US-amerikanische Budgetkürzungen berauben Wissenschaftler der Frühkarriere ihrer Zukunft | Stornierte Zuschüsse und gekürzte Budgets wirken sich überproportional auf Junior Health -Forscher aus, was die Zukunft der Wissenschaft und der Gesellschaft in den USA erheblich betrifft

From the article: As a young doctoral researcher at a university in the southern U.S., Camilo felt like he was finally closing in on his dream of becoming a leader in the next generation of HIV scholars. His recent work has helped hundreds of LGBTQ+ Latino people access HIV prevention programs and preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a medication that reduces HIV infection risk. But these lifesaving efforts—and Camilo’s hopes of a career focused on directly helping people in his community—came to a screeching halt one recent Friday afternoon: he opened an e-mail that said a National Institutes of Health grant, vital to his work, had been terminated.

“I saw an image of a floating pair of scissors clipping my future,” says Camilo, who asked to use a pseudonym, citing fear of retaliation.

Since researchers first began receiving grant termination letters in late February, massive chunks of federal funding for science and health have been canceled on a near-weekly basis. The Trump administration has framed these cuts as a way to reduce wasteful spending, refocus research priorities and eliminate ideological bias. Grants have been flagged for containing keywords such as “women,” “diverse,” “minority” and “racially.” Camilo’s research checked all the boxes for the administration’s crackdown on so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) research. He had been expecting the bad news, but when it came, it was still crushing. “You’re losing everything,” he says.

Grant Watch, a project tracking Trump’s scientific funding cancellations, has tallied more than 2,482 terminated NIH grants worth $8.7 billion and 1,669 terminated National Science Foundation grants worth $1.5 billion as of mid-June. An NSF spokesperson declined an interview request from Scientific American but wrote in an e-mail that “we remain committed to awarding grants and funding all areas of science and engineering.” The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to direct requests for an interview for this article. An NIH representative did not respond to a list of written questions but said the agency “is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.”