The Red Cell Project
The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with The National Interest. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges.
Editor’s Note: Ellie Hardegree was an intern with the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub during winter 2026. She is completing her studies in Government at Dartmouth College.
By Mathew Burrows, Program Lead, Strategic Foresight Hub
Since the second Trump administration began in early 2025, funding cuts to scientific research have disrupted the work of many U.S. universities and government agencies. These cuts have worrying implications for critical research, the economy, and the future of U.S. scientific talent. Reducing resources at a time when China is forging ahead — if not already ahead — in certain emerging technologies risks U.S. Science and Technology (S&T) leadership. Against this backdrop of increased competition with China, the U.S. is bizarrely abandoning its advantages in basic research, higher education, and the ability to attract international talent, in stark opposition to the American approach to the USSR during the Cold War.
Funding Cuts to Federal Agencies
One year after President Trump’s inauguration, his administration has terminated or frozen over 7,800 research grants. This affected 1,300 grants at the National Science Foundation (NSF), resulting in around $700 million in unspent funds at the end of fiscal year 2025. Additionally, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw about $2.3 billion in unspent funds across nearly 2,500 frozen or terminated grants.
But the cutbacks didn’t end there; they have impacted U.S. agencies across the board. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also taken significant hits from the Trump Administration, with its spending plan $246 million short of the funds appropriated by Congress. Despite receiving the same appropriations as 2024, NOAA spent $53 million less in 2025 on climate research, representing a 25% reduction from $219 million to $165 million. These are only a few examples of the affected scientific agencies; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and others also experienced frozen or terminated funding.
Overall, the Trump administration targeted projects on topics perceived to be in opposition to its social and political agendas, including vaccines, countering misinformation, environmental protection, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Grants are reportedly being frozen for using “politically sensitive” terms like “gender” or “climate.”
There is not a clear successor to fill the gap left by federal funding. The private sector cannot feasibly fill this gap; as Vice President of the National Association of College and University Business Officers Ruth Johnston describes, such an idea is “idealistic, but not realistic.” The extent of funding that the private sector would need to provide to fill the gaps left by federal grants is insurmountable. Additionally, the private sector has an incentive to invest in research and development (R&D) activities that generate near-term profit benefits, rather than the basic research funded by the U.S. government that is not immediately able to be commercialized but leads to future innovation. Such basic research can be immensely valuable. For example, Google was born from a $4.5 million NSF grant to two Stanford graduate students, who developed an internet search engine.
Looking forward to 2026, the administration’s agenda involves yet more aggressive cuts in scientific R&D funding. Originally, the administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would have cut non-defense R&D funding by $42 billion, or 21%. In this proposed plan, the NSF would have been cut by 57%, the NIH by 41%, the EPA by 34%, and NASA by 24%, representing historic lows in funding. In the end, however, the federal budget that Congress passed included just a 5% cut to non-defense R&D, according to analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Nonetheless, reports detail that the science community is not celebrating. Alessandra Zimmermann, who analyzes R&D spending for AAAS, shares that even small budget cuts would have been shocking to the NSF a few years ago. Furthermore, the inclusion of funding in the budget does not mean it will be disbursed. The Administration may continue last year’s precedent of withholding funds authorized by Congress. Many also anticipate that Trump will again propose big cuts to science in the 2027 federal budget.
Trump Administration’s Policy Towards Higher Education
Another crucial piece of this anti-science agenda is the Trump Administration’s targeting of higher education institutions, particularly elite research universities. The Center for American Progress reported in July 2025 that over 600 colleges and universities had been affected by the Trump Administration’s federal funding cuts. Many of the main targets were Ivy League universities or other top U.S. research institutions that Trump sees as centers of “wokism.” For example, in March, $400 million in federal funding was cut from Columbia University. In April, Harvard University had $2.2 billion in grants frozen, and Cornell saw $1 billion in lost federal funding. The University of Pennsylvania ($175 million), Princeton ($210 million), and Northwestern University ($790 million) also saw hundreds of millions of dollars cut, frozen, or suspended. These funding cuts are an unprecedented tactic in the administration’s efforts to control universities’ internal policies, which critics charge is a serious infringement on academic freedom.
Six universities brokered deals with the administration, agreeing to certain conditions like sharing admissions data, complying with the Department of Justice’s guidance on DEI, and, in most cases, paying large settlements to restore federal funding. In another approach, Harvard succeeded in suing the Trump administration over its attempts to exert control over the institution, with a federal judge ruling that in terminating the grants, the administration broke the law in a “targeted, ideologically-motivated assault.” While university funding has now largely been unfrozen, the universities’ research progress was considerably disrupted in the past year, and the effects are “still lingering,” according to Gary Miller, vice-dean for research at Columbia. Moreover, these deals have not stopped the government from attempting to reduce future funding. In November 2025, a State Department proposal surfaced in the media that would suspend 38 universities, including Harvard and Yale, from a critical research partnership program due to their DEI hiring practices.
Beyond funding cuts, U.S. universities have also suffered from the Trump administration’s restrictions on international students. According to a January social media post from the State Department, the Trump Administration has revoked roughly 8,000 student visas. The administration launched a wide variety of efforts to discourage international student attendance, including canceling the legal status for hundreds of international students in a federal database, attempting to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese nationals, and specifically targeting Harvard’s 6,800 foreign students. As a result, the numbers of foreign students entering the United States fell 19% year on year, the Department of Homeland Security reported in August 2025.
Economic and Talent Consequences of Anti-R&D Policies For The U.S.
In addition to the loss of critical research, there are long-term economic repercussions to cutting R&D funding. Analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that every additional dollar invested in non-defense R&D increases GDP by an average of $11.50 in present-value terms over 30 years. The report clarifies that cutting R&D results in comparable negative effects on the economy. Declines in international students studying in the U.S. could also cut tens of billions of dollars from the American economy. For the 2023 to 2024 year, NAFSA reports that international students contributed $43 billion to the American economy. Specifically, the reduction in international talent represents a loss of important future S&T innovation for the U.S. In fact, a study from the National Foundation for American Policy in 2018 found that 55% of U.S. startup companies valued at over $1 billion had at least one immigrant founder.
The country has already suffered a steep loss in current scientific expertise in the federal government over the past year. Office of Personnel Management data reveals that in 2025, 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left the federal workforce. This adds up to 106,636 years of federal work experience lost across STEM and health roles. Science analyzed 14 agencies, and every one of them lost far more STEM PhDs in 2025 than in 2024, an average of three times as many. All these departures represent a large rupture in the scientific pipeline in the U.S.
Contrasting Strategies From Foreign Competitors
While the U.S. cuts R&D, foreign competitors are charting a directly opposite strategy that will capitalize on U.S. losses. If we look at China, the comparison is stark, as the leadership there has worked to increase funding to R&D and attract foreign talent. In 2024, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, R&D spending was up 8.3% year on year and exceeded 3.6 trillion yuan ($489.9 billion). In November of 2025, Alessandra Zimmermann suggested that China may have already overtaken the U.S. in R&D spending, sending the global system into “uncharted territory.” In addition to increases in funding, China has created programs dedicated to attracting foreign researchers, such as a visa program launched in fall 2025 that is dedicated to overseas graduates in science and technology fields. The government-hosted China Scholarship Council and country partnerships through the Belt and Road Initiative have also significantly boosted international student attendance by providing fully funded scholarships.
China is not the only country on this trajectory of investing heavily in R&D and scientific talent amid upheaval in the U.S.; various other international actors have created programs with the specific aim of attracting researchers leaving the U.S. For example, the European Union set up a “super grant” program in June 2025, with $566 million being injected into the European Research Council for 2025-2027 in an attempt to attract researchers. Spain, Australia, and Japan, among others, have also joined in on the global competition to attract talent with new programs. All these initiatives demonstrate that Trump’s R&D agenda is risking the United States’ global competitiveness.
Indicators of Chinese Scientific Dominance
These events are playing out at a time when indicators suggest that China is already forging ahead in certain areas of scientific leadership. One sign of China’s growing competencies is its activity in patents. In 2024, innovators in China filed around 1.8 million patent applications, while the U.S. filed only 501,831, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. China’s 9% growth in filings represented its fifth consecutive year of increase and its fastest growth rate since 2018. On the other hand, the U.S. reported a much slower increase than the majority of the other top five patent filing countries, with a 0.8% growth rate. In this way, China’s higher volume reflects a national prioritization of securing S&T intellectual property.
Another illustrative example is Chinese dominance in the renewable energy space, an area where the U.S. has failed to compete and is unlikely to catch up. By 2023, China had installed a total renewable energy capacity of 1,322 gigawatts, more than double the United States’ 468 gigawatts. The International Energy Agency projects that China will account for nearly 60% of global renewable energy additions by 2030.
Chinese universities have also begun to overtake U.S. universities in top ratings across various ranking platforms. In July 2025, the World University Rankings (published by the Center for World University Rankings) showed that China overtook the U.S. for the first time in the Global 2000 list — an evaluation of the top 2,000 universities worldwide based on indicators across quality of education, employability of graduates, faculty accolades, and research output. By these metrics, China’s prominence rose from the previous year to account for 346 of the top spots, with the U.S. presence dropping to 319 institutions. Additionally, the 2025 Leiden Ranking by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, based solely on bibliometric data, had China’s Zhejiang University in first place and Harvard slipping to third. All the remaining spots in the top 10 were also Chinese universities, apart from Canada’s University of Toronto. This offers a sharp contrast to 10 years prior in the 2015 Leiden Ranking when nine U.S. institutions occupied the top 10, and China’s highest represented university was in 119th place.
Reverse Sputnik
After the USSR launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Eisenhower mobilized a major campaign to upgrade U.S. science, R&D, and education in order to compete with Moscow. Within six months, the U.S. space R&D budget expanded from an average of half a billion dollars a year to more than $10.5 billion, the equivalent of about $118 billion today. Today, despite the Trump Administration’s rhetoric about competition with China, the U.S. is doing China a favor by undermining its own domestic R&D capacity. President Xi seems to have a better appreciation for the importance of S&T research for his country’s standing, as shown in his 2022 opening speech at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China when he urged China to “regard science and technology as our primary productive force, talent as our primary resource, and innovation as our primary driver of growth.” Though the exact opportunity costs of this policy divergence are difficult to calculate, policymakers and scientists alike ought to worry that several years of R&D cuts and the systematic exclusion of foreign talent will leave the U.S. unable to reestablish its global scientific and economic leadership.
