Government Shutdown Leaves Scientists in Limbo
Hundreds of people at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received layoff notices, and work at many federal laboratories has been suspended
A sign with a notice of closure is seen pinned on the fence to the National Zoo on October 12, 2025 in Washington, DC.
The shutdown of the US government, about to enter its third week, is starting to take a toll on US science. Since the shutdown began, the administration of US President Donald Trump has cancelled funding for clean-energy research projects and laid off public-health workers. The activities of some federally funded museums and laboratories have been suspended, along with the processing of grant applications by agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Funding to run the US government expired on 1 October after members of the US Congress failed to pass a spending bill. Negotiations to end the impasse have made little progress. Lawmakers from the opposition Democratic party say that they will only pass the spending bill if it extends popular health-care subsidies, a condition that Republicans do not want to negotiate. “The longer this goes on, the deeper the cuts are going to be,” Vice President JD Vance said Sunday.
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The Trump administration said in a court filing Friday that it will lay off 4,100- 4,200 federal employees, an action officially termed a reduction in force (RIF). The Trump administration invoked the absence of a spending bill as justification for the layoffs, which are an unprecedented measure during a shutdown. Unions representing federal workers have filed suit over the layoffs.
Starting Friday night, some 1,300 staff members of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received RIF notices, although the notices for 700 were quickly rescinded, according to Local 2883 of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing CDC employees. The layoffs would “undermine the nation’s ability to respond to public health emergencies,” a CDC staff member affected by the layoff said Tuesday at a news conference organized by Local 2883.
Some CDC employees have now been laid off twice in the span of half a year, says mathematical statistician Isaac Michael. At the CDC, Michael and his colleagues ran a survey and database that track the experience of new mothers in the United States — until the entire team was laid off in April. Several court orders have preserved their employment status for now, though they are still not allowed to work even when the government reopens. But some of his colleagues received a second layoff notice within the last few days, making it unlikely they will ever be reinstated.
If a state experiences a future uptick in maternal or infant deaths, “we won’t even know there’s a problem, because we’re not collecting any reliable data, and we won’t be able to do anything to help”, Michael says.
Andrew Nixon, communications director at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the CDC, said that all HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated as non-essential by their respective divisions, and that the department will continue to close “wasteful and duplicative entities”.
The administration’s court filing said that the US Environmental Protection Agency would lose 20-30 people. Staff members at US Department of Energy (DoE) offices overseeing renewable energy, energy efficiency and other areas have also received RIF notcies, a DoE spokesperson said. “These offices are being realigned to reflect the Trump administration’s commitment to advancing affordable, reliable, and secure energy for the American people,” the spokesperson said.
Coinciding with the shutdown, the administration has also announced a fresh round of cuts to research projects, adding to billions of dollars in federal research grants revoked since Trump took office in January.
On the second day of the shutdown, the DoE announced that it was cutting almost US$7.6 billion in funding from 223 energy projects, many of them supporting renewable energy. An analysis by Nature found that the list includes grants to 33 academic institutions, which have a combined value of $620 million.
An overlapping list that has not yet been made public includes 647 projects slated for termination, according to the news outlet Semafor and others. The DoE did not respond immediately to a request for comment about the grant cuts.
The NIH and NSF, among other agencies, have stopped awarding new grants and holding reviews of grants. At the NSF, more than 40 review panels in disciplines such as astronomy, mathematics, and chemistry were scheduled to be held in the first two weeks of October and have been canceled.
That scenario seems increasingly likely: the lead Republican in the House of Representatives, Rep. Mike Johnson, predicted Monday that this will be “one of the longest shutdowns in American history.” The previous record holder, in 2019, was 35 days.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on October 15, 2025.
Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences.
Dan Garisto is a freelance science journalist.
Max Kozlov is a science journalist at Nature whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Nature, Quanta Magazine and Science, among other publications.
Heidi Ledford works for Nature magazine.
Jeff Tollefson 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.
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