Since taking office, President Donald Trump has slashed biomedical research funding, fired thousands of federal agency scientists, canceled training programs for young researchers, temporarily removed access to public datasets, and pressured scientists to alter or abandon work ideologically opposed to the White House’s agenda. In an open letter published Monday, nearly 2,000 of the nation’s top researchers called on the Trump administration to halt this “wholesale assault on U.S. science,” which they say is threatening America’s position as a global research leader as well as the health and safety of its citizens.
“We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment. We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry,” they wrote. “We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”
advertisement
The letter’s signatories are all elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a prestigious body of the nation’s most accomplished scientists. But they took pains to make clear that they are not speaking for the National Academies. “The views expressed here are our own, and not those of the National Academies or our home institutions,” the letter said.
The absence of an official rebuke from the National Academies, or NASEM — widely seen as the nation’s leading science organization and to many, its conscience — is a glaring example of the reluctance of major universities and other institutions to do anything that could put them into the administration’s crosshairs. That’s especially true of organizations like NASEM that are dependent on government contracts.
For the last two months, pressure has been building on the NASEM leadership — including from Nobel laureates — to take a public stance against the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the nation’s scientific enterprise, said Randy Schekman, a member who signed the letter and who was an early critic of the organization’s silence. But concerns over jeopardizing funding, or even having its charter revoked, have dominated decision-making at the leadership level, he said. “They see this as an existential issue.”
advertisement
In response to STAT’s questions, NASEM emailed a statement: “We respect our members’ point of view and their commitment to speaking out on these important issues,” it said, adding that National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt discussed similar issues in a recent interview. The National Academies “were founded on the principle that impartial non-partisan scientific advice is essential to effective policy making and advancing the public good. We are continuing that work, engaging with sponsors in line with our mission, and demonstrating the value of science, engineering, and medicine to society,” the statement concluded.
NASEM is a nonprofit organization that has contracts with the federal government, through the National Research Council, to carry out their work of educating the public and advising policymakers. It’s tasked with researching and writing influential reports on issues of technology, science, and health, including medical racism and health disparities.
But following President Trump’s executive orders declaring work involving diversity, equity and inclusion unlawful and discriminatory, the NASEM has taken steps to scrub forthcoming reports of terms such as “marginalized populations” and “health equity,” as STAT has previously reported. Those efforts received pushback in February from 100 members who sent a letter of protest to NASEM leadership.
The new open letter, which was first reported by The New York Times, was not signed by any of the three NASEM presidents. NASEM leadership also discouraged the letter-writing organizers from circulating it using listservs maintained by the organization, according to Schekman, a University of California, Berkeley molecular and cell biologist. “It spread more like a game of telephone,” he said. “A lot of people never even received it.”
According to its website, the NASEM has a combined membership of more than 6,300 scientists, engineers, physicians, and other health professionals.
advertisement
The letter describes a “climate of fear” in the research community. “Researchers, afraid of losing their funding or job security, are removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as “climate change”) that agencies are flagging as objectionable,” it says.
“If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. … The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.”
This story has been updated with a statement from the National Academies.
