June 17, 2026—For decades, the U.S. government was a partner in the scientific enterprise. Now that relationship is crumbling. Plus, concerning trajectories of the Ebola outbreak, and the first tropical storm of the season has formed.
—Andrea Gawrylewski
Chief Newsletter Editor
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Galaxy M83 in x-ray and optical light. NASA/CXC/SAO (x-ray); NASA/ESA/AURA/STScI/Hubble Heritage Team/W. Blair/STScI/Johns Hopkins University/R. O’Connell/University of Virginia (optical); NASA/CXC/SAO/A. Jubett, L. Frattare and P. Edmonds (image processing)
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A set of supernovas in the galaxy Messier 83 haven't been fading steadily as expected after they exploded. Instead, they've varied in brightness over the course of 14 years, according to new data. | 2 min read
A genetic analysis of samples from graves of hunter-gatherers in Siberia point to a deadly disease outbreak dating to some 5,500 years ago. Could this be the oldest known lethal plague outbreak? | 3 min read
Nearly 5,000 clinical trials, including more than 1,000 cancer treatment tests, face termination under proposed federal regulations, a new analysis by the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science finds. | 3 min read
The human brain can't contemplate a trillion, the value of Elon Musk's wealth. | 3 min read
A new galaxy, named DF9, appears to be devoid of dark matter, the substance that astronomers believe is necessary to ... hold galaxies together. | 2 min read
The first Atlantic tropical storm of 2026 is here. Tropical Storm Arthur is the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season and will bring heavy rains and potential flash flooding to the Southeast. | 2 min read
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U.S. Science in Chaos
Yesterday, I introduced our inaugural class of Young American Scientists and described how that project came into being: the next generation of researchers is facing tumult and uncertainty when it comes to research funding in the U.S. We at Scientific American wanted to spotlight some of the incredible work coming from the scientists of the future. But today I’ll get a little deeper into what is happening to the enterprise of science and why.
History of funding science: Since WWII, the government has had a compact with the scientific enterprise. Officials recognized that science had won the war for the Allies—not only the atomic bomb but also radar, penicillin, food preservation, cryptography, and so on. The state’s capacity to conduct science expanded with the formation of the National Science Foundation and growth of the National Institutes of Health. In the following decades, funding for science evolved further, including investments from venture capitalists. Government-funded research moved into universities, which became partners in discovery. Today, 40 percent of all the funding for basic, blue-sky, exploratory research comes from the federal government. At the same time, the most influential private-sector developers of technology are now in Silicon Valley. Their perspective on innovation is that it should move fast, disrupt markets and make money. That idea is influencing how the government finances science more than ever before.
Current landscape: Under the Trump administration, thousands of federal grants have been frozen or canceled, with around 2,600 still in limbo—about $1.4 billion worth. The NSF and the NIH are awarding three quarters of their usual number of grants. Such cancellations and delayed disbursements are both arbitrary and unprecedented. Many are being justified on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (or “woman” or “race”)—which has been unheard of until now. Meanwhile, fewer people are entering graduate programs and nearly 95,000 scientists have left federal government employment. And grant recipients aren’t allowed to share grant money with overseas collaborators, which makes studying diseases like Lassa fever and Ebola next to impossible. Ironically, the current administration has cut millions in funding and yet still wants standout progress in the technology sector.
Missed discovery: In 2025 the NIH cut the amount of grant money awarded by more than 40 percent compared with years prior. What if, one team of economists asked, the NIH research budget had been 40 percent smaller for the past few decades? Grants in the bottom 40 percent of the priority queue, they reasoned, wouldn’t have been funded. The team tracked those grants to their outcomes—research that never happened in this parallel universe—and found that something like half of all drugs simply wouldn’t exist today.
The fallout: How do scientists feel about this chaotic breach of the government-science relationship? “The reality is, because of what happened and what’s happening now, the trust between researchers and the federal government is completely broken,” says Scott Delaney, a former Harvard University epidemiologist who co-created the watchdog group Grant Witness. “Is your grant going to be frozen? Is it going to be terminated? Is it going to be reinstated? Is it going to be delayed because you’re required to change the wording?” Other changes will likely follow, scientists say: “Laboratories are going to close. Trainees are going to go to other countries or pursue nonscience careers,” says Carole LaBonne, a developmental biologist at Northwestern University.
Join the conversation: What role do you think the government should play in science in the U.S.? Share your thoughts with other readers in our online discussion.
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Tonima Tasnim Ananna is an astrophysicist who studies the biggest black holes in the universe. Growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, rolling blackouts were the best time to look up at the stars. “You’ll see your neighbors, and then you see the sky,” she says. “And that’s how you become fascinated with the sky.” Ananna, now a professor at Wayne State University, has an incredible talent for making sense of large swaths of information, which is how she teases apart the behavior of supermassive black holes surrounded by white-hot disks of matter (also called active galactic nuclei, or AGNs) through the clouds of gas and dust that obscure their forms. Ananna’s research helps to lift these veils by combining observations of AGNs in optical, infrared and x-ray wavelengths. By probing mountains of telescope data, she and her team are hoping to find out how AGNs affect the galaxies in which they reside. —Emma Gometz, newsletter editor
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