It’s been a tough year for science south of the border. Budgets slashed. Scientists fired. Protections erased.
Since 20 January 2025, the Trump administration has decimated science and research across the U.S., and it’s having very real impacts on Canada’s research community.
At Evidence for Democracy, we’ve been tracking these policy changes since March 2025 in our “Trump’s War on Science” tracker. Last July, we published our “Accretion and Erosion” report on the state of scientific integrity in Canada, which was followed by our October op-ed in The Equation.
With so many U.S. announcements and policy changes, it can be difficult to make sense of what it means for Canadian researchers.
I’m going to break down the following trends we’ve noticed over the past year into 4 distinct phases:
Phase 1 – Launching the War on Science – January to April 2025
Immediately in its first week, the administration issued a series of executive orders to silence scientific federal agencies, halting all external communications across multiple agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Further executive orders muzzled scientists, halted all grant review panels, terminated researcher travel activities, and paused scientific advisory committees indefinitely.
The Trump administration also moved quickly to launch its anti-climate agenda through a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement; cutting restrictions on fossil fuel extraction in Alaska; attacking the 2009 Endangerment Finding; and eliminating climate advisory committee expertise. To align with Trump’s anti-EDI executive order, federal agencies began directing staff to take down thousands of government webpages featuring evidence-based recommendations, research, and datasets. Moreso, the NIH’s decision to rescind its scientific integrity policy eliminated critical protections for federal scientists, laying the groundwork for major rollbacks to come.
Early into its new term, the administration also set about rapidly cutting research funding and slashing the federal service. By February, it had initiated thousands of research funding cuts, introduced a new list of prohibited words to flag funding applications, and launched massive layoffs and terminations across the federal service, including at the CDC, FDA, NSF, and EPA.
Phase 2 – Rebranding Science as Ideology – April to August 2025
April marked a turning point for the new Trump administration, as it shifted gears from its intense crackdown on science towards pushing political agendas under the guise of “science”. Under US Health Secretary Kennedy’s direction, HHS officially started promoting misinformation on vaccinations and gender-affirming care, tasking NIH, CDC and its own officials to launch studies into the alleged causes of autism, appointing discredited researchers and vaccine skeptics to spearhead these investigations. The release of Kennedy’s misinformation-riddled MAHA Commission report in May – which included broken web links, incorrect conclusions, and a lack of credible sources – was announced on the heels of what would become one of the most consequential attacks on science to date: the controversial “Gold Standard Science” executive order.
In the executive order, the US President announced his intention to completely overhaul federal scientific integrity policies (SIPs), using terms like “transparency” and “reproducibility” as a smokescreen for cracking down on politically-inconvenient research. The executive order also signalled plans to revoke previous protections against political interference in science – directly contravening the mission of scientific integrity – instead installing political appointees to oversee these protections across all federal agencies. Further announcements in June and July marked significant political interference in science, including: the introduction of political allegiance into federal hiring and firing processes; US Health Secretary Kennedy’s move to replace the entire US Vaccine Advisory Committee with hand-picked anti-vaccine appointees; and the EPA’s decision to dismantle its entire research office.
The Trump administration also began shifting research priorities through a combination of altered funding requirements; the appointment of anti-vaccine advocates to positions of power; widespread cuts to federal funding; and the initiation of mass firings of federal scientists in politically-undersirable fields, including gender studies, climate science, and public health. As a result of the intensified crackdown on prohibited words in research funding applications, more than 1,000 NSF grants and 800 NIH grants were either frozen or cut by the end of April. The NIH’s decision to halt “foreign subawards” (i.e. US researchers sharing grant money with international collaborators) – and to force foreign researchers to apply directly to a revised NIH application process – further manifested in a reduction of grants awarded to Canadian institutions by mid-year, which saw Canadian researchers lose nearly $20 million USD compared with the previous year.
Phase 3 – “A New Wave of Attacks” August to October 2026
August marked the return of a new wave of attacks on science. The launch of the former oil executive and newly-minted Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Chris Wright’s report established a new frontier in the administration’s efforts to use US agencies to suppress evidence and push political ideology. The controversial DOE report – which misrepresented decades of climate research, omitted key evidence of climate change impacts, and cherry-picked scientific studies to support a rollback of regulations on fossil fuels – neatly recycled messaging around the administration’s plans to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding (i.e. the key ruling that underpins all US greenhouse gas emission regulations). Ultimately, these efforts paved the way for the EPA’s decision in September to officially stop collecting emissions data from major polluters. At Health Secretary Kennedy’s direction, the HHS directed the FDA to revoke the emergency-use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines; suppressed a new report on alcohol and cancer; and promoted a new misinformation-riddled MAHA report on paediatric health.
In August, the US administration continued its attacks on scientific integrity, issuing new guidance that all federal agencies rescind Biden-era scientific integrity policies (SIPs) – a move that directly led to the EPA’s monumental decision to tear down its landmark SIP. The removal of these protections paved the way for further attacks on science, including the politically-driven firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, and the immediate termination of EPA employees who signed an open “Declaration of Dissent” letter criticizing the Trump administration. By September, the EPA announced major restructuring of its research offices, and levied new measures to muzzle water scientists. In anticipation of the looming federal government shutdown, the Trump administration announced plans to further slash thousands of federal science jobs, including its plan to suspend 41% of the HHS workforce.
Lastly, Phase 3 marked further research funding cuts. In August, the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya issued a new review of all NIH grants to ensure conformity with Trump priorities. Further announcements slashed millions from weather agency budgets, targeted crackdowns on fetal research and environmental justice projects, and even prompted the National Science Foundation (NSF) to openly defy a federal court order to restore slashed university research grants.
Phase 4 – Post-Shutdown Uncertainty – October 2026 to Present
The US government shutdown, initiated 1 October 2026, once again brought a lull in attacks on science. However, during this time, the Trump administration actively worked to slash federal workforce and cut budgets, justifying these cuts using federal agencies to issue partisan messages in direct violation of US law. With the shutdown suspending over 750,000 federal workers, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) lead Russell Vought announced new plans to issue thousands of “reductions-in-force”. During the shutdown, the administration effectively eliminated the National Council on the Humanities, fired leading NIH institute directors, and issued thousands of layoffs across federal agencies, including the CDC, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and EPA.
Conclusion
Overall, the past year of the Trump administration has been a chaotic and devastating one for science and research that is directly and indirectly impacting Canada’s research community through cut grants, disrupted collaborations, and suppressed evidence.
Despite these sustained attacks on science and research by the Trump administration, the US scientific community has stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of evidence-informed policy, most visibly through mass mobilizations like the millions who mobilized in the March for Science and the No Kings protests, as well as public pushback through the Bethesda Declaration, NASEM open letter, and Surgeons General joint public statement.
As we head into 2026, Canada’s research community will continue to feel the repercussions of Trump’s war on science. We are facing an uncertain period for science, and need to continue to speak out on behalf of science and research. To keep track of the latest insights, you can follow our “Trump’s War on Science” tracker here.
