Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York sparked outrage among Democrats in his party last week when he helped to pass a Republican-led spending bill.Credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty
The US government averted a shutdown late last week after President Donald Trump signed into law a spending agreement that likely locks in modest cuts to science funding this year. But a larger crisis for science still looms as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress continue to seek massive cuts to the federal budget for 2025 and beyond.
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Assuming that federal spending follows current trends, the 15 March ‘continuing resolution’ agreement means that overall funding for research and development during the current fiscal year, which ends on 30 September, will probably ring in around US$193 billion — representing a relatively modest 3.5% cut compared with fiscal 2024, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Part of that cut comes from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The spending agreement calls for a 67% reduction in funding for the agency through the 21st Century Cures Act, which includes investments in the 2016 Cancer Moonshot programme and the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative; total funding under the Cures Act will drop by $280 million, to $127 million.
The spending bill, drafted exclusively by Republicans in Congress, does not include many of the usual line-item details directing agencies precisely where to put their money. This gives the Trump administration leeway in directing where the money goes — one of the reasons why many Democrats in Congress threatened to shut down the government rather than vote for the bill. Late last week, however, a small group of Democratic senators, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, went against the rest of the party and advanced it to keep the government’s doors open.
Whether or not the Trump administration will actually spend the money laid out in the continuing resolution remains to be seen. Over the past two months since Trump took office, his team has ignored previous spending laws passed by Congress by freezing and terminating federal grants, including those from the NIH, that the administration does not support. The latest spending agreement is unlikely to change that dynamic, says Jennifer Zeitzer, who leads the public-affairs office at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland. “We are in a different era right now where nothing is normal”.
Nothing normal
Policy specialists say that the Trump team might still try to slash 2025 budgets with a separate legislative package of ‘rescissions’ — a process separate from the appropriations one used to fund the government. This would be the easy — and legal — way for the White House to push through many of the funding cuts for this year that it is seeking, policy watchers say.
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