How the U.S. Midterm Elections Could Shake Up Science
As tens of millions of voters head to the polls on 3 November to cast ballots in the US mid-term elections, a political shake-up could be coming to Washington DC — with substantial consequences for the country’s scientific landscape.
Republicans currently hold more seats than do Democrats in both chambers of the US Congress, which has given the party and administration of President Donald Trump unified control of the federal government. But polling data favour Democrats to win back the House of Representatives and suggest that they have a chance of taking control of the Senate, too.
Since Trump took office last year, his administration has terminated thousands of research grants, slashed the federal scientific workforce and sought unprecedented political oversight of science agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Many researchers and science advocates hope that a new Congress will stand up to the Trump administration to protect science funding and investigate its actions. “The Republican Congress has basically ceded their role in oversight for the last almost two years,” says Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, a political fundraising group in Washington DC, which recruits and backs Democratic scientists, engineers and health-care specialists running for office.
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Another way that Congress could push back against the Trump administration’s reshaping of US science is to attach specific conditions to funding bills. For instance, because lawmakers haven’t yet agreed on the final budget for the 2027 fiscal year, they passed a ‘stopgap’ bill that funds the government only up to 11 December. The bill contains a section that temporarily blocks a White House plan to overhaul US science.
That plan is controversial: it would, for instance, put political appointees in charge of federal grant review and allow them to override the decisions of scientist peer reviewers. Giving control of grants to political appointees would threaten biomedical progress globally, says Ellie Dehoney, senior vice-president of policy and advocacy at Research!America, a non-profit organization in Arlington, Virginia. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which created the plan, said it did so to improve transparency, accountability and oversight of federal funds.
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