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Trump Proposes Deep Cuts to Education and Research [insidehighered.com]:

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President Donald Trump wants to end funding for TRIO, Federal Work-Study and other grant programs that support students on campus as part of a broader plan to cut $163 billion in nondefense programs.

The funding cuts were outlined in a budget proposal [whitehouse.gov] released Friday. The document, considered a “skinny budget,” is essentially a wish list for the fiscal year 2026 budget for Congress to consider. The proposal kicks off what will likely be a yearlong effort to adopt a budget for the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. Trump is unlikely to get all of his plan through Congress, though Republicans have seemed especially willing to support his agenda this year.

If enacted, the plan would codify Trump’s efforts over the last three months to cut spending and reduce the size of the federal government—moves that some have argued are illegal. (Congress technically has final say over the budget, but Trump and his officials have raised questions about the legality of laws that require the president to spend federal funds as directed by the legislative branch.)

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The proposed budget plan slashes nearly $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health, $12 billion from the Education Department and nearly $5 billion from the National Science Foundation. The skinny budget also eliminates funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences [insidehighered.com], AmeriCorps [insidehighered.com], the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities [insidehighered.com]. Trump has already made deep cuts at those agencies and put most—if not all—of their employees on leave.

A fuller budget with more specifics is expected later this month.

Democrats were quick to blast Trump’s plan, saying [senate.gov] it would set the country “back decades by decimating investments to help families afford the basics.” But Republicans countered [house.gov] that the proposal would rein in “Washington’s runaway spending” and rightsize “the bloated federal bureaucracy.”

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For higher ed groups and advocates, the proposed cuts could further jeopardize the country’s standing as a leader in global innovation and put college out of reach for some students.

“Rather than ushering in a new Golden Age, the administration is proposing cuts to higher education and scientific research of an astonishing magnitude that would decimate U.S. innovation, productivity, and national security,” said Mark Becker, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, in a statement [aplu.org]. “We call on Congress to reject these deeply misguided proposed cuts and instead invest in the nation’s future through education and pathbreaking research.”

Zeroing Out ED Programs

At the Education Department, the Trump administration is proposing to end a number of programs and reduce funding to others.

The president wants to eliminate [insidehighered.com] the department altogether; Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement that the proposal reflects “an agency that is responsibly winding down, shifting some responsibilities to the states, and thoughtfully preparing a plan to delegate other critical functions to more appropriate entities.”

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McMahon laid off nearly half [insidehighered.com] of the agency’s staff in March, so the budget also addresses those cuts.

<img src="https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/22969434/thumbnail" width="100%" alt="table visualization">

To compensate for the cuts to programs that directly support students or institutions, the administration argued colleges, states and local communities should on take that responsibility. Other justifications for the cuts reflect the administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and higher ed.

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For instance, officials from the Office of Management and Budget wrote that the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program “contributes to rising college costs that [institutes of higher education] have used to fund radical leftist ideology instead of investing in students and their success.” (The SEOG program provides [studentaid.gov] $100 to $4,000 to students “with exceptional financial need,” according to the department.)

On TRIO and GEAR UP, which help low-income students get to college, the administration said those programs were a “relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access … Today, the pendulum has swung and access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”

Additionally, the administration wants to cut the Office for Civil Rights’ budget by $49 million, or 35 percent. The budget document says this cut will refocus OCR “away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases.” In recent years, the Biden administration pleaded with Congress to boost OCR’s funding in order to address an increasing number of complaints. The office received 22,687 complaints in fiscal year 2024, and the Biden administration projected that number to grow to nearly 24,000 in 2025.

But the OMB document claims that OCR will clear its “massive backlog” this year. “This rightsizing is consistent with the reduction across the Department and an overall smaller Federal role in K-12 and postsecondary education,” officials wrote.

The administration also proposed cutting the Education Department’s overall budget for program administration by 30 percent. The $127 million cut reflects the staffing cuts and other efforts to wind down the department’s operations.

“President Trump’s proposed budget puts students and parents above the bureaucracy,” McMahon said. “The federal government has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars into an education system that is not driving improved student outcomes—we must change course and reorient taxpayer dollars toward proven programs that generate results for American students.”

Science and Research Cuts

Agencies that fund research at colleges and universities are also facing deep cuts. The $4.9 billion proposed cut at the National Science Foundation is about half of what the agency received in fiscal year 2024—the last year Congress adopted a full budget.

The cuts will end NSF programs aimed at broadening participation in STEM fields, which totaled just over $1 billion, as well as $3.45 billion in general research and education.

“The budget cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science,” the officials wrote in budget documents. “NSF has fueled research with dubious public value, like speculative impacts from extreme climate scenarios and niche social studies.”

As examples of “research with dubious public value,” officials specifically highlighted a $13.8 million NSF grant at Columbia University to “advance livable, safe, and inclusive communities” and a $15.2 million grant to the University of Delaware focused on achieving “sustainable equity, economic prosperity, and coastal resilience in the context of climate change.” The administration is maintaining the funding for research into artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences.

The budget plan also aims to make significant reforms at the National Institutes of Health while slashing the agency’s budget by $17.9 billion. NIH received $47 billion in fiscal 2024.

The plan would consolidate NIH programs into five areas: the National Institute on Body Systems Research, the National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institute of Disability Related Research, and the National Institute on Behavioral Health.

The National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research would all be cut. The administration is planning to maintain $27 billion for NIH research.

“The administration is committed to restoring accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH,” officials wrote. “NIH 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.”

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Under Trump, National Science Foundation Cuts Off All Funding to Scientists [scientificamerican.com]:

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Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature.

The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research [nature.com], from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last “until further notice”.

Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature.

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An NSF staff member says that although good science can still be funded, the policy has the potential to be “Orwellian overreach”. Another staff member says, “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades”. One program officer says they are resigning because of the policy. Nature spoke with five NSF staffers for this story, all on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

An NSF spokesperson declined Nature’s request for comment.

Continuing turmoil

The changes are hitting an agency already in crisis. In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated roughly 1,040 grants that would have awarded US$739 million to researchers and their institutions. The agency’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last month [nature.com].

Uncertainty is also being felt by scientists outside the agency. Colin Carlson, an expert in disease emergence at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, leads an initiative to predict viruses that pose pandemic threats [nature.com]. The project, which involves roughly 50 researchers across multiple universities, is funded by a $US12.5 million NSF grant. The project’s latest round of funding was approved, but Carlson worries about subsequent rounds, and the fate of other researchers. Unless it is lifted, the freeze “is going to destroy people's labs,” Carlson says.

Funding for the NSF, as for all other federal agencies, is set by the US Congress. To date, the agency has received only about one-quarter of the funding that Congress appropriated to it for the current fiscal year, which ends on 30 September.

More cuts on the way

It is not clear whether a funding shortfall is driving the latest grant freeze. But Matthew Lawrence, a specialist in administrative law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says that under a 1974 law called the Impoundment Control Act, the NSF must give Congress special notice of the grant halt, which would otherwise be unlawful.

Cuts to NSF spending this year could be a prelude to a dramatically reduced budget next year. Sciencepreviously reported [science.org] that US President Donald Trump will request a $4 billion budget for the agency in fiscal year 2026, a 55% reduction from what Congress appropriated for 2025. Similarly, the proposed 2026 budget for the National Institutes of Health [nature.com] calls for a 44% cut to the agency’s $47 billion budget in 2025, according to documents leaked to the media. During Trump’s first term, Republicans in Congress rejected many of the president’s requested cuts to science funding, but it is not clear that they will do so again.

In the long term, severe reductions to science funding could damage the economy, according to new research. A report by economists at American University in Washington DC estimates that a 50% reduction in federal science funding would reduce the US gross domestic product by approximately 7.6% [doi.org]. “This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point,” one NSF staffer says.

NSF staff expect hundreds more grants to be terminated Friday.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published [nature.com] on May 1, 2025.

Journal Reference:
Gonzalez Garcia, Ignacio, Montecino, Juan, Ramaswamy, Vasudeva. Preliminary Estimates of the Macroeconomic Costs of Cutting Federal Funding for Scientific Research, (DOI: 10.57912/28746446 [doi.org])

Original Submission