On the 2026 US budget prospects, the battle between the Trump administration and the US Congress will a.s. (hopefully!) continue, incl. the cuts to indirect costs, the politisation of grant panels, the drop in foreign student applications and conference attendees. The maps are making much more sense through Nature interactive page than on paper. Since the Mondrian-like maps that represent grant cuts and cancellations according to state, funding source (NIH, NSF—from which direction our Ottawa U friend Panchanathan resigned last April), court reinstatement, and topics. Still, the dynamic change of colours and the lack of scale make these poor or even terrible graphs. Over-optimistic scientists consider reimagining higher education towards public needs (to be distinguished from populist and conspirationist calls on which ground?!), turning to philanthropic support (with highly uncertain long-term prospects, seeing how quickly high-tech moguls turned their jackets under Orange pressure!), and the remaining entries are just wistful thinking… The UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) is reported documenting 536 attacks of the Trump administration on science and scientific integrity, not counting harassment and intimidation, but this pales against the several thousand federal scientists who have fired and the remaining ones who (still) work in federal agencies under several swords of Damocles, from abruptly cut funding, to newly prohibited domains of research, like health disparities and sexual diseases, to firing, and to visa cancellation… Not a comforting read, this 22 Jan issue of Nature, when realising how massive, deep, long-term-impacting, the havoc the Trump administration has wreaked (or wrought!) on science as much as economy and international relations.
