Senior Republican hits out at Trump's research funding cuts

The Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen Susan Collins, has torn a strip off the Trump administration for policies that she said are putting the US position as a world leader in biomedical research at risk.

Collins told a meeting of the committee this morning that "stability is a key aspect of the American formula" for research, as it allows scientists "to focus their work knowing they will have the support they need to pursue and test their ideas from start to finish."

The continued success of the system cannot, however, be taken for granted, and she cautioned that "proposed funding cuts, the firing of essential federal scientists, and policy uncertainties threaten to undermine the foundation for our nation's global leadership."

Collins added that actions taken by the new administration, which may allow rivals like China to close the gap with the US on biomedical research, include an arbitrary cap on funding for indirect research costs borne by projects supported by NIH grants, which she believes is a blunt instrument that will be extremely harmful to many institutions and runs counter to appropriations law.

Also worrying are abrupt cancellation of grants, proposals to slash funding, and the laying off of scientists and technical experts "with apparently little or no justification," she added, telling the committee that they "must be reversed." Not to do so could lead to halted clinical trials, shuttered research organisations, and effective treatments for diseases will be delayed or not discovered at all, she argued.

So much has happened in the first 100 days of Trump's second term that there was no scope to cover other detrimental actions by the administration, such as the dismantling of USAID and the US exit from the World Health Organization (WHO), which have undermined America's standing and soft power on the world stage.

Collins' position drew praise from Appropriations Committee vice chair, Democrat Sen Patty Murray, who said the panel had a long history of bipartisan support for biomedical research that has paid off in strong economic activity, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and "cures that were once impossible and treatments that were once impossible."

She added that Trump has "taken a wrecking ball to our biomedical research enterprise" and, with DOGE head Elon Musk, "have been tossing tomorrow's groundbreaking cures into a shredder."

From its inception, DOGE – the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official government department, as these can only be established by an act of Congress – has been cutting research "without rhyme, or reason, or any regard for who gets hurt," said Murray.

Earlier this week, Murray and fellow Democrat Rep Rosa DeLauro launched a tracker intended to document federal funding blocked under Trump, saying that his administration has targeted at least $430 billion in money that is illegal and "hurting people in every zip code in America."

At the committee meeting, she said that Trump has already axed over 800 grants and billions of dollars in research funding, and imposed a $1 limit on NIH researchers' payment cards, which means labs cannot buy essential equipment like gloves, pipettes, and vials.

"If Trump and Musk have their way, they will not only bring biomedical research to a halt, they will send it careening backwards," asserted Murray. "The fact that [they] are pushing such a painful policy really underscores how they don't know, or don't care, whether their policies actually hurt people."