Chaos erupts in US science as Trump’s team declares freeze on federal grants

The freeze’s effect on research is still unclear, but scientists fear ‘incalculable’ damage

The administration of President Trump set off an uproar 27 January by suspending federal spending on grants and loans.Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty

Researchers in the United States are reeling after the Trump administration issued an order 27 January that froze all federal grants and loans. A federal judge in Washington DC temporarily blocked the order late today, but it had already spurred many US universities to advise faculty members against spending federal grant dollars on travel, new research projects, equipment and more.

The administration issued a subsequent memo today attempting to clarify what is and is not covered by the freeze, but it included no information specific to scientific funding, leaving many scientists just as confused as when the order was issued.

“If somehow they are allowed to get away with this, the disruption is almost incalculable,” says John Holdren, the former science adviser to US president Barack Obama.

The order is only the latest in a stream of White House directives on federal spending, diversity and other programmes that have sown chaos and confusion in the US scientific community. In the past week, the Trump administration ordered staff at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cease communication with the World Health Organization and scrubbed most federal websites of any material about diversity. Additionally, agencies like the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) have suspended grant review meetings.

Researchers aren’t sitting still: hundreds of scientists sprang into action on the social-media platform Bluesky to organize a rally at the White House today and to set up sessions for people to call their elected officials to stop the freeze.

Scientists are worried about the long-term effects of the administration’s actions. “It will be much easier to destroy the world’s greatest scientific ecosystem than it will be to try to rebuild it,” says Carole LaBonne, a developmental biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

The White House, NIH and NSF did not respond to queries about the breadth of the order, when it will be lifted or scientists' concerns.

Frozen in place

The spending freeze was outlined in a 27 January memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which ordered federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance”. It singled out spending on “foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal”.

First reported by the journalist Marisa Kabas, the memo was challenged in court by a coalition of states and legal experts who argue it illegally suspends funds appropriated by Congress. Matthew Lawrence, an expert in administrative law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says that the US Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to appropriate funds. An order that imposes “a halt across the board, and without a special message … would violate the Impoundment Control Act,” he says, referring to a 1974 law that limited the president’s power to impound, or withhold, funding.

The memo’s broad language left researchers confused about which portion of the country’s roughly US$200 billion annual spending on research and development is affected. Worried about the risk of non-compliance and without more clarity, many university officials have already begun to freeze funding at their institutions. For example, The University of Chicago in Illinois informed their faculty members on Tuesday that they should suspend certain spending on federally-issued grants.

“We must for now proceed under the assumption that grant expenditures incurred after today while this memorandum is in effect may not be covered by federal funding,” university provost Katherine Baicker wrote in an email to faculty. “This is not a request that I make lightly.”

Elusive clarity

The OMB issued a memo today clarifying that the funding pause does not apply to benefits programmes such as Medicare, which provides health care to older people, and it emphasized that the 27 January order sets up a process for agencies to determine which spending is affected. After review, the spending pause could be “as short as [a] day”, the clarification said, without offering a specific example of a programme whose funding had been restored.