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➡ Science funding for the 2025 fiscal year has yet to be finalized. Science agencies are being funded at 2024 levels until a new budget is passed, which must happen by March 14.
➡ Preliminary spending bills from Congress don’t provide substantial increases to science agencies’ budgets.
➡ The incoming presidential administration and Republican-controlled Congress could change how funds are distributed.
Science funding for the US government’s 2025 fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025, is up in the air following months of unsuccessful budget negotiations in Congress. Under a continuing resolution passed in December, legislators now have until March 14 to finalize the federal budget. In the interim, science agencies will continue to be funded at 2024 levels.
A preliminary spending bill drafted by the House of Representatives calls for most science agencies to receive flat or decreased funding. Only the Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) budgets would see increases, which would range between 1.0% and 2.2%.
The proposed increases for the NIST and the NSF would not offset the 8% cuts the agencies’ budgets received in 2024.
The Senate was more generous in its preliminary bill, giving the NSF and the NIST 5.4% and 12.9% budget increases, respectively. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive a nearly 4% increase.
Once Congress agrees on a consolidated version of the two bills, it will need to be signed by newly inaugurated president Donald J. Trump. But getting that signature is not guaranteed. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, he rejected Congress’s appropriations bill, leading to a 35-day government shutdown that caused major disruptions for chemists across the US.
Trump has a mixed record when it comes to science funding. In his first term, he prioritized some research spending, particularly for artificial intelligence and quantum information science. But he also proposed “massive” budget cuts to science agencies as a way to reduce government spending.
Last time, those cuts were rejected by Congress, but Republicans’ confidence in science has declined since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent Pew survey. “This is not the same Congress as that Congress,” says Dominique Baker, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies higher education policy. “I would not be shocked to see decreases in funding.”
Beyond setting funding levels, the incoming presidential administration and the fully Republican-controlled Congress could change how agencies distribute funds. For example, last year, the House passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have prevented the US Department of Defense from funding US universities with research collaborations with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The language ended up being removed from the final bill.
With regard to the president-elect, Baker says she wouldn’t be surprised if Trump were to issue an executive order that would consider certain countries hostile. In that case, she says, “foreign nationals of those countries would have restricted access to funding and other potential resources.”
Science agencies that incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion into their funding processes could also see changes when Trump takes office. His campaign outlined his plans to “eradicate any attempt to weaken America’s institutions through these harmful and discriminatory ‘equity’ programs.”
For example, Baker says, diversity-related requirements for research proposals, such as the NSF’s broader impacts statements, could be eliminated. In addition, grants that focus on expanding diversity within science could “potentially face new challenges in how they are administered,” she says.
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