Articles

Originally published in: Science

Democrats in the Republican-controlled Congress may lack the political clout to reverse the billions of dollars in federal research grants canceled by President Donald Trump’s administration since he took office in January. But they can at least shine a light on what that loss could mean to the country—and make the case for why Trump’s proposed budget cuts for next year should be blocked.

That was the rationale for an event today on Capitol Hill, staged by Democrats on the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Titled The Things We’ll Never Know: A Science Fair of Canceled Grants, the event featured two dozen academic scientists narrating posters depicting what might have been. The researchers came from around the country to showcase projects, ranging from modeling coastal hazards to teaching quantum information science, that were killed prematurely this spring by one of a half-dozen federal agencies.

“If we don’t stanch the bleeding, it will take decades for us to rebuild and recover the scientific enterprise that … has brought us further than any nation has gone before,” Representative Don Beyer (D–VA) told a small crowd of pro-science advocates gathered in the foyer of the Rayburn House Office Building.

With the House on a weeklong recess after passing Trump’s massive tax and immigration bill last week, there were few if any Republican legislators in the building, and none at the event. But knowing they would be absent didn’t stop Oklahoma State University biologist Michael Reichert from traveling from Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Washington, D.C., to make the case for science.

“Most people still don’t know about these cuts,” said Reichert, whose 3-year, $2.7 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), was designed to give a science-related campus job to college graduates in hopes of attracting them into the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce. NSF canceled his grant weeks before the third and final cohort of nine students was due to show up for work. “So, I thought it was important to come here and speak about the opportunities being lost.”

Jessica Rosenberg, an astrophysicist at George Mason University, is still dumbfounded that NSF terminated her 3-year, $1.2 million grant to develop a curriculum in quantum science, a field viewed as a top priority by the Trump administration. But she’s even more upset that it meant rescinding job offers to the three postdoctoral students—a physics educator, a computer scientist, and a social scientist—who had turned down other offers to join her project. “They were the cream of the crop,” she says.

Alexis Petri, an education researcher at the University of Missouri, was part of a 5-year, $10 million NSF-funded program to help undergraduate STEM students with disabilities. Losing the last year of that grant means not serving hundreds of deserving students. The program, she says, helped students “believe in themselves” and their ability to overcome steep barriers in pursuing a scientific career.Top of Form

Today’s event was also designed to build momentum for Democrats trying to block the massive cuts to research that Trump has proposed in his 2026 budget request. But that won’t be easy, either, Beyer admitted. “We have limited expectations,” he said. He noted that, so far, Republicans in the Senate have backed Trump in major votes on fiscal policy. (The House has also gone along with Trump’s wishes.)

The first test of congressional support for research comes on Thursday when the Senate appropriations committee votes on a bill to fund several science agencies, including NSF and NASA. It’s part of what is expected to be a protracted debate in Congress over 2026 spending that could trigger a government shutdown later this year.