Moving on: Donald Trump’s re-election poses challenges for science.Credit: Loren Elliott/Getty
When Donald Trump was first elected to the US presidency in 2016, Nature advised scientists to constructively engage with Trump. We said that the incoming president’s contrary approach to evidence, among other things, had no place in modern society. We added that the science community had a responsibility to step up and work with the president and his new administration so that they govern on the basis of research and evidence.
‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election
And yet, during Trump’s first term, the world saw a government that ignored and undermined efforts to address some of the world’s greatest problems, such as climate change and a global pandemic. Many researchers left US federal science agencies, their place sometimes taken by lobbyists and political appointees.
The United States has now re-elected Donald Trump as president. Many researchers have told Nature that they are in despair, seeing the election result as a step backwards for facts, reason, knowledge and civility.
Last week, Nature said that the United States needs a leader who respects evidence. The incoming administration must embody this principle. On behalf of the research community, we will hold it to account if it falls short.
We hope that the incoming administration will govern in the best interests of the United States. That means holding on to the best of what the previous administration did, and not returning to some of the policies of the first Trump presidency.
The world needs a US president who respects evidence
This includes respecting the scientific consensus when making regulatory decisions in public health, environmental issues, artificial intelligence and elsewhere. This is one of the cornerstones of modern government. Policymakers and politicians retain control over decision-making, but they cannot control the facts.
Climate change must also remain a crucial priority. During the past four years, the United States took important steps in recognizing that it is in its own interests to not stand still as global temperatures continue to increase. It enacted policies to support industries and communities through the coming sustainability transition. If those policies are repealed, people on the lowest incomes and those from marginalized communities will be among those most affected.
Both the United States and the world are at their best when the country engages internationally. That means not repeating the previous Trump administration’s decision to exit the 2015 Paris climate agreement — an accord aimed at protecting the world from the impacts of climate change, which US scientists helped to craft. And it means continuing to support other important international organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations science and cultural organization UNESCO.
The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?
Trump’s threat to defund the WHO in 2020 was especially dangerous for those low-income countries where the agency’s work is crucial for tackling diseases and maintaining standards of public-health infrastructure. Currently, the WHO’s epidemiologists, clinicians and logistics personnel are helping to treat and control diseases in countries including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan and Yemen. Diseases do not respect borders: to cooperate and engage with international institutions to fight their spread is in the best interests of the United States.
The United States is a nation that welcomes the world’s talent, in science and in other fields. That must continue if the country wants to maintain its strength in research and innovation, the bedrock of prosperity.
The research community must engage with the new administration with courage, tenacity, strength and unity. At the same time, scientists in the United States must know that they are not alone. The research community is a global one. We need to stand together and stand strong for the challenges that are to come. And that will mean continuing to speak facts to power.
Agronomists examine a field where the cash crop, maize, has been harvested and a cover crop, radishes, has been planted to protect soil health.Credit: Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press/Alamy
As climate change threatens farmers’ ability to produce the world’s food, researchers and environmental advocates think they have a solution: playing in the dirt.
How farming could become the ultimate climate-change tool
Experimental evidence is accumulating, they say, that by improving soil health, crops can be made more resilient to drought and extreme weather — and they want governments to offer financial incentives to farmers who use ‘regenerative’ practices to climate-proof farmland. These agricultural practices include boosting the soil microbiome — that is, its microbial community — by rotating crops between fields, rather than repeatedly planting the same crop in the same field, and by adding ‘cover crops’ to fields. These comprise plants that won’t necessarily be harvested, but that prevent soil erosion and boost soil nutrients.
“There are lots of ripple effects from the changing climate that are creating challenges for our food system,” says Rob Myers, the director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “The ways we combat that are with biological diversity, more organic matter in the soil — and more integrated approaches.”
But switching to such practices requires upfront investment. Researchers and farmers who spoke to Nature say that regenerative agriculture does work, but it can take a few years of implementing it before farms start to see a profit. In the United States, advocates are calling on the US Congress to include more subsidies for regenerative agriculture in the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation that is updated every five years or so and includes funding for disaster aid and farmer training. The most recent version expired on 30 September. Meanwhile, the latest version of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy entered into force last year, and included funding for farmers using these types of sustainable practice.
Nurturing the soil
Industrial agriculture usually relies on fertilizers, pesticides and mechanical equipment to produce high-yielding monocultures — single crops such as maize (corn) or wheat. Excessive use of chemicals on these crops disrupts ecological processes in the soil and is one of the leading causes of water pollution in the United States. Unhealthy soil struggles to soak up water or retain nutrients.
CRISPR-edited crops break new ground in Africa
An estimated 8,505 million tonnes of topsoil on US farmland was lost to erosion between 2013 and 2017. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization warns that more than 90% of Earth’s soils are at risk of becoming degraded by 2050; this could lead to a rise in famine.
Regenerative agriculture lacks a formal definition, but scientists who spoke to Nature say that its general goal is to rebuild healthy soil. That starts with increasing the proportion of organic matter — including living roots and manure — to feed the soil microbiome and recycle nutrients for plants.
Although the term is modern, regenerative principles are ancient. Implementing them means “returning to some of the practices that we’ve relied upon as a human species for thousands of years”, says Rich Smith, an agricultural ecologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
Keeping cover
One practice that is considered regenerative is cover cropping: planting species that typically won’t be harvested, such as crimson clover, when the cash crop is out of season instead of leaving the soil bare. Roots from the cover crop prevent erosion and take up excess nitrate from fertilizers that would otherwise leach into streams and groundwater. When a farmer cuts down the cover crop to prepare for the next round of cash-crop planting, they work it into the soil where it feeds the bacteria and invertebrates underground, improving soil fertility. Only about 5% of cultivated land in the United States was cover cropped in 2022, but that figure has been increasing: by 2022 it was 17% higher than in 2017.
Farmer Brandon Kaufman plants the grain kernza on his fields in Moundridge, Kansas, as a cover crop and grazes cattle on it to fertilize the soil.Credit: Brandon Kaufman
During a major drought that destroyed maize and soya bean crops across the US Midwest in 2012, Myers heard farmers say that cover-cropped fields hadn’t been hit as hard as fields without the extra plants. So he worked with the Conservation Technology Information Center, a non-profit organization in West Lafayette, Indiana, that promotes conservation in agriculture, and a sustainable farming programme funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to launch the National Cover Crop Survey. Researchers polled roughly 700 farmers, and found an average 9.6% greater maize yield and 11.6% greater soya bean yield during the drought on fields in which cover crops had been grown.
This was surprising, because “at the time, many people thought that cover crops would take moisture away” and not leave any for the cash crops, Myers says.
The USDA has offered subsidies to farmers who use cover crops. Of the farmers who responded to the 2022–23 National Cover Crop Survey and had received payments to plant cover crops, 90% said that they would probably continue the practice after the funding stopped.
Valuing variety
There is also evidence that crop rotation can improve soil health and resilience. Swapping out crops, rather than growing the same monoculture on the same field for years on end, can improve soil health without sacrificing productivity, Smith says.
Eat less meat: will the first global climate deal on food work?
This can be done by rotating different crops, including cover crops, on the same field over time, or by planting several crops on the same field at the same time, including the ‘three sisters’ trio of maize, beans and squash that has been grown by some Native American tribes for centuries.
A review of 20 studies that analysed the effects of crop rotation on soil life found that rotating various species increased the amount of microorganisms in soil by about 15% compared with monoculture fields, and boosted microbial diversity by more than 3%1. Rotating two or more different crops also generates more of the nutrients carbon and nitrogen in soil than does monoculture2. A review of 33 papers that assessed fields in which legumes and grains were grown together revealed an increase in the stability of yields year-to-year compared with those of monoculture fields3, suggesting that biodiverse farms could improve food security.
“Those types of systems can often be more resilient to weather variation and have some enhanced disease resistance,” Smith says. “The evidence is relatively strong that they maintain, if not increase, yields.”
Seeding incentives
But the switch to regenerative agriculture can take about three years to pay off, say farmers and researchers who spoke to Nature.
Genetic modification can improve crop yields — but stop overselling it
Brandon Kaufman, a fourth-generation farmer in Moundridge, Kansas, rotates crops and also grazes cattle on fields in the autumn and winter to fertilize the soil. When he got started with regenerative agriculture at the industrial operation he inherited, he “didn’t have a safety net to fall back on”, he says. Government subsidies “incentivized me to try some things, and I’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge because of that”.
Federal, state and business programmes that incentivize cover cropping usually stop after farmers make the transition. To support producers supplying the nation’s food who institute these practices over the long term, the US Farm Bill should include a measure to reduce farmers’ federal crop insurance premiums, Kaufman and others say. The USDA trialled this idea during the COVID-19 pandemic by offering farmers who planted cover crops an insurance discount of US$5.00 per acre. The federal programme has now ended, but states including Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois have implemented their own versions.
Farms can move away from industrial agricultural practices and move towards healthier soil, Kaufman says. “It just takes time” and financial incentives to get producers to change, he says. But it’s important, he adds, because “if you think about your kids and your grandkids … where’s their food going to come from in 100 years?”
Kennedy’s past makes him an unlikely candidate for agriculture secretary, according to Daniel Glickman, who served in the role during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “It’s hard for me to imagine, given Trump’s traditional base in the heartlands, that he would pick somebody who was an advocate for breaking up large farms and breaking consolidated agriculture,” says Glickman.
Like top posts at HHS, the USDA secretary position would need to be confirmed by a Senate vote. “I don’t think [Kennedy] is a slam dunk,” says Glickman.
Trump’s pick for USDA chief during his first term was Sonny Perdue, a former governor of Georgia and founder of an agricultural trading company. Most agriculture secretaries either have a background in the industry or politics—two crucial constituencies for the person who will be in charge of a department that employs nearly 100,000 and is made up of 29 agencies, including forestry, conservation, and nutrition programs. “The difference between Sonny Perdue and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is like night and day,” says Glickman.
If Kennedy were to be confirmed as agriculture secretary, he might struggle to enact the most radical parts of his program. He is an outspoken critic of pesticides, but the USDA is generally not in charge of regulating those, says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, director of agriculture policy and research at the Breakthrough Institute. Rather, the EPA regulates pesticides with public health uses.
Although he may not be able to directly influence pesticide regulations, Kennedy has said he would try to “weaponize” other agencies against “chemical agriculture” by commissioning scientific research into the effects of pesticides. The USDA Agricultural Research Service has a nearly $2 billion discretionary budget for research into crops, livestocks, nutrition, food safety, and natural resources conservation.
There are other levers that an agriculture secretary could pull, says Blaustein-Rejto. The USDA is investing $3 billion through the partnership for climate-smart commodities—a scheme that’s supposed to make US agriculture more climate-friendly. A USDA chief might be able to put their thumb on their scale by influencing the selection criteria for these kinds of programs. The USDA also oversees the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which has a $5 billion fund that it uses to support farm incomes and conservation programs, and to assist farmers hit by natural disasters. It’s possible that a USDA chief could influence how these CCC funds are distributed by the agency.
Kennedy has also argued that corporate interests have captured the US’s dietary guidelines, and he pledged to remove conflicts of interest from USDA groups that come up with dietary guidelines. US dietary guidelines are developed jointly by the USDA and HHS and are updated every five years, giving the agriculture secretary limited opportunities to influence any recommendations.
“If RFK is in a high-level policy role, I expect to see a lot more talk about ultra-processed foods, but I’m not sure what that would actually entail when it comes to the dietary guidelines,” says Blaustein-Rejto.
The experts WIRED spoke with largely think Kennedy’s more extreme positions will likely be constrained by bureaucracy. But the message that elevating a vocal vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist would send remains a serious concern ahead of a potential second Trump administration.
The extreme bonding between football fans can lead to trouble, but it can also be harnessed for positives, such as fans coming together to help their communities and standing up against racism.Credit: Adam Fradgley/Getty
Since we became funded research fellows in 2020, we’ve felt pressure to demonstrate our worth to funders — and ultimately to the taxpayer — by demonstrating the impact of our research. Fortunately, our work is practical and largely relevant to government interests in the United Kingdom, where we are based. M.N. investigates how the social bonds forged through sport can be used for social good, working with police units and the prison service, both in the United Kingdom and in mainland Europe. S.W.’s research focuses on increasing the social value of the archaeological work that is often conducted during construction projects as part of the planning process, with an eye to influencing both local and national UK government departments.
Some researchers might feel that their research area is too obscure to have a direct impact on government policy, and could struggle to see how it can be applied. Others might find networking and attending events difficult. We all recognize the painful conference coffee break, but policy impact can depend on contacts. How do you handle situations that might feel uncomfortable to some? And how can you get invited to influential events at which researchers meet policymakers, industrial leaders and other users of research?
We’ve found that a particularly powerful way to influence policy and politics is to be in the right rooms at the right time. Often, this means reaching beyond academia and outside the normal conference circuit. For M.N., this has meant taking opportunities to attend events in person (when childcare allows). At two BBC studio interviews, for example, conversations with other invited guests who have policy backgrounds have led to long-term professional relationships.
On the basis of our experiences, we have distilled four key recommendations for effective engagement.
Emphasize the relevance of the research. In the past, M.N.’s research on football (soccer) fans was dismissed by some as looking at ‘just a game’. Now she takes more time to detail why it matters: the sport has millions of fans around the world; levels of stress are high on match days, which can have knock-on effects for fans’ well-being; but the intense bonding between supporters has the potential to be harnessed for social good. Since adopting that practice, M.N.’s research has featured in a United Nations report on the use of sport for preventing violent extremism, as well as in a report prepared for policymakers associated with the international prison-based football charity the Twinning Project. It has also been used by the UK Football Policing Unit, which advises police forces around the country on how to handle football events. Her work now reaches the people who can change policies — for example, by adjusting policing regulations at football matches — and could ultimately help to make society a better place for us all.
Science-policy advisers shape programmes that solve real-world problems
Value informal conversations. Some of us find networking painful, but doing it helps to build relationships. Informal conversations can allow you to provide advice or references and arrange follow-up meetings. This is how lots of meaningful networks are created, and how trust can grow. The older we get, the more we realize that, often, the most senior people in our network are our old friends or colleagues, who now have more-influential roles. Remaining part of such steadily expanding spheres of influence will naturally benefit your own career.
As an early-career scholar, S.W. vastly expanded her network by volunteering for committees or editorial boards (many of which have become easier to be involved with because they now operate online). Some of these committee members now work as part of a UK parliamentary group on archaeology. Others regularly lobby the UK government through different routes, such as professional institutes, cross-sectoral initiatives and umbrella bodies of common interest groups. Maintaining professional networks with past and present colleagues on platforms such as LinkedIn can also be helpful, alongside strengthening more=direct links, such as by attending research and seminar groups and keeping an eye on relevant online forums and discussion groups. S.W., for example, follows Historic England’s Knowledge Hub, and attends the Heritage Alliance’s Archaeology Special Interest Group meetings to keep up to date on the latest policy and advocacy news.
Revealed: the ten research papers that policy documents cite most
Be prepared for a low success rate. Just as we have in the peer-review process, the two of us have learnt to develop a thick skin when it comes to policy engagement. Good timing can help. For instance, M.N. tries to release football-related research during the off-season (in the United Kingdom, this is between May and August) when journalists are often looking for stories, so this approach amplifies the message to policymakers. Increase your chances of engagement by sending a lot of e-mails. Resilience can simply involve accepting that a high proportion of them will go unanswered, and sending more. The attitude researchers have towards funding applications and peer review needs to be applied to policy engagement.
Revealed: the ten research papers that policy documents cite most
Frame your expertise as revelatory, rather than accusatory. Few people like to be corrected, but they do like to be helped to improve, so it’s your job to fill gaps in knowledge while building relationships. It often takes years to formulate a policy using conventional approaches. S.W. has come across a persistent and potentially frustrating way of thinking, in which preserving and reburying archaeological remains is seen as the preferred means of enabling them to provide value to the wider public. That’s despite the opportunities offered for widening participation and support for the heritage sector by considering other possibilities, such as excavations with community involvement.By drawing on research about inclusive practice, and on emerging social-value legislation that requires rethinking how communities benefit from development, these situations can become collaborative rather than confrontational. We’ve watched people we want to influence turn away when we’ve seemed too focused on a single solution, particularly if those individuals are policymakers whose work we’ve disagreed with. Instead, we advise channelling your passion into creative ideas and conversation.
High-level impact takes a lot of effort, but this does not need to come at the expense of a good work–life balance. Academics have skills in research and planning. Blocking out a few hours each month for preparation — including checking possible policy engagements, reserving space in your diary for sending out invitations and e-mail approaches, and creating spreadsheets of events and people — will help you to build up a base of contacts from which to create impact.
Turning research into real-world action isn’t easy — but, with patience, some proactive mingling and a thick skin for unanswered e-mails, it is achievable.
This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump at their first (and only) televised debate, on 10 September.Credit: J Matt/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Next week, US voters will go to the polls to elect a new president, along with members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. This election will take place at a time of extreme uncertainty, both for the United States and for the world. The two candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, represent vastly different views of the challenges and opportunities that the country faces, and the role of the United States on the international stage.
The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?
Like all elections, the 5 November vote is about much more than science. However, the fate of scientific research, evidence-based lawmaking and the government’s receptiveness to independent science-policy advice will be key determinants of the country’s future course and long-term well-being. And, as we reported in a News Feature on 23 October (Nature634, 770–774; 2024), US science could be at an inflection point: the election and a range of domestic and global forces could challenge the primacy that the country has held since the Second World War.
A priority for both the winning presidential candidate and the new members of Congress must be ensuring that US science continues to thrive. This is essential if the world is to solve shared challenges, such as the climate crisis, inequality and societal divisions — and that means retaining the openness and collaborative spirit that have characterized US science for much of the past 75 years. US scientists work with peers around the world, which has helped to position the country at the centre of fundamental, applied and translational research, while creating bonds of friendship and collegiality between US researchers and their international collaborators. These bonds are needed now more than ever.
Power and responsibility
The United States needs leaders who fully understand the responsibilities that come with power and, moreover, are wholeheartedly committed to respecting facts or the consensus of evidence while governing.
Harris, the vice-president under President Joe Biden, is a former US senator; before that, she was a public prosecutor and attorney general in California. In her previous and current roles, she has broadly sought to advance policies that are in line with the scientific consensus and with the objective of keeping people safe and protecting public health and the environment.
What Kamala Harris’s historic bid for the US presidency means for science
The Biden–Harris administration’s signature achievement is the plan to invest more than US$1 trillion in climate and clean-energy technologies over a decade — albeit while overseeing record levels of production of oil and natural gas in the short term. A landmark piece of legislation passed by Congress in 2022, called The Inflation Reduction Act, is a historic investment that seeks to modernize US manufacturing and create jobs in the clean-technology industry. At the same time, the administration has sought to craft and implement plans to insulate regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), from political interference.
Harris said on 22 October that her administration will not be a continuation of the Biden presidency. She has said she wants to build an “opportunity economy”. Precisely what that means is yet to be defined — a science- and evidence-based approach needs to be at its core.
That record is in stark contrast to what happened during Trump’s presidency, from 2017 to 2021. As president, Trump not only repeatedly ignored research-informed knowledge, but also undermined national and global science and public-health agencies. He has denied climate science, lied about the federal government’s response to hurricane forecasts and asked scientists to investigate whether disinfectants could be used to treat people with COVID-19.
He pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. He withdrew the country from both the Paris climate agreement and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (also called the Iran nuclear deal) — both of which the United States had helped to craft. He instilled fear at the EPA, including by rolling back climate policies and making it harder for its research workforce to be able to function independently of politicians, as many EPA scientists told Nature at the time.
Mounting risks
If anything, Trump’s speech has coarsened. In the past few weeks alone, he has falsely claimed that millions of migrants are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums” and eating people’s pets, and that members of the Democratic Party support the execution of babies after birth.
Effort to ‘Trump-proof’ US science grows, but will it succeed?
The risks of a second Trump presidency continue to mount. It wouldn’t be easy for a new administration to reverse the investments pledged by the Inflation Reduction Act, but Trump has promised to try. He has said he will ramp up fossil-fuel production and promised to reclassify the positions of tens of thousands of federal employees, including scientists and senior officials in the executive branch of government. That is an alarming development that would require reversing the rule that the Biden administration has crafted to prevent such action. It would undermine a basic premise of modern governance the world over: that scientific and technical specialists working in government are recruited for their expertise, not on the basis of their loyalty to the president or a political party, which is what Trump wants to do.
Political leaders, irrespective of party membership or ideology, generally agree on the need for a society that creates jobs, promotes better health and advances science. But solutions for the world’s mounting problems can come only from a shared, accurate understanding of reality.
A lack of regard for the law and evidence fosters mistrust of scientists and institutions of state. That, in turn, weakens the foundations of democracy, both in the United States and around the world. A second Trump presidency would have an even more destabilizing effect globally, giving the green light to yet more leaders like him.
By the end of 2024 up to two billion people will have gone to the polls, in a pivotal year of elections around the globe. This is giving political scientists the chance to dive into each election in detail but also to compare the differing voting systems involved.
They hope understanding the advantages and drawbacks of the systems will help highlight whether some are more likely to promote democratic resilience or to stave off corrosive partisanship.
This is an audio version of our Feature: Which is the fairest electoral system? Mega-election year sparks debate
Science in the United States has never been stronger by most measures.
Over the past five years, the nation has won more scientific Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined — in line with its domination of the prizes since the middle of the twentieth century. In 2020, two US drug companies spearheaded the development of vaccines that helped to contain a pandemic. Two years later, a California start-up firm released the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT and a national laboratory broke a fundamental barrier in nuclear fusion.
This year, the United States is on track to spend US$1 trillion on research and development (R&D), much more than any other country. And its labs are a magnet for researchers from around the globe, with workers born in other nations accounting for 43% of doctorate-holders in the US workforce in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM).
US election debate: what Harris and Trump said about science
But as voters go to the polls in November to elect a new president and Congress, some scientific leaders worry that the nation is ceding ground to other research powerhouses, notably China, which is already outpacing the United States on many of the leading science metrics. “US science is perceived to be — and is — losing the race for global STEM leadership,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, in a speech in June.
Concerns range from funding limitations for R&D and the growing politicization of science to heated debates about immigration. This has created “a perception that the United States is increasingly hostile to foreigners”, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) reported in August1, warning that the United States “can no longer take for granted that it will remain the destination of choice for the world’s best and brightest”. The academies called for a government-wide effort to attract and retain international talent and improve STEM education at home.
The future of US science hinges, in no small way, on the November election. Together, the next president and Congress will play a pivotal part in setting the course for the US scientific enterprise for years to come by establishing funding plans, immigration policies and national-security measures that affect international collaboration.
Given the concerns over US leadership in science, how does the country measure up and what comes next after the election? Nature examines the numbers and a few key issues that could determine the United States’ scientific future.
Losing ground to China
The driving force behind research is money, and the United States has long enjoyed a leading position in science and technology in large part because it outspends all other nations. Combining government and private funding, the United States spent $923 billion in 2022 (the last year for which full numbers are available), or around 30% of global R&D spending.
But as China’s economy has soared, so has its R&D spending, to the equivalent of $812 billion (adjusted for purchasing power parity). On that trajectory it will draw level with the United States before 2030 (see ‘Research funding race’).
Source: OECD/MSTI
On sheer numbers of personnel, scientific output and patents, the United States has already lost its lead. In 2016, China leaped ahead as the top producer of science and engineering articles. In 2019, it passed the United States in the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded; and in 2021, it became top dog in international patent applications, according to a report by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) published in March2.
For years, some researchers who study science metrics have argued that China still lagged behind in terms of the quality of its scientific output, but that is also changing. In 2020, for instance, China overtook the United States in terms of its share of the world’s top 1% cited papers, a proxy measure of high-impact work, according to numbers from the Web of Science database (see ‘Top-cited research’).
Source: Clarivate/Web of Science
China showed particular strengths in engineering, chemistry and materials science, whereas the United States retained its lead in areas such as biology and medicine (see ‘Who leads in various fields of science?’).
Source: Clarivate/Web of Science
Citation statistics are imperfect measures of influence: a study this year found that researchers in China show the greatest ‘home bias’, that is, disproportionately citing work from their own country3. Adjusting for this bias dents China’s progress — perhaps nudging it down to fourth in the world, the study suggested — but it doesn’t hugely change its direction of travel.
There are other signs of rising quality in China relative to other nations. Last year, it surpassed the United States in terms of papers that appeared in influential journals (see ‘Share of work in influential journals’).
Does it matter whether China or the United States is on top? Some political rhetoric frames these trends as essentially a zero-sum game. But in research, one country’s gain is not necessarily another’s loss, says Caroline Wagner, a research-policy specialist at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
The highest-cited papers of all come from US, Chinese and European researchers working together, she says. If China, or any other country, is pouring more money into research, this should benefit the United States — as long as it retains world-leading scientists who can tap into global innovation, and keeps its own research funding and quality high, says Kieron Flanagan, a research-policy analyst at the University of Manchester, UK.
Missing in action: federal funds
The current alarms about US science echo similar warnings that have rippled through policy circles about once a generation. In 2005, for example, the National Academies published a dire report called RisingAbovetheGatheringStorm that cautioned about threats to US competitiveness from globalization4.
How Trump damaged science — and why it could take decades to recover
One recommendation from the report was to double the amount of basic research funding for mathematics, engineering and physical sciences, in line with the doubling of the budget for the National Institutes of Health that was accomplished between 1998 and 2003. The US Congress, which sets funding levels, passed a law in 2007 promising to do just that — but lawmakers didn’t follow through.
History is now repeating itself. In 2022, this time with an eye on China, Congress united to pass the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized $280 billion to promote the domestic semiconductor industry and boost the budgets of several major research agencies. A key beneficiary of the legislation, the NSF, saw its budget increase by 11% to $9.9 billion in 2023 — only to fall back to $9.1 billion when Congress finalized this year’s budget.
As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), public investments in the NSF, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the US National Institutes of Standards and Technology — all major funders of basic research in the physical sciences — are now lower than they have been at any time since 1997, according to Matt Hourihan, associate vice-president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities in Washington DC (see ‘Falling federal research intensity’). US research investment as a share of GDP is still rising — but that is because R&D investment from private businesses is picking up the slack.
Source: OECD/MSTI
“We absolutely have to get federally funded R&D back on a healthier track,” says Arati Prabhakar, science adviser to US President Joe Biden and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The sharp uptick in private R&D is good for jobs and the economy, but it is no substitute for the kind of basic science that federal investments support, she told Nature.
Indeed, these trends explain the shifting balance of power between the United States and China, says Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at the Institute of Scientific Information, a unit of the analytics firm Clarivate, who is based in London. Adams points out that the United States retains its lead in areas that it has invested in the most, such as biomedical research. By contrast, China is overtaking the United States in materials science, physical sciences and computer science, which are areas where US investments have fallen short.
The question, come January, is whether the next president and Congress will work together to advance scientific funding commitments that both political parties have endorsed in the past. This depends in large part on who controls the two chambers of Congress, which is currently divided, with Democrats holding the Senate and Republicans having a majority in the House of Representatives.
Biden seeks to boost science funding — but his budget faces an ominous future
When it comes to setting spending priorities, Congress often goes its own way no matter what presidents propose in their budgets. For example, although previous president Donald Trump repeatedly sought to cut science budgets, it was during his tenure that Congress broke its own self-imposed budget caps and gave science agencies a significant boost in funding alongside the increases in defence spending sought by the Trump administration, says Jennifer Zeitzer, who leads the public-affairs office at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland.
Today, lawmakers are once again operating under a budget agreement that seeks to cap overall spending until 2025, which could make it difficult to increase STEM spending, but it’s unclear how that discussion will play out with a new president and Congress next year.
“I call it the whiplash effect,” says Zeitzer. Funding agencies are constantly buffeted by shifting political winds that produce big promises — and occasionally big investments — before an inevitable swing back towards austerity. Half of the time, funding agencies are operating under provisional budgets and the looming threat of a government shutdown. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to be competitive if we’re facing another 20 years of this,” Zeitzer says.
The importance of foreign talent
Because the United States relies heavily on international talent to fuel its scientific engine, a key question is whether it will remain the preferred place for researchers globally to study and work. There are different ways to interpret the data.
The United States relies ever more heavily on overseas researchers: more than one-third of science and engineering PhDs granted last year went to international students (those on temporary visas), with the share at 59% in computer science (see ‘US reliance on overseas talent’). “We are at an all-time high in terms of dependency on foreign talent,” says Darío Gil, director of research at the technology giant IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York, and current chair of the US National Science Board, which oversees the NSF.
Source: NCSES
Most of these students come from China and India, which is a distant second. And when asked, 77% of Chinese students who earned doctoral degrees in the United States said that they intended to stay in the country, according to 2022 data, a proportion that has dipped only slightly over the previous five years.
More generally, the United States remains the world’s top venue for international students, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development5, hosting 15% of all students worldwide in 2020, the latest comparative figures available.
But there are signs that the United States might be losing its edge. Its share of international students is declining, down from 23% in 20005. And although enrolment numbers have recovered to an all-time high after a brief pandemic dip (see ‘International students on the rebound’), there remains a question about whether top talent from China continues to view the United States as an attractive destination.
Source: ref. 2
China is still the United States’ biggest research collaborator, but the number of articles co-authored by Chinese and US researchers is falling — even as Chinese collaborations with competitors rise (see ‘US–China collaboration is dropping’).
Source: Scopus
Some lawmakers in Congress might welcome this trend. Citing the dangers of letting science that is funded by US taxpayers fall into the hands of the Chinese military, congressional Republicans are pushing legislation that would limit the kind of research collaborations that university researchers can pursue.
Questions about immigration and research security came to a head when Trump occupied the White House. First came the temporary travel ban that mainly impacted citizens from several Muslim-majority countries. Then a federal crackdown on academic espionage, dubbed the China Initiative, drew accusations of racism after ensnaring scholars with links to China, including many US citizens of Chinese descent.
Biden ultimately ended both policies, but many scholars say they could make a comeback if Trump prevails in November. Last month, Trump vowed to reinstate his travel ban, and Republicans who control the US House of Representatives have approved legislation that would, if enacted, essentially reinstate the China Initiative.
These tensions might be taking a toll: surveys in the United States have found that many Chinese researchers worry about prejudice after the China Initiative. A study6 published this year examined the propensity of Chinese students to enrol in US PhD programmes, compared with a control group of non-Chinese students. The two were in step until 2016, but the Chinese students became 15% less likely to enrol by 2019 — and more likely to enrol in non-US English-speaking countries. (The rapid drop of enrolments during the pandemic means that the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, can’t reliably be extended to later years.)
Although Chinese-student enrolment at US universities has rebounded since the pandemic, China’s best and brightest might be shying away, says Yingyi Ma, a sociologist who heads the Asian/Asian American studies programme at Syracuse University in New York. Soaring anti-China rhetoric probably plays a part, Ma says, but so do expanding opportunities for Chinese graduate students at home, and the growing challenges to obtain work visas.
How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of scientist scoops medals?
A further challenge, and one that would be easy for Congress to fix, is the limitation on the availability of ‘green cards’ that grant permanent residency in the United States, says Amy Nice, an immigration scholar at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who recently served at the White House OSTP under Biden. The Biden administration has been working to do just that under existing laws and regulations, she says, but it’s ultimately up to Congress to increase the numbers of green cards that are available. “That’s the one thing that Congress could do to solve this problem,” Nice says.
Not everybody is convinced that US academic institutions are facing an imminent crisis when it comes to international talent. Allan Goodman, chief executive at the Institute of International Education in New York City, points out that the United States isn’t the only country that is cracking down on immigration: Canada, the United Kingdom and others are doing much the same. This means fewer non-US options as international students consider where to forge their careers.
Gil also says that he doesn’t see evidence showing Chinese students have been put off coming to the United States. “There is an extraordinary appetite to continue to come to the US,” he says. Gil says a bigger problem is how to encourage US students to engage in science and technology, citing declining mathematics attainment scores.
The campus culture wars
Across university campuses in the United States, there are growing tensions over issues such as the Gaza–Israel war; efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion; and the rights of transgender individuals. Part of a broader trend towards increasing political polarization, these culture wars have engulfed campuses and led some lawmakers to impose limits on what university researchers can study and teach, and to curtail policies that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The August NASEM report1 tapped into some of these sentiments, raising the fear that the United States’ reputation is beginning to suffer abroad. “Some of the nation’s most important advantages in attracting and retaining talent are the intangibles: values, freedom, and opportunity,” the report stated.
Like Biden, vice-president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris would be expected to advance science-friendly budgets while continuing to emphasize the role of science in tackling climate change and promoting public health. By contrast, Trump and his appointees repeatedly undermined government scientists and agencies during his time in office, especially on issues such as climate change and public health.
Many political scientists fear a second Trump term could be even more fraught for government researchers. Besides Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the results of any election he doesn’t win and his promises to use the powers of the federal government for political retribution, researchers fear that he just might succeed in reshaping the US government by replacing thousands of federal scientists with obedient political appointees. This would further undermine the part that science plays in developing the rules and regulations that govern everything from greenhouse-gas emissions to drug development.
No matter which party controls the presidency and Congress, the fate of US science is linked to broader trends in an increasingly polarized society, in which trust in many institutions has been eroding for several decades.
So far, the institution of ‘science’ remains an outlier, with support from broad swathes of the public, but that could change if polarization increases on issues ranging from vaccines to global warming, says Henry Brady, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If science and academia become ideological endeavours,” he says, “it’s going to be hard for them to survive.”
The United Nations Summit of the Future took place shortly before the start of the General Assembly (pictured).Credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty
Last week’s United Nations General Assembly debate saw a lot of anger. Some was directed at the UN, some at powerful nations, for their seeming inability or unwillingness to do more to tackle the world’s crises. UN secretary-general António Guterres did not mince his words in his criticism of world leaders. “Conflicts are raging and multiplying, from the Middle East to Ukraine and Sudan, with no end in sight. The climate crisis is destroying lives, devastating communities and ravaging economies. New technologies, including artificial intelligence, are being developed in a moral and legal vacuum, without governance or guardrails,” he said.
The world is in what social scientist Pedro Conceição, the editor-in-chief of the UN’s annual Human Development Report, describes as a “new uncertainty complex” of inequality, planetary pressures and polarization. In 2019, the Human Development Index, a composite measure of well-being, dropped for the first time in its more than three-decade history, although it is now recovering. It is also extremely unlikely that any of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be achieved by the UN’s self-declared 2030 deadline.
Yet, amid the anger and frustration, a different meeting, the UN Summit of the Future, brought a sliver of hope that a better future is possible: one in which science and cooperation are front and centre. Through a document called the Pact for the Future, Guterres says that he wants to “turbocharge” climate action and efforts to meet the SDGs. The 61-page text was signed off by world leaders on 22 September. It might be one of the few remaining opportunities that the world has to correct course.
Unearthing ‘hidden’ science would help tackle the world’s biggest problems
The pact is a list of 56 pledges across 5 themes, in which world leaders promise, among other things, to provide more finance for low-income countries; work harder towards peace and security; mobilize science; and listen more to young people. The document also advocates reform of the UN’s top level of governance, as well as changes to global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These organizations have not changed much since the end of the Second World War, when they were established in part to support countries devastated by the conflict.
The document already has its critics. Some are disappointed that there is no mechanism for monitoring whether the pledges are kept. Others see it as another example of governments getting unnecessarily involved in peoples’ lives. Some of these points are valid, although there are a number of concrete mechanisms for following up on the pledges, including ones on improving Internet governance while protecting its autonomy, and improving the world’s financial architecture. These are also reasons why it would be wrong to dismiss the pact. The benefits of such documents are as much about the process of writing them as they are their actual content, and need to be judged by what has changed from what came before.
Several things are worthy of note. First is the fact that there is a whole section of the report devoted to science. This is not always the case with system-wide reports from the UN’s highest office. For example, advancing science is not one of the SDGs. Some argue that it doesn’t need to be, because science implicitly underpins the process of achieving all 17 goals. This is true, but science’s invisibility at the highest level also means that it risks getting ignored. Guterres recognizes this. He has re-established a board of science advisers reporting to his office, which was originally established by his predecessor Ban Ki-moon, but wasn’t continued in Guterres’s first term. Also, as Nature reported last week, researchers, including those working at the UN, are pushing national governments to establish a much greater role for evidence in policymaking (see Nature633, 493; 2024).
How to stop a looming ‘splinternet’
Second, the pact was produced through a radical process — for governments at least — that needs to be studied for its replication potential. Starting with its founding charter in 1945, the UN has grown to oversee hundreds of treaties and conventions, which set the rules for everything from managing road traffic to conserving endangered species. These agreements often have their own legally binding text, governing structure and complicated schedule of conferences. The existence of so many individual agreements makes it challenging to tackle cross-cutting issues. Most countries have no formal mechanism for different government departments to work together to achieve the SDGs.
What was novel about the creation of the Pact for the Future is that representatives from different countries and across individual SDGs had to cooperate to produce it. SDGs, such as zero poverty or education for all, need to be achieved individually, but they also intersect — reducing poverty has an effect on education, and improving education boosts poverty reduction. In creating the pact, Guterres’s team broke through these silos, something that researchers have long been advocating and that is in fact the 17th goal: working in partnership. Researchers should help UN member states to learn from this process.
Third, and appropriate for the document’s name, the pact is a call for nations to invest more in their young people and involve them in decisions now. It is the coming generations that will “live with the consequences of our actions and inaction”, as the document says.
Ultimately, the pact will live or die on the actions of its signatory countries. If they choose to collaborate, they can achieve goals much quicker. If they build walls between them, there is a limit to what can be achieved. Guterres and his team have shown what can be achieved by prioritizing evidence and using a partnership approach. It is now up to all of us who care about sustainability, peace and security to run with the baton that has been passed to us.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro speaks at a march in early August following a disputed election the month before.Credit: Maxwell Briceno/Reuters
As President Nicolás Maduro continues a crackdown on his political opposition, researchers in Venezuela are increasingly considering leaving the country. His government has detained more than 1,600 people, including students and professors, since the National Electoral Council declared him the winner of July’s contested presidential election, according to Foro Penal, a human-rights organization based in Caracas. Edmundo González, who ran against Maduro in the election, fled for Spain on 8 September to avoid being arrested.
The Venezuelan health-care workers secretly collecting COVID stats
Scientists, some of whom spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution from the government, say that Venezuelan research was already censored and underfunded before the election, but that they anticipate things will get even worse. They point to a bill passed by Maduro’s administration last month that regulates non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which some researchers rely on for funding or to help publish their research. This latest chapter in Maduro’s reign could spell the end for independent science in the country, they say.
“I am afraid to talk to you,” retired biologist Jaime Requena told Nature as he nervously prepared to leave the country, fearing that his passport would be confiscated by authorities to prevent his departure. “Science here is going down the drain quickly.”
The Maduro administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Venezuela’s Ministry of Popular Power for Science and Technology has reported that about 24,000 people are employed in research and development. However, that number is an overestimate because it includes anyone who has a degree and staff who clean and maintain laboratories, says Requena, who has been monitoring the number of scientists in the country. In 2004, when science in Venezuela was more stable, there were only about 7,100 scientists actively engaged in research in the country, says Requena, who is a member of the Venezuelan Academy of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences.
Because the science ministry no longer publishes clear, reliable information on its spending, Requena assesses research output in scientific journals as an indicator of the health of Venezuelan science. An as-yet unpublished analysis that he carried out last year suggests that there are now, at most, 1,200 still-active scientists.
Leaving in droves
Protests erupted after Maduro was named the winner of the July presidential election. The European Union, the United States and most South American countries have questioned the legitimacy of the result and called for Maduro to release a full tally of the votes.
Protestors demonstrate in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, on 29 July following the disputed presidential election.Credit: Samir Aponte/Reuters
Venezuela’s economy has been in crisis since Maduro took office in 2013. The country’s gross domestic product fell from about US$373 billion at its peak in 2012 to about $44 billion at its lowest point in 2020 and has now recovered slightly to $106 billion. National science funding is around 0.3–0.4% of that (the average for countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is 2.7%). Nearly 8 million people — about one-quarter of Venezuela’s population — are estimated to have fled to avoid violence, hunger and poverty.
Young scientists have left in droves seeking out high-quality education or stable career prospects. Those who remain are mostly older researchers — Requena’s research suggests the average age is 55 — who are financially stable or can use international connections to get funding.
But even senior researchers have left, too. María Eugenia Grillet, a 64-year-old biologist who studies the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases, moved to Colombia in December 2023 to avoid power outages and to be able to conduct research freely, among other factors. Before that, she had been a researcher at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, where she earned $70 per month. “Daily life is very hard for everyone, and it’s going to get worse given the political situation,” she says.
In short supply
Public research institutions and universities, which employ the vast majority of the scientists that remain in Venezuela, are having trouble keeping their doors open because of the government’s lack of revenue, and because of politically-appointed officials mismanaging education and science budgets, researchers say. Equipment, supplies and personnel are all scarce.
“But it’s not just funding” that’s a problem, says Cristina Burelli, the director of SOSOrinoco, an advocacy group in Caracas that works with researchers who anonymously document the ecological degradation of the country’s forests. “It’s the de-institutionalization and de-professionalization of the industry,” she adds. “It’s the deliberate effort to take out anyone who knows anything, anyone who can question the government.”
Academic freedom in the country began to disappear under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, whose government, in the name of twenty-first-century socialism, took control of funding that had previously been given directly to researchers by private companies. Chávez also gave ‘communal councils’ — groups of local citizens — the power to set university budgets and elect university vice-chancellors.
A terrifying law
Today, people who study topics that potentially present a publicity problem for Venezuela — the resurgence of once-eradicated diseases or the pollution of the Amazon rainforest as a result of illegal mining, for instance — tell Nature that they work anonymously, or from another country where they are out of the government’s reach, or they self-censor what they publish.
Illegal mining in the Amazon hits record high amid Indigenous protests
Researchers are concerned by the passing of a law, which rights groups have called the anti-NGO bill. Approved on 15 August, this legislation requires NGOs to share information about their funding, which is sometimes awarded to research projects, with the Venezuelan government. According to the law, this is to ensure that civil-society groups do not promote “fascism, intolerance or hatred for racial, ethnic, religious, political, social, ideological, or gender reasons”.
Researchers who spoke to Nature say that the law gives the government the discretion to prosecute anyone whose motives it does not agree with. “Academics at [leading universities] are absolutely terrified by the anti-NGO law and are therefore silenced,” a group of Venezuelan researchers told Nature in a statement after they requested anonymity.
Requena says that science in Venezuela is one step closer to its death. “Science ensures that we are not isolated, that our brains can come together to produce things that help all of humanity,” he says. “It gives a sense of being part of humanity, and I can’t imagine not feeling like I’m a part of humanity.”
