2025-05-29
42 分钟Across America, scientists have been living under a cloud of uneasy anticipation.
Emily Steinmark is The Economist's science correspondent.
Mere months into Donald Trump's second presidency and the scientific world has been thrown into chaos.
Federal science agencies have laid off employees en masse.
The Trump administration has sought to hold the nation's premier universities hostage.
Online, rumours are swirling that there is a list of words related to diversity,
equity and inclusion, and if any ground includes them, it will be denied or cancelled.
In the midst of it all lies one especially salient fear, the arrival of the letter.
On March 20th, this letter landed in the inbox of Amy Nunn,
a professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
I was on my phone, actually.
I just was cruising through my emails and I got the termination award that was sent to us by the Research Administration Office.
The following day, it came for Hannah Cooper, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Effective with the date of this letter.
Funding for project number 5U54HD113292 is hereby terminated.
Nearly a month later in Minneapolis, Brigitte Assime,
a professor at the University of Minnesota, also received the letter.
It was Friday, and I had already signed off for the day.
And I was with my children, who I had picked up from school.
And I got a Slack message saying that the NSF was terminated.