In 2024, China outspent the United States on research and development for the first time, $1.03 trillion to $1.01 trillion. The figure comes from Indicators 2026, the biennial assessment of American scientific competitiveness released by the National Science Board.
This week, National Academy of Sciences member and Professor Walter Leal of UC Davis, the lead author of an April letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, informed 3,375 signatories that their letter had been entered into the official record as Outside Witness Testimony at both subcommittees that fund federal research. The letter warns that the proposed FY27 cuts to federal research agencies would “risk the loss of a generation of scientific talent.” Its signers include 48 Nobel laureates, 30 recipients of the National Medal of Science and more than 1,500 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The House Labor, Health and Human Services Subcommittee marks up NIH funding on June 5. The Senate is still in hearings.
What Has Changed Since August
Leal and his colleagues sent their first letter to the Senate last August. It drew roughly 2,000 signatures and warned that proposed cuts to research agencies “would have irreparable consequences for our economy, public health, national security and innovation.” The new letter is the second. It has grown by more than half in signatories. More than 200 of the new names belong to assistant professors, the early-career scientists whose grant cycles will be the first place policy changes show up.
Mark Hay, a Georgia Tech marine ecologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who signed both letters, told me the breadth of support is itself the news. “This level of unanimity is unusual,” he said. “Scientists dedicate their lives to discovery, and it is not just science that is being attacked, but the concept of truth itself.”
The administration’s FY27 proposal includes structural changes that headline percentages conceal. The NIH budget appears in the request as a 10.8 percent reduction. Inside that figure are a 28 percent cut to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a 15 percent cap on facilities and administrative costs that universities use to support research infrastructure and a requirement that competitive awards be fully obligated in their first year. The administration’s own tables project a 47 percent reduction in the number of new NIH competing awards. The CDC headline is a 3.47 percent cut. Underneath, per Leal’s analysis, 14 CDC programs are proposed for elimination just as an unusual cruise ship outbreak of hantavirus and a new Ebola outbreak are making headlines.
The Document Congress Never Saw
Trump fired the entire National Science Board in April. Science magazine’s Jeffrey Mervis has now reported what the firing interrupted. The board was finalizing a two-page essay, intended as a cover letter to the State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2026 report, that described the U.S.-China relationship as “a two-nation race for leadership” and “a marathon, not a sprint,” i.e., requiring substantial ongoing investment by the federal government if the US is to retain its technical superiority. The board did not have the chance to approve it before being dismissed.
Keivan Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt who was halfway through his six-year term when Trump removed every Science Board member, told Mervis the framing was deliberate. “You only say it’s a two-nation race when you’re No. 2,” Stassun said. “And that’s humiliating for a country that reacted to Sputnik by doing whatever it took to win the race to the moon.”
Although the cover letter never made it out, the data behind it did.
Why This Is the Moment They Are Sounding the Alarm
Adjacent measures from the same Indicators 2026 report tell a similar story. In 2000, China accounted for about 5 percent of global research spending; the United States alone accounted for 39 percent. Samsung was the leading recipient of U.S. patents in 2024 with 10,220, more than Apple, Qualcomm and IBM combined. Domestic startups built on technology licensed from U.S. universities fell to 951, down from a 2020 peak of 1,125. China surpassed the United States in annual science and engineering doctorates awarded in 2019, and the gap has widened. In 2024, temporary visa holders earned 38 percent of all S&E doctorates from U.S. universities. They earned more than half of those awarded in computer and information sciences, in engineering and in mathematics and statistics. Among U.S. S&E workers with doctoral degrees, 46 percent were born abroad.
Against those numbers, NSF’s own FY27 Budget Request proposes a 54.7 percent cut, taking the agency from $8.75 billion to $3.96 billion. The budget submissions of EPA, NIST and NOAA propose cuts of 52 percent, 54 percent and the complete defunding of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Across the federal R&D portfolio, defense rises by nearly 80 percent; nondefense falls by 4 percent.
Hay framed what those numbers add up to. “By gutting science, the United States is stepping down and letting competitor nations like China create the future our children will inherit.”
Cutting science spending also hurts the economy. Economists estimate that for every dollar spent on scientific research and development, the economy eventually produces an additional $1.71 in output, a return that exceeds nearly every other form of public or private investment.
The Next Vote
On May 14, the full House Appropriations Committee adopted the FY27 Commerce, Justice, Science bill by a vote of 32 to 28, with substantial cuts to NSF, NOAA and NASA. The House Labor, Health and Human Services markup of NIH and CDC is on June 5. The Senate is still in hearings.
The administration can fire a board. It cannot fire 3,375 scientists. It cannot rewrite Indicators 2026. The question on June 5, and again in the markups that follow, is whether having the warnings on the official record is enough.
Indicators 2026 and the FY27 budget request are produced by the same federal apparatus. Their accounts of where American science stands do not match. The markups beginning June 5 will reconcile which account Congress accepts.
