For the second year in a row, US President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to the budgets of major US science agencies. Released Friday, the White House’s federal spending plan for next year also includes a ban on using federal funds for subscriptions and publication fees for certain academic journals.
The plan proposes cuts to federal agencies that fund or conduct research on health, space and the environment. Some of the biggest reductions would be made to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): the budgets of both would decrease by more than 50% in 2027 compared to their current levels. The budget of the United States National Institutes of Health would decrease by 13%.
A budget document said the proposal would maintain funding for research on quantum information and artificial intelligence “to ensure that the United States remains at the forefront” in these areas. The administration plans to increase funding for applied research on these topics at the Defense and Energy departments, says Alessandra Zimmermann, who tracks science budgets and policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a nonprofit in Washington, DC. But funding for basic quantum and AI research at the NSF, for example, would be cut by 37% and 32%, respectively.
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Ultimately, it is the U.S. Congress that decides how the federal budget will be spent, not the president. Congress rejected the administration’s demands for huge cuts in 2026, restoring funding for many the programs the White House sought to eliminate. Trump’s proposal is a starting point for negotiations in Congress, which could last until the start of fiscal 2027 on Oct. 1, or even beyond, due to the Nov. 3 congressional elections, Zimmermann says.
The budget would increase funding for presidential priorities — such as the military, which would receive $1.5 trillion, a 44 percent increase — while reining in spending on many domestic programs.
Radical changes
The White House is seeking to cut the NSF budget by nearly 55 percent, bringing it to $4 billion. The proposal also removes all funding from the NSF division that funds research in the social and economic sciences. At an all-hands internal meeting Friday, NSF leaders announced they would disband the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members who shared information anonymously in order to speak freely. NSF’s budget request to Congress says the agency will close SBE but will maintain “SBE grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, and that all affected employees will be transferred to other parts of the agency.”
The proposed cuts in the NSF would be “devastating,” says Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “We cannot cut the pipeline and expect production to continue. This is how the United States loses its scientific leadership – with a reckless budget line.”
The proposal would be eliminate funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. It would also result in the closure of three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers — those focused on minority health and disparities, international research and alternative medicine.
NASA faces a 23% reduction in its total budget and a 47% drop in funding for its science division. More than 40 projects would be stopped. “This is an extinction-level event for science,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a Pasadena, Calif., nonprofit that advocates for space exploration. “This would weaken and prevent NASA from being the world leader in space exploration.” NASA declined to comment on Dreier’s statement.
Publication costs
The proposal would also prohibit the expenditure of “federal funds on expensive academic journal subscriptions and prohibitive publication costs, unless required by federal law or approved in advance by a federal agency.” The proposal does not define “expensive” or “prohibitive” and does not specify which journals would be affected. Many journals “charge the government for both publication and access to the same research study,” the proposal says, adding that there are many “low-cost outlets” to publish federally funded research.
The suggested ban comes as the NIH prepares to issue a policy targeting the fees that many scientific publishers charge to make articles free to read. The agency argued that these article processing charges (APCs), which are often paid by article authors, reduce the funding available for research. THE The NIH proposed a cap how much it will pay federally funded scientists for APCs, but some researchers fear a cap could lead to inequality in which researchers can publish in journals with high APCs.
This aspect of the budget proposal, which would affect all federal spending, signals that the administration is “doubling down on public access to federally funded research” and indicates that it is a “broader conversation across government” beyond just the NIH, says Christopher Marcum, who worked on the White House budget and science and technology policy offices under former President Joe Biden.
Caroline Sutton, executive director of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), a professional association that represents some 160 academic and professional publishers, says she finds the proposal “confusing.” “Research integrity faces growing threats from AI misuse and bad actors globally,” she says, making this “precisely the wrong time to reduce support for high-quality, validated scientific information.”
The academic publishers Springer Nature and Wiley, members of the STM, did not respond Naturequestions about the proposal at the time of publication. (NatureThe press team is independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)
Elsevier, also a member of the STM, says the proposed policy “still allows authors to publish open access,” whereby journals make articles freely available once published, and “Elsevier already supports adherence to this model.”
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time on April 3, 2026.
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