Trump administration proposes massive budget cuts to science

The Trump administration has put forward a proposal to significantly reduce science funding.

By Max Kozlov, Dan Garisto, Edward Chen & Nature magazine

For the second consecutive year, President Donald Trump has suggested major reductions to the budgets of key US science agencies. The White House’s spending plan for the upcoming year, unveiled on Friday, also proposes halting the use of federal funds for certain academic journal subscriptions and publishing fees.

The budget plan outlines cuts to federal bodies involved in health, space, and environmental research. Among the most significant reductions are those to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with both agencies facing budget cuts exceeding 50% in 2027 compared to current levels. The US National Institutes of Health would see a 13% decrease in its budget.

According to a budget document, the proposal seeks to sustain funding for quantum information and artificial intelligence research to ensure the US remains at the forefront in these fields. The plan includes increased applied research funding for these areas within the defense and energy departments, notes Alessandra Zimmermann from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. However, basic research funding for quantum and AI at NSF would be reduced by 37% and 32%, respectively.

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Ultimately, Congress has the final say on federal budget allocations, not the president. Congress previously rejected the administration’s substantial cut requests in 2026, restoring funding for various programs the White House wanted to eliminate. Trump’s proposal serves as a starting point for congressional discussions, which could extend to the beginning of the 2027 fiscal year on October 1, or even beyond due to Congressional elections on November 3, Zimmermann explains.

The budget would allocate more funds to presidential priorities like the military, which would receive $1.5 trillion—a 44% increase—while reducing spending on numerous domestic programs.

Significant Changes

The White House intends to cut the NSF budget by nearly 55% to $4 billion. The proposal also eliminates all funding for the NSF division supporting research in social sciences and economics. In an internal meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced the dissolution of the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate, as stated in the budget request. Two NSF staff members, speaking anonymously, confirmed this information. The NSF’s budget request to Congress indicates that the agency will close the SBE but continue supporting SBE “grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all affected employees will be reassigned within the agency.”

These proposed cuts to the NSF would be “devastating,” according to Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We cannot cut the pipeline and expect the output to continue. This is how the US loses its scientific leadership — with a reckless budget line.”

The proposal also plans to end funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Additionally, three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers—those focused on minority health and disparities, international research, and alternative medicine—would be closed.

NASA is facing a 23% budget reduction and a 47% decrease in its science division funding, leading to the termination of over 40 projects. “It’s an extinction-level event for science,” claims Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society in California, advocating for space exploration. “It would undermine and prevent NASA from being the world leader in space exploration.” NASA did not comment on Dreier’s statement.

Publishing Fees

The proposal also seeks to forbid spending “Federal funds for expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by Federal statute or approved in advance by a Federal agency.” The proposal does not clarify what qualifies as “expensive” or “prohibitively high” or specify which journals might be affected. According to the proposal, many journals charge the government for both publishing and accessing the same research study, suggesting there are “low cost outlets” for publishing federally funded research.

This proposed ban comes as the NIH is set to introduce a policy addressing the fees that many scientific publishers charge to make articles freely accessible. The agency has argued that these article processing charges (APCs), often paid by the articles’ authors, decrease funding available for research. The NIH has suggested limits on how much it will pay federally funded scientists for APCs, but some researchers are concerned that such limits could create inequity, affecting who can publish in journals with high APCs.

This aspect of the budget proposal, affecting all federal spending, indicates the administration’s “commitment to public access to federally-funded research,” reflecting a “broader government conversation” beyond the NIH, says Christopher Marcum, who worked in budget and science policy offices at the White House under President Joe Biden.

Caroline Sutton, chief executive of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), which represents about 160 academic and professional publishers, describes the proposal as “baffling.” She notes, “Research integrity faces growing threats from AI misuse and bad actors globally,” saying that now is “precisely the wrong time to cut support for high‑quality, validated scientific information.”

The academic publishers Springer Nature and Wiley, both STM members, did not respond to Nature’s inquiries about the proposal before publication. (Nature’s news team operates independently of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

Elsevier, also a member of STM, states that the proposed policy “still allows authors to publish gold open access,” where journals make papers freely available once published, and “Elsevier already supports compliance with this model.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 3, 2026.

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