Scientists face deficiencies in leadership countering US policies

What started as a simple Bluesky post—“Get in dorks, we’re going protesting”—transformed into 32 official Stand Up for Science rallies last month, as well as over 100 related events across the US and abroad. On March 7, an estimated tens of thousands of students, scientists, and science supporters gathered, protest signs in hand, to collectively advocate for three key policies: an end to political interference in science, the restoration and expansion of scientific funding, and the protection of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Some say they demonstrated to pressure their congressional representatives to push back on recent executive actions by the Donald J. Trump administration, such as firing probationary federal workers from science funding agencies and slowing the federal grant peer review process. Others hoped that it would persuade local lawmakers to commit to supporting scientific research at the state level.

Meanwhile, several participants told C&EN that they thought the large gatherings of science supporters might capture the attention of onlookers who may be oblivious to the threats the scientific community currently faces. It’s an opportunity for “folks who aren’t as intimately connected with the community to see that there’s a lot of people that are worked up about this,” says Christopher Fisher, a chemical biologist who founded the science communication consultancy Multivalent Communications and attended the Boston rally.

But while the rallies generated an overall sense of camaraderie and enthusiasm among the participants, several key issues have come to the fore regarding efforts to counter the Trump administration’s policies.

Those difficulties include a lack of leadership, the need for better public engagement, and the unprecedented political climate.

Impact on US science policy unknown

According to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who studies nonviolent civil resistance at Harvard University, it’s too early to tell how much of an impact the Stand Up for Science rallies and the movement building around them will have on US science policy.

In the month since the events took place, the Trump administration has announced more large layoffs across federal science and other agencies, canceled or threatened to cancel billions in additional research grants, and detained and deported researchers who were either working in or visiting the US on temporary visas. Sweeping tariffs—currently on a 90-day pause—also threaten to raise the cost of research equipment and supplies for scientists who are already under financial strain, though some chemical companies have suggested that these tariffs create opportunities to reshore production.

The White House did not respond to C&EN’s request for comment on the impact of these actions or the pushback it has received.

But Stand Up for Science is hardly the first time the scientific community has taken to the streets asking for both public and political support. In April 2017, over a million people in more than 600 cities around the world participated in the inaugural March for Science. Those protests sprang up in response to the first Trump administration’s antiscience actions, such as proposing major budget cuts to federal science funding programs and deleting mentions of climate change from federal websites.

Yet many in the scientific community don’t consider the 2017 march successful, says J. P. Flores, a bioinformatics PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the five core organizers of Stand Up for Science. “There weren’t a lot of policy changes that came about.”

As a result, although most participants who spoke with C&EN say they saw value in attending the Stand Up for Science rallies, a number also questioned whether their waving protest signs would make a difference.

“Are the people who are in charge going to be caring about these science demonstrations happening across the US? You would hope so,” says Ivan Aprahamian, a chemistry professor at Dartmouth College who attended a local event in Hanover, New Hampshire. “The reality of it is, probably not.”

That doesn’t mean that rallies and marches aren’t effective forms of advocacy. Public demonstrations can have an impact, Chenoweth says. For example, the "Capitol Crawl” protest for disability rights in March 1990 was followed just 4 months later by passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Research shows that protests can also influence elections.

Today, however, “we’re in a different situation politically,” Chenoweth says. “Even things like town halls and phone calls to Republican representatives may have not yet had the same kind of impacts that people would have expected before.”

To be successful, these forms of advocacy need to be part of a more coordinated effort, argues Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies social movements. That will require some form of leadership, which currently appears to be lacking in science advocacy, he says.

A lack of leadership

The Stand Up for Science organizing team says it has also marked the leadership gap and is working to fill it. The group started by making concrete policy demands that the scientific community could focus on at the March 7 demonstrations. Since then, it has gathered ideas from the community on how to transform the momentum from the rallies to meaningful, collective action.

“It’s really, really clear that people want to do things and to an extent really benefit from having a centralized group kind of lead the charge,” says Leslie Berntsen, a social scientist and science educator who is also part of the Stand Up for Science organizing team. “When we have solid plans to share with everybody, we will be sharing them with, quite literally, everyone everywhere.”

Stand Up for Science now has a list of upcoming demonstrations on its website—both those the group is organizing itself and those it’s doing in partnership with other organizations. The team members also recently launched Science for Good, a new initiative that will support science advocates and conduct research to inform science policy.

Seeing these organizers and other small science groups step up is promising, Tormos-Aponte says. Unions, including those representing federal and higher education workers, are also becoming key players in science advocacy. But he adds that more traditional scientific organizations, such as professional societies, could have been driving the movement a while ago.

Some of the initial silence and hesitation from these organizations may simply be due to the uncertainty of this moment. Earlier this year, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal that the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy purposely bombards the opposition with new directives and policies at a speed that makes effective response difficult.

“I think everybody had to get their sea legs,” says Katherine B. McGuire, the chief advocacy officer of the American Psychological Association (APA). “I just think there was a lot of shock in the beginning that led to individuals maybe not stepping forward.”

That’s not to say that some traditional scientific organizations haven’t started pushing back against certain Trump administration policies. Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, testified in February before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. He urged policymakers to continue investing in basic scientific research and to recognize the importance of international collaborations.

Scientific societies have a responsibility to speak up about policies that are detrimental to the scientific enterprise, Parikh tells C&EN.

Several societies, including the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the Materials Research Society, have sent a letter to Congress asking members to prioritize research funding. (C&EN is published by ACS but remains editorially independent.) Susan R. Morrissey, ACS senior vice president of strategic initiatives, says in an email that the letter “helped prevent deep cuts in R&D funding in the recent continuing resolution.”

Meanwhile, the APA coordinated its own letter, cosigned by multiple scientific organizations.

The cosigners represent “a powerful, though informal, coalition of organizations that collectively are deeply committed to defending and advancing science,” McGuire says. The formation of the coalition received a positive, proscience response from elected officials that suggests science still has some bipartisan support in Congress, she adds.

But like Chenoweth of Harvard, Tormos-Aponte still questions the efficacy of these methods in a political climate in which some Republican representatives are canceling town halls and Democrats are being criticized for their weak opposition to Trump administration policies.

“These dudes in DC have done a great job of intimidating elected officials into silence,” said Bapu Vaitla, mayor of Davis, California, speaking at the Stand Up for Science rally in Sacramento. “They make us fear being a target. They threaten us with the power of the purse.”

Tormos-Aponte says that for those reasons, science advocacy “can't just be about writing letters to Congress and calling [them]. It has to be more of [an] active effort, a more tactically diverse effort.”

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is one of the societies that have come to a similar conclusion. “We realized very quickly that Congress was not going to be able to provide the relief that we typically count on when the executive is implementing things that we don't agree with,” AGU CEO Janice Lachance says.

So the union joined a lawsuit challenging the firing of probationary federal employees, even though it was a move that the AGU doesn’t have much experience with, Lachance says. “If we were going to try to help the scientific enterprise and our members, we had to use all of the tools at our disposal.”

Other types of research institutions, like universities, have also been filing suits against the administration. On April 14, for example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with five other universities, filed a suit against the Department of Energy for proposing to cap their indirect cost rate at 15%. The University of California supported legal action when the National Institutes of Health made a similar policy change in February.

Some universities have also called for the formation of mutual academic defense compacts, where participating institutions commit to sharing resources and support each other when under direct political infringement. There are currently proposals to form compacts among all public and land grant universities and all public and private colleges in Massachusetts.

In addition, Harvard University recently refused to give in to demands from the Trump administration. Former president Barack Obama said on the social media platform X that this move should “set an example for other higher-ed institutions.”

Improving public communication

Scientific institutions should also mobilize members to more effectively advocate for science, says Scott Frickel, a sociologist who studies society and the environment at Brown University. “Many of them are going to be older, well-established, mainstream scientists who suddenly, out of nowhere, have had their entire lives turned upside down or the threat of that seems very real and imminent.”

Case in point: the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has begun to see an uptick in scientists interested in combating some of the recent actions by the Trump administration, says Melissa Varga, the senior manager for the UCS Science Network. The network trains and supports experts who want to engage with the public and advocate for science-related policies.

That bigger pool of advocates presents an opportunity for professional scientific societies and other institutions, Tormos-Aponte says. “What about helping us organize a phone call or a Zoom call? What about giving a little bit of media training? What about organizing an advocacy day?”

Most of these organizations do host advocacy workshops and provide their members with scripts for calling or writing to members of Congress. But it’s unclear if researchers regularly take advantage of these resources or even know they exist.

When asked about future plans for science advocacy, Erin, a researcher who studies autism and schizophrenia and attended the Sacramento Stand Up for Science rally, said she wasn’t aware of other opportunities. “I’d love to hear more about them,” says Erin, who did not want to give their last name out of concerns about professional reprisal.

But scientists don’t have to simply wait for an organization to figure out a strategy or plan an event, says Fisher, the chemical biologist from Boston. He prefers using a more bottom-up advocacy approach that focuses on communicating “how science works, specific topics in science, and also how science benefits society from an individual level.”

The idea of public engagement was a common theme among the speakers at the Stand Up for Science rallies. Francis Collins, a former director at the National Institutes of Health who spoke at the Washington, DC, rally, told C&EN that scientists “have not done a great job of explaining why science and medical research is so critical for our nation, or what it has done both to build our economy and to provide people with all kinds of technologies and better health.”

Amy, a researcher who works at a Boston-based biotech company and attended the DC rally, said that when she spoke to passersby on her way to the event, none of them knew that private companies were being affected by the recent NIH funding chaos. Amy declined to give her last name.

“What we need to do is be getting the message out to people that are not scientists and that vote,” says Brian Trainor, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who attended the Sacramento rally. Trainor recently participated in Labs to Lives, a video series developed by UC Davis that explains the importance of federal research funding.

One problem is that many scientists aren’t trained in how to communicate with the public—a problem the public has noticed. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 52% of US adults don’t consider scientists good communicators. “We are operating at a little bit of a deficit, where a lot of scientists that suddenly want to start doing this work don't feel like they have the training to do so,” Fisher says.

On top of that, they’re rarely engaging with the areas of society that aren’t exposed to the value of what scientists are doing, says R. J., a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland who attended the DC rally and declined to give his last name.

“We need to have a plan for interfacing with the community so that they meet scientists and understand the work that we do and why it's important and how it contributes to the economy,” says Theanne Griffith, a neuroscientist at UC Davis and the lead organizer of the Sacramento rally.

Again, scientific societies and universities both have resources for those who want to sharpen their communication skills and learn to engage with people who are skeptical of science. But public engagement could also be as informal as having a discussion with people around the Thanksgiving dinner table, says Berntsen, the Stand Up for Science co-organizer.

“We will be best protected and supported if there is more massive public outrage,” Fisher says. “We need more of that grassroots, bottom-up approach to activate more scientists, more chemists, and then also by extension activate more of the people in their immediate communities.”

Additional reporting by Brianna Barbu, Laurel Oldach, and Priyanka Runwal