Tag: Scientific

‘End of an era’: Experts warn research executive order could stifle scientific innovation

An executive order that gives political appointees new oversight for the types of federal grants that are approved could undercut the foundation of scientific research in the U.S., research and higher education experts say.

President Donald Trump’s order, signed Aug. 7, directs political appointees at federal agencies to review grant awards to ensure they align with the administration’s “priorities and the national interest.”

These appointees are to avoid giving funding to several types of projects, including those that recognize sex beyond a male-female binary or initiatives that promote “anti-American values,” though the order doesn’t define what those values are.

The order effectively codifies the Trump administration’s moves to deny or suddenly terminate research grants that aren’t in line with its priorities, such as projects related to climate change, mRNA research, and diversity, equity and inclusion.

The executive order’s mandates mark a big departure from norms before the second Trump administration. Previously, career experts provided oversight rather than political appointees and peer review was the core way to evaluate projects.

Not surprisingly, the move has brought backlash from some quarters.

The executive order runs counter to the core principle of funding projects based on scientific merit — an idea that has driven science policy in the U.S. since World War II, said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

“It gives the authority to do what has been happening, which is to overrule peer-review through changes and political priorities,” said Smith. “This is really circumventing peer review in a way that’s not going to advance U.S. science and not be healthy for our country.”

That could stifle scientific innovation. Trump’s order could prompt scientists to discard their research ideas, not enter the scientific research field or go to another country to complete their work, research experts say.

Ultimately, these policies could cause the U.S. to fall from being one of the top countries for scientific research to one near the bottom, said Michael Lubell, a physics professor at the City College of New York.

“This is the end of an era,” said Lubell. “Even if things settle out, the damage has already been done.”

A new approach to research oversight

Under the order, senior political appointees or their designees will review new federal awards as well as ongoingl grants and terminate those that don’t align with the administration’s priorities.

This policy is a far cry from the research and development strategy developed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration at the end of World War II. Vannevar Bush, who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development at the time, decided the U.S. needed a robust national program to fund research that would leave scientists to do their work free from political pressure.

Bush’s strategy involved some government oversight over research projects, but it tended to defer to the science community to decide which projects were most promising, Lubell said.

“That kind of approach has worked extremely well,” said Lubell. “We have had strong economic growth. We’re the No. 1 military in the world, our work in the scientific field, whether it’s medicine, or IT — we’re right at the forefront.”

But Trump administration officials, through executive orders and in public hearings, have dismissed some federal research as misleading or unreliable — and portrayed the American scientific enterprise as one in crisis.

The Aug. 7 order cited a 2024 report from the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, led by its then-ranking member and current chairman, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that alleged more than a quarter of National Science Foundation spending supported DEI and other “left-wing ideological crusades.” House Democrats, in a report released in April, characterized Cruz’s report as “a sloppy mess” that used flawed methodology and “McCarthyistic tactics.”

Trump’s order also referred to incidents at Stanford and Harvard universities in recent years. In July 2023, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as Stanford University’s president after an independent review of his work found significant flaws. And in May, Harvard University fired and stripped the tenure status from a renowned scholar after finding she had manipulated data to support her hypotheses in several studies

“There is a strong need to strengthen oversight and coordination of, and to streamline, agency grantmaking to address these problems,” the order stated.

Scientific misconduct does occur from time to time, but the scientific community does a pretty good job at policing itself through peer review processes, said Lubell. The scientific process has functioned “extremely well,” he added, and contentions that the scientific community is in crisis are not accurate.

“Could it be better? Of course you can always improve things,” said Lubell. But “there is no crisis.”

Deterring the younger generation?

Michael Wilhide has worked as a molecular biologist and clinical lab scientist at a public university, for private companies and at hospitals for over 20 years — looking into how genomics affect health outcomes such as cardiovascular and kidney disease, and whether molecular tests could detect COVID-19 in patients.

However, after a research project he worked on ended four months ago, he said in September that he struggled to land another position in what has been a challenging job market for molecular biology scientists.

Wilhide speculated the difficult job market may be partly due to research universities being uncertain about whether they will be able to secure grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. However, more recently, Wilhide said the job market appeared to be improving a bit.

“There is a strong need to strengthen oversight and coordination of, and to streamline, agency grantmaking to address these problems.”

Donald Trump’s Aug. 7 executive order on research grants

Still, NIH and other federal agencies have cut vast sums of research funding in the months since Trump took office for the second time.

By late July, the federal government had cut $3.3 to $3.7 billion in research funding from over 600 universities — targeting institutions in its crosshairs and projects that didn’t align with their ideological goals, said Sara Partridge, associate director of higher education at the Center for American Progress, citing a recent analysis from the liberal think tank.

Over half of federal research dollars goes toward medical and life science research, said Partridge, meaning the cuts could compromise the U.S.’s ability to find new treatments for diseases.

Despite a challenging job market, some scientists may revise their proposals and try to continue their work under the August executive order’s guidelines, said Lubell. But if the Trump administration suddenly cancels their grants, they may look to continue their work in the European Union or China, where American scientists are being actively recruited, he said. Others may leave the scientific research field completely, he said.

At the same time, young people might avoid working in an environment where they need to watch their words, lack job security and aren’t appreciated for their work, Lubell said, or just turn to fields that pay more.

This scenario has kept Wilhide awake at night. He fears America may be losing the next generation of scientists because the students who love science will see the politicization of the field and today’s scientists struggling to find jobs, he said.

“Are junior high, or high school kids, or grade school kids going to be interested in becoming a scientist when they see that science is under attack by the current administration?” asked Wilhide.

“This is the end of an era. Even if things settle out, the damage has already been done.”

Michael Lubell

Physics professor, City College of New York

In fact, past policies that redirected federal grants to align with an administration’s goals have hampered the recruitment of scientists, Lubell said.

In 1970, during the Vietnam War, Congress choked off U.S. Department of Defense funding for basic scientific research that wasn’t directly related to the military’s function or operation. That made it difficult for many scientists to get jobs — and it took a decade for the field to recover, said Lubell, who was a fellow at the Atomic Energy Commission at the time.

“That legislation passed and all of the sudden the bottom dropped out,” said Lubell. “Most of my colleagues bailed out. They couldn’t find jobs. They left basic science and went into medicine, they went into law, they went into finance.”

Limiting curiosity

Scientists often enter research projects without knowing what they’ll find — leading to all sorts of advances that were totally unexpected, said Smith.

The late microbiologist Thomas Brock received an $80,000 NSF grant to research whether living organisms exist in the Yellowstone National Park’s hot springs, which were believed to be above the temperature in which life can exist, said Smith.

Brock did, in fact, find bacteria reproducing inside the hot springs — a discovery critical to the development of polymerase chain reaction, a DNA sequencing method that has advanced biotech, including helping to lead to the creation of COVID-19 tests.

But under the August executive order, the federal government would only award research grants to projects that would likely “produce immediately demonstrable results with the potential for potentially longer-term, breakthrough results.”

“The administration’s policy risks becoming a tool that judges curiosity-driven research through the lens of policy priorities,” Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in an email. “Which cure or solution will we lose by limiting the potential of what we can study?”

“Are junior high, or high school kids, or grade school kids going to be interested in becoming a scientist when they see that science is under attack by the current administration?”

Michael Wilhide

Molecular biologist

Many people are concerned the order could narrow the scope of research projects that are pursued and discourage proposals, thereby limiting creativity, Chad Ross, vice president of grants at Hanover Research, a research and analytics firm, said in an email.

It would be fine for the administration to set priorities that guide scientists in their research focus, said Smith.

“There are always going to be certain areas of national need that have priority to get additional funding,” he said.

But it’s problematic when the administration decides what categories of research constitute good versus bad science, Smith said. Researchers need to follow the science, not expect to know the outcome of their scientific experiment before actually doing it, he said.

“I’m worried that if politicians are now judging which science is the best science, they will judge it on believing they’re going to get something when the scientific experiment starts,” Smith said.

How will colleges be impacted?

It’s unclear what areas of research the executive order could curtail, said Partridge. It could affect climate change research, she speculated, but the order also states it won’t fund research that compromises public safety or promotes “anti-American values.”

Recent grant cuts also offer hints at which topics will be affected. The administration has cut or proposed slashing grants for agricultural research, money that supports K-12 teacher training, and programs that help students from underrepresented backgrounds pursue STEM careers, she said.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is also winding down mRNA vaccine development research under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who has famously been skeptical of vaccines. Backing some of the concerns about grant funding, Smith noted that top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently resigned, citing the politicization of science.

The executive order and mass grant cancellations could also affect a university’s ability to sustain their research capabilities.

Plus, if grants are terminated based on priorities that change from one presidential administration to the next, science will not occur in the U.S., said Smith. That’s because science doesn’t occur over a one-year period, it happens over five- to more than 10-year periods, through grant funding that extends three to five years, said Smith.

When navigating the order, universities should include uncertainty into their research calculations and prioritize projects with the best chance of getting approved, said Carney. They should also make long-term plans to diversify funding sources — beyond the federal government — for their research priorities, she said.

“I’m worried that if politicians are now judging which science is the best science, they will judge it on believing they’re going to get something when the scientific experiment starts.”

Toby Smith

Senior vice president for government relations and public policy, Association of American Universities

The executive order could help in some ways, higher ed and research experts said. The order directs federal agencies to simplify the language in funding opportunity announcements to minimize “the need for legal or technical expertise in drafting an application.”

The simplified language should reduce complexities in grant application paperwork —- potentially making the process more accessible for international researchers and nonspecialist reviewers, said Ross.

And language in the order calling for awarding research grants to a mix of recipients — instead of mostly institutions with strong track records — could help researchers from less prestigious research institutions obtain grants, said Partridge.

Going forward, open and transparent lines of communication are needed among universities, principal investigators, and federal agency program officers, said Carney.

“Federal research agencies will need to be exceptionally clear about what they hope to achieve and how it aligns with the administration’s priorities,” she said.

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November 3, 2025
The Growing Problem of Scientific Research Fraud

When a group of researchers at Northwestern University uncovered evidence of widespread—and growing—research fraud in scientific publishing, editors at some academic journals weren’t exactly rushing to publish the findings.

“Some journals did not even want to send it for review because they didn’t want to call attention to these issues in science, especially in the U.S. right now with the Trump administration’s attacks on science,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, an engineering professor at Northwestern and one of the researchers on the project. “But if we don’t, we’ll end up with a corrupt system.”

Last week Amaral and his colleagues published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. They estimate that they were able to detect anywhere between 1 and 10 percent of fraudulent papers circulating in the literature and that the actual rate of fraud may be 10 to 100 times more. Some subfields, such as those related to the study of microRNA in cancer, have particularly high rates of fraud.

While dishonest scientists may be driven by pressure to publish, their actions have broad implications for the scientific research enterprise.

“Scientists build on each other’s work. Other people are not going to repeat my study. They are going to believe that I was very responsible and careful and that my findings were verified,” Amaral said. “But If I cannot trust anything, I cannot build on others’ work. So, if this trend goes unchecked, science will be ruined and misinformation is going to dominate the literature.”

Luís A. Nunes Amaral

Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, have already written about the study. And Amaral said he’s heard that some members of the scientific community have reacted by downplaying the findings, which is why he wants to draw as much public attention to the issue of research fraud as possible.

“Sometimes it gets detected, but instead of the matter being publicized, these things can get hidden. The person involved in fraud at one journal may get kicked out of one journal but then goes to do the same thing on another journal,” he said. “We need to take a serious look at ourselves as scientists and the structures under which we work and avoid this kind of corruption. We need to face these problems and tackle them with the seriousness that they deserve.”

Inside Higher Ed interviewed Amaral about how research fraud became such a big problem and what he believes the academic community can do to address it.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: It’s no secret that research fraud has been happening to some degree for decades, but what inspired you and your colleagues to investigate the scale of it?

A: The work started about three years ago, and it was something that a few of my co-authors who work in my lab started doing without me. One of them, Jennifer Byrne, had done a study that showed that in some papers there were reports of using chemical reagents that would have made the reported results impossible, so the information had to be incorrect. She recognized that there was fraud going on and it was likely the work of paper mills.

So, she started working with other people in my lab to find other ways to identify fraud at scale that would make it easier to uncover these problematic papers. Then, I wanted to know how big this problem is. With all of the information that my colleagues had already gathered, it was relatively straightforward to plot it out and try to measure the rate at which problematic publications are growing over time.

It’s been an exponential increase. Every one and a half years, the number of paper mill products that have been discovered is doubling. And if you extrapolate these lines into the future, it shows that in the not-so-distant future these kinds of fraudulent papers would be the overwhelming majority within the scientific literature.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Q: What are the mechanisms that have allowed—and incentivized—such widespread research fraud?

A: There are paper mills that produce large amounts of fake papers by reusing language and figures in different papers that then get published. There are people who act as brokers between those that create these fake papers, people who are putting their name on the paper and those who ensure that the paper gets published in some journal.

Our paper showed that there are editors—even for legitimate scientific journals—that help to get fraudulent papers through the publishing process. A lot of papers that end up being retracted were handled and accepted by a small number of individuals responsible for allowing this fraud. It’s enough to have just a few editors—around 30 out of thousands—who accept fraudulent papers to create this widespread problem. A lot of those papers were being supplied to these editors by these corrupt paper mill networks. The editors were making money from it, receiving citations to their own papers and getting their own papers accepted by their collaborators. It’s a machine.

Science has become a numbers game, where people are paying more attention to metrics than the actual work. So, if a researcher can appear to be this incredibly productive person that publishes 100 papers a year, edits 100 papers a year and reviews 100 papers a year, academia seems to accept this as natural as opposed to recognizing that there aren’t enough hours in the day to actually do all of these things properly.

If these defectors don’t get detected, they have a huge advantage because they get the benefits of being productive scientists—tenure, prestige and grants—without putting in any of the effort. If the number of defectors starts growing, at some point everybody has to become a defector, because otherwise they are not going to survive.

Q: [Your] paper found a surge in the number of fraudulent research papers produced by paper mills that started around 2010. What are the conditions of the past 15 years that have made this trend possible?

A: There were two things that happened. One of them is that journals started worrying about their presence online. It used to be that people would read physical copies of a journal. But then, only looking at the paper online—and not printing it—became acceptable. The other thing that became acceptable is that instead of subscribing to a journal, researchers can pay to make their article accessible to everyone.

These two trends enabled organizations that were already selling essays to college students or theses to Ph.D. students to start selling papers. They could create their own journals and just post the papers there; fraudulent scientists pay them and the organizations make nice money from that. But then these organizations realized that they could make more money by infiltrating legitimate journals, which is what’s happening now.

It’s hard for legitimate publishers to put an end to it. On the one hand, they want to publish good research to maintain their reputation, but every paper they publish makes them money.

Q: Could the rise of generative AI accelerate research fraud even more?

A: Yes. Generative AI is going to make all of these problems worse. The data we analyzed was before generative AI became a concern. If we repeat this analysis in one year, I would imagine that we’ll see an even greater acceleration of these problematic papers.

With generative AI in the picture, you don’t actually need another person to make fake papers—you can just ask ChatGPT or another large language model. And it will enable many more people to defect from doing actual science.

Q: How can the academic community address this problem?

A: We need collective action to resist this trend. We need to prevent these things from even getting into the system, and we need to punish the people that are contributing to it.

We need to make people accountable for the papers that they claim to be authors of, and if someone is bound to engage in unethical behavior, they should be forbidden from publishing for a period of time commensurate with the seriousness of what they did. We need to enable detection, consequences and implementation of those consequences. Universities, funding agencies and journals should not hide, saying they can’t do anything about this.

This is about demonstrating integrity and honesty and looking at how we are failing with clear eyes and deciding to take action. I’m hoping that the scientific enterprise and scientific stakeholders rise to that challenge.

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August 12, 2025
Trump Adviser Blames “Scientific Slowdown” on DEI, Red Tape

President Donald Trump’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy believes the recent, seismic cuts to federal research funding offer “a moment of clarity” for the scientific community to rethink its priorities, including the government’s role in supporting research.

Michael Kratsios, who is pushing for increased private sector support of research, said that federal investment in scientific research—much of which happens at universities—has yielded “diminishing returns” over the past 45 years.

“As in scientific inquiry, when we uncover evidence that conflicts with our existing theories, we revise our theories and conduct further experiments to better understand the truth,” Kratsios, a former tech executive with ties to tech titan and conservative activist Peter Thiel, said at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. “This evidence of a scientific slowdown should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting and using science.”

But some experts believe Kratsios’s comments mischaracterized trends in the nation’s academic research enterprise, which has been faced with decades of declining federal funding.

“Kratsios may have things exactly backward. Our growth has slowed down over decades—the same decades where we have been funding science less and less as a share of GDP,” Benjamin Jones, an economics professor at Northwestern University and former senior economist for macroeconomics for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Federally supported research is near its lowest level in the last 70 years. If the U.S. really wants to be ‘first’ in the world, the key will be how fast we advance. Cutting science is just a huge brake on our engine.”

A wide body of literature confirms that federally funded research and development continues to produce enormous social returns. A 2024 paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that rates of return on nondefense R&D spending range from 140 to 210 percent. Another report from United for Medical Research determined that for every dollar the National Institutes of Health spent on research funding in 2024, it generated $2.56 of economic activity. And yet another science policy expert has estimated that an additional dollar of government-sponsored R&D generates between $2 and $5 in public benefits via economic growth.

But those facts were absent from Kratsios’s remarks, which accused scientists of focusing on “trying to score political points” and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives instead of so-called gold-standard science. “Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” he said. “Political biases have displaced the vital search for truth.”

Kratsios also cited “stalled” scientific progress despite “soaring” biomedical research budgets and “stagnated” workforce training as proof that “more money has not meant more scientific discovery, and total dollars spent has not been a proxy for scientific impact.” Since 1980, he specified, “papers and patents across the sciences have become less disruptive,” and since the 1990s, “new drug approvals have flatlined or even declined.”

The White House OSTP did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for Kratsios’s sources of information, but some outside experts said those specific claims have merit, even if they lack additional context.

A 2023 paper in Nature shows that patents and papers are indeed becoming less “disruptive” over time. But the authors themselves said the slowdown is “unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors,” but rather “may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology,” which is presenting increasingly difficult and complex problems for researchers. The authors also called on federal agencies to “invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific projects.”

(Many of the federal research grants the Trump administration has terminated in recent months supported those aims, including funding for graduate and postdoctoral students and multiyear projects that weren’t yet complete.)

And even though new inventions may be decreasingly likely to push science and technology in new directions, as the Nature paper indicated, federally funded research has nonetheless expanded its reach to consumers since 1980—the same time frame Kratsios claims has been marked by diminishing returns that warrant an overhaul of federal research policy.

Prior to the 1980s, the government owned the intellectual property of any discoveries made using federal research dollars. The policy gave universities little incentive to find practical uses for inventions, and fewer than 5 percent of the 28,000 patents held by federal agencies had been licensed for use, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

That changed when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, allowing universities, not-for-profit corporations and small businesses to patent and commercialize federally funded inventions. Universities began transferring inventions to industry partners for commercialization. Between 1996 and 2020, academic technology transfers in the U.S. contributed $1.9 trillion in gross industrial output, supported 6.5 million jobs and resulted in more than 126,000 patents awarded to research institutions, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).

As for Kratsios’s claim that drug approvals have “flatlined,” Matt Clancy, a senior research fellow at Open Philanthropy, said that’s a matter of interpretation. “If you think it means discovery is dead and not happening, that’s clearly false,” he said, noting that while drugs had been getting steadily more expensive to develop in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, costs have started falling over the past decade. “If you think it means the rate of discovery has not increased in proportion to the increase in spending, I think that is correct.”

‘The Enemy of Good Science’

Kratsios also tied those alleged declines in innovation to the assertion that researchers have fallen victim to a misguided “professional culture” and to “social pressures.” As an example, he pointed to the scientific community’s insistence on keeping schools closed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus as an example of scientists’ unwillingness to question dominant viewpoints. “Convention, dogma and intellectual fads are the enemy of good science,” he said.

Administrative burdens have also hamstrung the scientific enterprise, he added.

“The money that goes to basic and blue-sky science must be used for that purpose, not to feed the red tape that so often goes along with funded research,” Kratsios said. “We cannot resign our research community and the laboratory and university staff who support them to die the death of a thousand 10-minute tasks. To assist the nation’s scientists in their vocation, we will reduce administrative burdens on federally funded researchers, not bog them down in bureaucratic box checking.”

Expanding the role of private funders is part of Kratsios’s solution.

“In particular, in a period of fiscal constraints and geopolitical challenges, an increase in private funding can make it easier for federal grant-making agencies to refocus public funds on basic research and the national interest,” he said at the NAS meeting, which was attended by university lobbyists and senior administrators.

“Prizes, challenges, public-private partnerships and other novel funding mechanisms can multiply the impact of targeted federal dollars. We must tie grants to clear strategic targets while still allowing for the openness of scientific exploration and so shape a general funding environment that makes clear what our national priorities are.”

According to Kratsios, private industry is well positioned to step in. He claims the sector spends “more than three times on R&D than does the federal government,” though it’s not clear from where he drew that statistic. Data from AUTM shows that in 2023, industry expenditures made up just 6.8 percent of all research spending in the United States, compared to 56.6 percent from the federal government. (Inside Higher Ed has previously reported on the challenges of looking to private funders to meaningfully make up for the Trump administration’s current and proposed cuts to academic research.)

Shalin Jyotishi, senior adviser for education, labor and the future of work at the left-leaning think tank New America, said that while some of the issues that Kratsios raised regarding federal science policy have merit, the administration hasn’t put forth a clear vision for reform.

“Instead, what we are seeing is ‘creative destruction’ playing out across the federal research enterprise—without the ‘creative’ part,” he said. “It’s not too late. The administration can and should still salvage the federal research enterprise and enact reform to make it even better.”

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May 22, 2025