New Republican Science Chair Sketches Priorities, Sidesteps Chaos from Funding Freezes

At the House Science Committee’s first hearing this year, Republicans avoided discussion of chaos in the scientific community caused by President Donald Trump’s early executive orders while Democrats sought to draw attention to the disruptions.

In his first hearing as chair, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) said Congress should focus on incentivizing private sector R&D through actions such as “tax reform, reducing bureaucratic red tape, and safeguarding patents and intellectual property rights.”

“I believe that over the rest of this decade, we’re going to see an incredible growth in our science and technology sectors, and the last thing that Congress should be doing is slowing this down,” Babin said. He noted the increasing expenditures on R&D by industry while also stressing that the federal government has an important role to play in supporting “high risk, high reward” research.

Babin also called for reforming the U.S. research system in light of technological competition with China while committing to retain free market principles. “We can’t beat China by becoming them,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) pointed to Trump’s executive orders freezing federal funding and disbanding federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as undermining the country’s scientific enterprise. She also mentioned a news report that the National Science Foundation has been asked to prepare to lay off between one quarter and half of its staff in the next two months, though she noted that she is not sure if the report is accurate. (New reporting by Science states that the Office of Personnel Management asked NSF to prepare for layoffs on that scale.)

“The new administration is actively, and with unprecedented speed and ferocity, apparently seeking to tear down and undermine some of the very scientific foundations upon which our leadership has been so painstakingly built,” Lofgren said. “I just don’t know how anyone reconciles the rhetoric about competing with China with pulling the rug out from under our own research enterprise.”

Earlier this week, Lofgren sent letters to NSF and other science agencies requesting information on their efforts to comply with Trump’s DEI orders and expressing concern that the agencies “appear willing to carry out these destructive policies without pushback or protest.”

Alternatives to DEI probed

Committee Republicans did not address Trump’s orders or their effects, though Babin asked witness Heather Wilson, the president of the University of Texas at El Paso, to highlight how her university does not have a DEI office yet produces “an overwhelming number of STEM graduates compared with other R1 Hispanic-serving institutions with DEI offices.”

Wilson noted that UTEP is 96% minority, 84% Hispanic, and 66% Pell Grant eligible. She described the university conducting analyses of the academic, social, financial, and cultural circumstances that affect individual students’ success.

“We have the results people who advocate for DEI say they want,” Wilson said. “We meet each student where they are, and we help them to become a better version of themselves. … If you give students access to an excellent higher education and show them where the doors are, you can inspire them to achieve at very, very high levels.”

Rep. Luz Rivas (D-CA) pressed Wilson on the subject, noting that UTEP receives millions of dollars in federal funding to support diversity in science and help other universities understand how to implement DEI initiatives. Wilson replied by characterizing DEI offices and training as “quite different from the inclusive excellence strategies pursued by universities like UTEP,” saying that the former were largely fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

“We haven’t gone in a direction that I think is the concern,” she said. “I do think that there’s a lot of confusion about what DEI is and what it is not, and that may be an area where things can be clarified.”

Funding freeze fallout

Witness Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the uncertainty from the temporary funding freeze has caused many researchers, especially those early in their careers, to rethink whether a career in science is right for them.

“Graduate students, postdocs, the people who do the work in the sciences, are living paycheck to paycheck. So, when this lack of certainty happens, even if it’s for a period of two or three weeks, it leaves a scar,” Parikh said.

He added that dissuading people from pursuing science means those researchers are less likely to go on to work in aerospace, AI, or other priority technology sectors.

“If we could say from the top down, science remains a priority and we’re going to continue, and this is the concrete thing that’s going to happen, that would make such a difference,” Parikh said.

In contrast, witness Samuel Hammond, the chief economist of the technology think tank Foundation for American Innovation, said U.S. scientific institutions “are in need of a deeper disruption,” in reference to the reports of planned layoffs at NSF. Prior to the hearing, he posted on social media that NSF could operate with one-tenth the staff and be ten times as effective “with the right people and smarter approaches.”

In the hearing, Hammond stated that funding of “politicized research” by NSF and other science agencies is part of the reason why science funding “has lost the bang for its buck” in the U.S. Hammond alluded to a report released by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last fall that asserts over 25% of new NSF grants in 2024 went to projects that “pushed far-left perspectives” on status, social justice, gender, race, and environmental justice.

Some representatives and other witnesses disagreed with the methodology of the study and its characterization of NSF’s activities. Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC) said the study applied a search of 200 terms to NSF’s database of abstracts, which included words such as disability, women, bias, barrier, and Hispanic.

“This is a complete ignorance of science,” she said. “Of course, words like bias and systemic can show up across disciplines that have nothing to do with diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Foushee also lamented that NSF staff are now using a similar word search as part of the agency’s review of DEI grants mandated by Trump.