After a relentless deluge of Trump administration attacks, overwhelmingly at the hands of Elon Musk, the nation’s exceptional, thriving innovation machine is teetering on the brink.
The ramifications are calamitous.
Since World War II, the US has committed itself to robustly supporting the scientific enterprise, that great endless frontier, in recognition of the wellspring of public benefits that such research can ultimately bring forth. At the heart of that commitment is the central tenet that science should be a public good, for public good. The US research enterprise reflects that, with the nation supporting a vast ecosystem within which a staggering array of public and private actors—and their many and varied areas of interest—can flourish.
Musk is now knowingly, deliberately, gleefully taking an ax to the whole of it.
With the full and unyielding support of President Trump and his administration’s leadership, Musk is directing the indiscriminate firing of federal workers, casting off hard-earned, impossible-to-replace expertise.
He is hamstringing agencies and their capacity to execute research internally and launch significantly more research externally.
He is slashing universities’ and research institutions’ capacity to pursue bold new ideas, as well as onboard and train the next generation of innovators.
He is arbitrarily and catastrophically reneging on government contracts and agreements, leaving pioneering new investments in the lurch while undermining faith in future government-supported endeavors.
He is isolating the nation’s researchers by attacking vital channels of international coordination and collaboration that have long improved our own country’s work.
And instead, courtesy the world’s richest man whose riches rest upon the very system he now abhors: science behind a paywall; knowledge for a fee.
Firing federal researchers, hamstringing federal agencies
Federal researchers are positioned at agencies throughout the government, at institutions as wide-ranging as the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
From tracking food safety outbreaks, to studying pollution controls, to analyzing crop yields; from triaging pending pandemics, to identifying infrastructure vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, to flying through hurricane eyewalls. Civil servants, in civil service, pushing for insights that ultimately help to unravel how things work, how things break, and how we, as a society, can push ever forward.
But now, Musk is directing the slashing of the federal workforce, without concern for the role, the expertise, the loss, the cost.
Take, for example, the mass firing of federal workers on probationary status. Conservative estimates suggest that this has impacted approximately 20,000 workers thus far, though lack of transparent reporting, as well subsequent re-hirings, have muddied accurate accounting. The Trump administration has further signaled its apparent intent of ultimately slashing nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of employees on probationary status—albeit now under new cover.
This move is illegal on its face, and is being advanced in a manner that is entirely devoid of authority.
Moreover, it is fully untethered from any coherent strategy. Notably, “probationary” does not equal “junior” or even “new,” as promotions and position shifts can result in a return to probationary status. Indeed, such firings are only being advanced because probationary employees have fewer workplace protections and are thus easier to fire.
The net result, the intended result, is a staggering theft of publicly funded, publicly held knowledge and expertise—as well as the theft of all the ways in which that publicly held expertise would have served the interests of the public in the hours, days, and decades to come.
Much will be lost outright. That which is not lost faces threats of privatization and paywalls. Think hurricane warnings for the rich—not for the most exposed; drought forecasts for commodity traders—not for the farmers planting rows.
And this is just the beginning.
At the same time that agencies are being forced to draw up broader plans for even more massive reductions in staffing, they are also being directed to abandon core and critical areas of work. The ensuing involuntary atrophy of capacity and achievement will then be cynically invoked to justify even further staffing cuts in the time to come.
For those who remain, the work will change. Not just in the way in which an administration change always signals the arrival of new priorities, nor even in the way in which a specifically, relentlessly anti-science administration will antagonize the means of executing those priorities.
No, this cuts deeper.
The Trump administration is already forcing the nation’s remaining federal scientists and experts to insulate and isolate: to depart from coordinating bodies, to abandon collaborative endeavors, to extract themselves from the inherently interconnected affair of scientific research.
At Musk’s and Trump’s direction, federal agencies are seizing up. And as they do, so too does the capacity of the scientific enterprise to serve the public good.
Slashing federal support for research and innovation
As harmful as the arbitrary attacks on federal agencies and federal experts are for the nation’s public good, attacks on the federal government’s ability to support the broader innovation ecosystem threaten to be even worse.
In 2024, US support for research and development totaled approximately $200 billion dollars.
More than half of that funding was dedicated to defense. Of the rest, approximately half was allocated to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), while the rest was channeled through a range of agencies including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Commerce, USDA, and more.
And yet, the Trump administration is now attempting to illegally seize the funds outright or, where stopped, undertake other means to achieve the same outcome.
Take what’s occurred at NIH.
Of NIH’s approximately $47 billion budget, as much as 85 percent is awarded to outside research. In 2023, that funding translated into approximately 60,000 awards, supporting more than 300,000 scientists, at more than 2,700 entities, across all 50 states. A recent sample of that research: a vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer, novel ways to detect Alzheimer’s earlier, and the most detailed mapping yet of human brain cells, to name just three.
A scientific-, economic-, innovation-spurring, and life-saving colossus—which the Trump administration is now actively, unrelentingly working to break.
Since Day 1, the Trump administration has alternately attempted: directly freezing funds, indirectly freezing funds, freezing the means by which funds can actually be granted, firing the workforce required to process funds, limiting the scope of what can be funded, and dramatically curtailing how research institutions are compensated.
What’s occurred at NIH is shocking. It also should not be viewed as a one-off.
For one thing, the administration directed the freezing of all funds, disbursed by all agencies. Same for limiting research agendas. Same for wildly disruptive workforce firings. And there is no reason to believe that attempts at abrupt, severe changes in indirect cost rates will stop at NIH.
Accordingly, the chill is setting in. Research institutions across the country are confronting this injection of wild uncertainty into the funding picture and bracing for shattering impact. Already, word is emerging of institutions halting enrollment for the next class of researchers—the canary, in plain sight. But the specter of calamitous funding shortfalls is also leading to broader hiring freezes, holds on approvals of new instruments and equipment, and overall adoption of austerity measures.
If these attacks do not soon relent, austerity will be just the start.
Moreover, at the same time as the administration is attempting to knock out the research foundations of the US scientific enterprise, it is also—again illegally, again incomprehensibly—attempting to dismantle the scaffolding established by forward-looking industrial policy intended to help turn that research into applied solutions.
These are policy instruments and investments meant to ensure that the technologies, the industries, the workforces our nation will want and need to have on hand to respond to the challenges confronting us are strategically nurtured and developed. Under Musk’s and Trump’s hands, however, the green shoots of those policies—the manufacturing investments, the job training programs, the novel solutions—are withering in salted earth.
What could be—and what gets lost
Musk and his team of DOGE scavengers revel in spotlighting off-beat grants—nevermind the repeated falsehoods of their “efficiency” claims, nevermind the rapidly accruing expenses resulting from their lawless execution of unconstitutional actions. Moreover, these identifications are not the wins they think.
The hallmark of the US commitment to the scientific enterprise is just that: A commitment to science, and in so doing, a commitment to curiosity. It is precisely because of that fiercely held commitment to curiosity, and its attendant tolerance of funding work that could ultimately fail to deliver, that the US has cultivated the research envy of the world. These are, at their core, the conditions required to allow for pioneering, truly path-breaking discovery.
Now, as Musk and his DOGE team hunt for the latest bad-faith headline to win the internet for the day, they lurch the country another step further, another step further, another step further to rendering the whole of the publicly-oriented scientific enterprise obsolete.
As the endless frontier recedes, in its place looms the pitch-black darkness of pay-to-play, with a public cut off from the vast riches enabled by civil science, in civil service.