This is text from a previous episode of the Daily Tech News Show detailing monthly changes affecting federal funding for science in the United States for March 2025.

Monthly update – US Science

There is SO MUCH going on, it is hard to cover everything in a briefing.

A good source is Science’s “Trump Tracker”on the news section of their website

https://www.science.org/content/article/science-trump-latest-news

• Firings at NIH, NSF, CDC, NOAA, and more

On February 14th, about 1/10th of the employees at the CDC (center for disease control) were fired. That’s approx. 1300 people. Over a thousand of NIH’s employees were also let go. 170 employees at NSF were fired but about half of them are being re-hired, at least as of March 6th. Between 600-900 NOAA employees were terminated last week. Overall, over 6000 federal workers from NSF, NIH, CDC, FDA, and other health and human services were sent termination notices from the administration. “These are people who are critical to our programs” said the former NIH director to ScienceInsider. It’s almost impossible to quantify the impact on science, but some examples include: Workers researching highly pathogenic bird flu at the national bio- and agro-security facility; CDC’s cancellation of the annual meeting to discuss vaccine dissemination, including which strains of the flu are to be vaccinated against this year, as well as voting on vaccines for things like meningitis and Chikungunya. Another example, due to firings at NSF, the 40 scientists who usually monitor the population of the endangered northern spotted owl can no longer continue this monitoring. And I could give you 1000 more examples that affect science in 1000 different ways.

• Foreign aid freeze of nearly $2 billion uproot US based research.
  For example work on global famine relief and malnutrition at US experimental research stations in Africa.

• Grants frozen in many ways
  • The firings we just mentioned make it more complicated to handle grants.
  • Federal register freezes the scheduling of grant review meetings, although they are slowly resuming at about half capacity. This makes it difficult to review and fund new grants (56 of 124 review meetings have met at NSF). 
  • Funding numbers compared to last year are way down (NSF & NIH)

For example, for NIH about $500 mil in grants was awarded in 2021. This round, we are under $200 mil in funded grants because of the freeze (those that were awarded were mostly renewals, as opposed to new submissions). There is so much more detail I could go into. For example, many of the grants that are not being funded are those for trainees or those directed towards diversity mechanisms like encouraging young, early career, diverse scientists to join the field. Dr. David Miller is doing a great job covering this on Bluesky by reporting numbers provided by NSF’s Directorate.

• Overhead cost proposal currently blocked by federal judge

https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-judge-blocks-nih-s-plan-slash-overhead-cost-payments

“A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked an attempt by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to cut some $4 billion annually that goes to universities to cover the cost of supporting research on their campuses. The preliminary injunction replaces a temporary restraining order issued 3 days after NIH announced on 7 February it was reducing the “indirect cost rate” paid on an NIH grant to a flat 15%, down from 50% or higher at many institutions”.

For more on explanations of indirect cost see my February DTNS update!

• Paused graduate admissions in biomedical sciences
  Some universities have paused graduate admissions such as Vanderbilt and University, University of Pennsylvania. Some slowed spending like University of Missouri, while others instilled a hiring freeze like Cornell University and University of Louisville. More have recommended reducing graduate admissions without stopping them entirely. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00608-z

• Banned words” list & frozen grants

The current list of banned words originates from an October 2024 report of banned words. Now, a senate report led by Ted Cruz singled out 3,400 NSF funded grants that were allegedly “woke”. This list includes one of my grants, used to fund early-career scientists to travel to a conference. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/2/cruz-led-investigation-uncovers-2-billion-in-woke-dei-grants-at-nsf-releases-full-database

I think it is important to highlight this quote from the official senate document: “3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”

The database serving as the backbone for this report contains over 1200 “keywords and phrases”. 

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC

It is difficult to find a reputable source with the current-day list of “banned” words being used today to allegedly filter grants, but here are some sources I have located.

https://gizmodo.com/the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-words-that-will-get-your-paper-flagged-at-nsf-2000559661

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/

Originally, this was posted to Twitter/X by Dr. Darby Saxbe

Here is a shorter list (about 100) that Dr. Saxbe tweeted were being used to create these lists (I excluded some plurals to make the list shorter so I could read it on air).