Nearly 2,000 leading American scientists, including dozens of Nobel Prize winners, have issued a stark warning that the U.S. lead in science is being “decimated” by the Trump administration’s cuts to research and a growing “climate of fear” that jeopardizes independent research.
An open letter from members of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made public on Monday outlines grave concerns.
“A climate of fear has descended on the research community,” the letter says. Researchers fearing for their jobs are “removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as ‘climate change’) that agencies are flagging as objectionable.”