If you’ve ever watched someone try to “fix” a Swiss watch with a sledgehammer, you might have a decent understanding of how the Trump administration approached science in 2025. The goal, according to the White House, was a historic transformation to “restore the American people’s confidence” in science and unleash a new era of innovation. The result, according to nearly everyone else paying attention, was one of the biggest upheavals to the federal research enterprise in 80 years.
The year’s science policy can be summed up in two complementary acts. First, a campaign of disruption, characterized by funding cuts and firings. Second, a grand, futuristic vision promising to harness artificial intelligence (AI) for national glory. Whether these two acts add up to a coherent strategy or a profound contradiction depends entirely on who you ask.
Act I: The Great Unwinding
The administration wasted no time. Within its first weeks, it began firing thousands of federal researchers and cancelling tens of billions of dollars in research grants. The targets ranged from global health programs at USAID to basic biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The stated reason? To cut funding for “left-wing pet projects masquerading as ‘scientific research’”. The practical outcome was a chilling effect that rippled far beyond Washington. As one open letter signed by 2,000 top scientists, including dozens of Nobel laureates, put it, “A climate of fear has descended on the research community”. Researchers reported removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals to remove terms like “climate change” that agencies had flagged as objectionable.
The administration also flexed its muscle over universities, using federal research funding as leverage to force policy changes on hiring, admissions, and campus policing. In one instance, the administration withheld $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania until it agreed to hand over data, cancel diversity programs, and adjust athletic records involving transgender athletes. A former NIH director summed up the tactic: “If you can pull hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of funding from universities in a moment, it turns out you can make them jump through all kinds of hoops”.
The financial chaos was immense. Grants were frozen or terminated mid-stream, with the NIH alone cutting around $9.5 billion across 2,100 grants by June. While many were later reinstated after lawsuits, the damage was done. Universities, facing what they saw as an unreliable partner, began freezing hires, laying off staff, and scaling back graduate programs. Enrollments in life science Ph.D. programs flatlined.
Act II: The Grand, AI-Powered Vision
While one arm of the administration was busy dismantling, the other was sketching a futuristic blueprint. In November, President Trump unveiled the “Genesis Mission” via executive order. Described as a historic effort akin to the Manhattan or Apollo projects, the mission aims to create a national, closed-loop AI platform to supercharge scientific discovery. The goal: solve “hard science” problems in energy, biotechnology, and national security at a breakneck pace.
The order demands demonstrations of capability within 270 days and significant discoveries within three years. It’s a vision of scientific acceleration, treating AI not as a risk to be managed but as a “weapon of national dominance to be sharpened”.
There was just one catch, according to critics: the Genesis Mission depends on the very institutions, talent pipelines, and public datasets that the administration spent the year undermining.
“After the Trump administration has inflicted so much damage to valuable datasets and publicly funded research, the new executive order is a Band-Aid on a giant gash,” said Arati Prabhakar, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Biden.
The administration’s own cost-cutting task force, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had earlier slashed jobs in the very National Science Foundation branch designed to accelerate technology development. Historians of science were blunt. Paul Josephson of Colby College called the Genesis Mission’s aggressive deadlines a sign of “tremendous ignorance of how science and technology work”. He reduced the grand plan to “a vision without policy” and “a hope without funding”.
The Contradiction at the Core
So, did President Trump transform science in 2025? Absolutely. The question is whether it was a transformation toward efficiency or toward ruin.
The administration and its supporters frame the year as a necessary correction. They argue that the postwar model of funding basic research through universities had become bloated and ideologically captured. Policies like the “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order aimed to impose new rigor, transparency, and alignment with national priorities. The Genesis Mission represents a shift from funding curiosity-driven science to directing a focused, public-private “moonshot” aimed at concrete technological dominance, particularly against China.
The scientific community and a host of critics see a darker picture. They argue the administration has “shaken the hell” out of the 80-year social contract between the government and universities. The funding volatility, they say, wasn’t about efficiency but about exerting political control, replacing expert review with ideological compliance. The Union of Concerned Scientists tallied over 500 “attacks on science” in the first 10 months of 2025 alone, compared to 200 in all four years of Trump’s first term.
The ultimate impact may be a generational brain drain. With research careers in the U.S. looking unstable, both American and international talent are looking elsewhere. As one expert noted, countries like China are actively recruiting scientists spooked by the U.S. funding climate.
As the year ended, the long-term trajectory was still being contested in courts and Congress, which has so far rejected the most drastic proposed budget cuts for 2026. But the landscape is irrevocably changed. The genie, as one former NIH official put it, is out of the bottle. The United States entered 2025 as the world’s premier scientific superpower. It ended the year as a nation conducting a radical, high-stakes experiment on the very foundations of its own innovation.
the ztec100 science team.