It’s time to check in on what’s been happening with science funding over the past month.
Since May 14
- May 28, 2025. Weather researchers performed a 100 hour long youtube livestream from May 28th to June 1st. It was made up of a series of 30 min talks with messages in between to raise awareness about funding cuts. They discussed topics like the push to re-open shut weather data centers, and how budget cuts impact your forecasts. The overall goal: show the value of climate science. The stream got 77k views in their first 30h!
- 30 May 2025. Proposed congressional budget cuts. As a refresher, scientific grants are awarded by federal science foundations like NSF and NIH. The number of grants they can award is dictated by their budget, which is approved by congress. This year’s proposed budget went out and… it’s not looking good. While what is proposed & what is approved is often different, this year’s proposal may be the most drastic budget science budget slash we’ve seen in decades. Just some examples of the proposed budget cuts for FY 26: NASA 50% cut, which would end 40 missions, including Mars Sample Return, Juno mission (orbiting Jupiter) just to name two. NIH 40% cut (this finds things like cancer research and Alzheimer’s disease research), NSF Biology 70% cut, NSF social sciences 70% cut, CDC 53% cut, Aids relief 30% cut… you get the idea. Now a proposed budget is not the final budget, so some back and forth remains before this goes through.
- 4 June 2025. Fly base funding slashed. FlyBase is THE database that contains all of the genetic information for every single fly gene used in research. Essentially everything we know about fruit flies, which are the model species for genetic research is in this database, it is the one-stop-shop for fly research. However, FlyBase is mostly funded by a $2 million grant to Harvard. As you may recall from last month’s update, Harvard’s federal grants have been frozen. So NIH has “stopped paying the bills” for FlyBase, creating quite the buzz. The team is currently collecting donations and looking to move their database elsewhere so that fly science can continue.
- June 9th, 2025. NIH employees publish the Bethesda Declaration. Over 300 NIH employees have signed a letter called the Bethesda Declaration, in dissent of the administration’s cuts to federal funding for science. In the letter they underline that over 2000 NIH grants worth $9.5 billion have been terminated since January, while almost no new ones have been issued. They also state that this is in response to the proposed budget cuts. Now over 18,000 additional scientists have signed the letter. This news comes a day before the new NIH director, Jay Battacharya was called to testify in a key Senate spending committee.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/health/nih-letter-bethesda-declaration
As covered on the Daily Tech News Show on June 13th 2025. For a more detailed discussion of the topic, listen here:
Nicole Ackermans, CVN lab 
Leave a comment