U.S. science in chaos: frozen grants and an abandoned space telescope

An investigation published by Scientific American describes what the magazine calls a generational change in how the United States organizes its scientific enterprise: frozen grants, political filters on research language, a shrinking pipeline of young researchers and a space telescope abandoned after nearly a decade of work.

The AXIS telescope

Astronomer Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland spent nine years helping to shape AXIS, the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite — a billion-dollar orbiting observatory designed to study the first black holes and the formation of galaxies using x-ray mirrors made of single-crystal silicon. His group received a $5-million NASA grant in October 2024 and partnered with engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. After the Department of Government Efficiency pushed NASA into offering buyouts and early retirement, nearly 4,000 employees — about a fifth of the workforce — left. Reynolds's team lost 20 people, including the engineer designing the mirror heaters, the lead project manager and William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the mirror technology. "We were literally left with their PowerPoints," he said. A first cost estimate came in September 2025 at 10 percent over budget, a government shutdown halted work in October, and after it ended the team had two weeks to get back on budget. It failed, and AXIS was dead.

Grants, language and collaborators

Thousands of federal grants have been frozen or canceled, with roughly 2,600 — about $1.4 billion — still in limbo, and the NSF and NIH are awarding about three quarters of their usual number of grants. The NIH issued 120 notices of funding opportunity in 2025, down from as many as 850 a year, and only 14 by mid-March 2026. Researchers say new filters bar language related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and grant recipients can no longer subcontract to collaborators overseas — a serious problem for scientists studying diseases such as Lassa fever and Ebola. A STAT survey found more than half of NIH-funded researchers reporting disruption to their funding.

Why it matters

About 40 percent of funding for basic research in the U.S. has come from the federal government, under a compact dating to Vannevar Bush's 1945 report "Science: The Endless Frontier" and reshaped by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Scientists interviewed for the article argue that trust between researchers and the government is broken: nearly 95,000 have left federal employment, and in a Nature poll about 75 percent of 1,650 respondents said they were considering leaving the country. One team of economists estimated that had the NIH budget been 40 percent smaller over recent decades, about half of the drugs available today would not exist.