Equity. Racial discrimination. Climate change. Gender. These are just a few of the 200 or so terms being used to flag federal grants that are under review to determine whether they align with the research priorities set by the administration of US President Donald Trump . The administration initially terminated US$3 billion in grants in 2025, and despite many reversals, roughly $1.4 billion in funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) r emained frozen or cancelled earlier this year. In addition, roughly $25 billion for international aid and development — including for research on global health, infectious-disease surveillance and environmental conservation — was lost when the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was closed down last year.

During the first two years of Trump’s second term, amid funding cuts, agency and programme closures and lawsuits (see ‘Lost funding and shut-down science’), some researchers had to get creative to keep…