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For the second year in a row, US President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to the budgets of major US science agencies. Released Friday, the White House’s plan for federal spending next year also includes a ban on using federal funds for subscriptions and publishing fees for some academic journals.

The plan proposes cuts to federal agencies that fund or conduct research on health, space and the environment. Some of the steepest cuts would be made to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): the budgets of both would fall more than 50% in 2027 compared to their current levels (see ‘Budget crunch’). The budget for the US National Institutes of Health would drop 13%.

A budget document says that the proposal would maintain funding for research on quantum information and artificial intelligence “to ensure the United States remains on the cutting edge” in those arenas. The administration plans to increase applied research funding on those topics at the defence and energy departments, says Alessandra Zimmermann, who tracks science budgets and policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a non-profit organization in Washington DC. But basic quantum and AI research funding at NSF, for example, would be cut by 37% and 32%, respectively.

Ultimately, it is the US Congress that decides how the federal budget will be spent — not the president. Congress rejected the administration’s requests for huge cuts in 2026, restoring funding for many of the programmes the White House sought to eliminate. Trump’s proposal is a starting point for congressional negotiations, which could last until the start of the 2027 fiscal year on 1 October — or even beyond it, because of Congressional elections on 3 November, Zimmermann says.

The budget would increase funding for presidential priorities – such as the military, which would receive US $1.5 trillion, a 44% increase – while reining in spending on many domestic programmes.

Sweeping changes

The White House seeks to slash the NSF budget by nearly 55%, to $4 billion. The proposal also cuts all funding for the NSF division that funds research on the social sciences and economics. At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members who shared information anonymously in order to speak freely. The NSF’s budget request to Congress states that the agency will shut down the SBE but maintain SBE “grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all impacted employees will be transferred to other parts of the agency.”

The proposed cuts to the NSF would be “devastating,” says Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “We cannot cut the pipeline and expect the output to continue. This is how the US loses its scientific leadership — with a reckless budget line.”

The proposal would eliminate funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. It would also shutter three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centres – those focusing on minority health and disparities, international research and alternative medicine.

NASA faces a 23% cut to its total budget and a 47% drop in funding for its science division. More than 40 projects would be terminated. “It's an extinction-level event for science,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization in Pasadena, California, that advocates for space exploration. “It would undermine and prevent NASA from being the world leader in space exploration.” NASA declined to comment on Dreier’s statement.

Publishing fees

The proposal would also prohibit the spending of “Federal funds for expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by Federal statute or approved in advance by a Federal agency”. The proposal does not define “expensive” or “prohibitively high” or specify which journals would be affected. Many journals “charge the Government to both publish and to access the same research study,” the proposal says, adding that there are many “low cost outlets” for publishing federally funded research.

The suggested prohibition comes as the NIH is poised to release a policy targeting the fees that many scientific publishers charge to make articles free to read. The agency has argued that these article processing charges (APCs), which are often paid by the articles’ authors, reduce funding available for research. The NIH has proposed capping how much it will pay federally funded scientists for APCs, but some researchers worry that a cap could lead to inequity in which researchers can publish in journals with high APCs.

This aspect of the budget proposal, which would affect all federal spending, signals that the administration is “doubling down on public access to federally-funded research” and indicates that it’s a “broader conversation happening across the government” beyond just the NIH, says Christopher Marcum, who served at the White House budget, and science and technology policy offices under former President Joe Biden.

Caroline Sutton, chief executive of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), a trade association that represents some 160 academic and professional publishers, says she finds this proposal “baffling”. “Research integrity faces growing threats from AI misuse and bad actors globally,” she says, making this moment “precisely the wrong time to cut support for high‑quality, validated scientific information.”

The academic publishers Springer Nature and Wiley, which are members of STM, did not respond to Nature’s queries about the proposal by the time of publication. (Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

Elsevier, also a member of STM, says the proposed policy “still permits authors to publish gold open access”, whereby journals make papers freely available once published, and “Elsevier already supports compliance with this model”.

Max Kozlov is a science journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Nature, Quanta Magazine, The Scientist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Behavioral Scientist, and The Public’s Radio.

Dan Garisto is a freelance science journalist based in Syracuse covering physics, issues in research integrity, and science policy for publications like Nature and Science.

Edward Chen is a news intern at Nature

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