The Trump administration’s impact on mathematics
It would be hard to be unaware that the current government of the United States has implemented many policies in unprecedented ways, with wide-ranging impacts on individuals and groups. Mathematicians are certainly not immune to the individual impacts, many of which are broadly publicized. I will focus here on the impacts that we face as mathematicians specifically: impacts on the scientific community more broadly, and impacts specifically on mathematics.
Conferences in the USA
At least one previous article in the Notes addressed the author’s current reluctance to attend conferences in the USA. The author’s decision was based on the extensive anecdotal evidence of people having been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, often for extended periods, on the basis of limited or no evidence, or even without any actual charge of wrongdoing.
The last International Congress of Mathematics (ICM) that was held in North America took place in Berkeley in 1986, so the forthcoming ICM scheduled for Philadelphia 40 years later in 2026 is likely to be the only one to take place in North America during the careers of most currently-active mathematicians. That many members of the Canadian mathematical community may be unwilling to attend this gathering is not a small issue.
More generally, the relative sizes and scopes of the mathematical communities in Canada and the USA tends to mean that for many Canadian mathematicians, many of the most accessible conferences (in terms of travel costs, travel times, and time changes involved) within our fields of research, take place in the USA. If we are unwilling to attend these conferences, or to send our trainees to them, either our ties to a significant portion of our academic networks are weakened, or the costs of disseminating our research are notably increased.
National Science Foundation Budget and Interference
Most mathematical research funding in the USA comes through the National Science Foundation (NSF). On July 21st, a public letter was sent from the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3403 to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. This union represents roughly 2/3 of the 1500 employees of the NSF, and the letter was signed by 149 of these employees, a significant proportion of the NSF workforce. It raises a number of serious concerns about NSF funding:
- The letter states that between April and May 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) required that the NSF terminate over 1600 active grants. The criteria on which these decisions were made was not disclosed. Other sources have indicated that keywords such as “equitable” or “minority” associated with particular grants may have been behind these cuts, and that the ways in which these words could be used in scientific contexts unassociated with equity-related research may not even have been considered. The canceled grants came to more than $1 billion USD.
- The letter states that an ideological review of grant applications by political appointees is taking place, and is interfering with the peer review process intended to assess the grant applications on their scientific merit.
- The letter states that the financial allocation to the NSF being proposed for 2026 represents a 56% cut to the NSF budget (from $8.8 billion to $3.9 billion), including more than 70% of funding targeted to education programs. It claims that these proposed cuts would eliminate funding to more than 250,000 researchers and students.
- It outlines a variety of ways in which the work of NSF staff has been made more difficult, and consequently their ability to support researchers has been impeded.
A recent Supreme Court decision ruled that the government was allowed to withhold the funding from the cancelled grants.
Additional information from: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-grants-nearly-90-percent-were-related-dei
Fulbright Board Mass Resignation
On June 11th, after repeated attempts to resolve their concerns both verbally and in writing with members of the Trump administration, the Fulbright Scholarship Board voted to resign en masse and issued a public statement explaining their decision. In the statement, they assert that:
- No responses or acknowledgments had been made to their attempts to reach out to the administration with their concerns.
- A substantial number of awards that had been approved through the merit-based review process, were subsequently denied by government administrators.
- In addition, more than 1200 foreign recipients are having their applications subjected to an extra unauthorized review by the government.
The Board believed that continuing to serve under these circumstances would legitimize what they believed to be unlawful and unjustified actions by the Trump administration, so chose to resign.
Source: https://substack.com/inbox/post/165673358?r=17cemi (covered in the news, for example, by https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/fulbright-board-resigns-scholarship-trump-quit-rcna212395)
AMS Government Relations Campaigns, Including Problems with Federal Statistics
The American Mathematical Society has a Government Relations office that encourages mathematicians to lobby the government about issues that impact the mathematical community, and suggests specific issues for them to focus on. Current priorities of the AMS office of Government Relations include:
- Reversing or at least moderating the 56% proposed cut to the NSF budget in 2026.
- Publicizing the work of the American Statistical Association (ASA), who are keeping track of changes to government programs that collect public data and produce federal statistics. One recent report from the ASA notes, for example, that the next US census has been mandated to exclude “people who are in our country illegally” for the first time ever. Another observes that the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) was recently fired by Trump for the reported job numbers, which Trump asserted were “RIGGED” to make him and Republicans look bad, and the White House subsequently issued an article undermining the integrity of the BLS.
- In June, the AMS was one of 20 scientific organizations who wrote a joint letter to the government supporting the work of career civil servants in maintaining standards with respect to agencies like the NSF, and opposing efforts to politicize these positions or to make them more temporary.
Source: https://www.ams.org/government
Impacts on the Future
The various problems outlined above are likely to have a substantial and long-lasting impact on the American scientific community, and more specifically on the mathematical community. Research directions that are no longer being funded will of course slow scientific progress on specific problems, but the larger impact may be on scientific personnel.
Early in the year, there were announcements that funding had been cut to at least a dozen of the NSF-funded REU programs (Research Experiences for Undergraduates). The closest equivalent to these programs in Canada is the NSERC USRA (Undergraduate Summer Research Award) program, but a particularly important difference to understanding the magnitude of this cut is that each REU program includes and funds a number of students, typically 8-10.
The difficulties international students face if they wish to study in the United States have reached unprecedented levels, between travel restrictions, increased difficulty of obtaining visas, and reduced supports for students with equity-deserving identities.
Perhaps most importantly, the Trump government’s efforts to destroy all programs that serve to encourage or support equity or diversity, risks returning us to an era when American mathematicians were almost exclusively privileged white men.
