¡°I never thought vengeance, spite and insanity would play such a big role in decisions,¡± reflected Kenneth Kaitin on whether he is surprised by Donald Trump¡¯s relentless aggression towards US research over the past five months.

Like many US scientists, Kaitin, who is professor at Tufts University¡¯s School of Medicine, expected Trump¡¯ second term to be difficult for America¡¯s research universities given the punitive endowment taxes he threatened on the campaign trail. Yet his administration¡¯s concerted attacks on federal science funding were not predicted, with more than 2,000 grants, ?(?7.4 billion), cancelled on the grounds that they contravene the administration¡¯s anti-DEI agenda. That comes on top of suspending the issuing of visas to overseas students ¨C an important source of revenue and doctoral brainpower ¨C as the government sets up systems to vet their social media history. International students who have previously said things the government disapproves of have been imprisoned and deported; these include Tufts PhD?candidate?R¨¹meysa ?zt¨¹rk, who criticised the university¡¯s handling of pro-Gaza protests in a cowritten op-ed in the campus newspaper.

Tufts¡¯ neighbour, Harvard University, has been singled out for particularly harsh treatment. Trump has attempted to suspend the issuance of all visas for Harvard-bound international students and freeze some $2.6 billion in federal research grants, in retaliation for the institution¡¯s alleged failure to tackle antisemitism and to submit to widespread government control over its hiring and curricula.

For Kaitin, an internationally recognised expert on drug development, the unprecedented attack on America¡¯s elite research universities is not just a tragedy for the hundreds of researchers whose projects had been unceremoniously terminated.

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¡°This has set back drug therapeutics for years ¨C the US¡¯ lead in many areas will decline,¡± he warned, adding that the sustained attack on Harvard in particular will have a ¡°catastrophic impact¡± on the Boston area¡¯s previously burgeoning biotech ecosystem ¨C now the world¡¯s largest, responsible for about 140,000 jobs and tens of billions of dollars of exports.

¡°If I was a foreign researcher working in a lab, I¡¯d be worried about my immigration status but also if there is any money to employ me,¡± he remarked ruefully.

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To make matters worse, it appears that Trump¡¯s attack on US research is only just beginning. His congressional budget requests for 2026 codify huge cuts to science agencies: 25 per cent for Nasa, 40 per cent for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a jaw-dropping 57 per cent for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Such gargantuan cuts would see the number of people who receive support from the NSF fall from 330,000 to about 90,000 a year, reported, resulting in success rates potentially dropping from 26 per cent to just 7 per cent.

Those unprecedented cuts ¨C $5 billion for the NSF, $18 billion for the NIH, plus a funded by the Department of State ¨C have prompted two questions: why are they being made and, more pragmatically, can any other sources be tapped to replace at least some of the lost funding?

In its more reflective moments, the Trump administration maintains that the policies are part of broader efforts to ¡°revitalise America¡¯s scientific enterprise¡± by looking beyond existing structures that might, in some areas, have become stale and unproductive. As Trump¡¯s science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios to the National Academy of Science on 19 May, US science has faced ¡°diminishing returns¡± from biomedical research funding, which should ¡°spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting and using science¡±. Alongside the obligatory digs at the ¡°red tape that so often goes along with funded research¡± and ¡°political fads¡± indulged by leftist scientists, Kratsios called for a ¡°renewed focus on gold standard science¡±, urging researchers to ¡°adjust to new realities and creatively partner with industry and philanthropy¡±.

However, the administration¡¯s so-called for 2026 ¨C a of its budget requests, submitted to Congress at the beginning of May ¨C puts its motivation in rather more nakedly political terms. The NIH, it says, has ¡°broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health¡±. Chief among its crimes is a failure to prove the right-wing view that Covid-19 originated in NIH-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the lab leak hypothesis); the agency is blamed for bankrolling ¡°dangerous gain-of-function research¡± involving viruses.

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A downsized NIH will ¡°align with the President¡¯s priorities to address chronic disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating research on climate change, radical gender ideology, and divisive racialism¡±.

The NSF, meanwhile, will eliminate funding for ¡°climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science¡±. The agency has ¡°fueled research with dubious public value, like speculative impacts from extreme climate scenarios and niche social studies¡± such as a $13.8 million grant to ¡°advance livable, safe, and inclusive communities¡±.

But perhaps there is a little more to it than that ¨C if not in Trump¡¯s case then at least in that of some of his acolytes. In Kratsios¡¯ case, some suggest that the 38-year-old¡¯s previous career as chief-of-staff to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and prominent libertarian and political donor, is the key to understanding his thinking around the proposed reshaping of US science.

Through his personal charitable foundation, Thiel has handed out hundreds of fellowships of $100,000 to young people to pursue tech start-ups or scientific research, eschewing traditional academic ways of doing things. And during the pandemic, Thiel and fellow tech moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, put $50 million into science philanthropy body Fast Grants to meet the Covid-19 challenge, believing that the NIH¡¯s bureaucratic machinery was not moving fast enough.

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This Silicon Valley mentality that small?but smartly targeted research projects ¨C focused on exceptional people ¨C might outperform more established modes of peer-reviewed science could also be part of the explanation for the Musk-led cost-cutting of recent months, via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). The huge strides made by artificial intelligence in the past few years has, some believe, further solidified a mindset among tech pioneers that transformational results can be made at a fraction of the cost of traditional research methods. Optimism about AI¡¯s impact on research even led DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis earlier this year to predict that the technology may be able to ¡° within a decade.

However, that explanation of Trump¡¯s cuts is too charitable given his track record of weaponising funding to pursue personal vendettas, insisted Josh Hiller, associate professor of mathematics and computer science at Adelphi University, on New York¡¯s Long Island. ¡°Trump is trying to show his base that he really socked it to the liberal elites,¡± he said.

The fact that Trump¡¯s agenda is not driven by saving money is illustrated, according to Hiller, by his cuts to the Internal Revenue Service, with which : over the next decade, it has been estimated that the cuts will cost the US Treasury more than a??in lost tax receipts.

¡°This is about short-term political showmanship at the expense of our country¡¯s long-term good,¡± asserted Hiller, observing that the breakthrough technologies sought by self-styled disruptors have emerged from research projects funded by the US government over decades.

¡°Large neural networks exist because of research performed in the 1970s,¡± he said, while vaccines using mRNA technology ¡°exist and are sold on the back of funded research from the NIH from the 1990s¡±. The developers of the pioneering mRNA Covid vaccines were rewarded with the 2023 ?but Trump¡¯s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a prominent vaccine sceptic, has the development of further mRNA-based vaccines. ?

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Earlier this month, scores of scientists at the agency itself to the NIH¡¯s Trump-appointed director, Jay Bhattacharya, accusing the agency¡¯s leadership of prioritising ¡°political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources¡±.

Kratsios appears to believe that industry could step in to fill the funding gap when the NIH and NSF step back, noting in his speech that private firms already spend more than three times [more] on R&D than does the federal government, even funding more basic research than the federal government funds at universities¡±. Yet, according to Tufts¡¯ Kaitin, big pharma is becoming ever more reliant on academic science for novel ideas, rather than funding blue-skies research itself.

¡°Thirty years ago, it was common for drug companies to come up with their own discoveries ¨C Merck was famous for doing this, with lots of Nobel winners working in the industry,¡± said Kaitin. ¡°But the advent of genomics [the study of the function of the entire genome] saw industry ¡°take the collective decision that it was impossible to justify this kind of expenditure,¡± he added.

In the Boston biotech ecosystem, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Greater Boston¡¯s other elite institutions help provide the ¡°transformational research laboratories where ideas are produced. If you remove one of the key pillars of the ecosystem then you risk collapsing the whole system,¡± said Kaitin.

?However, some academic researchers whose federal research funding has been abruptly cancelled have not given up hope that others might step in to ensure that crucial projects can be maintained. One of those is Molly Franke, professor in the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. When Trump terminated Harvard¡¯s federal funding, she lost four major NIH grants related to the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis, putting years of fieldwork in jeopardy. She is now exploring whether private foundations or industry could help her finish at least some of the important work she has done with vulnerable teenagers in Peru.

¡°The Boston biotech scene isn¡¯t going to save us but it could be an important part of the solution in the short term,¡± she said of the potential ¡°multifaceted¡± solution that she is fighting to secure. ¡°The recent events have opened up collaborations with industry that we hadn¡¯t considered in the past ¨C completing some of this work could be a surmountable challenge.¡±

That said, the costs of establishing research projects in developing countries such as Peru ¨C previously met by the NIH, USAID and other US agencies ¨C are unlikely to ever be met by industry given the distant prospect of a return on investment, Franke said. ¡°The potential destruction of research infrastructure is alarming ¨C I¡¯m not really sure how we can rebuild it once it¡¯s gone,¡± she added.

On a personal level, the loss of her funding has been ¡°devastating¡±, and she lamented both the ¡°vast toll taken on researchers¡± and ¡°the breach of trust with participants who were part of the trials¡±.

¡°We¡¯re mourning so many things at the same time ¨C the loss of colleagues, but also the shutting down of cutting-edge science with the goal of improving people¡¯s lives ¨C that shouldn¡¯t be used as a political tool,¡± she said.

For Kaitin, imagining Boston¡¯s biotech community will ever make up the shortfall caused by Trump¡¯s cuts would represent a Pollyannaish level of optimism. ¡°Pharma is not in the business of funding academic research for the sake of it ¨C how would the CEO justify this to shareholders, particularly in Harvard¡¯s case when it has a huge endowment?¡± he said.

Moreover, Trump¡¯s signing?last month of an executive order introducing mechanisms to means that ¡°the pharmaceutical industry is in survival mode itself ¨C it¡¯s not going to take on responsibility for Harvard¡±.

Many people within the US drug discovery world that Kaitin knows so well are, instead, looking beyond the US, he said, for sources of funding for new projects.

¡°It¡¯s always been a challenge to start new research, so people are saying ¡®Can I do this outside the US? If not, it¡¯s maybe time to look for another job¡¯,¡± he said.

Overall, he considers it unforgivable that Trump is destabilising the East Coast¡¯s biotech industry ¨C one of America¡¯s greatest economic success stories in recent history ¨C for entirely spurious reasons.

¡°It¡¯s not just Harvard ¨C my alma mater, Cornell University, has taken a big hit, as have so many other [institutions],¡± he said. ¡°Claiming that this is happening because you¡¯re anti-DEI or fighting antisemitism ¨C that¡¯s all nonsense. Not least because where this is hitting hardest is Greater Boston¡¯s teaching hospitals ¨C Beth Israel Deaconess and the Massachusetts General ¨C where Harvard does much of its medical research. They¡¯ve nothing to do with any of this ¨C it¡¯s all so short-sighted.¡±

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com