The stakes are especially high for one group of scientists this morning, as a federal judge in Massachusetts hears arguments on whether she should allow President Donald Trump’s administration to slash the overhead costs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) pays to institutions for medical research. Researchers who use tens of millions of rodents and thousands of nonhuman primates each year are especially dependent on these NIH “indirect cost” payments to support major animal research facilities, where complex housing, staffing, medical care, and regulatory oversight requirements push up costs. It’s not uncommon for large research universities, for example, to have “mouse houses” that support tens of thousands of rodents. Indirect cost rates can be relatively high at universities; at Stanford University, for instance, they are 54%, meaning an NIH grant with direct research costs of $100,000 would come with an additional $54,000 to pay for administration and facility costs. But at animal facilities, the rates can rise above 80%. Although scientists using the animals must pay per diems out of their own grants for the use of the animals and the procedures they undergo, those payments don’t cover the cost of running the centers. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up That means that the steep rate cut NIH has proposed, to 15%, “could have very, very, very bad consequences … for animals,” says Paul Locke, an attorney with expertise in laboratory animal law at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (He was speaking for himself and not his university.) Major animal facilities, he predicts, will “have to make very, very hard decisions about the animals that they have on site. … It could be extreme.” Some institutions might have to euthanize thousands of animals, observers say. At facilities that house primates, “This sort of cut would cause a death spiral,” says Deborah Fuller, director of the Washington National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington. The center—one of seven such facilities supported by NIH—would lose $5 million of a $30.5 million budget if NIH cuts its rate to 15%, according to one of two legal challenges to the NIH proposal, filed by 22 state attorneys general. The center’s negotiated indirect cost rate is 83.1%, the lawsuit notes. A cut would force it “to reduce or eliminate the 800 nonhuman primates in its care,” it states. At the Jackson Laboratory (JAX), a major supplier of genetically engineered mice to the research community, the proposed NIH policy could deliver a double blow, both cutting funding to its own large research programs and reducing its revenues by dampening sales of its mice to researchers. The indirect cost rate of the lab’s main facility in Bar Harbor, Maine, is 77%. Advertisement Gary Friedmann, a member of the Maine House of Representatives whose district includes the Bar Harbor facility, wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on 18 February, urging him to reverse the proposed cut. Since then, “I’ve gotten lots of responses from people who are scared about their jobs and, really, about the future of scientific research at the lab,” he says. Friedmann estimates “One-third to almost 40% of the total NIH dollars that are coming to JAX would be at risk. That’s hard to imagine.” JAX declined to answer detailed questions about its indirect costs but said in a statement the proposed cut “threatens the entire biomedical research community.” At the Washington primate center, Fuller says overhead payments not only help feed and house its 800 macaques but also support a biosafety level-2 facility for studying infections in the animals. The center employs 179 staff, and the university has to provide the oversight personnel and processes to make sure the work there complies with U.S. animal welfare requirements. “This is a highly sophisticated operation [with] huge infrastructure,” Fuller says. At least one national primate center director says the cut, if it goes through, won’t be fatal to his center. Buddy Capuano, interim director of the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, which has a significantly lower indirect cost rates of 38.5% and 55%, says the center would flex and adapt. “We make contingency plans all the time.” Scientists who use animals have much to lose in the Trump assault on indirect costs. But opponents of animal research see a major opportunity. Justin Goodman, senior vice president of White Coat Waste Project, an advocacy group, argued in a recent congressional hearing that “indirect costs … go into a slush fund that has nothing to do with the research. So, they're willing to let experimenters do whatever they want to animals to keep the money flowing. … You cut off their funding for animal testing, they’re gonna figure out something else to do.” Locke believes medical research needs to transition away from using animals. But he says an abrupt cut that could leave millions of research animals homeless is a bad idea. Change, he says, needs to come through “aggressive incrementalism and not death by ax.” The plaintiffs attempting to block the indirect payment cuts argue NIH has violated both procedural rules for implementing new policies, and a congressional directive that limits NIH’s ability to change indirect cost rates without the approval of Congress. At today’s hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley will be considering whether to extend an order she issued on 10 February that prevents NIH from implementing the new policy while the case is argued on its merits. With reporting by Sara Reardon.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future. These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears. Scores of young researchers were affected after the country’s main federal funding agencies, NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF), canceled programs that were judged to be in violation of Trump’s 21 January executive order banning “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI).” Some were supplements to other grants secured by principal investigators and were meant to support the salaries and career development of trainees from underrepresented groups. Others were awards given directly to graduate students and postdocs who proposed, as part of their research or through outreach, to help broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up “These kinds of shocks are going to lead to a mass exodus … for minorities in particular,” says Trajan Hammonds, a Princeton University mathematics Ph.D. student who last year applied for one of the postdoc fellowship programs NSF has since canceled. He expected to hear news about his application this month—but instead he got an automated email notification that the program had been deleted. He’s now scrambling to find other postdoc opportunities. “I’m fairly annoyed,” he says. “I would’ve happily applied for the ‘regular’ [fellowship] … and I would have had a pretty strong application.” Another applicant, a postdoc who asked to remain anonymous, says they’re concerned about their own future in science—and about what will come of efforts to ensure the academic community is accessible to people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. “What part of diversity, equity, and inclusion do you have a problem with?” she asks. The campaign against DEI could endanger some nondiversity grants to early-career researchers, as well. One Ph.D. student, who also wished to remain anonymous, told Science she applied for an NIH training grant to support her research on maternal mortality. Her proposal, which had been scheduled to be reviewed in January, mentioned racial disparities and used gender-neutral language such as “birthing people.” She fears it may now be flagged as being in violation of Trump’s executive orders. Advertisement Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported. Some prospective students wonder whether they will even accept a slot if offered. Mathew Sarti was hoping to start grad school this fall. Now, he says, “I want to wait and see how departments handle certain things before committing fully to a place,” he says. He’s holding out for a department that will support students affected by the turmoil, as he was. A junior specialist in a lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Sarti was told by NIH in January that he was being recommended for funding for a diversity training grant. But on 5 February he and his supervisor received a follow-up email that said, “I regret to have to inform you that NIH has instructed us not to issue any diversity supplements that are pending." He lost funding to attend conferences, and he can’t afford to pay his own way. “I’m first generation in all senses of the word.” Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.” They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said. That leaves those earlier in the career pipeline worried as well, especially as reports start to trickle in about universities slowing hiring of faculty members and postdocs. “What does my future look like?” asks Ashley Walker, a fourth year planetary science Ph.D. student at Howard University who founded #BlackInAstro and dreams about working at NASA someday. “The job market—what it looks like today, will be completely different a year from now, right? And so, what trajectory does that lead me in?”

Already bruised by the first round of firings of federal workers by President Donald Trump’s administration, employees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) faced more bad news. NIH’s 27 institute directors were told this week the agency must cut staffing back to 2019 levels, or at least 10% below its 2024 tally, according to two sources. All told, according to an authoritative NIH source, the biomedical agency has in recent days lost about 1200 employees, or just over 5% of its workforce of some 20,000 staff, as part of the firings of “probationary” employees with less than 1 or 2 years in their current position. They range from administrative staff who handle outside grants to NIH lab managers, staff scientists, and tenure-track investigators. The blows have left employees shaken and wondering about the future. “The firings and uncertainty that have happened even just up to now have set back NIH science significantly,” says one still-employed principal investigator on the NIH campus who declined to be identified for fear of retribution. “Ongoing projects have been disrupted, project plans are screwed up, people are looking for other jobs.” SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up The cuts hit hard in NIH’s in-house research program, which makes up about 11% of the agency’s $47.4 billion. With 1200 principal investigators, the intramural program is the world’s largest biomedical research institution, although that often goes unappreciated. NIH this week sought permission to reinstate about 13 to 15 tenure-track principal investigators–young talent who had recently started up their labs. Several worked at a 4-year-old Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias that has had strong support from Republican lawmakers. Also on the list of 150 probationary worker firings being appealed was the scientist in line to serve as the center’s acting head to replace its departing director, according to a memo obtained by Science. Although researchers at NIH’s massive Clinical Center were largely spared after some last-second reprieves, it lost about 10% of lab technicians, an investigator there says. That will hamper research and delay routine blood tests needed to treat sick patients. Advertisement The firings come on top of other actions upending NIH’s intramural research including a communications pause, restrictions on purchasing, and the closure of a popular “postbac” trainee program that brings 1600 young scientists just out of college to the NIH campus to help run labs. The agency has also been declining in recent days to renew investigators hired under Title 42, a special mechanism that requires regular renewals. The internal firings are disrupting NIH’s extramural program, which oversees $39 billion a year in grants to researchers at institutions across the country. An NIH program officer, one of the scientists overseeing grants in a specific area, said they had lost half of their peers in their division. That, they said, will “double the work” they do, which includes guiding investigators through submitting proposals through revisions and checking progress reports. The scientist, who has spent much of their career at NIH, says, “I am heartbroken for what is happening to biomedical research and scared at what is going to happen to public health in this country and around the world as a result” of Trump’s actions. The cuts to another key part of the grantmaking process, the Center for Scientific Review (CSR), which runs most peer-review panels, were less severe, according to a scientific review officer (SRO) there. Only three of the center’s 300 SROs were cut, they said, possibly because they are “essential” staff needed to run federal advisory committees. “CSR was relatively lucky, which is good because it impacts everybody,” the SRO said. But extramural staff remain frustrated, along with biomedical scientists across the country, with a hold on study sections and institute council meetings, where grant applications are peer-reviewed. They remained inactive because the Trump administration has determined its communication pause extends to posting required notices in the Federal Register. CSR is now waiting until just 24 hours before study sections are scheduled to cancel them, in the hope that an exemption will come through in time for them to resume, the SRO said. The abrupt cancellations of the peer-review study and advisory council meetings are frustrating for busy scientists who volunteer for them, the SRO added. “They choose to do this because they believe in it,” the person said. “It just seems very disrespectful.” One policy expert in the NIH director’s office resigned in protest this week, partly over the freeze in meetings, saying the Federal Register issue is a stealthy way to not draw legal challenges. “I think that [the Trump administration] realized that the Federal Register is a choke point, and by strangling that choke point, you could prevent us and a lot of other departments and agencies from being able to comply in a way where you were not giving them direction not to comply,” Nate Brought told Science. While NIH’s extramural staff wait on frozen reviews, a group within CSR continues to check grant proposals for terms such as “environmental justice,” “transgender care,” and “racial justice,” according to a memo obtained by Science. Staff must remove those proposals or grant components in order to comply with executive orders banning work on those topics. But NIH is leaving intact studies of health disparities, according to the SRO who spoke with Science. “NIH is trying their best to protect those things.” Intramural scientists did end the week with a little bit of good news. Today, NIH announced its intramural scientists can attend and present work at off-campus meetings. They can also go back to serving as peer reviewers for journals, which had been stymied by the “communications” pause. In a message to NIH employees today, acting Director Matthew Memoli acknowledged the difficulties and warned of more pain to come. “The last few weeks have been difficult for many of us, but we must prepare for further changes ahead,” Memoli wrote. “When this transition is behind us, NIH may look different, but our mission—to improve the health of all people through groundbreaking biomedical research—will remain unchanged.” Memoli also tried to reassure staff that NIH has the support of Robert F Kennedy Jr., the lawyer and vaccine skeptic now serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He noted that in a speech to employees this week, Kennedy “spoke warmly about NIH” and recounted a childhood visit where he “admired NIH researchers.” Yet Kennedy this week announced the cancellation of three NIH programs studying the impact of climate change on human health. With reporting by Jon Cohen.

Telling both sides “I have a lot of work to do” after promising to move “as quickly as I can,” a federal judge today extended a temporary halt to a plan by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) that would pay grantee institutions billions of dollars less each year to support the NIH-funded research done on their campuses. At a 2-hour hearing in Boston, U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley heard arguments from lawyers for a coalition of states and research institutions protesting NIH’s 7 February announcement of a sharp reduction in the amount of so-called indirect costs that accompany each grant. The new cap of 15%—meaning an additional $15,000 to the institution for every $100,000 spent on direct research—compares with the existing rates of 55% and higher for many institutions. Research advocates say the much lower cap on indirect costs would force universities to close labs and lay off researchers. Academic administrators say they lose money on government-funded research but accept that fate to further their educational objectives. Critics of the current rules say indirect costs are a waste of tax dollars and a slush fund for universities. They say many institutions can afford to support the NIH-funded research through existing revenues, including by tapping into their large endowments. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up “We’re fairly optimistic that the lawyers made a compelling case for the damage [the new rule] would do to biomedical research in this country,” says Heather Pierce of the Association of American Medical Colleges, a plaintiff in one of the three cases heard together today. During the hearing, the judge asked each side to defend its arguments, filed earlier with the court. Plaintiffs say NIH’s sudden change in the rates violates a 1946 law barring “arbitrary and capricious” regulatory decisions by federal agencies, as well as a 2017 congressional statute barring NIH from taking such a step. That language was enacted after NIH sought a 10% ceiling on indirect cost rates early in the first administration of President Donald Trump. In contrast, NIH has said it has the authority to adjust those rates, which the government negotiates with each institution receiving federal research dollars. The government’s lawyer Brian Lea also said any complaints should be taken up by a separate federal court that handles breach-of-contract allegations, not the district court. Advertisement Another bone of contention is what would happen to the money saved by paring indirect costs. Lea said it would be spent on direct costs, meaning more or bigger grants. But Kelley cited an NIH blog post proclaiming the change would save “$4 billion.” Asked by the judge to explain that apparent contradiction, the lawyer referred to the 7 February notice, which says only that “it is vital as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead” without specifying if such a shift would occur. The outcome of such federal suits often hinges on whether the plaintiffs have “standing,” that is, whether they would be “irreparably harmed” by the new regulation and whether blocking it would provide them with immediate and lasting relief. States and institutions receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in indirect costs on NIH grants say the answer is obvious. Researchers who depend on lab animals, for example, fear the cut could force institutions to cull countless mice, rats, and nonhuman primates used for experiments. And institutions without other sources of revenue would have to curtail research activities. Government lawyers say the harm is only “hypothetical” and that institutions can cope with the reduced revenues. The 10 February temporary restraining order would have expired on Monday, but Kelley indefinitely extended it until she issues a new ruling. She did not say when that decision would come.

A modest space telescope with an innovative design is about to search for traces of a key moment in cosmic history: the first tiny fraction of the first second following the Big Bang. SPHEREx, an infrared telescope with a mirror no bigger than a dinner plate and a price tag less than 1/20th of that of NASA’s flagship JWST space observatory, is designed to survey 450 million galaxies and create a vast 3D map. That data will shed light on galaxy evolution and the chemistry of our galaxy, but perhaps its most striking use is searching for evidence of cosmic “inflation,” a theorized trillion trillionfold ballooning of the universe in its first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. SPHEREx aims to narrow down the possible drivers of that growth. “It’s a cool project,” says cosmologist Jo Dunkley of Princeton University. “I’m pretty excited we could detect one [of the signatures of inflation] that would tell us more.” The $488 million telescope, scheduled for launch into low Earth orbit on 27 February for a 2-year survey, commands a wide field of view, the equivalent of 200 full Moons. This will enable it to map the entire sky every 6 months, mapping galaxies and recording their “color” in infrared light—a clue to distance, as light from farther objects is redshifted because of the expansion of the universe. “We struggled quite a bit with the design of the optics” to fulfill its varied goals, says SPHEREx principal investigator James Bock of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up A series of three aluminum mirrors gathers light from its wide view and onto detectors via so-called linear variable filters. The filters only transmit light around a certain wavelength, which varies along the length of the filter. SPHEREx moves so that its image shifts along the filter in 102 steps, capturing 102 different colors. The setup is not as precise as a spectrometer, the usual device for analyzing different wavelengths of light, but allows the telescope to survey a large area of sky at reasonable cost. Meanwhile three nested photon shields keep the telescope cold, preserving its sensitivity to incoming infrared signals, and explain the horn-shaped appearance of the roughly car-size observatory. Astronomers hope the resulting data will allow them to probe possible drivers of inflation, a concept developed in the 1970s to get around certain problems thrown up by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, an all-pervading afterglow of the Big Bang. Dating from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the CMB appears now remarkably smooth, suggesting a uniform universe in all directions. But why should conditions at opposite ends of the universe, which could never have communicated because of light’s finite speed, look so similar? “This picture of the primordial universe that we have is extremely boring,” says astroparticle physicist Lucien Heurtier of King’s College London. “It’s basically the same everywhere and that was a big surprise.” Its shape is also surprising. According to Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, large masses such as galaxies or black holes add curvature to spacetime, but overall, the universe is utterly “flat,” meaning its density is finely balanced between expanding forever and having enough matter to overcome expansion and pull it into a Big Crunch. Advertisement That flat uniformity can be explained if the universe had an early period of ultrarapid growth, in which it swelled in an instant from smaller than a proton to the size of a grapefruit. Its growth then slowed, but the initial burst essentially locked the cosmos into its initial uniform state and stretched out any curvature. Many physicists invoke a new fundamental force with its own field, mediated by a particle called the inflaton, as the driver of this phenomenal growth. But theorists have proposed others, with more fields and more particles—sometimes trying to unify all the forces into a single theory of everything. “We cannot pinpoint which theory of cosmic inflation is the correct one yet,” Heurtier says. SPHEREx hopes to narrow down the range of possibilities by measuring the distances between a large number of galaxies. Rather than being randomly spread across space, galaxies clump together in denser areas that are the remnants of tiny quantum fluctuations in the original preinflation universe, blown up to enormous size. A simple, single-field inflation would produce a universe where the distances between galaxies have a symmetrical distribution called a bell curve. Multifield theories of inflation deviate from that in different ways, which might be apparent in SPHEREx’s galaxy map. SPHEREx will also study the evolution of galaxies, by looking not at individual galaxies but at the overall glow of space, coming from clouds of gas and isolated stars as well as galaxies. Galaxies began forming when the universe was less than half a billion years old, gradually growing bigger and brighter as they drew in more gas and formed more stars. But after around 4 billion years, star formation began to slow. Today, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, galaxies are quiet places forging few new stars. One theory attributes the slowdown to stellar winds, outpourings of particles that, when galaxies reached a certain size, became so strong that they broke up the gas clouds. “You need gas to cluster enough in order to then coalesce to form stars,” says astronomer Anthony Pullen of New York University. “You don’t have that effect if there is wind pressure that’s disrupting that process.” By analyzing how the intensity of the combined light from galaxies and gas changed over time, SPHEREx investigators hope to test that scenario. SPHEREx’s infrared vision also makes it sensitive to chemical compounds in our own galaxy, including water ice, carbon monoxide and dioxide, and methanol, frozen onto grains of dust—potential building blocks for life. “These ice absorption features … are not extremely well studied,” Bock says. SPHEREx will help reveal how prevalent these materials are and how stars transform them, thanks to its expansive view. “We get the whole sky,” Bock says.

The Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in Ithaca, New York, home to one of the most extensive invertebrate fossil collections in North America, is facing imminent closure, with an unfulfilled pledge from its major donor putting the museum in danger of defaulting on its mortgage. Founded in 1932, the institution currently houses more than 7 million specimens, including one of the largest invertebrate collections and the most complete mastodon specimen ever found. PRI has also been instrumental in many scientists’ education, especially women in paleontology. With foreclosure looming, the future of the institution’s fossils and research mission remains uncertain. “It really is exceptional, certainly in the top five or so [of collections in the country],” says David Jablonski, a paleobiologist at the University of Chicago who has used PRI’s collection of Venezuelan fossils for his work. Losing it, he adds, “would be a real blow.” “The devastation of losing something like PRI is monumental,” adds Corrie Moreau, an organismal evolutionary biologist at nearby Cornell University, who has collaborated with PRI staff on exhibits at the institution’s Museum of the Earth on insect diversity. “It can never be replaced.” SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up Founded by Cornell paleontologist Gilbert Harris almost a century ago, PRI has served as a hub for the study of ancient life, evolution, and climate change. Its vast fossil repository includes the largest collection of invertebrates from the Cenozoic era in North America, and the largest collections of fossils from Antarctica, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, drawing researchers from across the country and institutions worldwide. The collection’s marine invertebrates from the Devonian period help scientists study prehistoric ocean conditions. Its vertebrate fossils include the remarkably complete Hyde Park mastodon, which researchers found 25 years ago in New York’s Hudson River Valley. PRI has also adopted many orphaned collections from other institutions over the years, including 35,000 fossils from Seymour Island and other locations in Antarctica. “By virtue of being a champion of many of these orphaned collections, PRI has served a unique role in the company of natural history museums, and not just North America, but the world,” says Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who has worked for years on the Hyde Park mastodon. Beyond the fossils themselves, PRI has also played a big role in training women paleontologists. PRI’s second president, paleontologist Katherine Palmer, was a pioneer in the early days of paleontology in the United States, says Rowan Lockwood, a paleontologist at the College of William & Mary, and president of the Paleontological Society. She estimates PRI has produced more paleontologists who identify as female than most other institutions put together. Advertisement Lockwood, who was a graduate student when she worked with PRI’s collections, first heard about the new financial situation at a geology conference in 2023. She and dozens of paleontologists around her—most of them women—discovered they had all studied or worked at PRI. “It was just really moving,” she says. The Paleontological Research Institution houses one of the largest Antarctic fossil collections in the world, like these from the Cretaceous collected from Seymour Island.Paleontological Research Institution The future of such work is now in jeopardy. For over 20 years, the institution has been mostly funded by a single donor, says Director Warren Allmon. That donor had made gifts of more than $20 million between 2000 and 2023. PRI’s recent financial straits largely derive from the fact it had been counting on some $30 million that had been pledged but never paid out by the philanthropist, who has always wished to maintain anonymity, to fund PRI over the next 2 decades. “We have only been told that they have had a severe liquidity problem that has kept them from making payments,” Allmon says. As a result, PRI now faces a $3 million mortgage it cannot afford. The deadline to pay off the mortgage “was 15 months ago,” Allmon says. Since fall of 2023, PRI has reduced its staff by more than half to curtail costs. PRI’s situation follows a trend across the United States and abroad of funding woes forcing institutions to shutter their scientific collections. For example, Duke University’s vaunted herbarium closed a year ago and its collection was expected to be split and moved to other institutions. And last year, a Colombian museum housing valuable fossils faced imminent closure thanks to a lack of visitors. Lockwood and others fear a similar fate for PRI. “The thought that such a magnificent collection is going to be lost or divvied up to a variety of institutions, or some of it may land in dumpsters … is just absolutely horrifying to contemplate,” she says. Efforts to save the institution are ongoing. A coalition of scientists, students, and community members is working to raise awareness and funding to prevent foreclosure. After Allmon sent an email to members of the Paleontological Society in December 2024, many fellow paleontologists donated to the institution. And after local media covered PRI’s financial situation last month and social media posts went viral, the online gift shop was flooded with orders of their plush toys. “An order a minute,” Allmon says. Some hope Cornell itself will step in. Hundreds of the Ivy League institution’s students use PRI’s collections every year. More than 4000 people have signed a petition started last month by students and former PRI interns, and more than 60 Cornell faculty members signed on to a December letter to Cornell administrators asking them to step in. But Cornell leadership doesn’t seem inclined to help, despite having at least 18 current and pending research grants that depend on PRI’s services. “While we value their extensive collections and educational offerings, we are not in a position to provide financial assistance to address PRI’s challenges,” a Cornell spokesperson wrote in an email to Science. They didn’t comment on other, nonfinancial ways Cornell could help PRI. For now, Allmon is focused on securing enough funding to pay off the mortgage. He has an offer from a Cornell alumna willing to donate $1 million to help pay off the mortgage and incentivize other major donors, he says. The next step will be to find long-term funding to keep the institution going. PRI is seeking partnership opportunities with larger institutions. And fellow paleontologists are helping in any way they can. If PRI and its Museum of the Earth are forced to close, “Science is going to be interrupted,” says Rebecca Rundell, a land snail researcher at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry who is a member of PRI’s Board of Trustees. “It’s very hard to measure that in dollars—just loss that’s almost hard to fathom.”

Table of contents A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 387, Issue 6736. Download PDF TRUMP TRACKER Judges, critics push back against a whirlwind of science actions As President Donald Trump’s administration fired numerous researchers at U.S. agencies, other White House efforts to overhaul government spending and policy drew criticism from scientists and some restrictions from federal judges. (Follow breaking news from Science about the administration’s decisions affecting research.) CHRONIC DISEASE PUSHAfter the U.S. Senate narrowly confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on 13 February on a mostly party-line vote, Trump created a new commission to advance one of Kennedy’s key priorities: preventing chronic diseases. Trump directed the Make America Healthy Again Commission to deliver a strategy focused on childhood chronic diseases within 180 days. Skeptics worry the panel, composed of Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking administration officials, will serve as a vehicle for amplifying Kennedy’s views on the dangers posed by vaccines and other treatments, views many scientists say are not supported by evidence. Kennedy has also called for investigating conflicts of interest between officials at federal health agencies and pharmaceutical companies. AID FREEZE REVERSEDA judge issued a temporary injunction on 13 February blocking the Trump administration’s blanket freeze on foreign aid, which has halted the distribution of food and medicines and interrupted clinical trials and other types of research in many countries. In a lawsuit brought by government contractors and others, U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali ruled that the freeze has caused “irreparable harm” and lacked adequate justification. But as Science went to press, groups supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other federal agencies said they were still having difficulty accessing promised funds. And in some cases, they said, the funding thaw does not matter because it is impossible to restart research projects. NIH GRANTS THAWThe U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s largest single source of nondefense research funding, last week lifted a freeze on issuing new grants and funding continuing ones. The agency started the pause early this month to review the awards, checking for compliance with Trump’s orders barring federal funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other topics. But in a 12 February memo, NIH acknowledged the stoppage violated two court orders suspending Trump’s order in January that froze all federal funding, according to the news site Popular Information. Some NIH grantees say they are still unclear whether their award money will arrive. GENDER CRITICISMThe administration has directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to place a notice condemning “gender ideology” on web pages the White House says “inculcate or promote” that ideology. The pages were taken offline on 31 January in response to an administration memo, but on 11 February a federal judge ordered they be restored. Some of the web pages include data sets, such as CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, widely used by public health researchers. The required notice—which was reported by The Washington Post and appears on several restored CDC and FDA pages—states that any information “promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.” That statement is scientifically inaccurate, many researchers say. Last month, Trump ordered agencies to replace the word “gender” with “sex” throughout federal documents. EDUCATION SURVEYSThe administration last week said it had canceled $881 million in government contracts to collect information on the state of U.S. education. Researchers warn the move will blind the government to important trends from preschool to college and beyond. The cuts at the National Center for Education Statistics, orchestrated by the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, include projects studying problems in U.S. schools such as declining student mental health, the growing gap between low- and high-achieving students, and rising chronic absenteeism. MARCHES PLANNEDA group called Stand Up for Science is organizing rallies on 7 March in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals to support research. Without referring directly to Trump, the group is calling for stopping interference with and censorship of science; it also opposes attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion in research. The organizers are different from those who spurred the March for Science in 2017, shortly after the first Trump administration began. GEOLOGY HEADIn other news, Trump nominated geologist Ned Mamula to lead the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). He has called for the United States to increase mining of uranium and improve its access to other minerals needed for manufacturing and other purposes, a view in sync with Trump’s foreign policy. Mamula worked as a staff scientist at USGS before directing the Department of Energy’s critical minerals program during the first Trump administration and former President Joe Biden’s administration. In 2023, he become chief geologist of GreenMet, a company that promotes the U.S. critical minerals industry. He holds a Ph.D. in geological and earth sciences from Texas A&M University. CONSERVATION Threats to peatlands mapped Peatlands, such as a blanket bog in Scotland shown in this aerial view, store vast amounts of carbon. DAVID TIPLING PHOTO LIBRARY/ALAMY In their soggy, acidic soil, Earth’s peatlands store an estimated 600 gigatons of carbon, more than the world’s forests—despite taking up just 3% of land. Nearly one-quarter of this habitat is under intense threat from human activities, such as farming, deliberately set management fires, and mining, according to a new global survey. Just 17% of the 4 million square kilometers is protected, far less than other carbon-rich habitats such as tropical forests or mangroves. And one-third of protected peatlands areas are under moderate to high levels of threat, the team reported last week in Conservation Letters. When peatlands are disturbed, they release their carbon as greenhouse gases. One bright spot: More than 1 million square kilometers of peatlands lie on the land of Indigenous peoples, where they may be managed more sustainably than elsewhere. Editor’s note: This item has been updated to include the correct percentage of protected peatland areas under moderate to high levels of threat. RANKINGS More U.S. universities join elite Forty-one universities have ascended into the top tier of U.S. research powerhouses, a status viewed as aiding the recruitment of top faculty and students. The number of R1 institutions in the latest Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, released last week, now stands at 187, a 28% increase over the total in the 2021 rankings. The increase reflects new criteria. An R1 university must award 70 doctoral degrees annually and have $50 million a year in research activity, but the previous formula required institutions to award those degrees across many fields, a standard some called arbitrary. The new one helped elevate Howard University, making it the only historically Black college or university in the R1 category. Other newcomers include five flagship universities in states that previously had no R1 institutions: Idaho, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up INFECTIOUS DISEASES Flu shot for chickens advances With egg prices at an all-time high in the United States as H5N1 influenza viruses devastate poultry flocks, a vaccine to protect the birds moved one step closer to the market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture on 13 February issued a “conditional approval” to the manufacturer Zoetis to market its poultry vaccine. The agency still must give a final green light for its use because of special regulations surrounding so-called highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses. China, Egypt, France, and Mexico already use vaccines to protect poultry against such viruses; the U.S. has relied on culling flocks of infected birds to control them. The H5N1 viruses now in circulation occasionally sicken humans as well and have jumped to U.S. dairy cattle, causing significant losses in that industry. SCIENTIFIC FRAUD Sleuth endows integrity grants Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and prominent independent scientific integrity consultant, has donated $200,000 to establish a grants program to help expand investigations of research fraud. The money is the entire sum of Bik’s 2024 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research that honored her work. The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund will be administered through the nonprofit Center for Scientific Integrity, which operates the Retraction Watch news website, and Bik will choose the grantees, she and the center announced last week. Bik says the grants will likely be modest—typically several hundred dollars each—to cover expenses such as relevant courses and training, buying software, writing educational resources to aid other sleuths, or travel to conferences on research integrity. Independent sleuths, most of whom are volunteers, have few sources of funding for their work, such as rooting out manipulated images, fabricated text, cooked data, and paper mills.