Many scientists are worried. They’re also annoyed.

This spring, Ashley, who wished to be referred to by their first name for privacy reasons, received an email that stopped them in their tracks. The National Science Foundation, or NSF, would no longer be supporting their work with its prestigious graduate student grant. The experiments they had planned for their master’s thesis, studying alligator and crocodile nesting behaviors in the Everglades, now seemed out of reach. “I just burst into tears,” they say. “Like, there goes graduate school, right?” 

The grant would have covered permits and equipment and allowed Ashley to pay a small team of undergraduate assistants. They submitted an appeal, and the grant was reinstated with some modifications. “I had to purge a lot of wording such as community, biodiversity and female,” Ashley says. “How do you talk about reproduction without talking about the sex of the animal?”

According to the NSF website, there is no prescribed list of words grant writers should avoid, though in February The New York Times published a list of words that may cause a grant to be deemed in conflict with new priorities among federal agencies.

Ashley and their collaborators were able to proceed and have now tagged animals at hundreds of sites in Florida, but the troubles with their NSF grant reflect the new posture federal agencies have adopted since the start of the Trump administration. NSF froze funding in late January, began screening grant applications for political content in early February, and halted all new awards by May. 

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, have pulled funding from countless projects, often efforts that deal with diversity or social justice. After researchers joined sixteen state attorneys general in filing two separate lawsuits, a federal judge called for over 800 grants in these states to be restored, though the Supreme Court backed the original grant terminations in August. Government lawyers have advised the NIH to keep the grants in place, though the beginning of a new fiscal year could again put these projects in jeopardy.

Many researchers who do hold onto their projects are adjusting to new frustrations and anticipating future headaches. Sudden changes can throw scientists off the steady rhythm of the academic calendar. Gita Gnanadesikan, a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University who studies cognition and behavior in primates, started seeking a new job in April after learning the NIH grant that funded her role would not be renewed the following year.

“There aren’t very many jobs to apply for,” says Gnanadesikan, as most academic positions are listed a year in advance in the fall. “My boss has some funding available, so she’s able to pay me for a little bit beyond the end of this grant, but that’s money she would otherwise have been able to spend on research.”

Gnanadesikan was never told why her funding was rescinded, but she suspects it’s related to the community development aspect of the grant, in which recipients partner with a minority-serving institution. In addition to her research, she had been teaching at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college nearby. 

Cuts at one university can create problems elsewhere. Axed grants to Harvard University mean that the team behind FlyBase, a repository of fruit fly genetic data used by scientists worldwide, was laid off in August. The FlyBase site hasn’t gone anywhere yet, but this precarious state concerns researchers who rely on the resource.

FlyBase devoting remaining resources “to keep an unsustainable funding situation afloat” feels “like [Wile E.] Coyote running off the cliff” in a Looney Tunes gag, says Charlie, a technician in a genetics lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who requested to use his first name only for privacy reasons. He says his work would still be possible without the site, but it would take a lot longer.

These days, Charlie spends a lot of time 3D printing affordable versions of equipment like an incubator for raising fruit flies. The primary investigator in his lab suggested they could save money by making their own materials this way.

Charlie uses the shared 3D printers in the university library. “You have to compete with everybody else for time and space, … everything takes longer than you think it will,” he says. While he has created items for the team in the past, “now it feels like there’s an urgency to it that is looming over you, even when things are going well.”

Charlie’s supervisor is not the only one trying to stretch funding dollars. Kiana Aran, a biomedical engineer leading a diagnostic device development team at the University of California, San Diego, was initially “optimistic” about her lab’s resilience to funding cuts.

Then in early July, Aran noticed that an electronic reader her lab orders from Belgium was suddenly more expensive. The vendor was unaware of any cost increase as the surcharge had been added by the logistics provider after the goods arrived stateside. She was told that the spike in price was due to new tariffs which have compounded financial uncertainty in recent months. While the Belgian vendor gave her a discount, she also experienced price increases in equipment from the United Kingdom.

Aran wants U.S. manufacturing to one day become more competitive; more domestic production of semiconductors would benefit her business ventures. “But in the meantime, we’ll have to make sure that this tariff does not disrupt our innovation ecosystem,” she says.

The supply company Bio-Rad Laboratories announced a surcharge to offset tariffs in May, which they walked back weeks later. Other common suppliers like Millipore Sigma have also enacted tariff surcharges.

Some scientists are spending more time writing grants to keep labs afloat. Not only are researchers like Ashley combing through their grants to make sure the language doesn’t fall afoul of federal policies, some are also submitting similar versions of the same grant to multiple private funders, says Brian, who manages a cardiovascular research lab at the University of Iowa and wished to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons.

Grant writing is a time-consuming process for researchers involving multiple rounds of review, but Brian estimates that grants eat up 15% more time than they did when he joined the lab in January 2024.

Brian was already on the fence about pursuing a doctoral degree, but the last few months have convinced him it’s not worth the effort. Still, he believes in the power of academia to produce research that lays the groundwork for future discoveries but might not attract profit-oriented investors in the private sector. “All of us in academia are like factory workers churning out basic science,” Brian says. “It takes a village, and right now academic science is the only place for that village.”