – are under threat. This is because the new NASA budget would eliminate the US’s share of their funding, forcing partners to pick up the tab or see their investments go to waste. Did that possibility not deserve some mention at a conference on the future of the UK space sector?

The elephant in the room

Midway through the conference, satellite industry executive Andrew Stanniland declared that he was about to mention the “elephant in the room”. At last, I thought. Someone’s going to say something. However, Stanniland’s “elephant” was not the proposed gutting of NASA science. Instead, he wanted to discuss the apparently taboo topic of the Starlink network of communications satellites.

Like SpaceX, Tesla and, until recently, Trump’s budget-slashing “department of government efficiency”, Starlink is a Musk project. Musk is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he remains so after the society’s leadership rejected a grassroots effort to remove him for, inter alia, calling for the overthrow of the UK government. Could it be that speakers were avoiding Musk, Trump and the new US science budget to spare the Royal Society’s blushes?

Exasperated, I submitted a question to the event’s online Q&A portal. “The second Trump administration has just proposed a budget for NASA that would gut its science funding,” I wrote. “How is this likely to affect the future of the space sector?” Alas, the moderator didn’t choose my question – though in fairness, five others also went unanswered, and Rowan, for the record, says that she could “of course” talk about whatever she wanted to.

Finally, in the event’s second-to-last session, the elephant broke through. During a panel discussion on international collaboration, an audience member asked, “Can we really operate [collaboratively] when we have an administration that’s causing irreparable harm to one of our biggest collaborators on the space science stage?”

In response, panellist Gillian Wright, a senior scientist at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, called it “an incredibly complicated question given the landscape is still shifting”. Nevertheless, she said, “My fear is that what goes won’t come back easily, so we do need to think hard about how we keep those scientific connections alive for the future, and I don’t know the answer.” The global focus of space science, Wright added, may be shifting away from the US and towards Europe and the global south.

And that was it.

A question of leadership

I logged out of the conference feeling depressed – and puzzled. Why had none of these distinguished speakers (partially excepting Wright) addressed one of the biggest threats to the future of space science? One possible answer, suggested to me on social media by the astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker, is that individuals might hesitate to say anything that could be taken as an official statement, especially if their organization needs to maintain a relationship with the US. “I think it needs to be an agency-released statement first,” said Tasker, who works at (but was not speaking for) the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). “I totally agree that silence is problematic for the community, and I think that’s where official statements come in – but those may need more time.”

Official statements from agencies and other institutions would doubtless be welcomed by members of the US science workforce whose careers and scientific dreams are at risk from the proposed budget. The initial signs, however, are not encouraging.

On the same day as the Royal Society event, the US’s National Academies of Science (NAS) hosted their annual “State of the Science” event in Washington, DC. According to reporting by John Timmer at Ars Technica, many speakers at this event were, if anything, even keener than the Royal Society speakers to avoid acknowledging the scale of the (real and potential) damage. A few oblique comments from NAS president Marcia McNutt; a few forthright ones from a Republican former congresswoman, Heather Wilson; but overall, a pronounced tendency to ignore the present in favour of a future that may never come.

Frankly, the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic deserves better.

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