The June 17 edition of Scientific American’s Today in Science newsletter devoted considerable space to the breakdown of relations between the government and the research establishment: “For decades, the U.S. government was a partner in the scientific enterprise. Now that relationship is crumbling.” — Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

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In 2025 the NIH cut the amount of grant money awarded by more than 40 percent compared with years prior. What if, one team of economists asked, the NIH research budget had been 40 percent smaller for the past few decades? Grants in the bottom 40 percent of the priority queue, they reasoned, wouldn’t have been funded. The team tracked those grants to their outcomes—research that never happened in this parallel universe—and found that something like half of all drugs simply wouldn’t exist today.

The fallout: How do scientists feel about this chaotic breach of the government-science relationship? “The reality is, because of what happened and what’s happening now, the trust between researchers and the federal government is completely broken,” says Scott Delaney, a former Harvard University epidemiologist who co-created the watchdog group Grant Witness. “Is your grant going to be frozen? Is it going to be terminated? Is it going to be reinstated? Is it going to be delayed because you’re required to change the wording?” Other changes will likely follow, scientists say: “Laboratories are going to close. Trainees are going to go to other countries or pursue nonscience careers,” says Carole LaBonne, a developmental biologist at Northwestern University.

How are SciAm editors reading the room?

Politicians can afford to bungle a lot of things and ignore a lot of other things. But they can’t afford to ignore the issues that really matter to voters. It’s been less than a week since British PM Keir Starmer (now ex-PM) paid the price for tone deafness. So maybe we should look a bit deeper.

Dr. H. Winet offered a thoughtful response to the screed:

Your question is too short-term, and ignores the underlying cause of our predicament. The lay public is the ultimate arbiter of government policy. During the past 30 years it has steadily decreased its trust of academic scientists, because they have become so politicized that they are viewed more as preachers than honest brokers of data. The phrase “settled science” is a key symptom of the preaching arrogance. To members of the working class, university elitists are more interested in ideologies than their everyday struggles to live even a shred of the American dream. Vannevar Bush couldn’t have predicted this result of his dream.

He’s right; trust in science has declined over the years: “Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, compared with 70% when Gallup last measured it more than four decades ago. ” It has yet to recover from the beating it took during the Covid panic five years ago.

Trust has also changed political polarities, according to Gallup: “Republicans today are much less likely than their predecessors in 1975 to have confidence in science. Meanwhile, Democrats today have more confidence than their fellow partisans did in the past.”

Partisanship is likely to affect how people see government failure to renew a given grant. Politicians, estimating reelection chances, must ask: Do those who can be persuaded to vote for them next time see matters more as Gawrylewski does or more as Winet does? It’s not Armageddon, it’s a marketplace.

But there is a bigger issue as well…

There are just so many areas today in which science disciplines are not earning our trust. We have covered many of them over the years here at Mind Matters News. Here are a few I don’t think we have touched on yet:

● Colin Wright draws attention to the growing habit among scholars of making themselves the research subjects, (autoethnography) Objectivity is not even a goal; the thesis may simply be an identity politics rant. The journal may have been founded in order to process rants. If such researchers’ or journals’ funding are not renewed, how will that affect what most of us understand to be science?

● AI is beginning to flood the journals with slop, and journals struggle to address it. At Science Alert, Vitomir Kovanovic, explains,

The preprint website arXiv has announced that researchers who have put their names to papers that included errors clearly generated by artificial intelligence (AI) will face a year-long ban and ongoing restrictions.

The move is a response to a growing influx of AI-generated papers faced by scholarly journals as well as sites such as arXiv, which serve as unofficial platforms for research publication ahead of peer review…

A common problem in AI-generated research writing is hallucinated citations: references to other research that does not exist.

“‘AI Slop’ Is Flooding Science Publishing, And One Major Site Is Fighting Back,” (May 19, 2026)

Well, we can’t have it both ways, can we? If AI can really write the stuff, what is the point of awarding grants to human researchers? That is a case they will need to make, especially in the face of claims that the slop is getting better.

● The system often works to protect outright fraud. At Reason, “Seconds” reports

In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné’s paper [on Alzheimer] had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.

More news and details trickled out over time. Charles Piller’s 2025 book Doctored talks about the Amyloid Mafia, a nickname for a network that had prioritized novelty over replication and marginalized dissenters for decades. Anyone questioning the amyloid gospel was pushed out and watched their funding vanish.

“How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars,” (May 6, 2026)

When the well-protected fraud was uncovered, Lesné resigned a rich man.

The moral? The people who do not trust science today would probably like to be able to. And the people who do trust it may simply be unaware of the problems — some of them growing problems.