When the System Shrinks: Living Through a Contraction in Science

Five hundred people. One virtual meeting. A handful of HR staff trying to explain retirement paperwork to a room full of departing colleagues—while some of those same HR staff were being terminated themselves. They broke down crying together on screen. That was my last day at the National Institutes of Health (NIH): April 18, 2025.

Many people in the scientific community are grieving right now. Grants have been delayed or canceled. Programs are being scaled back. Careers built over decades suddenly feel fragile or dispensable.

If you work in or around federally supported science—as a civil servant, a grantee, a trainee, or a contractor—this moment may feel less like a policy shift and more like a personal reckoning.

This essay is not about assigning fault or predicting collapse. It’s about understanding where we are in a longer historical cycle, and what it means to hold the line during periods when public support for science contracts rather than expands.

Who This Is Landing On

I want to be explicit here. This moment is landing hardest on federal science workers: program officers, scientific review officers, intramural researchers, analysts, and support staff whose work has quietly sustained the research enterprise for decades.

I think about my former colleagues still inside, watching programs they built contract in real time. The program officer who designed a multi-year initiative that will now never launch. The grants specialist who drew up complex awards, only to be told later they must be rescinded. The scientific review officer now overwhelmed by full consolidation of review in the Center for Scientific Review, but with less staff to handle the workload.

It’s also landing on investigators whose labs and trainees depend on federal grants, who are now facing uncertainty through no failure of their own. The researcher whose renewal is stalled. The early-career investigator whose first award got canceled. The senior scientist who is forced to lay off their trusted research staff as grant awards sunset and new ones become increasingly more difficult to obtain.

I left NIH in April 2025 through the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority. I chose to walk away from 22 years of work I loved rather than participate in what was being demanded of the agency.

The sense of abandonment many are feeling is real, and it deserves to be named.

Contraction Is Part of the History, Even If It Never Feels That Way

When you’re inside a contraction, it doesn’t feel like history. It feels like failure: personal failure, institutional failure, maybe even moral failure.

But periods of contraction are not new in the history of science. What is new is how rarely we talk about them openly while they’re happening.

American science has expanded and contracted over time, often in response to political realignment, war, economic pressure, or shifting public trust.

Before World War II, the United States was not yet the dominant scientific superpower it would become after 1945. Federal investment in civilian research was relatively limited and concentrated in mission areas such as agriculture and resource surveying, while universities and laboratories relied heavily on philanthropic foundations and industry, which in turn influenced which scientific questions were pursued and which were neglected. ^{1, 2, 3}

The massive postwar expansion that many of us implicitly treat as “normal” was historically unusual. In the decades after World War II, rapidly growing federal support for basic research, especially in the context of the Cold War and the Space Race, created an era of “Big Science,” but even that era saw periods of constraint. In the 1970s, as growth in federal research budgets slowed, oversight increased, and economic turbulence hit, funding became tighter in several fields, and scientific careers—particularly in areas such as high‑energy physics and some branches of engineering—became less secure, prompting some highly trained researchers to leave academic science altogether. ^{4, 5, 6, 7}

President Bill Clinton, along with bipartisan congressional support, initiated and oversaw a major increase in the NIH budget, resulting in its doubling from around $14 billion in 1998 to over $27 billion by 2003, a period marked by significant annual funding hikes, often exceeding 14-17%, to accelerate biomedical research and tackle diseases like cancer and map the human genome. ^8,9,10

What makes the current contraction feel especially destabilizing is that it’s not driven by a broad loss of public support for science. Polling consistently shows strong majorities favor federal investment in health research. The dismantling we’re witnessing is instead the result of a political moment in which a minority viewpoint holds disproportionate power.

That distinction matters. When contraction reflects shifting public priorities, rebuilding can follow familiar paths. When it reflects ideological hostility to science itself, the damage isn’t easily reversed, even if political control later changes hands.

Why Contraction Feels So Personal

Even when contraction is systemic, it lands personally.

Federal science workers often experience these moments as a loss of identity as much as a loss of employment. For investigators, a paused or unfunded grant isn’t just a budget problem. It’s a threat to trainees, collaborators, and years of accumulated expertise. For program staff, watching carefully designed programs stall or unwind can feel like professional grief.

The system rarely acknowledges this emotional reality. Science culture valorizes resilience and adaptability without recognizing the real costs of constant instability. People are expected to pivot, retool, or “find another funding source,” as though that were simply a technical adjustment rather than a profound disruption.

In early 2025, the NIH experienced a freeze. No grant awards allowed, no meetings, no travel, no outside communications. Then came the February 14th illegal firing of over a thousand colleagues with no prior warning to staff or supervisors, followed by immediate lockout from systems.

By March, those of us still inside faced mandatory daily office presence, increased campus police searches, constant DOGE surveillance, and petty rules. Immediate termination was threatened for not displaying ID badges or powering down laptops, even when using the restroom. We were required to submit weekly activity reports to DOGE under threat of dismissal. Even more shockingly, some of my NIH colleagues were cruelly named on a “watchlist” posted online by the so-called “American Accountability Foundation,” which wanted to remove them from their jobs for allegedly “promoting liberal ideologies.” The objective: terrorizing and pushing out dedicated federal employee scientists.

The April 1st Reduction in Force brought even greater chaos. Staff were crying in the halls. Critical personnel across communications, IT, budget, and leadership were dismissed with no transition. The HR staff who were fired were tasked with off-boarding themselves and thousands of others.

All while we were expected to maintain scientific integrity and serve the public mission.

Naming this matters. Not because it solves the problem, but because silence compounds it.

What Contraction Exposes

Periods of contraction reveal truths that are easier to ignore during expansion.

They expose how much of the system depends on invisible labor. When program officers disappear, when institutional knowledge walks out the door, when support staff are cut, the gaps don’t show up immediately. They show up weeks later when critical coordination doesn’t happen, when protocols aren’t enforced, when the people who knew how to process payments are simply gone.

They highlight which kinds of work are considered essential and which are treated as expendable. Stewardship work (building consensus across institutes, mentoring colleagues, establishing governance structures) is almost always considered expendable, right up until its absence creates chaos.

They also clarify the difference between rhetoric about “valuing science” and the structures that actually sustain it. On April 1st, the day thousands of HHS employees were fired, the new NIH Director sent his first email to staff, thanking departing colleagues and claiming their firing was “in no way a reflection of the quality of their work.”

But it was. They were fired because their work was invisible until it was gone. Because stewardship doesn’t show up on efficiency metrics. Because expertise takes years to build and seconds to dismiss.

The Bridge Forward Is Not Just About Money

It’s natural to hope for a rebuilding phase, and history suggests that such phases do come. But rebuilding is never a simple return to what was.

The most consequential question isn’t whether funding will eventually increase again. It’s how the next system is designed and what it learns from the period of contraction that preceded it.

What do we actually want public science to do? What kinds of work requires stable, long-term support? What roles are essential to stewarding knowledge, not just producing it?

The dismantling is still ongoing, which makes it hard to imagine rebuilding yet. But one thing seems clear: we will need to find ways to leverage and connect the popular support for health research that polling consistently shows exists. We may need more explicit ways to directly engage the public in the work and connect the benefits of science with the American people more regularly. Support for public science cannot depend solely on political winds when those winds can shift so dramatically against public sentiment.

Moments like this create space, however uncomfortable, to rethink assumptions that were previously locked in by abundance. During expansion, it’s easy to layer on new programs without questioning foundational structures. During contraction, those questions become unavoidable.

For those still inside the system, this may mean holding two realities at once: continuing to do careful, ethical work under constrained conditions, while also imagining different structures that could support science more sustainably.

For those pushed outside it, and I’m one of them now, the loss is real. So is the expertise that risks being squandered. People who spent decades building methodological innovations, mentoring colleagues, establishing research programs don’t simply carry all that institutional memory with them when they leave. Much of it just disappears.

Recognizing that loss is part of any honest rebuilding.

Holding the Line on Meaning

I can’t offer certainty about timelines or outcomes. What I can offer is this: contractions don’t erase the value of the work that came before them. They don’t invalidate the careers built within those systems.

Science has always been shaped by cycles of expansion and retrenchment. What endures across those cycles are people—their judgment, integrity, and commitment to evidence—even when institutions falter.

If a rebuilding phase comes, it will depend on that human capital more than on any single appropriation. And if it doesn’t come quickly, the work of making sense of this moment still matters.

Acknowledging the pain, naming the tensions, and refusing to pretend that this is easy aren’t acts of pessimism. They’re acts of stewardship.

I don’t know what comes next for me, or for the many others who have left or will leave. But I know the work we did mattered. The programs we built, the colleagues we mentored, the innovations we championed, the careful governance that made complex research possible—all of that was real, even if it’s being treated as expendable now.

That work still matters. Even in contraction, even in grief, even when the system shrinks around us.

This essay is part of a series reflecting on what I learned over more than two decades working inside the U.S. biomedical research enterprise.

Historical Sources:

1. https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/23/us-science-policy-at-a-crossroads/

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK45556/

3. https://www.historians.org/resource/history-of-federal-science-funding/

4. https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/narrative

5. https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/how-us-became-science-superpower

6. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016nsf....1643037T/abstract

7. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/588694

8. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43341

9. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/opinion/double-the-nih-budget.html

10. https://www.clintonfoundation.org/stories/the-golden-years-in-medical-research/