On Mar. 19, 2026, a nationwide STAT survey of federally funded researchers reveals that, a year after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, many academic scientists are reeling. Rather than waning, the impacts of the administration’s seismic changes to science funding are intensifying, causing researchers to drastically scale back the ambition of their work and driving some to shut down their labs entirely.

The survey of nearly 1,000 researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading funder of biomedical research, paints a concerning portrait of the state of American science. More than a quarter of respondents have laid off lab members, and more than 2 out of every 5 have canceled planned research. Two-thirds have counseled students to consider careers outside the ivory tower. 

Strikingly, despite courts reversing some grant terminations and Congress thwarting plans to slash the NIH budget, just 35% of respondents whose grants were cut or delayed said their government funding had been fully restored by the end of 2025.

Labs aren’t just shrinking. In some cases, they’re on track to shut down permanently, with early-career researchers among the hardest hit. A staggering 81% of junior tenure-track scientists said they are very or somewhat concerned that disruptions to their research productivity could threaten their chances of earning tenure.

In follow-up interviews, survey respondents told STAT that interrupted funding and changes in federal priorities caused patients to drop out of a diabetes prevention trial in Puerto Rico, forced an Ohio researcher on the cusp of losing her position to close her lab, and led one scientist to take a 95% pay cut

From a distance, it may seem that the nation’s research enterprise made it through 2025 largely unscathed. After all, despite a slow start, NIH spent most of its budget by the end of the last fiscal year. A Trump administration plan to slash support for research overhead has been blocked in the courts. Congress increased the NIH’s 2026 budget and rejected a proposed reorganization of the agency. A federal judge ordered the restoration of thousands of terminated grants, and the administration reached an agreement to reconsider certain frozen and denied grant submissions.

STAT partnered with the MassINC Polling Group to conduct its survey of 989 researchers from 45 states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. It was emailed to about 41,000 NIH-funded scientists between Jan. 28 and Feb. 18, relying on a public database of grant recipients in 2022; respondents were then screened to ensure they had active grants in 2025. The results were weighted based on each researcher’s total NIH funding and their region of the country, and the margin of error for questions asked of the full sample is 3.3 percentage points.