Measuring the Impacts of Federal Scientific Research Cancellations
Repairing the Damage
The “grant cancellation form” located at this web address has this description:
The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Democratic Staff, is surveying the impact of the Trump Administration’s cancelation of federal research awards. If your award was terminated since January 20, 2025, please fill out this brief survey. If you had multiple awards terminated, please fill out a separate form for each award. While anonymous submissions will be helpful to the Committee’s efforts, we encourage you to leave your contact information if you are open to having a confidential conversation with Committee staff. Please find our confidentiality policies at the following link – any information you share will be treated with these protections, regardless of your current affiliation with any current or former funding agency: https://democrats-science.house.gov/contact/whistleblower
I’m glad this is being done. Establishing a baseline for understanding the short and longterm impacts of losing so much research talent and data as we are now seeing is an important topic to study. One big reason is that we need to plan how to repair the damage.
Potential Research Cancellation Impact Measures
WIth that in mind I asked ChatGPT Plus to help me identify what factors should be researched in order to understand cancellation impacts. Here is a partial list of what I got back. I then briefly discuss each of the measures that interests me the most:
1. Scientific Output and Innovation
Number of publications from affected research projects or institutions
Citation rates of prior and ongoing research
Patent filings and licensing activity
Interrupted longitudinal studies or loss of unique data sets
2. Researcher and Workforce Impacts
Job losses in research staff (PhDs, postdocs, technicians)
Migration of talent (e.g., brain drain to private sector or other countries)
Changes in academic program enrollment in STEM fields
3. Funding and Institutional Capacity
Changes in federal grant distributions by agency (e.g., NIH, NSF, DOE)
Shifts in institutional budgets and research infrastructure investment
Reduction in collaborative or international research programs
4. Public Health and Societal Impact
Delays in biomedical discoveries or clinical trials
Surveillance gaps in environmental, epidemiological, or agricultural domains
Loss of access to public data systems (e.g., environmental monitoring, genomic databases)
5. Economic and Industry Spillover Effects
Decline in spinoffs and startups from academic research
Changes in regional economic indicators in research-heavy areas
Private-sector R&D response
6. Equity and Representation
Disproportionate impact on underfunded institutions or minority-serving institutions (MSIs)
Impact on diversity programs in STEM
7. Public Trust and Scientific Literacy
Shifts in public trust in science (e.g., via Pew Research surveys)
Changes in science communication output
Key Impact Measures
Interrupted longitudinal studies or loss of unique data sets
Some cancelled studies may be restartable, others may have been destroyed, or “money down the drain” as I discussed in Massive Waste as Biomedical Research Dollars Go Down The Drain. Some research may still be salvageable. We need to understand which is which in as objective a fashion as possible, realizing that funding criteria may have to be considerable altered once rationality is returned to the process.
Migration of talent (e.g., brain drain to private sector or other countries)
This is one of the scariest outcomes I see as occuring. Losing talent will take years to repair, assuming it’s even possible. The US may forever lose leadership in key research areas and it may become necessary to choose—wisely—which areas to attempt to restore. That will force a serious discussion of the need to “triage” areas where we decide not to attempt to compete because we have fallen so seriously behind other countries. Ultimately I see this as a major national security concern.
Reduction in collaborative or international research programs
Pulling back from international programs will not only reduce our ability to “keep up,” it will reduce our influence on research that may eventually be beneficial to US citizens. Communication and collaboration benefit from face to face meetings. Cutting this off leads to isolation.
Delays in biomedical discoveries or clinical trials
We’ve all heard tales of cutbacks in cancer research and Alzheimer’s research, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know what the outcomes of research and clinical trials are, no matter how much we employ AI based simulation and predictive modeling. There has to be real world testing, unless, of course, you allow drugs to be marketed without adequate testing. What could possibly go wrong?
Surveillance gaps in environmental, epidemiological, or agricultural domains
Cutbacks in disease monitoring and reporting have the potential for killing people. We have been through what happens when efforts to contain COVID were late in starting. We are also seeing the impacts on life and proprty of climate change and weather-related disasters. Ignoring these conditions will not make them go away, it will just worsen the resulting problems.
Private-sector R&D response
Part of damage repair to research cutbacks may be an increase in public private cooperation in key research areas. But will this happen? Unless there’s money to be made, will the private sector actually increase funding in “basic” research? Somehow I doubt it. US comopanies that do depend on innovations emerging from basic research may simply try to switch their attention to non-US research sources.
Disproportionate impact on underfunded institutions or minority-serving institutions (MSIs)
This impact goes without saying. Still, it will be important to document it.
Changes in science communication output
There will be a dip in US-sourced research publications, preprints, and conference presentations. This needs to be tracked. (I’m referring here to counts of original publication by field, not to citation counts.)
Conclusions
The reason I’m suggesting the tracking of the above cancellation impact measures is to provide a sound basis for planning how to repair the damage being done by the current Administration to US scientific and biomedical research. A major question is: who will do this? How will it be managed?
We need a concrete plan and concrete measures. Who is in a position to undertake and manage such an effort? I don’t know. I suspect we may need a framework like the one adopted by ARPA-H when it was formed, but applied across the board to all areas of research. But we need to be planning now. That means documenting the impacts of what’s happening now.
Copyright (c) 2025 by Dennis D. McDonald
