The US has always had an anti-science core, anyway

Way back when I was a young kid going into a science career, I knew ahead of time that the pay was going to be crap and I was going to have to scramble for a new position every few years, and that I was going to have to move multiple times to destinations unknown. That was the job. My expectations were low (maybe too low — who’s stupid enough to pursue a career like that?) but I just wanted to do science and teach and have a satisfying intellectual life. We made enough money to scrape by, and there was enough of a demand that I felt I could probably land a new position at a university somewhere if one job fell through. I came from a generation where science was a viable, if not particularly lucrative, career.

That has changed.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future.

These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears.

Chopping out a whole cohort of researchers is a catastrophe. What happens in 10 years, 20 years, the time when all these young people should be in their prime, producing great new ideas and data? There was a time 30 years ago when I was tempted by opportunities to work in industry, and I said no, and committed to academic research. I’d be deeply conflicted if I faced that kind of situation now. Or not…maybe those academic avenues would be simply closed.

Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported.

Or wait…what if you decided to leave the academic track and pursue a career in industry, just like all your peers?

Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.”

They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said.

I never thought my career timing was particularly good — I was always being informed that there was going to be a wave of opportunities as older faculty retired, but that it was going to be ten years in the future. It was always 10 years from now, kind of like Elon Musk’s predictions about when we’d be living on Mars. Those predictions always failed anyway, just like the fantasy of Mars colonies. But now I think maybe I got lucky. I’m reaching the end of my career just as American science is being taken out back behind the chemical sheds by a gang of psychopathic fascists.

That doesn’t help my daughter, who has just begun a career in science.