The future of science in the U.S.: a study of Trump’s proposal for slashing the National Science Foundation, ExoMars and the Large Hadron Collider

In the past, a call to slash funding for science would have been robustly rejected, but “that is not true at the moment”, says Michael Lubell, a physicist who tracks science policy at the City University of New York. He says the cuts are likely to be large. The strategy of the president to put America first may play against international projects.

The president doesn’t want the budget to be in practice; it has to be approved by the US Congress. Policy watchers are worried that lawmakers might not reject many of Trump’s cuts, which they did during his first term as president.

The budget also includes large cuts to the US National Science Foundation (NSF), including a 40% reduction for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which has sites in Louisiana and Washington state. The funding for the Large Hadron Collider, a Europe’s particle-physics laboratory in Europe, would be cut by 40% under the proposed budget.

Artificial intelligence and quantum information science would take a hit, but that is not enough to keep up with inflation.

If Trump’s request comes to fruition, one of LIGO’s two detectors will close. The budget request doesn’t give a reason. Losing one of its two detectors would be “devastating”, says astrophysicist David Reitze, executive director of LIGO at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The programme would lose much of its ability to locate gravitational-wave events and would be more susceptible to ‘noise’, such as that produced by earthquakes, so that it might incorrectly classify the events it does detect, Reitze says.

But Trump’s proposed budget for NASA for fiscal year 2026 — published on 30 May — would slash to zero the US contributions to ExoMars, as part of a cut of almost 50% to NASA’s science division, compared with 2024 levels.

In a statement to Nature, the agency said that it is in talks with NASA and will discuss the budget proposals with its member states at a council meeting on 11 and 12 June.

“We can only hope that these proposed budget cuts never come to pass,” says a planetary scientist in the UK. The erosion of trust between agencies may be difficult to repair after these proposals.

Last year, NASA agreed to provide both launch and landing gear for ExoMars’s Rosalind Franklin rover after the European Space Agency (ESA) cut ties with its former partner, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The rover is going to find ancient life on the red planet.