Stand Up for Science Rallies Draw Crowds Protesting Trump Cuts
Scientists and supporters rallied in cities across the U.S. and Europe to protest dramatic funding cuts and other attacks from the Trump administration
Activists participate in the Stand Up for Science 2025 rally at the Lincoln Memorial on March 7, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Washington DC. Boston, Massachusetts. Denver, Colorado. Seattle, Washington. Trenton, New Jersey
Thousands of researchers and supporters of science protested in more than 30 cities across the United States and Europe today against actions taken by the administration of US President Donald Trump to cut the US scientific workforce and slash spending on research worldwide.
The mood was defiant at many of the rallies, where chants of “Scientists will not be silenced”, “Facts over fear” and “What do we want? Peer review! When do we want it? Now!” were heard.
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Quoting musician Bob Marley, Rush Holt Jr, former chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the crowd in Trenton, New Jersey, “get up, stand up”.
Over the past month, “I’ve been waiting for someone to do something,” said Abraham Flaxman, a global-health metrics researcher at the University of Washington who attended the Seattle rally. But “it’s dawned on me: nobody is coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.”
The Stand Up for Science rallies are a response to the Trump administration’s siege of the US research enterprise. Since taking office in January, Trump and his team have laid off, and in some cases then tried to rehire, thousands from US science agencies, whose jobs involved nuclear safety, bird flu surveillance, extreme-weather forecasting and more. The administration has also attempted to freeze research grants at science-funding agencies including the US National Science Foundation. And it has tried to slash ‘overhead costs’ awarded to biomedical research institutions by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — although federal judges have since blocked this action. This week, Nature revealed that, under Trump, the NIH — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — has begun mass termination of active research grants for projects studying topics, including transgender health, that do not align with the administration’s political ideology.
But the organizers know from past protests, such as the international March for Science in 2017 — which was organized by researchers critical of policies from Trump’s first presidency — that rallies alone will not effect change. “It’s not a one-and-done thing,” says Samantha Goldstein, who studies women’s health at the University of Florida in Gainesville and is one of the Stand Up for Science organizers. She adds: the organizers will continue to “be around, making sure our policy goals and demands are fulfilled — that’s what’s important”.
At a number of the rallies today, speakers and attendees worried about the chilling effect the Trump administration’s actions will have on future science and scientists.
Activists participate in the Stand Up for Science 2025 rally at the Lincoln Memorial on March 7, 2025 in Washington, DC. Stand Up for Science, a grassroots organization, held the rally calling on “policymakers, institutions, and the scientific community to uphold the integrity of science, protect its accessibility, and ensure its benefits serve all people.”
Atul Gawande, a public-health researcher and former assistant administrator at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), told the crowd in Washington DC that he has watched scientists holding their careers in boxes as they leave the dream jobs they have been fired from. (The Trump administration has fired thousands of workers from the USAID, which funds health programmes and disaster relief overseas, saying that it had been run by “radical left lunatics” and is party to “tremendous fraud”.) Scientists are being targeted, because “science doesn’t always give the answers that power wants,” Gawande said.
Some viewed the rallies as offering a safe outlet for scientists to voice their feelings. Valerie H., who declined to give her full name for fear of reprisal, is a software engineer who works in crop science. Recent mass firings at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have had a huge impact on Valerie’s research. “I know hundreds of people on LinkedIn who are looking for work,” she said at the Denver rally. “People are glad to have a place to come say something.”
People hold signs as they gather for “Stand Up For Science” rally to protest the Trump administration’s recent cuts to federal scientific funding, at Washington Square Park, New York, U.S., March 7, 2025.
That’s not to say that protests aren’t worthwhile: galvanizing a community can be important, Schuman says.
Austrian students and scientists attend a protest in support of the US “Stand up for science” movement, in Vienna, Austria on March 7, 2025.
In Washington DC, speaker Haley Chatelaine, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and vice-president of the NIH fellows union, told the crowd that the rallies were uplifting: “I feel excited and hopeful. We believe in our collective power.”
J.P. Flores, a core organizer for today’s rallies and a bioinformatics researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told Nature: “March 7 is the beginning — I don’t necessarily see it as the endpoint.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 7, 2025.
Julian Nowogrodzki is a science writer based in Boston.
Heidi Ledford works for Nature magazine.
Brendan Maher works for Nature magazine.
Alexandra Witze works for Nature magazine.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com