After “Rupture,” Science Leaders Call for More Advocacy

PHOENIX—More than a year after the Trump administration began enacting deep cuts to federal research funding, leaders of the nation’s scientific community are focused on moving forward.

“What happened over the last year [was] a rupture. We’re not going back. It’s not possible. Too much damage has been done. Too much has changed,” Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, said last Thursday at the opening address of the organization’s annual meeting. “There’s an entire generation of scientists that have a scar, a scar that is not going to go away. But scars can make us tougher. Scars can become shields and build resilience.”

That theme of reflection and resilience permeated last week’s three-day conference at the Phoenix Convention Center, which hosted thousands of scientists and science advocates from 45 countries.

For many of those based in the United States, the meeting marked a year since the start of sweeping federal policies that led to widespread grant cancellations; funding freezes; bans on certain research topics including race, gender and climate; layoffs; and shaky morale. At the same time, such losses spurred a new wave of activism and resistance within the scientific community, which Parikh implored attendees to continue.

“We have to build what comes next,” he said. “It’s going to take protests. It’s going to take politics. It’s going to take the ability to not speak gibberish. All of that has got to come together if we’re going to fight for the inheritance of the Enlightenment to continue to make our world a better place.”

At last year’s annual AAAS meeting in Boston, scientists were only beginning to get a sense of the radical changes the Trump administration had in store for higher education and science and research policy. In fact, the 2025 meeting kicked off the same day that the U.S. Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promoted medical misinformation and denied the safety and efficacy of vaccines, as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. “A year ago, I said that RFK Jr. was the wrong person for the job at HHS,” Parikh said Thursday. “I still feel that way.”

Since assuming the role, Kennedy has overseen mass layoffs, firings and resignations at HHS; attacked the validity of top scientific journals; and slashed funding for promising mRNA research, among other actions that have worried researchers.

Just before last year’s AAAS conference, the National Institutes of Health announced a unilateral plan to cap indirect research costs at 15 percent, which caused a mass outcry among scientists and research advocates who characterized the policy as “shortsighted and dangerous,” arguing it would imperil university budgets, local economies and lifesaving research.

“At last year’s AAAS meeting, I was on the phone, making emergency calls to decide what we’re going to do,” Toby Smith, vice president for government relations and public policy for the Association of American Universities, said during a panel Friday on using the courts to advocate for science. “It was becoming clear that doing what we’ve done in the past [to protect indirect research cost rates] was not going to work given the immense pressure coming from this administration.”

Over the next few months, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense also announced similar policies. In response, the AAU—along with numerous other higher education advocacy organizations and individual universities—sued the federal government. As a result of the litigation—and subsequent congressional action—changes to indirect cost rates have been blocked from taking effect for now.

But before this year, litigation wasn’t nearly as a big part of the research advocacy playbook as it has become.

“The AAU has been around since 1900 and we’ve never filed a lawsuit against the federal government until last year,” Smith said. “It’s opened up a legitimate way to challenge this administration.”

Austere indirect cost rates aren’t the only alarming policy changes that scientific researchers managed to avoid last year. While Trump proposed cutting nearly 40 percent of the NIH’s budget and 56 percent of the NSF’s for fiscal year 2026, Congress rejected that proposal and instead voted to keep funding for scientific research mostly flat.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Smith told Inside Higher Ed after the panel. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have liked to see it be better.”

Much of the hope he and other longtime science policy advocates see for the future of science lies in the advocacy work that many young scientists and students have taken up over the past year.

Following last year’s AAAS conference, a group of STEM graduate students were so concerned about the federal government’s changes to science policy that they launched the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP). The coalition of early-career researchers—whose mission is to bridge gaps between scientists, their communities and the general public—already has 120 members across 20 institutions, including several who spoke about their work during a panel Friday.

In addition to defending the scientific research enterprise from immediate threats coming from the federal government, SNAP is also focused on using this turbulent moment as an opportunity to rethink academic incentive structures that typically don’t reward scientists for engaging with the public and policymakers for the advancement of science as a public good.

“The house is on fire. We can’t defend it by pretending it’s not on fire and that there [isn’t] some seed of truth and some good faith questions in all of the nonsense and rhetoric that’s come out against research, science and higher education,” said Alex Rich, a neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and founding member of SNAP. “We have to engage with that.”