Congress defended American science. Its work is not over

American scientists spent much of 2025 in shock. The Trump administration cancelled thousands of grants and withheld billions of dollars from researchers. Labs were forced to close their doors as they ran out of cash. Fewer foreign researchers applied to move to America and rising numbers of American scientists began to look abroad for jobs. Worse, Donald Trump’s spending proposals for 2026 aimed to cut the budgets for America’s main science-funding agencies in half.

This assault on science has provoked a rare reaction from otherwise supine Republicans in Congress. They have rejected $30bn in proposed cuts and hardened the language in the spending bill to help them enforce how the administration spends the money. Lawmakers deserve credit for rediscovering the power of the purse—and their spines. They ought now to stiffen these further by using congressional oversight to undo more of the damage Mr Trump and his team are visiting on American science.

The president’s budget would have eviscerated research. Mr Trump proposed cutting 40% of the money going to the National Institutes of Health, which pays for much groundbreaking academic work and conducts plenty of its own. In addition, he demanded that it slash the number of its institutes from 27 to eight. Congress was having none of this, choosing instead to preserve the agency’s structure and increase its budget by 1%. Legislators also maintained funding for the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science at similar levels to the previous year.

They did not only safeguard the size of the budget. They also constrained the president by inserting language in the text of the spending bill that specifies how and when science dollars must be spent. In previous years these instructions were published alongside the bill in explanatory documents which, even though they are not legally binding, the White House tended to honour as reflecting the will of Congress. By writing these instructions into the statute itself, Congress has left less room for a notoriously norm-breaking administration to spend the money in ways that lawmakers had not intended (or not to spend it at all).

These actions show that lawmakers recognised how Mr Trump’s assault would blunt America’s scientific and technological edge, killing good science jobs and hurting local economies. Having stood up for their constituents in the budget fight, lawmakers should also protect them by exercising their power of oversight to stop the administration’s war on scientific advice and expertise.

In the past year federal science agencies have been shedding staff. Mr Trump’s appointees have also terminated, suspended or otherwise tampered with the work of some 200 expert committees that advise the government on everything from medicine to energy. Grant panels and other bodies have been politicised and stacked with cranks.

These changes are already affecting Americans. Last month the Health Department abruptly cut the list of recommended routine immunisations for children from 13 to seven. Shutting down programmes that collect environmental data will mean that Americans will be less able to prepare for worsening extremes in weather.

The Senate should start by summoning Robert F. Kennedy junior, the anti-vax health secretary, to explain why vaccine guidance was changed without adequate consultation. Both houses should step up their scrutiny of other committees and environmental monitoring. As with sparing science funding, Americans will thank them for it. ■