• "In [a specific month of] 2025 I was awarded a [specific] Graduate Research Summer Stipend by the [specific] LTER [Long term ecological research program]. In [specific months of] 2025, I was paid a stipend for being a Graduate Assistant with the [specific] REU [Research Experience for Undergraduates] program (it was technically listed as an RA [research assistant] in our department, but that was my Summer salary regardless). In [a specific month in] 2025, I became the Graduate Representative for the [specific] LTER site. In [a specific month in] 2026, during a [name redacted] Executive Meeting, I found out that the funding for the [specific LTER site] was being both cut and delayed and that the [specific LTER site] was actually over-budget because of this. Due to cascading effects from the delays and cuts in federal funding, the [specific LTER site] decided to cancel the 2026 REU program and downsize the number of Graduate Research Stipends that they were awarding in the Summer of 2026. I still applied for the graduate stipend, but unfortunately was not awarded the stipend despite my application being generally well-received. I went from having 2 sources of funding (that were ultimately federal/LTER related) in the Summer of 2025, to having no support from my graduate program in the Summer of 2026. To pay rent this summer, I am working at a local Chick-fil-a, and the 3-year research project that I was using Graduate Summer Stipend funds on is up in the air at this point. As a grad student, I already work on a razor-thin budget, and if it was not for the support of my fiance, federal budget cuts to the LTER program may have severely altered my degree path."

• "I graduated with a bachelor's degree in biology in 2025. All of my paid scientific experience to this point has been federally funded (e.g. REU [Research Experience for Undergraduates], NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] summer internships). I was unable to get into graduate school in marine science last year, and was told by multiple PIs that they could not or would not take new students due to the federal funding cuts. One of those PIs tipped me off about a private foundation fellowship for graduate school, and I applied to it and got it, so I do not consider the harms to my career personally irreparable since I will be starting my PhD next year with good funding, but there are only so many private fellowships and I worry that my cohort of scientists will be smaller and that will hamper our ability to deal with climate change and manage natural resources. Anecdotally, many in my cohort applying to federal fellowships such as the NSF GRFP [National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program] felt very discouraged and worried about whether they would be rejected based on unclear or secret criteria such as 'said the word diversity' or 'mentioned climate change.' I am working on a publication based on a federal sicence project that I interned with, and it should be my first publication in marine science. It has been delayed by government shutdowns, funding freezes, and increased workloads on the remaining federal scientists after their colleagues were fired. Additionally, I was at Western Society of Naturalists last year and felt the absence of federal scientists, since they were not allowed to travel."

• "Hiring freezes indefinitely delayed my application to seasonal federal jobs before starting graduate school such that I was not able to work in these jobs. The temporary hault on AD [Administratively Determined] or casual hire wildland firefighters in prescribed burns severely reduced my income while I was an intern with USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service]. A constant environment of uncertainty and bullying from higher ups prevailed while working at a National Wildlife Refuge. The continuation of my research as a graduate student has been impacted due to the impending closure of a National Wildlife Refuge due to budget cuts, workforce reduction, and hiring freezes. Job opportunities and grant opportunities are severely limited, and the general environment is extremely negative. The policies of the current presidential administration have been an unmitigated disaster for both basic research and conservation biology, and will likely do irreparable harm to these fields in the United States for decades if not permanently."

• "As a later-stage PhD student, I have this overwhelming feeling of dread and hopelessness when I think about finding a post-doc position. It feels like there is no money and, as a result, few opportunities. I missed the initial rush of international positions and am now stuck with the leftovers, both here in the US and globally. I am searching for alternative funding or fellowships, but those mechanisms just don't really exist because federal funding was such a huge part of the way our entire industry functions. Watching those graduating ahead of me struggle only intensifies this feeling of impending doom. It makes me question if this career choice was the right one and if I will be able to pursue it further or have to pivot to something that will be less fulfilling but more predictable. "

• "As a young wildlife biologist, I was regularly told about the positives for working for the federal government, not only for its stability, but for its highly regarded research and for its impactful management, conservation and education work. I spent time in my undergrad and after graduating, working jobs in academia and non-profits but always tried to get a federal position. I knew getting your foot in the door was hard, but I submitted as many applications I could every year to try to work for organizations like USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service], USFS [US Forest Service], USGS [US Geological Survey], NPS [National Park Service] or BLM [Bureau of Land Management], for which I was qualified. When I finally got through the mess that is USAJobs and its filters, I earned a seasonal job with the USFS in 2023. I was ecstatic because that meant when I graduated with my M.S. degree in 2025, I would have an in to get a great job with a federal agency. Instead, during my master's program, I watched the federal government dismantle and reduce its wildlife and scientific programs, eliminate jobs, freeze hiring, and even fire many of my friends and collogues who worked SO hard to get their positions. I watched as a career field I so badly wanted to be a part of disappeared and beyond that, many of the alternative job opportunities open to me (i.e., state wildlife agencies, non-profits, academia), also disappeared because of reductions to valuable and important federal funding programs and sources. Rather than feeling excited and energized to reenter the job market in May 2025 with my newly awarded master's in science for Wildlife Ecology and Natural Resources Management, I was terrified to find a position. There were way fewer jobs being posted than typical, increasing competition, and it was disheartening because it felt so clearly like the federal government was saying the scientific, wildlife and conservation fields did not matter, and in a way, that I did not matter. I lived for months with such high anxiety about what came next and fear for the irreversible destruction to not only jobs, scientific endevors, management, but also the wildlife and landscapes that are being directly and indirectly harmed due to this administrations actions. The only thing that gave me hope in the job process was that some states and state wildlife agencies were stepping up to try to fill gaps and it was thanks to a state's increased conservation efforts that landed me a job."

• "Collaborators with my graduate research have lost funding, of which they would have completed some of our lab work, and we now have had to drop a full chapter of work because they could not process the samples I collected and we have not been able to acquire more funding of our own. My doctoral committee has a federal researcher on it and we have had to change, delay, and pivot when [they are] not allowed to work, work has been dealyed due to USGS [US Geological Survey] co-op professors being terminated during the initial RIF [Reduction in Force] wave in February of 2025 and then re-hired. Over 2 dozen of my colleagues have either had to withdraw offers to early career professionals they were hiring, relocate, absorb multi-positions worth of work, or have been terminated themselves in the last 1.5 years through no fault of their own. "

• "I am a postdoctoral researcher working with the U.S. Forest Service through the [a specific] program. My research directly supported cost-saving measures to ensure that tax dollars were used as efficiently as possible while maintaining the quality and utility of the monitoring program that is required by law and directly informs budget appropriations for US Forest Service units. After January 20, 2025 the work environment began to feel toxic as my supervisors and colleagues within the agency were unsure about their future. During team meetings some raised concerns about free speech as federal scientists to communicate and share research at conferences when it involved climate change or other prohibited language from the new administration like DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion]. I had aspirations to work with the Forest Service following my postdoctoral fellowship, but the position was unable to be renewed and the hiring freeze in effect since the current administration took office has eliminated those aspirations entirely. I fear that what would remain of recreation research on public lands in the next administration would bear no resemblance or have the same institutional knowledge as researchers have voluntarily left or been shoved out the door through DRP [Deferred Resignation Program] or incentivized retirement. "

• "I am a proud fellow for a watershed educational organization, which has been able to support the fellowship program for a decade. However, due to increasing competition for federal grants, the alliance has not been able to receive funding for this program, and it will be indefinitely cancelled after the 2026 summer season. While I have only experienced a few weeks working as a fellow, it has been one of the most impactful experiences to me as a young person involved in STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] and the natural sciences. As a fellow, I act as a steward and employee for a local environmental education center that is also part of a national conservation-based organization, and work as an assistant to the educational coordinator onsite to engage local community members and encourage the ideals and values of the national organization. This fellowship has also given me opportunities to connect with other fellows and employees working at other centers throughout the watershed, including non-profit centers and organizations based in states other than the one I reside in. Being associated and working with a group of young people dedicated to spreading environmental education and awareness to our local communities has truly given me hope and inspiration that I honestly would not have found otherwise. Programs such as these are what help connect and build communities of young scientists, educators, and nature enthusiasts alike. I have wanted to be a part of this fellowship since last summer, and was fortunate enough to apply earlier this year and land a position working for not only an inspiring educational foundation, but a national society committed to protecting our natural world. I did not know the fellowship would be cancelled until our orientation a few days ago. Environmental education and community outreach is among the most important aspects of conservation and natural science. I now understand it is a privilege to be in a position to spread knowledge, passion, and wonder for our natural world to local communities, as I am currently one of the last to hold that privilege within the fellowship for the indefinite future."

• "I had participated in an undergraduate summer research program in the same lab for 2 years. I was successful in both projects and made lasting connections that allowed me to get into the graduate program I am in now. In the time I graduated from undergrad and was applying for graduate programs, I had hopes of working in the lab. My PI [Principal Investigator] and lab were happy to give me a spot, however, with the federal budget cuts, this was not feasible for the lab. It was quite disappointing because I had hopes of making a larger impact in that field of research. Fortunately, my PI had helped me succeed in matriculating in my current program other ways such as advice, mentorship, and writing me a strong letter of recommendation. Another federal policy that has impacted me directly is the Big Beautiful Bill act on student loans. Specifically, the cut of the GRADPlus loan has severely impacted my ability to receive financial aid to afford the program I am matriculating into. I was still able to receive the Federal Unsubsidized Loan, however, even with this aid, I have thousands of dollars in tuition not covered. Fortunately, I have some savings and am able to touch the bank of dad (my parents) for a zero interest loan. What is most disappointing to me is that my program is a very niche program yet has a vast impact with in the health care system and these regulations are expanding the gap within accessible healthcare."

• "Members of my lab were directly terminated by DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] policies before being reinstated. Multiple scientists in my department and agency that I work closely with were also briefly terminated and then reinstated in temporary positions. My PhD advisor was threatened with termination for several months until DOGE dissolved. Budgets and funding for my agency have been moved and re-consolidated so that purchasing items is slow and arduous and must be done once every six months rather than as needed for research projects. Fellow graduate students in my lab with legal resident status are unable to travel for conferences or working group meetings because they are worried about being deported at the airport or border crossings."

• "My PhD institution has been dramatically affected since January 20th, 2025, resulting in substantial, widespready anxiety about the uncertainty of job prospects going forward. I was forced to delay my doctoral defense and graduation to avoid missing paychecks and felt obligated to take the first postdoctoral position that was offered to me, despite the fact that the location was not ideal for my family and led to several months of physical separation and a greater strain on our financial situation than what my pre-Jan 20, 2025 plans would have. That said, I consider myself to be lucky given that I have not had lapses in employment and the funding for my position remains intact. I know many others at my PhD institution and elsewhere who weren't as lucky."

• "My salary comes from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program, and I have felt uncertainty about the continuation of the program. Also, watching the acceptance rates for an already prestigious fellowship drop by 50% is really disheartening. Additionally, I feel uncertain about my job prospects after graduating from my PhD. There seems to be a severe lack of postdoctoral research funding for me to personally apply for, and a lack of postdoctoral positions in potential research labs due to a lack of funding."

• "The delay of funding from USDA-NIFA [US Department of Agriculture - National Institute of Food and Agriculture] Education and Workforce Development postdoctoral fellowship (8 month delay from the expected funding decision date of December 2024 to the actual funding decision date of July 2025) left me in a state of uncertainty following completion of my PhD. Because my fellowship was through my current institution, I would have to stay at my current institution to complete the fellowship. Though I completed my degree in May, I stayed as a postdoc through July, because I did not want to move my family to start a new position, then move back if I was awarded the fellowship. After I was not awarded the fellowship (which was disappointing, but a fair decision), I started a postdoc position at a new institution in September. Because of the delay in the fellowship decision, my transition to a new position happened 4 months later than it would have, which made it much more difficult to find a position and made the upcoming year of research more difficult since I had missed the entire summer field season. Additionally, closing of the USDA-Beltsville lab does significant harm for bee and pollinator research. Much of the research that I do is built upon the basic and applied research performed by the USDA-Beltsville lab, and closing that lab and possibly losing millions of insect specimens may cause irreparable harm to the state of entomological research in the US."

• "There have been several practical impacts of federal policy changes since 2025 on my career. The most obvious was losing 3 program officers that were familiar with the federal grant I was paid on, leaving no one to help with questions regarding reporting, budgeting, and allowable expenses. Since then replacements have come online but are spread thin and unable to respond in a reasonable amount of time. This has left uncertainty about rebudgets and no cost extensions that myself and others are depending on. As an early career scientist, I think changes to federal policies have most gravely impacted my optimism for a career in this field. Since undergrad I have pointed my efforts towards applied research with the goal of always having an answer for the question 'who cares?'  which inevitably comes for all researchers. I had hoped making thoughtful decisions about the line of research I went into would provide increased funding stability and broader career prospects when I finished my academic training. I made myself competitive with good grades, continuous publication, successful funding of student grants, and by gaining industry experience between degrees. I was awarded a nationally competitive federal fellowship based on a research proposal to study a topic with bipartisan support. I have been targeting a research position with the federal government for as long as I can remember, when cuts came for the federal workforce I thought an academic position could suffice but cuts to federal funding and a general decline in the trust and value proposition of higher education have gutted those prospects as well. I've watched colleagues who have 'done everything right' fail over and over on the job market. I have since expanded my radar to look at jobs in the private, non-profit, and state agency sector but none of these remain unaffected by federal policy changes. Grants typically used to fund post docs are scant which may leave a fundamental hole in my academic training and the training of many others who need to pay the bills now and may take positions that tangentially use their skillset but do not advance science or their academic pursuits. 

I don't think the policy changes that have been made will lead to irreparable damage to the field of science as a whole. Recover is possible even if the scientific community that comes out on the other side looks very little like the community that went in. People with stable positions may be able to weather the storm relatively unscathed, let their elder grad students finish, publish on datasets sitting in their desks, and lean into small low-cost projects. What I do fear for myself and other people finishing grad programs and first post docs, is that we'll be left behind. We'll have to take jobs to support our families, our priorities will change, and people who could have made incredible impacts on the field of science and on generations of scientists to come will be skipped over. The impacted cohort will work it's way through the system like covid kids have started to work their way through primary education, but for me and my colleagues, the impact will continue on with us. "

• "As a graduate student, I am trying to plan for my future as an academic. It feels very uncertain to what degree it makes sense to continue in this direction. I care deeply about insect science, especially during the ongoing insect decline crisis, so I feel a responsibility to continue. However, I don't know I can do the taxonomic and conservation genetics work that I want to contribute to help with that problem without the resources to do so. "

• "Federal policies have decreased my lab's ability to receive grants, making it much harder to fund research. It is very difficult to pay undergraduate researchers, because there are no extra funds to spare. As a student looking into graduate school, I am extremely nervous that I will not be able to receive adequate funding because of the federal government's horrific decisions."

• "With reduced research and education funding as well as restrictions on indirect costs, our university can no longer employ the same number of lab assistants and TAs [Teaching Assistant]. Several of my friends have had to drop their degrees due to having federal grant funding revoked and no longer having sufficient teaching assistantships available to supplement funding. Those of us that are still here have a much heavier workload between losing invaluable lab assistants and teaching more students at once due to fewer TAs. I have also had to make difficult decisions in my personal and professional life for my future career, such as deciding if I will need to leave family behind to seek international post-docs due to significantly reduced career opportunities when I graduate."

• "While funding for my masters thesis research has not been impacted, my career trajectory and my perspective and opinions on a career in academia have changed completely. I initially strived to work in a federal government position, such as at NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], or in academia as a professor. Watching this administration eradicate the stability of federal government jobs and deplete research funding has made me completely change my mind about my future career path. I no longer want any part of federal agencies or academia because I do not want to subject myself to the level of stress and uncertainty that my mentors in the field are undergoing. Now, I am trying to position myself to go into industry."

• "I completed my PhD in 2023. As an early career scientist I am thankful to have a job but extremely fearful that the federal funding that pays for my position will not be renewed. I am terrified of what’s ahead and extremely concerned for the future of my career. I was even afraid to take the job I have and make a move because it is federally funded. I am scared I will end up unemployed and unable to find a job in the field in which I have worked so hard to become established. "

• "Many of the policies implemented since Jan 2025 have had a direct impact on me as a federal researcher. DOGE polices aimed at reducing budgetary costs severely reduced workplace morale, caused the exodus of thousands of government researchers with collective invaluable experience in the field, and in many cases actually increased hurdles to doing the research than reducing it. Policies aimed to limit purchasing and travel have been especially onerous for those of us remaining in running a functional research program and publicizing those findings to the world. Similarly policies aimed to reduce foreign workers in the research landscape have limited international collaborations in critical areas including food safety and sustainable agriculture, and put a dark cloud over future growth opportunities for foreign students and other trainees , and those who collaborate with them (which is almost everyone in sciences in the US)."

• "I am a federal researcher who was fired in early 2025 due to my status as a probationary employee (mandated by my institution as someone 3 years or less post hiring for my job series), although at the time all of us probationary employees that were fired were told in writing that it was for ""poor performance."" I had been working and my supervisor got pulled into a meeting where [they were] told I and the other probationary employees would be fired within the next 36 hours and that it would be for ""poor performance,"" despite my supervisor or [their] supervisor never having been consulted. I had been invited to apply for what is essentially a promotion less than a month prior, so clearly my chain of command thought my performance was fine.

I was sent a letter signed by the head of HR firing me shortly after my supervisor told me. The letter said I was fired as of 5 pm that day, which was before I received the email. I was eventually reinstated, but not before several weeks had passed. This meant that my planned projects for the field season had either been canceled or I had reassigned to others. My technician opted to take the [Deferred Resignation Program] previously. All of this meant that when I was eventually reinstated, I had no support staff, field season experiments in motion, and was essentially in need of beginning my lab all over again, but with the field season already underway. I have since been unable to hire a replacement technician due to the hiring freeze and incredible slowness of hiring since the freeze has been lifted. This means that I am over a year behind on my planned research now, just over a year later, and will continue to fall further amd further behind until my lab is adequately staffed. I have not been able to complete planned projects as a lab of a single person (myself), so have had to pivot research directions as well. 

This has ultimately set my career back significantly and it's unlikely to ever fully 'catch up' to what it would have been without the gap of my own employment and in support staffing."

• "I am a federal employee in an area of the government that has been actively targeted by this administration. Throughout 2025, I was constantly in fear of getting fired, which had a severely negative effect on my mental health, personal and professional relationships, and work productivity. I have learned to better live with the uncertainty, but the toll remains. In addition to that threat, I have one grant that has been in limbo for the past 1.5 years, and 2 others that were selected for funding but the funds never arrived due to the administration actively trying to stop the spending of congressionally approved funds, putting me and my subordinates in substantial uncertainty."

• "I am glad to have the opportunity to share my experiences working as a research scientist after January 20, 2025. At the time I was with the [a specific federal agency] leading a project to address and mitigate the effects of climate change on pollinators. The project brought together several federal agencies and universities to coordinate our efforts and share our research findings, On January 21, 2025, the project was terminated. 

In February when DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] reduced the Federal workforce, we lost all our new hires that were in their probationary period. This included both scientific and administrative staff. Over the next few months, the administrative staff were sent emails proposing a buyout. If thy did not take the buyout, they could be relieved of duty or sent to another location. All telework ended on January 21, so employees that were not fired would have to relocate. We lost our entire administrative staff. There also was a reorganization for spending procedures where credit cards were shut down. Purchases were made only through a single purchasing agent so approval for purchases took weeks. The upshot was for example; our weekly purchases of dry ice were being made with our own money and dry ice was being purchased from an ice cream factory in town.

With 3 months remaining in the fiscal year, the Laboratory budget was cut by 15%, so the budget was in a deficit. The remaining students I had working on projects that were being paid by grants were let go so that the grant funds could used to balance the Laboratory budget.

I realize that my experiences are just some of what my colleagues in all Federal agencies endured during this period and are still enduring. I retired and shifted to an academic appointment. Still, my colleagues cannot say ‘climate change’ in any proposal even though climate change and how we will address and deal with the effects is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. 

I appreciate this the opportunity to share these experiences and hope they will be made available to the public so that everyone will know about the assault on science being perpetrated on numerous fronts by this administration."

• "I had nearly $1M in research grants on Jan 20, 2025 when I worked for a federal science agency. Within weeks I was informed that my employees’ term appointments could not be renewed, that my purchase card spending limit had been reduced to $1, and that anything to do with travel and seasonal hiring would not be possible. My agency had been named specifically in Project 2025 as one that should be abolished, and rumors were spreading that our whole office would be subject to a reduction in force. By April, when we were given 5 days to decide whether we wanted to take the deferred resignation program with voluntary early retirement options for anyone who was eligible, I quickly realized that if I stayed and got fired before my [specific age] birthday later that year that I would be losing my health care benefits and retirement. My supervisor and the center director let us know that our work was no longer valued by the administration, and a town hall with the agency Secretary was deliberately designed to encourage us to leave. The stress of this abrupt decision was affecting my health. I took the early buyout not because I wanted to but because it felt like I didn’t have another choice. I then had one week to wrap up my [multi-decade] year career before getting locked out of my computer one day early, which effectively meant that I didn’t get to say good bye to my colleagues. The program that I was leading mostly dissolved. 45% of my office took the early out, mainly the most senior researchers. The office did not close but was left with severely reduced capacity. A year later I have started a consulting business and am resolved to finish the projects I had in progress, but this is an astounding, unanticipated disruption in my work. "

• "Many people in leadership positions at my agency were forced into early retirement by the threat of Schedule F. Along with other retirements and dismissals, there is currently a 30% deficit in staff that has greatly increased the burden on those remaining. Some of the leadership positions have since been filled with (mostly) internal hires, but there is concern about ability to backfill the large number of desperately needed and currently vacant positions. 

Spending that was impossible last year is now at least somewhat possible, but unnecessarily onerous, as only one person in my entire division has a functional purchase card, and approvals to purchase even the most mundane items can take weeks. Similarly, while travel for 'mission critical' activities is now allowed, the paperwork and approvals are also unnecessarily onerous. Even the employee driving a group of us to the airport 30 minutes away for our approved travel had to themselves get approval. 

If there has been any indirect positive impact, it's that members of the general public are way more aware now of what NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] is. Before, a lot of people I talked to had never even heard of the agency. Efforts to increase awareness of what the agency does and how it benefits the public seem to have had some effect."

Pre-tenure Academics

• "I began my tenure-track Assistant Professor position at a public R1 flagship university one year ago. I am an ecologist. I have not been directly impacted by changes to federal grant policy, because I was not being funded by a federal grant or pursuing a federal grant at the time of those policy changes. However, I expect a huge impact on my productivity and ability to gain tenure beginning this fall. Specifically, I had been planning to start pursuing federal grant funding in year 2 of my position, which begins now. The proposed changes to the way NSF [National Science Foundation] makes awards will effectively make me ineligible from most grant opportunities. My current research program is entirely internationally based and largely focuses on fundamental ecological questions, including topics related to climate change. For these reasons, my current research interests will likely be unfundable due to the proposed politicization of the grant making process. Furthermore, NSF is not the only agency I had planned to pursue that is no longer viable. Because my international research involved issues surrounding sustainability and biological conservation, I had planned to network with USAID (which no longer exists). I had planned to pursue a major RFP [Request for Proposals] that the Fish and Wildlife Service had previously announced for 20 years and no longer is being funded. My state's major wildlife conservation grants program appears to have ceased last year, presumably due to trickle-down effects from federal contributions. USDA-NIFA [US Department of Agriculture - National Institute of Food and Agriculture] is now the sole remaining major federal funder, and I will do my best to pivot my research program to make my work relevant. However, this will require abandoning large portions of my current research portfolio. Like most PIs, I will pursue other sources from state and private funders, but the loss of potential federal support puts me at a significant disadvantage. Hence, I am extremely pessimistic about my ability to achieve tenure and am planning to pursue alternative career paths within the next 5 years if necessary. I want to stress that I am not one to complain. Landing major grants has always been a challenge, and taking a R1 position already gave me pause due to the demanding expectations. My point here is that my job is now even more difficult and uncertain that it would have been 5 years ago. Despite my ability to write excellent papers, design and deliver compelling courses, and effectively contribute to the success of academia, my university will judge me solely on grants, the one aspect of my job that I now have almost no control over. I find that extremely depressing. On a more existential note, I am concerned about the future of ecology, particularly subdisciplines that depend on novel field data collection rather than existing 'big data' resources (e.g., remote sensing, citizen science, etc.). Current political priorities focused on AI and 'economic benefit' effectively marginalize larges swaths of fundamental research and will make the USA a follower rather than a leader when it comes to the production of knowledge at the global scale."

• "I am a new Assistant Professor who started in Aug 2025. So, for me it is hard right now to evaluate the impact of federal policies on my program as I started in the middle of these changes. What I can say, though, it's that it is very stressful to start a lab in such a landscape. I have applied to 2 USDA grants [US Department of Agriculture] in [the fall of] 2025 and still have not get any final notification. In 2 months the new NOFO  [Notice of Funding Opportunity] might came [come] out without knowing what the results were from last year. So that is frustrating... I am staying motivated and pleased with my program because I obtained some small funds to start my lab but it is hard to stay optimistic in front of my grad-students as I know funds are harder to get and there is more restrictions on how to spend them. The uncertainty of the future and the constant administrative burden we have to go through (i.e., justifying everything and having to show complete transparency while the government is far from showing the example) is upsetting me. I feel totally unsupported and discreditable by this government. I feel also deeply sorry for the international students (I was one of them before getting a faculty track position). I feel like all these policies are not encouraging the hiring of int. grad. students because of all the extra steps with the ambassy and all the risks with VISA renewal. Myself, I choose to hire American citizens for my lab because it seems complicated for me to get int. students."

• "The federal and state policies since January 20, 2025 have significantly hampered my ability to secure federal funding to support my lab and to advance our research mission. I have had two NSF proposals receive extremely positive reviews, only to be declined due to the severe cuts to the budget. Two senior co-PIs on these projects indicate that they have never, in their entire career, seen a funding situation this hostile to junior faculty/beginning investigators. The policies have been wholly demoralizing and have required me to reduce the scope of my research program, to the detriment of my trainees, department, and university."

• "As a assistant professor that started my job in 2023, the impacts of federal funding cuts has stymied my research in several ways including my ability to obtain and desire to apply for federal grant funding. Several initiatives that I was working towards have been cut or reorganized and I am hesitant to put in the work for a grant which may not come to fruition. I have also been affected indirectly by how I view my employer. I have seen the university administration act callously towards its faculty and staff and narrowly focus on obtaining money and surviving at all costs, even going as far as to say that the targeting of other universities may be a positive since they would get a bigger share of a smaller funding pie. This has made me question whether I am a valued member of my institution (and academia in general) and whether I am disposable. However, the biggest challenges have been the issues regarding personnel. I have been worried consistently about the status of many members of my lab and whether or not they could leave the country or may face deportation as they come from international countries that face travel bans. Furthermore, I personally face these challenges as I am the child of immigrants; this additional personal stress weighs heavily on me and prevents me from getting work done."

Principal Investigators (PI) and Career Scientists

• "My role is entirely grant funded. Federal grant programs that have long funded work like mine have disappeared, leaving my role in jeopardy. The solicitation for a proposal intended to support my role for 5 years was paused indefinitely, leaving me in an extended state of job insecurity. Of course I've been writing proposals for related areas, but processing times are incredibly long, with little information shared. For example, one proposal I submitted has been processing with no award decision for eight months. Of the five federal proposals that I have submitted since Jan. 20, 2025, all of them are either still being processed without a decision (sometimes a year plus after submission) or selected for funding but not processed in a timely manner (none of the awarded funds have arrived at my institution even after 3-6 months of waiting). We were given virtually no time to prepare for this major shift in the way our work was funded and scrambled for most of 2025 to identify alternative funding mechanisms and develop relationships with private foundations. Private funding now covers some aspects of ongoing long-term projects, but its a fraction of our program costs and isn't set up to support the graduate students that are critical to most projects. The extra time and energy spent on writing unexpected proposals, trying to get answers on proposal processing, coping with mid-career job instability, and supporting colleagues and students whose work is also affected detracted significantly from my ability to think creatively and bring new ideas to our program. There is a personal cost too; as someone that lives with a chronic health condition, I am less often able to show up for myself, my family, or my friends in fulfilling ways because my energy reserves are already drained."

• "In Oklahoma, it is now impossible to receive tenure status at public universities. Funding has also significantly decreased and my university appears to be hiding money opportunities making it harder to apply for money. This started immediately after Jan 2025."

• "There are no positive impacts of federal policies since Jan 20, 2025 on my research. Major negative impacts to my research program include the closure and reorganization of field offices and research stations within the USDA FS [US Department of Agriculture Forest Service] Southern and Northern Research Stations. I have regular and ongoing formal and informal collaborations with scientists throughout these regions and the ongoing federal chaos has impacted all of them. This has included colleagues retiring, having their positions changed or moved, and general malaise and stress associated with the untargeted, broad brush approach the federal government has taken to eliminating research in the United States. Other impacts include the loss of the USDA FS Forest Health Protection grants, which myself and many of my colleagues received funding through the work on applied forest health projects. One of my grants had been elevated from the [specific regional] competition to the national competition and was about to be awarded, but never was due to the elimination of the program. I am PI of a grant that was impacted by this process, which includes multiple federal collaborators across agencies and it has delayed the project by years and wasted many hours of time across all parties. Lastly, as an academic scientist, these changes have impacted recruitment of students and lab workers due to fears of funding being pulled. The current federal changes have made me very depressed and it is difficult to feel motivated to work in the field of conservation, and an institution of higher learning, when we are under constant attack and explicitly named as the "enemy" by folks such as the vice-president."

• "I was Senior Personnel on four different federally-funded grants at the start of 2025 going back years and am no longer as of late 2025 due to the administration's cuts to, and mass layoffs of, STEM and STEM education initiatives at multiple federal agencies. Some grants were simply not renewed and others outright cancelled mid-project, but the impact on my career was the same; my institution was no longer able to fully-fund my position. This had a negative impact on my mental health as we tried to find other funds to cover the gaps in my salary, which still remain uncertain to this day.  In addition to these personal impacts, these federal cuts and resulting chaos have destroyed the very student-centered STEM programs I was working on, which had helped thousands of students in my area over many years. This substantially negatively impacts the ability of future students looking to advance in a STEM career, constrains the nation's workforce development pathways, and effectively prevents American workers from being able to solve complex scientific challenges, prevents innovation, and ultimately reduces the nation's capacity to lead the world in STEM advancement and achievement. "

• "I am a late career scientist, so the impact on my long-term success is not applicable. But the impact on my science has been measurable and negative. This is a concern, because throughout my career I have been at the forefront of my field. Like my colleagues, I train the next generation of scientists, and in my case I also founded a successful company based on my science. That company provides income for many individuals and their families, and it provides products to US consumers. The notion that canceling grants that were previously awarded or arbitrarily capping award amounts at low levels (both of which happened to me) is in the public interest is demonstrably untrue -- my research program has contributed directly to the health of the US economy, both in academia and in the private sector, and those impacts have been substantially diminished by recent governmental policy changes."

• "I had a joint research position with the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] and an R1 [Research Tier 1] University. The funding mechanisms for this joint position had been in place for 16 years. The current administration stopped all of these Joint Venture Agreements when it gutted the research branch of the Forest Service.  This effectively resulted in a 30% reduction in my income, and a 100% reduction in my research capacity.  "

• "I am soft money research scientist conducting research related to the conservation of endangered species. I provide expertise and services on specific listed species to multiple federal, state, local and other groups such as ecological consultancies and nonprofit organizations. My research is largely reliant on federal funding as well as federal flow through funding to other agencies and groups. After contributing to the field for >20 years, my research and career are barely holding on, and I don't know if I will be able to continue in the field."

• "I work at a nonprofit on a restoration project for an endangered species, with the bulk of our work historically funded by federal grants. Our federal grants are coming to an end, though there have been solicitations for federal grants that would likely continue to fund out project. Although we spent considerable time to develop applications for these opportunities, we have yet to hear any response from the relevant agencies. This has led to us planning to scale back our operations, which will reduce the usefulness of our project to inform conservation and management of our focal species."

• "I worked for a state-funded non profit organization that also depended on federal funds for aspects of its work. When federal grants were not reimbursed in early 2025, there was a round of layoffs. Although my position was not federally funded, the loss of federal funds to the org required that it make up the difference by increasing its ask from the state. However, continued throttling of federal funds to many other state programs had further contracted the state’s budget, leaving less to go around. This had the knock-on effect of reducing the state funding allocated to the org during its budget renewal in mid 2025. Another reduction in force at the org resulted, which included the elimination of my position. I am still unemployed."

• "Work related to climate change has been fully censored.  Existing training programs that sought to increase diversity in science were cancelled.  A climate-related center that I direct has had its funding frozen for 9+ months and almost all research staff were fired.  About 1/3 of the federal workers that I have historically worked with closely (in USGS [US Geological Survey]) have retired or taken leave - the federal workforce for ecological conservation is now near zero as those workers were particularly targeted and were more likely to leave.  Some that remained have been reassigned to other tasks outside of ecology. There is practically no one left in NPS [National Park Service] or NFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service] to work on conservation - I try not to think about it. Grants now require several levels of sign offs from upper-level political appointees and are moving very slowly (if at all).  My federal partners are demoralized and are forced to constantly pivot based on the whims of political appointees and the guesses of their upper administrators as to what the executive branch wants (because it does not communicate with them). "

• "I [have a specific leadership role in] a department involved in environmental science research and I am speaking of my observations of impacts across that entire group. Graduate students and postdocs have chosen not to attend international conferences or to visit home (in the case of international students) because of worries about harassment at US border crossings.  I know of at least one and possibly two cases where decisions about final onboarding of postdocs in federal agencies were postponed so long that the individuals who received them sought other opportunities. No grants were directly cancelled, but a few new grants that were anticipated were not awarded.  One faculty member whose work is primarily in Antarctica can no longer get funding through US federal agencies to work there (and because the infrastructure is closely tied to government funding therefore has no immediate prospect of returning to that research). Another faculty member had [a specific federal agency]-funded deep sea data collection project terminated early and so was unable to get data that was to be a key part of pre-tenure research (and has had tenure clock extended). [Another specific individual has] been involved in legal action to reverse regulatory changes on US federal lands that have negative impact on scientific research that began in first Trump administration. Threats to rate of indirect cost return have caused university administrators to become financially conservative in ways that have tangible negative impact on faculty and staff hiring. State level changes have had more direct impacts. We have effectively lost tenure in [a specific state in the midwest], my department's degrees became "illegal" under legislation for minimum enrollment and had to be administratively restructured, the university has "cleansed" websites of language that could be construed to be related to diversity or equity, state troops were summoned to campus [a specific number of times] to repress small and quite innocuous protests, and faculty have been dismissed based on anonymous student complaints about alleged infractions of one-sided teaching."

• "I manage a university center. During 2025, we had about five graduates students we had to rescue. Their stipends were paid by federal grants which were suspended, frozen, or canceled. We were able to work with our university's central administration to scrape together funding to keep these students going, but that process was stressful, time-consuming, and took money away from other priorities. I also spent considerable time talking to our center's faculty associates about threats to the research enterprise. That was time I would normally spend on my own research. Last July I submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation. In the past, I received decisions within 5-6 months of submission. We just received our decision in late May--double the usual time. This delay is not only discouraging, but but has real, substantive impacts on the pace of scientific progress."

• "Our organization suffered the cancelation of ALL Department of the Interior grants awarded to us, which resulted in the organization needing to lay off upwards of 40% of its total staff, including myself. The fallout from this has been extremely negative, and since the grant terminations, I have not been able to find work as an administrator in the field of ecological conservation. I've also noticed an alarming decrease in available work, especially for seasonal positions.  "

• "As associate dean of an academic program, I have had to absorb the effects of both DOGE-related disruptions and the ongoing lack of transparency surrounding federal funding decisions, cancellations, and withdrawals. Together, these challenges have required the institution to provide unexpected financial support for numerous graduate students and led to NO recruitment of talented international students. As a result, my budget has been stretched to its limit and our reputation has been tarnished globally. "

• "As an environmental consultant, our work now is surrounded by uncertainty. Our clients funding sources, permitting regulations, and other rules impacting environmental policy has been in a state of flux. It is challenging to plan and permit large capital projects with this uncertainty. Climate change planning has also been a challenge given the federal hestitantcy to acknowledge reality."

• "I am contractor who has worked with several federal natural resource agencies consistently for the past [about two dozen] years. I have assisted with the design and analysis of monitoring plans and have had quantitative research funded by these projects. My contracts have been cut by about 80% and will probably be cut further. Many of the subject-matter experts who I have collaborated with took early retirement. "

• "The primary impacts for what I do as a consultant are as follows: changes to environmental laws (eg, eliminating the incidental take provision of the MBTA*), changes to federal agencies that I interact with, responses by state agencies, reduction in federal contracting opportunities, and whiplash policy changes affecting the economy and, therefore, the start of private projects/potential clients."

*[Eliminating the incidental take provision under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) exempts industries from criminal penalties for the unintentional killing or injuring of protected birds.]

• "Decreased Federal budgets and personnel have limited the number of grants available to my firm.  As a result, the work opportunities have decrease substantially for my firm and me."

• "The greatest impact I have experienced has not been adapting to changing regulations, but watching clients postpone or cancel projects because of regulatory uncertainty. I primarily support renewable energy projects, and I have had very little work associated with proposed solar or wind developments over the past year. Because ecological consulting in the Northeast is already seasonal, these slowdowns make it increasingly difficult to maintain consistent employment and retain experienced ecologists within the industry."

• "I work for a company that makes scientific instruments. As such, we often partner with scientists and collaborate with them. In addition, our company is supported by the funding of scientists to purchase our products. This past year we laid off 20% of workforce due to federal funding cuts."

• "Although I am retired, I am extremely concerned about the negative impacts that current science policy is having on the US scientific endeavor.  I spent my career as a person involved in making fundamental discoveries about the natural world.  I also dedicated myself to programs such as NSFs Graduate Research Fellowship program largely as a panelist as well as a reader of applications from student's at my university.  I was extremely disappointed in the award reductions last year from 2000 to 1000, later raised by 500 awards.  Fortunately, 2600 awards were given this year.  The problem is in my cursory examination of the fields funded suggests the fields supported are more directed to computer science and AI rather than life sciences.  Science advances that lead to new industries cannot be planned.  Genetic engineering was not a planned advancement, but emerged from three basic biological phenenoma, restriction enzymes, genetic transformation, and genetic vectors (plasmids and bacteriophages), that were combined together to give us the ability to manipulate genetic systems. No one said, we need to design a genetic engineering system, but rather basic biologists discovered three disparate things in biology that were combined to create the molecular biological revolution.  The same can be said for CAS/CRISPR as a system for precise genetic engineering.  My point is that transformative research emerges from basic research that  does not necessarily have an immediate goal.  Other examples include the discovery that Wolbachia infected mosquitos can serve as a control on disease causing viruses and the observation that diary workers did not get small pox.  Although, I have not been affected by current policy, I worry that the legacy of my colleagues and I is being negatively affected."

• "In the past, I have collaborated with US Fish and Wildlife Refuge staff on the [specific water body] to conduct research on [a specific type of] rare ecosystems in the [specific name] National Wildlife Refuge. I have set up soil temperature monitoring protocols and am conducting vascular plant surveys in these ecosystems. Since 2025, staffing cuts to the NWR have resulted in the loss of the biologist and full-time technician, meaning that it is extremely difficult for the agency to help with the soil temperature monitoring work. The burden of getting the work done has shifted to me. I am now retired and have no salary. I am volunteering my time and use of my private vehicle and computer & software to make sure that the research we started can continue. I am taking on additional responsibilities to assist the refuge manager monitor a federally threated plant species, since [they have] no staff to dedicate to this work. I am doing this work because I believe it should get done. But, it is frustrating to see the federal government abdicating its obligations to manage resources held in trust for the public."

• "I am retired, but I continue to work on old data sets. I formerly cooperated with several scientists at a nongovernmental research institute who depended on federal grants. These scientists have lost their funding and are considering leaving the country. I advise all early-career scientists to consider emigrating to countries where science is better supported. I liken the situation in the USA in 2026 to Germany in 1933, when Hitler destroyed German science."

• "I was a full-time researcher for a government agency until March 2025 when I felt I had no choice but to retire (at least 4 decades of civil service). Weekly reporting of 5 things you accomplished this week, federal purchasing and travel power reduced to $1 (a ludicrous insult), hiring freezes, uncertainty in whether projects already in place would continue, threats of having to sign a loyalty oath to the president, insults to my profession and research interests. The stated ingtent [intent] was to humiliate and insult civil service scientists into leaving, and it worked on me. My entire adult life has been devoted to science in the public interest, and this was ridiculed, as were civil servants in general as being unnecessary, "woke," freeloaders on the federal dole, and against many Executive Orders."

• "Although I have been retired since 2022, I have been working on two federal grants that spanned this time frame.  Although my funding has just expired, I continue working on climate change, biodiversity, and genetics issues associated with these grants as I feel the issues are so important that I will continue unfunded.  Because of the abysmal science/environmental record of this administration, current proclamations and policies are causing unrepairable harm at both local and global scales. My state university, a research 1 institution, is being systematically torn down to reflect far right ideology.  I am devoting more time to public outreach and continue working on an environmental/research bill that I co-authored and is pending in Congress, but has no chance of being funded in the current administration.  I continue to publish at the rate of about [a specific number of] papers per year in major journals and have had outreach articles published in popular venues such as newspapers, [a specific newspaper], and [another specific newspaper].  From my retired perspective, I see science, education, and research challenged as never before in my 50 year academic career and strongly feel that Trump is systematically destroying what makes American great such as independent though, critical scientific thinking, broad integration of ideas, and a funding / educational system that addresses broad ideas and concepts fundamental to the U.S. and the world. Because of the administrations attempts to reduce cultural diversity, the very word diversity is forbidden to the extent that someone working on microbial diversity in soils has had their recently funded grant withdrawn in my department.  Such ridiculous biases represent the new norm and reflect the spill-over effects of ideology run amuck.  I feel we must rise up to challenge the stupidity and the real dangers of this administration."

• "Some of our undergraduate students had their graduate school offers and summer internships rescinded. The number of Hollings [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hollings Scholarships] slots for undergraduate funding was slashed egregiously, we had a record low number (and an unimaginably small number) of students get the award, despite our program ranking every single year at the very top of number of awards, so some of our best students missed out not only on the professional and financial benefits to their undergraduate study of getting this award, but the longer term benefits that this program affords - undergraduate publication, professional development, respected credentials for later internships and graduate school/fellowships and scholarships/employment, and such. As well, we are a private institution, but we took steps to alter and mask our DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] programs. This has taken the time and energy of a lot of faculty and staff that is a disturbing endeavor. We simply do not want to draw attention to ourselves, and worry that having DEI programs could compromise our current and future federal and [specific state in the southeast] state funding. We worry that such attention would incur additional legal costs that we can ill afford, not to mention the impact to our time and focus (needed to deliver our high quality program supporting students)."

• "The impacts on my department and institution have been notable. Grants have been cut, few have been accepted, graduate students have left the program and cohort sizes have shrunk dramatically. During my first two years of graduate school, there was so much innovation, mentions in the news, publications and grants. Many graduate students in our department got the GRFP [Graduate Research Fellowship Program] and PRFB [Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology] and their careers were shaped by this federal funding. Now opportunities have dried up with funding cuts and critical research that helps many sectors including agriculture, healthcare, forest fire management, and many other fields have been directly impacted by funding cuts. What is so remarkable is people are still motivated to continue their work because they care so deeply, but it’s clear they could do so much more with additional resources. "

• "My institution has been severely harmed by federal policies and state level responses to those policies. Budget cuts across the board have been felt by our campus so much so that no recruitment of graduate student researchers is expected for multiple years. This severely impacts the planning as well as day-to-day research operations at the campus and limits total knowledge gained, mentorship, applied research, and community outreach. "

• "My institution, Harvard University, has been severely impacted by federal budget cuts. I was one of the [specific] investigators at Harvard whose federal grants were not suspended by the Trump administration. (I can only imagine why this was the case. Perhaps it was because my [specific grants] were each in their final year, and federal funds had already been transferred to the university.) Loss of federal funding caused many colleagues in my and other science departments to cancel unfinished research projects, abort planned travel for research-related conference attendance and fieldwork, and fire grant-paid staff. More broadly, the university imposed a faculty and staff hiring freeze and drastically cut back graduate school admissions."

• "Recent changes in federal research-grant policies have reduced my institution's ability to support faculty-student research, impeded the scientific research of my (especially non-tenured) colleagues in the natural sciences, and reduced research and employment opportunities for our students. The public interest is served by generous public funding of basic science, with competition for that funding depending on the quality of the science as judged by the scientific community, not depending on the ideology of the current executive branch and its political appointees. Political interference with science places at risk free inquiry, public access to information, and public understanding of nature. These are essential to a functioning democracy. "

• "I submitted an NSF [National Science Foundation] CAREER grant in July 2025. It received predominantly Excellent reviews from panelists and was recommended for funding by the Program Officer. However, its Education Plan, which taught concepts related to sex and gender in biology, was flagged for violating the current administration's Executive Order 14168. That executive order contains incorrect information on the biology of sex, but political bias has triumphed over accurate biology.  My grant was 'Returned' to me in March 2026, with no option to revise the proposal and receive funding. I plan to resubmit with revisions (i.e. censoring my original goals) this July 2026. As a pre-tenure faculty member, this setback has made it harder for me to fund my research and my team, and less likely that I will receive tenure under the policies of the current administration - I do not anticipate that my department will adjust tenure expectations regarding federal funding. This is also a loss for biology education. In my experience, teaching undergraduates and high school students about sex variation in evolution and animal behavior has been an incredible tool for expanding frameworks of biological diversity. "

• "While a representative on my universities graduate student council, we were told that the university was being sued because we maintained web pages (externally visible) that listed key fellowships and opportunities for individuals in marginalized groups. There were also resources for how to find housing and stretch graduate student stipends. This occurred in Spring 2025. It was shocking to hear that something as simple and useful as listing resources could be the target of legal action simply because the resources were targeted to benefit underrepresented groups. We were forced to make these pages inaccessible for those without a university login. In general, the administration became extremely sensitive. They repeatedly sent emails reminding us that as state employees (many at my research institute are state-funded), we cannot advertise protests or discuss our political discontent on university channels. The vast majority of professors, even the tenured ones, remained complacent and completely disconnected. It was disappointing to see members of the community with more power than graduate students failing to advocate for us or even recognize the threat to our futures. Responses to grant applications that were meant to fund my initial research project were delayed so much so that I pivoted my research to an area that felt more secure out of concern that I would not be able to continue in my program. If politics decides what graduate students can and can't study, then we, as a scientific community, have entirely lost our freedom of inquiry. What research questions will go unaddressed for years because a curious graduate student had to change their project to better align with the interests of the current administration? I was unable to interact with government scientists at a major conference because they were prohibited from using government funds for travel. This greatly limits by ability to establish connections in key areas that I want leverage after I graduate. Attendance at an influential workshop was dominated by US citizens due to international students struggling to obtain visas. This represents a profound loss of knowledge transfer and limits future international collaborations between students attending the workshop."

• "Proposal writing has been complicated by a need to police language previously common and useful. Collaborators, federal and otherwise, have been losing their jobs or feeling overwhelmed and unable to dedicate time to proposal development. Grant opportunities have also dried up, in particular for achieving meaningful changes in wildfire risk to vulnerable communities due to a perception of DEI."

• "Most of my research is synthesis science, meaning that I frequently need access to publically accessible research and to be able to contact various researchers. It is nearly impossible to determine who still actually works for the federal government. Further, my work frequently has both a climate change and social science dimension (ie. has mentioned diversity and equity), which means that federal partners are no longer willing to share or promote the publications. I have had federal partners go so far as saying that they will no longer work with me out of concern for retaliation."

• "Mostly on coworkers and lab staff being layed off in partnered labs. But I also educate, and I had to sign a statement of adherence that made it so I can't teach certain topics and ideas. This includes anything that said 'diversity, gender, etc' "

• "In the renewal of a grant we wrote that we were studying on 'small farms in a maritime climate.' I was forced to remove the word climate from the report to receive the renewal of the award even though the word was not used in any reference to climate change."

• "I lead a federally-funded collaborative project that includes several employees on the Gulf of Mexico. Since January 20, 2025 we have had to change our team name, change how we refer to the region (Gulf rather than Gulf of Mexico), drop our DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] activities (which were originally a required component of the proposed work), and our federal participants have experienced extreme difficulties or inability to travel to do field work or attend team meetings. I also used to serve on the steering committee of a DEI subcommittee of NABCI [North American Bird Conservation Initiative], which was terminated shortly after January 20, 2025. We have had to rewrite grant applications to exclude words like 'climate' or 'diversity', and still had them denied despite positive reviews."

• "We had an USAID grant canceled days before the monies were to be released. I was [an] author for a chapter in the Congressionally mandated 6th National Climate Assessment; it was canceled and permanant program staff fired. Three proposals submitted last fall (Sept., Oct) have not had a decision or any communication. One of my graduate students from Brazil who volunteered to help Vet Science students learn how to work through language challenges while working in the real world was deported. [They were] not paid a penny for [their] services, but since [they] COULD HAVE BEEN PAID, it was viewed a a visa violation. Partner scientists in USDA [US Department of Agriculture] have been furloughed and fired. Others have been asked to retire. Federal formula funds that support my institution (a Land Grant) have not been released so there is tremensoud [tremendous] uncertanity regarding hiring, and general support for programs in our college. I have not taken on new graduate students because of funding uncertainties at many levels. I just hope to have sufficient funds to finish the three students I currently have and keep the technical staff supported."

• "My [spouse] works for the USFWS  [US Fish and Wildlife Service] and [their] refuge has experienced significant loss of staff due to the DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] cuts and related cuts to the Dept of Interior. Personal stress was high because we were unsure if [their] job would be cut, which would result in a loss of health benefits and salary for our family. For a time, [they] had to submit what work [they] had done each week, which took away from [their] time carrying out management activities at [their] location. At my place of employment, a university, we have federal grants that have been submitted that were under review and now seem to be in a state of limbo. I think the clock is going to time out and no funding will be awarded, but that is unclear at the moment. Additionally, the University has been adamant that there is no mention of DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] Initiatives and some initiatives have been actively cut, which is harmful to students. Uncertainty about immigration status has also been harmful to students, particularly Dreamers."

• "Federal policies since Jan 20, 2025 have negatively impacted my research, career prospects, and personal health. I am an early-career scientist and completed my degree last year. It has been difficult to find a job. I think that reductions in federal funding have decreased the number of available postdoctoral positions and made applications more competitive. In addition, the NSF  [National Science Foundation] Ocean Sciences postdoctoral research fellowship program is not being offered, which would have been a great opportunity for me. I initially thought a job at NOAA  [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] or USGS [US Geological Survey] could be a good option, but I have seen few opportunities and hesitate to take a position when the federal government is so unstable and so many new hires were recently fired. I worked on a grant proposal with my current advisor to fund myself to continue working as a postdoc, but the review timeline seems to be delayed and we have not received any communications since February. Recent announcements that grant review rules will be changed to politicize funding decisions and that the Ocean Observatories Initiative [OOI] instruments are being removed from the ocean are not only detrimental to my research, but also my mental health. I use OOI data directly in my research, and changes to grant reviews could mean that important research doesn't get funding simply because it is not politically popular, not based on its scientific merit or benefits to humanity. I feel extremely pessimistic about the future of science in the United States and our ability to take action on climate change and prevent widespread harm to the environment and to people around the world."

• "The Research Branch of the USDA Forest Service has been heavily impacted.  While it is not completely clear yet, perhaps only 25% of the research locations may remain funded at some level.  One of the most important contributions that federal research has made over the years is the maintenance of long-term data sets for ecological/environmental data and the long-term research sites which universities and students have greatly benefited from over decades.  Examples for the Forest Service include experimental ranges, watersheds, and forests.  The loss appears to be extensive and many research locations will likely never recover."

• "The most significant impacts are potential access to government supplied materials (specifically identification bands for bird banding operations) and support for access to data in the BBL [Bird Banding Lab] database. The decrease of support staff has caused a significant impact on long range planning and BBL initiated research efforts. "

• "I coordinate a 15 year avian demographic monitoring project that directly informs federal decision making. The project depends on federal scientists participating in the collection of field data as well as federal funding for critical supplies and equipment. In early 2025 all federal employees were abruptly prohibited from participation in field work on the project, and purchasing contracts in place for critical supplies and equipment for the project were cancelled. We are continuing core aspects of the project on a volunteer basis to maintain the time series of data in hopes funding will be restored in the next administration. "

• "I lost my seasonal - permanent position with a federal agency due to administration orders. I was later reinstated but due to the fact that I do not live full time there and difficulty in getting to the remote area where the position was located I was no longer able to travel, additionally I was told by every single person I worked with that should I put the time, expense, and emotion into traveling to my duty location I would likely once again lose my job due to the upcoming 'reduction in force' my agency was set to undergo. Given the option of spending those resources only to be fired and become potentially stuck in an expensive remote location without a job or take the 'deferred retirement program' I felt I had no other choice but to take the 'deferred retirement program'. Because of this choice I had research I was unable to complete or assist with and my department was short staffed. Attempts by my department to hire positions that were necessary to fill this staffing gap were blocked by a hiring freeze and eventually unsuccessful due to the short term seasonal nature of the positions. In addition, much of the research I, and many others, had worked on was removed due to its mention of climate change. This information was used frequently by many stakeholders and is no longer available to them, nor were we given the chance to edit the information before it was removed. Additionally work colleagues reported having their research removed without warning or justification from their work-issued devices. In some cases this removed more than a decade of research. Policy changes ended monitoring programs that had been going on even longer and unpredictable funding caused rifts with long-term partners. This loss in monitoring and accountability by my department represents irreparable harm. Even if governmental funding were to return that trust is broken and we cannot turn back the clock and retrieve monitoring data that never happened."

• "I am faculty at a PUI [Primary Undergraduate Institution] and part of the science team at an LTER [Long Term Ecological Research] site. I'm going to focus first on direct impacts for my day-to-day scholarship, teaching, and mentoring. Then, I'll summarize first-hand but indirect impacts on my work. The main impact of federal policy change since January 20th, 2025 has been on the work that I do and support at the [Long Term Ecological Research] site where I am part of the science team. Staffing changes, changes to internal procedures, and the impact of DOGE meant that our previously approved grant funding was withheld for unknown periods of time and ultimately released in a reduced amount, for one-year installments, and with a constant threat of cancellation. In order for the funding to be released, the science team spent tremendous amounts of time revising our previously funded proposal to cut projects, reword text to meet new priorities, and rework our plans to make do with less. Uncertainty, reduced support, and loss of time meant that we canceled a [Research Experience for Undergraduates], did not do some routine data collection in 2025, and spent time that would have gone to research or mentoring on administrative work. The environment was also incredibly stressful, leading to frequent comparisons to the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are in a more stable place now, but the overall impact is that we are doing "less with less." Our focus is on constantly attending to the changing policy environment and rigidly adhering to the political winds that blow from [the National Science Foundation (NSF)]. We are doing less open-ended, exploratory, and long-term work and focusing more on churning out papers in order to justify our existence. We are also all spending time and energy finding alternative (state, private) funding sources to supplement work that previously was NSF-funded.

More broadly, the political environment of uncertainty, hostility to international scholars and scholarship, disruptions to federal workers' work and careers, and skepticism of environmental scientists has made it harder to do science and prepare the next generation of scientists. Loss of federal and state funding and threats of loss of funding (including reduced indirect) mean that my home institution is hoarding resources and increasingly asking us to scale back costs. Reduced job and grad school opportunities have pushed many of my students to leave science, emigrate from the US, or spend more time/energy searching for opportunities as opposed to doing science. Federally employed and International colleagues/collaborators cannot contribute to our shared work because they are unemployed/furloughed/visa-insecure. I personally have stopped applying for new grants and am focused on making do with equipment and materials I have while supporting my students to build sustainable careers for themselves. This system is not necessarily more efficient due to the constant uncertainty and instability, but is instead lower-performing."

• A participant who did not give us permission to quote them said that the EPA failed to publish a US greenhouse gas inventory in 2025 and 2026, despite this being required under the senate-ratified UNFCCC treaty. The lack of this data left states, industry groups, and communities scrambling to find other global sources of data. 

• "Changes in federal science policy have affected the viability of every aspect of ecological research.  We can no longer trust the government to provide funding that it promised - making it impossible to plan any aspect of conducting fieldwork, mentoring students, and ultimately learning new knowledge about ecology that we can communicate to all of humanity.  It is clear that priorities for funding are no longer guided by unbiased minds who seek to use science to make our lives and world better - policy now seems guided by minds bent only on destruction and misguided retribution.  The agencies that fund ecological work (for my lab, NSF and USDA) have been gutted.  Those few staff that remain have been reassigned, forced to move out of their office, and largely treated like second-hand citizens who are not as important as the 20-year-old DOGE experts who guided this ill-informed (and patently ineffective) exercise in increasing government efficiency.  To illustrate how these changes in federal policy affect the rest of society (including Americans), consider the example of zoonotic disease.  The majority of pathogens that cause human disease (including Ebola, Lyme Disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, COVID-19) are also found in animals.  These diseases are increasingly common and dominate the front pages of most newspapers (as well they should).  Recent changes in staffing at NSF, program priorities, and a general scorched-earth approach to disemboweling science has left disease ecology vastly underfunded.  The next pandemic is very likely to be a disease found in animals - and yet, thanks to recent changes in science-funding policy, we are much more poorly equipped to detect emerging pathogens before they become the next global pandemic.

An additional detail that is important to mention -- destroying programs is much easier than building them.  In less than 18 months, one administration has almost completely destroyed scientific research in the US.  Not long ago, we were the global leader in science -- now, we will cede that leadership to other countries (probably China).  When the US becomes a place where people no longer seek knowledge, smart people will go somewhere else - and we will no longer be a 'shining city on the hill' - we will be a smoldering heap of what was once the envy of the world.

It took 18 months to gut science in the US; if we started tomorrow, it would take at least 18 years to rebuild our status.  Scientists no longer trust the US government to support them and to provide the funding it was contractually obligated to provide.  Instead of support, the primary function of current US science 'policy' is to deport scientists, discourage collaboration with scholars from other countries, pursue misguided pseudoscience studies with largely political aims, and to ensure that the US is certainly not great again.  The US was the greatest science-conducting nation in the world - but that was 18 months ago."

• "With cuts to federal programs, new world screw worm.is now back in the US and I do a lot of work with the food industry. It has also impacted research on public health pests, urban pests, and structural pests which means less information on how to successfully manage those pests to protect my clients. This has also meant an increase in pest borne diseases like Lyme, alpha gal, malaria, and more. Rodents have become more prevelant and there has been a lack of approval for new pesticides because the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is understaffed and significantly behind."

• "My research site is federally run and relatively isolated, so federal policies have severely limited the work we can do. From a negative perspective: Our grants have been reduced; sites are so understaffed that rodents (with hantavirus) are entering all parts of the field station and vehicles, and; vehicles are not maintained, reducing the amount of research that can be done by both distance traveled and number of people conducting research, limiting scope of understanding.

However, irreparable damage has been done. Due to understaffing, response to natural disasters such as fires has been devastatingly slow and has decimated much over 50% of field sites, which contain many endemic and endangered species."

• "In my field of classical biological control of invasive insect pests (although retired I am still involved with active colleagues in research), the federal cuts and restrictions have severely limited external national and international collaborations. Without these collaborations biological control programs are currently impossible to implement or pursue. In addition, the loss of grant funding, cuts in staff and inability to hire postdocs and intern students severely restricts the research that can be accomplished."

• "It is overwhelming and stressful to even answer this question. The impacts of Federal policies since 01/20/2025–and similar state policies that either inspired the federal policies or followed suit—are almost universally negative, and devastatingly so, to my agency, my program, the public we serve, and to me as an individual worker. People in power have made it clear their goal has been to terrorize the federal worker, and they are effective in doing so. I have seen numerous high-performing colleagues leave federal service prematurely, taking years of valuable institutional knowledge with them. I have seen the fear of negative consequences cause agency partners to pull funding for needed projects. I have seen delay after delay after delay for newly required layers of approval grind normal operations to a halt. I have seen these delays result in severe project disruptions, including loss of personnel. It would likely take me an hour and pages more to fully catalog the impacts I have witnessed first-hand."

• "I was directly affected by funding freezes. The funding that my paycheck comes from was frozen a few days before payday with almost no notice. We received mixed messages from federal employees about whether it was possible to request our payments early, and those who tried received stern emails about the questionable legality of their actions. It was extremely stressful to have uncertainty about when/if I would get a paycheck. My institution was relatively supportive, but they were also uncertain about if/when money would come through and what the legal implications would be of any support that they offered in the interim. Even after a judge ordered the money to be released, federal employees continued to be in the dark and unable to provide guidance. This left me concerned over not only the reliability of my paychecks, but also the financial and legal burden I was personally taking on by having this funding. These policies have done irreparable harm to the trust that scientific workers have in the federal institutions. Prior to 2025, the funding that I was receiving was making a huge impact on my career and opening doors for me. Now, I am unsure if it is responsible to pursue a career in science at all. I am confident that this has done irreparable harm to the scientific workforce in a way that will have impacts on Americans for decades to come. "

• "There are at least 4 major areas of impact to me, my lab, my department, and scientific research in general. First is the delays and cuts in research funding, with by far the most frustrating being the interference in federal agencies intended to result in not spending money on research that the Congress has allocated. Related is the shift in scientific priorities from being driven by scientists and those with a long view of the economic and social benefits of scientific research to priorities chosen with a short term view. And then following this by taking money from currently successful endeavors for poorly planned initiatives. Third is the large reduction in federal research and research administration workforce that makes previously useful and relatively easy tasks hard to accomplish. This includes timely grant reviews, publicly available data, and many other things. Finally, the public interest has been harmed by science being driven by political viewpoints rather than scientific curiosity and planning."

• "The lack of solicitations and the cancelation of existing solicitations makes planning for research and student support difficult. The slow response and underfunding of solicitations that do go through makes it even harder, and most of the solicitations I see these days involve turnaround times faster than my university can process. I also have to consider the impact of travel bans and visa limitations on my trainees, whose mental health can struggle with the uncertainty and lack of family connection. "

• "The withdrawal of NOFOs [Notice of Funding Opportunity], delays in releases of NOFOs, changes to NOFOs, extremely short turn arounds from NOFO release to submission, the freezes due to additional terms on awards that led to litigations, the complete randomness on NOFO releases, all these are heavy burdens to carry in addition to the stress of running a functioning lab."

• "My role is entirely grant funded. Federal grant programs that have long funded work like mine have disappeared, leaving my role in jeopardy. The solicitation for a proposal intended to support my role for 5 years was paused indefinitely, leaving me in an extended state of job insecurity.

Of course I've been writing proposals for related areas, but processing times are incredibly long, with little information shared. For example, one proposal I submitted has been processing with no award decision for eight months. Of the five federal proposals that I have submitted since Jan. 20, 2025, all of them are either still being processed without a decision (sometimes a year plus after submission) or selected for funding but not processed in a timely manner (none of the awarded funds have arrived at my institution even after 3-6 months of waiting).

We were given virtually no time to prepare for this major shift in the way our work was funded and scrambled for most of 2025 to identify alternative funding mechanisms and develop relationships with private foundations. Private funding now covers some aspects of ongoing long-term projects, but its a fraction of our program costs and isn't set up to support the graduate students that are critical to most projects.

The extra time and energy spent on writing unexpected proposals, trying to get answers on proposal processing, coping with mid-career job instability, and supporting colleagues and students whose work is also affected detracted significantly from my ability to think creatively and bring new ideas to our program. There is a personal cost too; as someone that lives with a chronic health condition, I am less often able to show up for myself, my family, or my friends in fulfilling ways because my energy reserves are already drained."

• "Changes to existing grants (huge budget cuts, being canceled, then reinstituted), proposals, review timing, and ever-changing new rules, then going back to old policies - creates tons of wasted time and effort; this chaos is the biggest case of waste, fraud, and abuse I've ever seen within the scientific community.  To say that this is saving taxpayers money or is creating better outcomes is completely untrue."

• "I have a grant that was scored favorably by my peers and recommended for funding by my program officer, yet I have been waiting for months to know whether or not I will receive funding. Because I do not know what will happen, I cannot hire anyone because I do not know how long I will be able to pay them. During this same time period I have had PhD students graduate. So my lab is getting smaller and soon we will lose everyone and thus research continuity. It's impossible to plan for the future in this environment. "

• "I have had to wait approximately 1 year and 4 weeks to receive a decision on an NSF proposal.  My institution is also in the process of pre-emptive belt-tightening due to actual and perceived financial threats from the current federal administration, and have consequently tightened enforcement of rules in our graduate school in such a way that will both make it almost impossible to recruit foreign students and severely restrict the number of domestic students that we can have in our labs."

• "I submitted a USDA grant for [the fiscal cycle] in the fall of 2024- I have still (now June 2026) not received the final decision on that grant officially. This is despite being told that my grant was recommended for funding in [a specific month in] 2026, but then having that phone call walked back by my program manager two months later to say it was still under review. The project associated with this grant proposal is field based- and builds from an experimental context that I created using start-up funding that has since been used up. I have scrambled to find bridging money to keep things afloat, because I spent WEEKS assuming that I had a grant that I didn't receive (at least in time to keep the experiment running- something that needs to happen in order to do the work associated with the grant still under review). I made commitments to students, I started planning future projects- all to have things crunch to a halt with no explanation. In addition, the program managers (at least for the areas that I am submitting under) have been insanely slow at communication. The two month lag above was despite my sending follow-up emails every two weeks to check-in on next steps for proceeding with the grant; any communication during that time would have made things less dramatically terrible for me."

• "A collaborative grant has been in review now for nearly 10 months. This massive delay prevents one to recruit graduate students in this cycle if the proposal is successful, or to start revising it for the next round if not successful. Either way, this hurts my research program and robs the students of educational opportunities at least at this particular timeframe.

Importantly, a considerable and most cited part of my research program has to do with the effects of climate change on forests, and this area seems to be blacklisted now. There have not been any specific new RFPs [Request for proposals] in my area since January 2025, and the current proposal under review appears to be waiting for an administrative approval, rather than (or head of?) a scientific peer review. This lack of attention to this research are is pretty problematic since forests are important for local and national economy in many ways and not being able to understand how they respond to changing climate, and how to adjust their management under changing conditions, is going to hurt forest and recreation industries of the country.

Finally, the haphazard restructuring of federal funding agencies and rules has had a chilling effect on my preparation on new grant proposals. This is obviously not good for the future of my research program, and replicated across other labs ofor the the US research enterprise overall."

• "Two things of note: * Key collaborators on a federal grant were funded by USAID. All of that funding was cut without notice, throwing this key collaboration into jeopardy and forcing us to curtail research. * A NSF grant I submitted in 2025 was returned with high priority for funding, but was not funded. We re-submitted based on program officer suggestion. It has now been 1 year since we submitted, with no review returned and no updates. In my experience, NSF has never taken >6 months to inform on outcomes. In effect, the research has stopped due to government inaction."

• "Funding for my research program has evaporated because of funding that has been revoked as well as proposals that have been in review for a long time with no decision (over 9 months; over 18 months in one case). I struggle to find teaching assistantships to support the graduate students to whom I have already made commitments before 20 January 2025. My research productivity has greatly suffered.

If I were younger, I would look for faculty positions abroad. If I were older, I would seriously consider retiring. The world class science infrastructure that the US was known for has been greatly diminished and will take decades to recover even if policies revert back to pre- 20 Jan 2025 tomorrow. "

• "I was personally impacted by the personnel cuts to federal funding agencies (NSF and NIH) and the government shutdown(s), which resulted in delays on pending fellowship proposals by several months. In particular, I recently received an NIH postdoctoral fellowship that I submitted in [a specific month in the spring of] 2025 with a requested start date of [a specific date late in] 2025. I received my notice of award [in a specific month in spring 2026] and have still not yet officially begun the fellowship work as of writing. While I did ultimately receive this fellowship, the personnel cuts and overall chaos in the federal government resulted in a 6-month delay in funding and the research that I can do at a critical career stage."

• "Negative impacts: It is nearly impossible now to know who is working in which divisions/programs at NSF [National Science Foundation] and to get answers to emails or phone calls. Often when you do reach someone, a month later they have retired or were reassigned. Also program officers are having trouble answering important questions because funding changes from day to day, it seems. In addition, with such massive turnover, many POs [program officers] are now running programs that they are unfamiliar with so getting useful advice is tough.

Trump Administration decrees lack clarity and are often backwalked, which makes knowing if or when applying for grants is a waste of time or not.

We have had some really great ideas come up recently that should merit grant funding, things that people would recognize as high-risk innovations. But we aren't pursuing them because we cannot tell if there is any support for science anymore, or funding to pursue.

Grants are now more opaque because we have to avoid "bad words" that could get them rejected for non-scientific reasons.

With fewer grants being funded and submitted, we are no longer including graduate students in many proposals so we can continue to keep technicians on payroll with the grants that do get funding.

I am actively recommending to undergraduates that they pursue careers outside of research. Even though we will have a new President in 2.5 years, the Republican party is not a reliable partner for science."

• "Told I could not apply for a REU  [Research Experience for Undergraduates] for an existing grant because of staffing shortage at NSF [National Science Foundation]. "

• "A subaward contract from USDA-ARS [Agricultural Research Service] was delayed by 10 months on a 12-month project. Throughout the 10-month process, USDA-ARS requirements continued to change, and each change resulted in either new requirements (forms) or additional approvals (within USDA-ARS).This put the completion of the project at risk, affected staff salaries, and carried a high level of stress and uncertainty. At one point, it seemed that my institution was going to need to forfeit the funding, and ultimately we had to make concessions despite not being in alignment or agreement with language that was added to the contract. Going forward, we had to work with the funding entity to reverse the PI status so that I could be the lead PI."

• "A grant that I'm on was accepted for funding but with the caveat, essentially, that the granting organization wasn't sure when or if any of the money would come through. That status remained for about 5 months, after which it seemed likely that the money would come through, and then it finally arrived 4 months after that. At this point it was too late to fund and plan work for the field season, but the start date on the grant was still set as the original date, which may prove problematic when the deadline rolls around."

• "I have been working with the US Bureau of Reclamation to get a contract in place since the end of January 2026. It is for work they and the US Fish and Wildlife Service want us to do, it is not work we are proposing to them. The particular office we are working with has been significantly impacted by reductions in force and due to the staffing shortages, the contract is still not in place. Because the contract will require significant, time-sensitive data collection and analysis, I hired a technician to start on July 1, 2026, thinking that this would be plenty of time for the contract to go through. The technician was going to be funded from this contract all summer and now I am scrambling to find other funding for [them] until this contract is finalized. Prior to January 20, 2025, this type of contract would have cleared USBR [Bureau of Reclamation] and university review within a month or so. Sadly, the results of this work were needed starting in April, as it directly informs management of a critically endangered species. Right now natural resource managers are having to make decisions without these data."

• "I was fortunate to receive federal funding in 2026. However, the timeline from score release to award was several weeks late, which led to high anxiety, with a positive resolution. In addition, I served as reviewer on an nsf panel which ultimately awarded no grants due to political motivations, and although applicants received panel summaries, felt like a wasted effort. Finally, there is some survivorship guilt in getting a grant in times such as this. "

• "There are federal grants I have applied for in 2024 and 2025 that I still have not yet received updates from, even where the timeline for receiving funds based on the RFA [Request for Applications] has now passed. Spending time to write federal grants takes significant time (often several months), and now seems to be a inconsistent and risky source for acquiring funds. This has inhibited hiring technicians, undergraduate and graduate students in our lab. Additionally, I have had to shift language significantly in writing funds or have been unable to move forward certain projects relating to fields like climate change as these projects appear to be black listed, despite increasing complications and concerns occurring in agriculture and food production systems due to climate change impacts. Overall, the federal funding process has become volatile, inconsistent, and intentionally receiving roadblocks and barriers that make it impossible for researchers in the US to grow and thrive."

• "Dow [Department of War] (formerly DoD [Department of Defense]) funding decision and award administration has slowed. It took months to finalize a contract with the university for my funding, which delayed hiring and lost us a field season, putting us 1 year behind schedule."

• "We had a grant selected for funding, which was great. But the release of funds was delayed by 4 months. Unfortunately that fell over the summer, which is the normally the most productive research time for my lab. As a result progress on the project has been significantly delayed."

• "The lab I work in is small and we all receive 100% of our salaries from grants, mostly from federal grants. We have a strong track record of publications, training of younger scientists, and grant completion, but little of this matters anymore in the current funding environment. We had been asked by a federal funding agency with a focus on health and the environment to write a grant proposal to continue our lab's research program in an area that has shown great promise. By the time we wrote the grant, an administration appointee had been put in place to lead this part of the agency and we were told that they would no longer consider projects that included environmental sampling or monitoring. We had spent years acquiring multiple grants and building this research program to have it all come to an end very abruptly. I submitted a grant to NSF earlier this year. So far, it has bounced around between groups within NSF. I do not have much hope that it will ever be reviewed, let alone funded. There is also a general feeling of panic in our lab. Our PI is overextended because [they] feel[] that [they] need[] to constantly be seeking out funding opportunities outside of the federal government. [They] still meet[] with trainees regularly, but [their] ability to be involved in the lab is more limited because of the time [they have] to spend seeking funding to keep the lab going beyond the next two years."

• "Annual funding was not provided until our field season was over. I have grants sitting at the NSF for over a year without a decision."

• "Due to the cancellation of STEM DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] focused grant: a full time employee lost their job (grant funded position); all of the time and money spent on planning summer camps and outreach activities was wasted; and students lost an invaluable opportunity to gain skills and knowledge that would have benefitted their undergraduate engineering careers.

Due to not receiving year 2 of a two year grant, we were not able to complete the research project and the students had to try to write up a half-completed project. Conference travel was in year 2 of the budget, so they were not able to present their findings to the research community or network and meet future employers."

• "Our team had an already awarded federal grant which was abruptly rescinded in early 2025. This was for no other reason than 'realigned Federal policy' and was despite us meeting or far exceeding all targets and promised outcomes. With no prior warning this cancellation meant that we had to suspend all associated research, training and support staff. It was devastating for out team and our partners."

• "I have had a research grant cancelled for purely political reasons by the USDA [US Department of Agriculture]. The letter cited 'The Green New Scam'. My research funding has also been targeted by Senator Ted Cruz, who built an 'investigative' database 'which exposes how the Biden administration weaponized federal agencies to push a far-left ideology'. The portion of my award funding called out in this database was budgeted to train local veterans."

• "A letter from the federal government in February 2025 informing immediate termination of my project resulted in discarding two field trials in the middle of their progress,  wasting funds already expended in conducting them. Additionally, a dozen staff involved in the project hadd to loss their jobs."

• "- NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] funding canceled at my institution mid-grant, ending a program for incoming science students to do summer research, etc.

- USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service] funding put on hold since summer 2025, money I would like to apply for to complete a research project. Luckily the staff still seems to have their jobs, as it looked bad initially in spring 2025.

- Loss of federal government staff from wildlife management areas and properties makes the properties more vulnerable to fire, vandalism, trail maintenance, making it harder to plan research projects in those locations.

- DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] lash out swept a wide net forcing changes to wording of missions and policies, even words like 'biodiversity' raised red flags. Not to mention the chilling effects on our students. "

• "During February of 2025, the sole grant that supports my research was frozen. It was unclear if or when those funds would be released. Without those funds, I would effectively lose my position at my institution and would have to leave the position and likely move for another job. Luckily that funding was restored and I have been able to continue to do research at my institution without fear of reprisal. However, conferences that were mandatory for my grant have been canceled as the NSF headquarters was moved and grant administrators were fired. This has made it more challenging to navigate the changing requirements to stay in good standing with administering the grant. My ability to collaborate has been greatly curtailed as new USDA [US Department of Agriculture] rules prohibit ARS [Agricultural Research Service] positions from collaborating with international scholars despite those scholars working at American universities (though the rules are intentionally vague and irregularly enforced). Grant opportunities that could have extended my position have been greatly curtailed and the area priorities of what funding does remain shifts markedly and frequently. All of which has created great uncertainty and instability, resulting in hiring freezes across potential institutions I am considering for my next career phase. "

• "I was awarded a major grant from [a specific federal agency] that was canceled as the entire research office was shut down. I am not able to conduct the research, including collaborations with scientists at [that agency] who have since been pushed out of the agency. My graduate student who would've been supported on the grant was able to find support through a teaching position, but this slows [their] research productivity for [their] dissertation as [they have] more teaching responsibilities. This hampers the production of ground-breaking and relevant scientific knowledge that we can produce in our lab.

I was awarded another grant from [a federal program] that has been in limbo for nine months due to slow budget processes at the federal level. This has slowed my ability to conduct the project, as there is no timeline of when funds might arrive. I am very hesitant to conduct activities such as asking partners from Tribes and external agencies to participate in research activities without knowing when I will be able to provide them the resources they need to participate. It also creates uncertainty for another graduate student who should be supported by the project. Again, this makes it harder to create the kinds of outputs and knowledge that can help inform coastal managers and other stakeholders, as well as the public. The research objectives in this project were co-developed with stakeholder input and failing to deliver on those objectives harms my relationships with communities and limits the impact of our lab's research.

The harm to collaborative relationships between academia and agency scientists is immense and irreparable. Long-time collaborators were forced out of their positions, leading to massive knowledge gaps that cannot be filled. There is also on-going harm to academic institutions - my program is facing huge uncertainty in recruiting international students as their status over the course of a degree is now in question. This means the most talented and motivated students may not be able to join our university and will not contribute their efforts to the scientific research enterprise in the United States. "

• "Our NSF [National Science Foundation] ADVANCE [Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions] grant was cancelled, causing irreparable harm to our program to ensure that all STEM faculty have a positive experience and are adequately supported for hiring, retention, and promotion."

• "Definitely very harmful. My university took pretty strong precautions in a university wide budget cut. This has caused loss of internal fellowships for students, layoffs, and lack of retentions. I got an offer at another university and will be leaving because mine won't give a retention due to the budget situation. With uncertain federal funding to support my research, I can't justify staying at an institution without much internal resources that is actively cutting the little funding we had for students. For personal reasons, this choice to move is a gamble/less than ideal, and I don't know what the long term career/personal impact will be. These hard choices wouldn't have been necessary without the federal situation causing my university to cut down on spending."

• "The impact of federal and state policies since Jan 20, 2025 have been overwhelmingly negative. A family member lost their job at an institution they had devoted more than 20 years because personnel were cut. While searching for my current position, I noticed a decrease in the number of jobs that fit my qualifications. I strongly suspect this was due to budget cuts to research funds at the federal and state level. I am also very concerned about the growing divide in the general population between science vs. the current administration. Facts are being blatantly misquoted or outright lies are being told by the current administration on scientific issues, and in many cases, science is dismissed as biased or fictional if it does not support the administration's narrative. I find it deeply disturbing that so much of the general population is more willing to find an enemy in scientists rather than critically think about the issues under question."

• "Well the NSF GRFP got restricted to exclusively a first year graduate award. This was extremely unfair since it was changed one month before it was due. A competitive GRFP proposal can take a year to refine, so a rule change that eliminates an entire half of the applicant field one month prior to the deadline is cruel. Additionally, my department lost ALL travel funds. We went from providing funding for one conference a year for active researchers to providing no funding for travel at all. Conferences are integral to the scientific community, and they can be defining events for early career researchers. I am sad at this lost opportunity for newer graduate students in my department."

• "As a state research scientist the impacts to federal funding decisions and dispersal has been felt, though with a buffer time due to the nature of federal to state payments. The main impacts have been bureaucratic due to uncertainty of continued funding resulting in unwillingness to commit to funding projects fully . My research also involves a large amount of international cooperations, including sometimes international subcontracts. These were all completely stopped after Jan 20 as all international funding was held up. This damaged projects significantly as labs were not able to continue to maintain insect colonies etc as they were not able to hire staff etc. This of course also put a strain on those relationships."

• "The abolishment of USAID has adversely impacted my and my colleagues' research and conservation efforts in Africa. "

• "I was developing an international collaboration and working to use an internal, endowed postdoc program to bring an expert from another country, with a rare and unique specialization, to work in our collection. We dropped it in the face of changes to immigration enforcement, and because, given the violence and abuse meted out against even legal immigrants under this government, we decided it was not safe to continue our work. My graduate student received an honorable mention for [their] NSF GRFP proposal, but we forever live with the uncertainty that political corruption might have tanked [their] chances at getting actual support because [they] had used the word ""climate"" (as in, historical climate gradients) in the abstract."

• "I now find it difficult or impossible to attract students, postdocs and visiting researchers from other countries. Many are are afraid to come to the US because they fear that invasive searches of their electronic devices and social media. Others, will not visit out of principle, even if they are not particularly worried about invasive policies. International collaboration and training is beneficial and really quite essential to science in my field and current policies will set back such collaborations for years to come. Federal funding opportunities have constricted and now favor fields that are perceived as consistent with the administration's agenda. Whole areas of science are thereby starved for resources and I think this will have a generational effect on the direction of science and attractiveness of a career in science. "

• "As noted, USA got rid of its only research icebreaker, which has major implications for marine research in the Antarctic. USA no longer the leader it was in marine research in the Antarctic."

• "We have lost an estimated 25-30% of personnel in my facility. I am the sole individual in my lab group now. Research restrictions on international collaborators have resulted in my name being dropped from papers and agreements that I worked on. Restrictions on certain terms and phrases (related to dei [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] and climate change) have changed how and what I can publish."

• "Increasing restrictions and scrutiny of international travel and collaborations has severely impacted by research, e.g. increased border security causing delays in shipping tissue samples within North America"

• "moratorium on H1B transfers into Florida complicates incoming international candidates for tenure track assistant professorships, and also will block international postdoctoral researchers "

• "My institution is not planning to replace as many faculty positions in our upcoming round of hires (2026-2027) as it wants to, because of uncertainty in the federal funding climate. The NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] programs where I typically compete for funding decided not to release any NOFOs this year because of conditions within NOAA [Notice of Funding Opportunity] so I don't have any opportunities to submit proposals to these programs (and bring in new funding). One of my graduate students wanted to work at the science-policy interface and given the federal policies has decided to stay in academia for now. My postdoc is not a US citizen and works at my institution through a visa. [They] decided to move [their] family back to their native country due to the impacts of the federal policies on the US hiring landscape in academia and [their] feelings about exclusion, both professionally and personally. This negatively impacts my research program, because [they are] taking leave for this purpose."

• "Cuts to USAID have done irreparable harm to public health and facilitated disease transmission, while research into disease transmission has been substantially reduced (e.g., loss of NSF EEID program [National Science Foundation] [Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases]). The targeting of foreign collaboration is extremely short-sighted, since diseases do not respect national borders, and the negative impact on human health will be immense."

• "As a collections manager of a research museum, I frequently work with USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service] to coordinate legal imports and exports of specimens and have found a substantial slow down in basic paperwork that has harmed our workflows. Our university, as a result of cascading effects of budget cuts, has frozen staff hiring, which has resulted to substantial harm to our basic abilities to request maintenance fixes etc. in our university and basic operations like our mail services. This has placed strain on everyone in the university and existing staff are leaving and retiring to avoid the fallout of working under these stressful conditions, which further exacerbates the problem. These are the ways the current federal administration has most greatly impacted me personally. "

• "I had to cancel two sub awards from an NIH [National Institute of Health] grant that were to European colleagues"

• "A visa revocation occurred without an explanation being provided. The resulting uncertainty has created ongoing stress and has affected day-to-day work, long-term research planning, and professional decision-making. The lack of clarity regarding immigration status makes it difficult to commit to future projects, collaborations, and career opportunities. This impact is relevant to the public interest because research institutions and the broader public invest substantial resources in training and supporting researchers. Policies that create uncertainty about a researcher's ability to remain and work in the United States reduced research productivity, disrupted ongoing projects, and discouraged  highly skilled individuals from pursuing or continuing careers in the U.S. As a result, the potential scientific, technological, and economic benefits of their work diminished. The uncertainty also weakens the return on public investments in education, research, and workforce development by increasing the risk that trained researchers are unable or unwilling to contribute their expertise in the United States over the long term."

• "The federal funding landscape has changed drastically since Jan 2025. Funding opportunities, delays to existing awards, personnel hiring, visa concerns, pretty much anything and everything we deal with as faculty on a daily basis have been impacted by the current policies set forth by this administration. Not only have all of the day to day happenings been impacted, but US scientists are becoming increasingly isolated from our colleagues in government and industry and even more so from our international colleagues. No one outside the US is really interested in visiting our country and being subjected to the horror stories told about ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the border. American exceptionalism is a distant memory of the past and we are now laughing stocks on the world stage. Other countries have simply pivoted away from the US and its citizens. I have personally seen this happen with close colleagues in Canada as they cite concerns about US diplomatic relations and wanting to actively boycott anything to do with the current administration. Additionally, international attendance at conferences has evaporated which has put a significant burden on events that had been in the planning stages for years. I hosted an international scientific conference and only 3 international attendees joined this event. Typically, we would have 20-30 individuals join from all over the world. Again, those colleagues cited travel concerns with the US and not wanting to be subjected to border services and border agents. Again, we are a laughing stock and the world has moved on. The US is being left behind."

• "One of the greatest impacts I believe to affect not only my research, department, and institution, but the entirety of scientific research is the limiting of international relationships and diversity under the guise of national security and "DEI hires". Not only does it affect the kinds of grants many of us can apply for, but it limits our language and irreparably harms the future of science through eliminating broader collaboration. This plus of the oversight of committees meant to be independent from the Federal Government is purely tyrannical on science and education. How can we freely explore the questions of the universe and our world if we cannot freely speak on these questions with our colleagues and within our work without certain monetary consequences?"

• "As far as immigration policy, a trained research assistant critical to a mosquito surveillance program was denied reentry to the US from the UK because of social media posts/history, suspension of federal awards because of personal disagreements between the executive branch and state government, delays in awards that then delay contracts for work on public health entomologic surveillance, decrease in funds that decreases geographic distribution of surveillance programs"

• "Positive impacts: None[.] Negative Impacts: Multiple. 1) The majority of my data come from samples collected in Africa and the new federal policies have made me unsure if my work will continue to be supported and also have increased negative sentiment towards Americans among my African collaborators and research assistants. 2) I have submitted three grants since January 20, 2025 and the decisions (positive or negative) on all of them have been delayed by >4 months in each case, including an REU [Research Experience for Undergraduates] supplement application which was submitted three months ago for this summer, but has not even been reviewed yet. 3) Multiple solicitations I planned to apply for were archived without notice and major sources of funding for my field are imperiled or have been archived. In fact, the SBE  [Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences] directorate may be closed, which would have a huge impact on my field. "

• "The impacts on my ability to conduct international research, with international collaborators, has been the most severe affect for me. Harassment and searches when returning to the United States after international fieldwork and conferences have become standard at US ports of entry (as a US citizen, I imagine it must be worse for others). Draconian policies are also being enacted at both the federal level and in many states that restrict or in some instances ban any international collaboration. These policies are driving my decision to move more of my research program, projects, etc. completely abroad and not in the United States at all. These policies will obviously be detrimental to US science."

• "My institution has worked on several International grants for animals that spend part of their lifecycle in other countries. We were at a stage where we could work with partners in other countries to devise and implement management actions that would help the conservation of the species. However, funding of international projects has declined and the few that still exist are now even more competitive and much harder to obtain, especially for smaller organizations. There is also more competition for small domestic non-federal grants as well. This makes it difficult to obtain enough grant money to keep our current employees and/or even to fill positions when current employees leave. I am extremely worried about the federal government's approach to climate change. Not only is the federal government cutting programs that reduce climate change impacts, it is making it worse by incentivizing the petroleum and coal industries to increase production which will create more problems. It's also encouraging data centers that will use up more energy and dwindling water supplies. Paying wind companies to not finish almost completed projects is perverse and insane and creates even more harm. We are in a critical period and if these policies are continued, we may hit an irreversible tipping point. The amount of harm that has already been done the last year and a half has caused irreparable harm to many species and humans (i.e. the public good). Freedom of speech has been taken away when it comes to climate change and diversity in the workplace (we have diversity in our workplace, but I now feel that I can't talk about it). I have already been asked to remove the term 'climate change' from one of my reports written for the federal government. This makes the report less accurate that it would have been if I were able to use scientifically correct terms. Instead I used the phrase "current trends in precipitation and temperature".  I've also experienced extreme delays (>year) in permit approvals. Something I have not experienced in my >25 year experience obtaining these permits prior to Jan 20, 2025."

• "We have been under a hiring freeze.  We have lost 2/3 of all senior scientific staff.  We are highly international and our ability to co-author papers has been constrained by an approval process that has been 'paused' and a complete ban on overseas cooperative agreements.  All procurement is now funneled through a sing purchase card holder...greatly complicating any purchases. Our travel approval process has choked off all scientific conferences, and all international collaborative symposia. As an Federal institution we are going into a life support mode."

• "I've been having a hard time finding a postdoc in a location that is safe. I'm a lesbian and my [spouse] is trans. Between the increase in anti-trans legislation and fewer postdoctoral opportunities due to reduced federal funding for research, my options are quite limited. I always knew that the academic job market is cut-throat and many talented people end up in other industries. However, I thought that I would be able to spend at least a few years as a postdoc pursuing curiosity-driven research before having to decide whether to stay in academia or start considering other options."

• "I am a trans woman. Federal attacks on trans and nonbinary people have made it clear that I am unwelcome in this country. My existence is politicized as woke pseudoscience, sexualized as perversion, and pathologized as mental illness. This has harmed my ability to collaborate and to advance in my scientific career. I am inherently an object of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; why should a collaborator or future employer not fear that they will be financially punished for working with me?"

• "I've been having a hard time finding a postdoc in a location that is safe. I'm a lesbian and my [spouse] is trans. Between the increase in anti-trans legislation and fewer postdoctoral opportunities due to reduced federal funding for research, my options are quite limited. I always knew that the academic job market is cut-throat and many talented people end up in other industries. However, I thought that I would be able to spend at least a few years as a postdoc pursuing curiosity-driven research before having to decide whether to stay in academia or start considering other options."

• "Funding cuts and staffing vacancies in Dept. of Interior have negatively impacted the ability of my (former) agency to effectively carry out their legislative mandate.  Weakening of regulations which protect endangered species has negatively impacted the ability of agencies and organizations to further the conservation work needed to protect habitat and recover species populations."

• "We have two projects on national wildlife refuges and the USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service] staff at those refuges are close partners. The budget cuts and reduced staffing has severely impacted their ability to manage the refuges. Our projects have continued, but some activities the USFWS would normally do have become our responsibility and it is sometimes difficult to plan because of the uncertainty of USFWS ability to partner."

• "My career was preparing environmental impact statements and assessments, delineating and mitigating impacts to wetlands, and identifying endangered species habitats. The laws that mandate my work have now been decimated and there will be much damage to the environment that will go unmitigated and unknown to the public. "

• "Three grant proposal for which I was a part were rejected, likely because they delt with climate change directly as related to infrastructure and changing landscapes in permafrost regions. The SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] ruling on WOTUS [Waters of the United States] has completely changed which wetlands are jurisdictional, resulting in many wetlands that would have previously been jurisdictional now no longer being jurisdictional. This has resulted in a huge increase in wetland delineations with the client's desire to fill wetlands that are no longer under USACE [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] jurisdiction."

• Investigator's Note: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed a new rule in the spring of 2026. As summarized by the American Institute of Biological Sciences: "The proposed rule would, among many other changes, authorize federal agencies to terminate active research awards when administration priorities shift; insert political appointees into the final step of the grant selection process, giving them authority to override the judgment of independent scientific peer reviewers; make publication costs and open access fees unallowable by default, in direct conflict with existing federal open access requirements; and restrict a wide range of routine research activities—from professional society memberships and journal subscriptions to conference attendance—through new approval requirements and cost prohibitions. The criteria that would govern these decisions, including what constitutes administration priorities or the national interest, are left undefined in the proposed rule, offering grantees little basis to anticipate, understand, or respond to adverse decisions." 

• "General sentiment (myself and other colleagues) is that research fields and careers that were already somewhat uncertain (e.g. tenure track faculty jobs) are even more unceratin now. With less funding available, certain institutions being targetted for federal funding witholding, and certain fields being blocked from funding entirely creates a chaos and disheartning environment. Most recently, the OBM [Office of Management and Budget] policy changes are further dismantling the scientific process in the US and globally, and are a cause of major concern, as the undermine core foundations to science including peer-review, international collaboration, and sharing of findings. "

• "Realized threats have already been considerable.  e.g. the loss of Project officersat [officers at] NSF has been substantial and consequently affects the time for evaluating and awarding grants.  I have witnessed the outrageous use of the "Probatinary period" as a blanket reason to terminate permanent staff at NSF.  These folks only error was getting a promotion that led to this probationary period. The ominous implications from the proposed OMB decree to make all federal grants subject to final review by a political appointee at each agency is already having an effect on staff at NSF and grant applicants.  This would be a blatant move to steer grant awards by politics for what has been heretofore a merit based system.  Peers can correctly evaluate proposals (as they have for decades) not randomly chosen political apointees."

• "Difficult for me to obtain permits and a reduction of responsiveness from USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service]."

• "The demise of IMLS [Institute of Museum and Library Services] has eliminated a funding stream for infrastructure improvements at natural history museums. The reduced staffing at USFWS [US Fish and Wildlife Service] and USDA [US Department of Agriculture] and USGS [US Geological Survey] has made it impossible to renew permits for bird banding, scientific specimen collecting, and transport/import permits."

• "I have noticed it takes longer when working to get answers regarding APHIS [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service] permit(s). The USDA [US Department of Agriculture] has lost some highly knowlegeable people that had been a great resourse for work in the field and laboratory. "

• "Impacts on my research have been neutral. My funding level has continued about steady because I am selective in picking projects that have higher funding success rate. My university has been struggling with student enrollment and budget cuts resulting from enrollment issues but most of that is not directly tied to federal funding. State funding is tied to enrollment. "

• "no change - Federal aid in wildlife restoration funds are protected by law"

• "Private Pest management Industry still has the resources and personnel for research on effectiveness, safety, and proper usage of materials and methods"

• "As a federal research scientist, I have witnessed the irreparable harm inflicted on my department since January 20, 2025 first hand. Roughly twenty percent of my department's workforce was either illegally fired, or left through voluntary separation or early retirement. A continuing hiring freeze has hobbled our ability to recoup those positions and functions, and left most frustrated, burnt out, and angry. Internal funding bottlenecks, which are the result of reduced capacity and DOGE-implemented policies, continue to stymie the purchase of basic equipment and services for our labs, and have led to conflicting and confusing guidance around our funding capabilities and goals. Other disruptive policies have also hindered our research capacity, including a federal travel ban that prevented staff from accessing their own lab facility for nearly an entire field season. "

• "The program I work in is traditionally comprised of 100% federal employees, with 3-6 seasonal employees or interns during summer field work and 6-8 permanent employees. Now, we are comprised of three permanent employees, one full-time partner employee (as in, employed by a partner organization instead of the federal government), one part-time partner employee, and seasonal workforce supported exclusively by internships or universities. Reduction-in-force actions still threaten our remaining staff. This has caused irreparable harm not only to the program I work in but the agency mission, as our program no longer has the capacity to support the agency mission--let alone mission critical items. Our program carried out work that was one-of-a-kind, gold-standard in our area of focus for supporting threatened species and public lands, going back over two decades."

• "The federal policies have had direct negative impacts on my graduate education and career as an environmental scientist. I am a graduate student and part of the funding for my graduate research assistantship was unexpectedly terminated by the Department of Government Efficiency. This meant that I suddenly lost several years of support for my graduate education. This caused negative and irreparable harm to my graduate education because it left me with insufficient financial support to complete the research and finish my degree program. Losing financial support also significantly increased my stress levels and depression because it was suddenly unclear if I would be able to finish the graduate degree program that I had been working toward for years. "

• "I began my Masters degree in the fall of 2024, fully funded by an award my laboratory received. Six months later, our funding was frozen. My income became unstable and inaccessible for months. Although we later received word that it was unfrozen, the hectic state it left my finances in has done irreparable damage to my ability to live comfortably. Even with back pay, I'm now on constant edge for when funding will be pulled again. I'm afraid that when I graduate, I will be unable to find a job. I've taken to applying to PhD programs outside the United States because I'm afraid I will either lose my funding again if I stay or that jobs will be completely inaccessible. I'm afraid for myself and afraid for science."

• "I wrote that my research area - conservation science - has experienced irreparable harm for two main reasons. First, students who are interested in pursuing scientific careers in environmentally related fields now have fewer training pathways and job prospects to enable them to do so, because of the widespread loss of federal funding/cancellation of solicitations by NSF [National Science Foundation] and NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] among other agencies/discouragement of people from diverse backgrounds to participate in public life, including scientific research. Second, the loss and re allocation of funds from environmental, climate, and community development themes also has led to the curtailment of data collection and analyses, particularly of data streams that require deployment of people in the field and/or maintenance of remote systems, e.g., environmental sensors, buoys, and monitoring stations. These are data that we will not be able to replace as they are time and place specific. "

• "My primary funding agency (USDA [US Department of Agriculture]) has been thrown into chaos, which has caused irreparable harm to research that protects US food security. My collaborators within the government lost most of their staff, which slowed our shared projects. Funding calls were cancelled or delayed because of some crusade to scrutinize the RFAs [Request for Application]s of programs meant to fund food security research for DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] related text. As a result I was unable to apply for multiple programs. I lost program officers with decades of experience due to DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] efforts to implement illegal workforce reductions. New staff had no idea how to run programs, what ongoing projects were happening, and how to communicate with researchers on those projects. The USDA issued new terms and conditions that give broad leeway to cancel grants if grantees or their institutions teach or speak about topics the administration doesn't approve of, even if the information being taught/delivered is factual. My institution, along with institutions in 21 other states, is suing the USDA over these terms and conditions. As a result, I cannot start up any new awarded grants. I cannot access hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding at present due to the issues outlined above. My international employee is also facing difficulties in their visa processing. Every day is a struggle to adapt and plan amidst this chaos. "

• "Impacts of federal and state policies since Jan 20, 2025 have been extremely negative and harmful. Grant review processes that used to be clear are now entirely opaque. Federal funding agencies have experienced massive cuts and the time for grant review decisions has increased by many months. My graduate student's NSF [National Science Foundation] graduate fellowship proposals was declined without review for not meeting research area criteria, which was absolutely not true based on the solicitation and our appeal was not responded to. Longstanding USDA [US Department of Agriculture] labs researching pollinator health have been entirely cut, losing scientists with decades of unique experience. This does irreparable harm to our country's ability to meet the needs of farmers who rely on pollinators for crop production. I am in a leadership role in my graduate program and have seen firsthand that graduate students are deciding to change career paths and not pursue scientific research in academia or the federal government due to the volatility and unpredictable nature of these positions since 2025. The current government's policies, constant changes, attempts to politicize funding decisions, revoking of awarded grants and massive cuts to the work force are doing irreparable harm to scientific research in our country and dissuading an entire generation of bright young students from pursuing careers in science."

• "One federal award of about [a specific amount of tens of thousands of dollars] that was already approved verbally by a program in NPS [National Park Service] was not awarded because the program was cancelled. This would have funded a field season and 50% postdoctoral appointment. The OPUS [Opportunities for Promoting Understanding through Synthesis] program at NSF [National Science Foundation] was cancelled in spring 2026, and my planned proposal submission this year thus could not be submitted under the re-organization at NSF. There was no separate FON [funding notice] for the LTER [Long term ecological research] program in 2026, leaving those sites and long-term studies at risk (outcomes not yet known). Triage of proposal review at NSF provided few reviews of my most recent submission (submitted December 2025), no panel summary and none of the usual statistics for submission numbers and awards. Federal competitive programs such as the Joint Fire Science Program no longer had funding opportunities for basic fire ecology, but shifted to very very narrow opportunities. I have also lost many of my federal collaborators, scientists in the USFS [US Forest Service], USGS [US Geological Survey] and NPS [National Park Service], to RIFs [Reduction in Force] and early retirements. Currently, I am not accepting new graduate students because of the funding uncertainties, which is deleterious to my research program. There is also irreparable harm coming from the loss of long-term USFS study sites (e.g., the experimental forests), the ocean monitoring (funded by NSF and being dismantled) that provides data to the models used to forecast disturbance events and climate changes, the closing of USFS research stations across the country, and attempted closure of NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research], which is a resource for all ecologists. Programs can be destroyed quickly, but recovery will take decades...hence, I consider these impacts to cause irreparable harm to data streams, to the training of the next generation of scientists, and to my personal research program. The proposed OMB rule changes currently in the comment period will also deal irreparable harm to science if they are implemented, but I will not add details to that here. However, collectively the impacts to federal policies will destroy the US science enterprise, and to think that it is self-inflicted by the US is beyond belief. "

• "We were unsure if our federal funding would stick around. If we lost funding, our whole program could had disappeared. I worked in invasive species control in the CA Central Valley and loosing funding and the program would cause irreparable damage to wetlands and agricultural infrastructure like canals "

• "This question is a) vague and b) leading. Describes the impact of federal AND state policies over the last 1.5 years? Which policies? Tariffs? State bans on tenure? This entire survey is designed to collate the collective whining of scientists, but nowhere does it ask about the national debt, international monetary policy, or anything on the other side of the coin. It's an anti-scientific survey, and quite disappointing to see society efforts spent in this manner. I only allotted time for this survey because I'm sure I'm in the 1% minority, but we need to reduce government spending in MANY arenas (e.g., defense) so that our economy is sustainable...science is one of those arenas. "

• "Before I do, I wanted to share a few ways this survey could be improved. First, the scale for the question about impacts goes from 'slight negative/positive' to 'extremely negative/positive.' This is not a natural way to scale such a question. Presumably, many people will have experienced an effect somewhere between the extremes of 'slight' and 'extreme.' This not only makes analyses more suspect, it also undermines trust in the reported survey results. It sort of feels as if you are baiting people into selecting the more extremely negative option. Which is unfortunate, because this survey is doing something really important and valuable. I would hate for it to be undercut by people saying it is probing for more extreme effects.

Also, for the question about whether grant submissions are taking longer to report, there is no option to say 'I didn't apply for any grants in one/more of these periods so I don't know.' Which I'm sure will be true for a lot of prospective respondents.

Now, in terms of impacts: I was a part of the National Nature Assessment, which was cancelled. My Department has a lot of fear around using DEI-related terms. Though I feel like last summer was the peak of that sort of thing. Sort of feels like events have moved on some and people are less acutely fearful. I applied for [a specific federal fellowship program] twice and didn't get it though I got pretty good reviews. Not sure if I got DOGEd or not but it's something I think about. I think academia was already competitive but now I bet there are many fewer jobs.

I do think there was some overcorrection around DEI around 2020, and some de-indexing of this is probably worthwhile for academia at large (I say this as someone dedicated to DEI and for whom it is an important part of my work). But for a lot of academic disciplines, for example, a diversity statement does sort of feel like an ideological purity test. Or it can be constructed as such. Requiring it, putting it at the same level in a way, as your teaching and research statements, does seem sort of idealogically militant in a way I don't think is always great. And it can be in some ways counter to the free flow of ideas and ways of thinking about things that is so valuable about academia. So anyway, I think there was room for some course correction around academia in some of that. But the way this has been carried out is idiotic, incoherent and cruel. And clearly isn't coming from a place of re-centering the value of free thought in academia. It's just fascistic. "

• Another participant who we do not have permission to quote said that the survey is skewed toward academics who who apply for federal grants, and different questions are needed to include federal scientists who apply for internal and external funds.