The scissors announced by the Government of Donald Trump 56% to the budget of its National Science Foundation “would paralyze US science,” according to 150 workers of this government agency, which in its 75 years of history has financed the investigations of the Nobel Prize. The signatories denounce “the systematic dismantling” of the entity, with a budget cut that would exceed 70% in biology, engineering and scientific education. “If carried out, the United States scientific leadership would undermine and eliminate financing for more than 250,000 researchers and students,” warns the text, in line with three other similar issued in the last month, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. It is an unprecedented scientific rebellion.
In the Foundation, with 9,000 million dollars of annual budget, there is fear. The Trump executive fired more than 10% of the workforce in February, so arbitrarily that a federal court has already ordered the reinstatement of some employees. Only one of the 150 signatories of the letter dares to appear publicly with his name and surname: the Spanish, who studied medicine at the University of Alicante and has been working since 2012 at the US Foundation, known as NSF)
“What is happening in the NSF does not resemble anything we have faced before,” laments Soriano, president of the agency’s workers. “Our members – scientific, responsible for programs and the rest of the staff – have been attacked by doing their work with integrity. They have faced reprisals, mass layoffs and the illegal retention of billions in funds for research,” he explained Tuesday in Washington, along with Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. “For 75 years, the NSF has turned this country into a destination for students, innovators and winners of the Nobel. In just over six months, this government has made pieces,” Lofgren proclaimed.
The open letter details that the Government Efficiency Department – directed until May by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk – has canceled more than 1,600 subsidies already granted, “without transparency or legal justification”, annulling “billions of dollars in previous investments.” Until now, the NSF, with a template, presumed to finance the work of more than 350,000 people. Since May, the president of the NSF Government Body is the Spanish engineer, until then world director of the Research Area of the American multinational IBM.
The 150 signatories, headed by Soriano, demand that their independence be guaranteed, to release retained funds and that NSF employees are “protected in the face of politically motivated dismissals”, with a work system based on merit. The workers have sent their letter to the Democratic congressmen of the Science Committee of the House of Representatives such as, to be covered by the Informant Protection Law against possible reprisals of the Trump government.
The letter binds to three other similar published in the last month: one signed by the National Health Institutes, another by the Environmental Protection Agency and one more presented this Monday by NASA. Hundreds of the signatories are anonymous for fear of reprisals. The Trump government has already temporarily suspended 139 of the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency who supported the letter, according to. Four months ago, more than 1,900 members of the American scientific academies – the world elite of their disciplines – published in which they denounced the “real danger” involved in “the systematic attack against science” perpetrated by President Donald Trump.
The 150 NSF workers denounce that they cannot do their work “under a climate of fear, censorship and institutional sabotage.” If the congressmen do not correct the course marked by Trump, they warn, the damage will be irreversible: “To put it in a nutshell, the United States will yield their position of scientific leadership to China and other rival countries.”
