Less than two days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Evangeline Warren, a sociology PhD student at the Ohio State University, logged into a professional development workshop alongside a hundred other young researchers. Just about everyone online was either employed by, or receiving grants from, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest single funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world.

Mid-presentation, a senior organizer interrupted, informing attendees that the NIH was no longer “allowed to do any external communication,” Warren said. Without further explanation, the video call ended.

Warren’s experience was hardly unique in the first week of Trump’s second term. Hundreds of scientists flocked to Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter alternative, to report sudden, vague cancellations of long-scheduled meetings about government-funded science. These delays piled on top of a broader freeze on federal health agency communications issued by the Trump administration last week. In the past few days he has called for the US to stop working with the World Health Organization, suspended public reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and banned travel for Health and Human Services staff — all without explanation.

While briefly pausing communications during a presidential transition is normal, indefinitely disrupting the grant process like this is unheard of, according to several researchers at the NIH and NIH-funded universities. Rescheduling work meetings with a lot of moving parts would be a logistical nuisance for anyone. But when the memo comes from an administration that has repeatedly threatened to take down federal science agencies, a canceled meeting can feel more like the first step in a broader attack on public health and higher education.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has come for public health research, but it’s the first time their blows could actually land. Trump proposed deep cuts to the NIH in his first term, but the agency managed to stay on track, thanks to generous budget increases from a supportive Congress. Now, with anti-establishment allies like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poised to take control of the Department of Health and Human Services, dozens of scientists told me that they’re afraid that last week’s actions mark the beginning of the end of public science. If NIH-funded research grinds to a halt, long-awaited treatments for everything from cancer to diabetes — and whatever infectious disease might spark the next pandemic — could be delayed for years.

A senior researcher at the NIH, who spoke to Vox anonymously out of fear of retribution, told me, “It’s actually fucking scary.”

The Trump administration’s freeze on government science, explained

Last Tuesday, the Trump administration told agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services — including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — to pause all public communications until February 1, including weekly scientific reports, social media posts, and public health data releases. The next day, panicked researchers posted on Bluesky and Reddit about canceled meetings, rescinded job offers and grants, and travel bans, unsure whether these disruptions were part of the communications freeze.

Nearly all biomedical researchers in academia, and many........

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