Scientists sound warning over Trump cuts — and 75% consider leaving the U.S.

This week, in response to President Trump’s ongoing cuts to scientific research and staffing at federal agencies, nearly 2,000 of the country’s leading scientists signed a letter urging the administration to “cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science.”

“We see real danger in this moment,” the letter, which was signed by a number of Nobel Prize winners, stated. “We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”

Last week, the journal Nature published a poll it conducted of more than 1,600 U.S. scientists.

“Are you a US researcher who is considering leaving the country following the disruptions to science prompted by the Trump administration?” the poll asked the group.

In response, 75.3% of those polled said yes, while 24.7% said no.

The poll was conducted prior to Tuesday’s announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services that it was laying off 10,000 employees, including scientists from agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute, among others. The mass firing followed Trump administration cuts to research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“We’re scared that these blanket mandates could erase decades of progress fighting cancer,” Anjee Davis, the CEO of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about protecting the progress we’ve fought so hard to achieve in cancer care and research over the past two decades.”

In a post to social media on Tuesday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the job and funding cuts as a way to improve health outcomes.

“This overhaul is about realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again,” Kennedy wrote. “It’s a win-win for taxpayers, and for every American we serve.”

Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler sharply disagreed.

“We are less safe today because of these cuts that have happened the last several days,” Kessler said in a Wednesday interview with MSNBC. “I always thought that things were fixable. You could fix things. I am very concerned that if these cuts are not rescinded, these will have an effect for decades.”

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against NIH on behalf of several scientists laid off in the HHS purge.

“Our case is specifically addressing NIH’s lawless grant terminations and their upending of the grant review process for applicants,” Olga Akselrod, senior counsel at the ACLU Racial Justice Program, told NBC News. “These sweeping actions have disrupted hundreds of research grants, derailed really crucial research and are upending the careers of the most promising scientists in the United States with really no clear rationale.”

While the Trump administration has taken a dim view of federal science spending, cutting agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the National Weather Service, a 2023 paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that government research and development funding accounted for more than one-fifth of U.S. productivity growth over the last 80 years.

“For over 80 years, wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world,” the letter sent this week from the nearly 2,000 scientists stated. “Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”