USDA Cancels Hundreds of Journal Subscriptions

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has canceled nearly 400 of the National Agricultural Library’s roughly 2,000 journal subscriptions, Science reported this week.

The decision to cancel the subscriptions came at the direction of the Department of Government Efficiency, a new agency led by South African billionaire Elon Musk who donated $288 million to President Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign.

The eliminated journal titles include any of those published by 17 presses, most of which are affiliated with universities or nonprofit scientific societies, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, the cuts spared journals published by for-profit publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley, which collectively accounted for more than half of the library’s journal subscriptions, according to Science’s analysis.

USDA told staff members Friday that though the agency would consider restoring some of the journals, they were only given hours to submit justifications.

“Peer-reviewed publications are literally the cornerstones and building blocks of science, and taking these away from scientists at USDA is like you’re building a house and pull out the foundation: Everything else above becomes more unstable,” said Chris Stelzig, executive director of the Entomological Society of America. “USDA scientists are doing this work to protect the American food supply, and it frustrates me that that’s not being recognized here.”