Trump axes AI staff and research funding, and scientists are worried

Ongoing Trump administration cuts to government agencies risk creating new collateral damage: the future of AI research. 

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the February layoffs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) of 170 people — including several AI experts — will inevitably throttle funding for AI research. Since 1950, the NSF has awarded grants that led to massive tech breakthroughs, including the algorithmic basis for Google and the building blocks for AI chatbots. 

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The firings are expected to impact current research and budding AI talent in the US. 

“Almost every employee with an advanced degree at every American AI firm has been a part of NSF-funded research at some point in their career,” Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center, which focuses on national security, told Bloomberg. “Cutting those grants is robbing the future to pay the present.”

The cuts leave fewer staff to award grants; Bloomberg noted that some review panels and project funding have already been halted. Similarly to impending layoffs at NIST and the AI Safety Institute, the firings impact teams created under the Chips and Science Act, which invested in domestic machine learning and manufacturing efforts. 

Industry experts and former NSF employees told Bloomberg they found the move confusing given how it weakens US AI development — despite how vocal the Trump administration has been about ramping up “America’s global AI dominance.” Rumors of massive budget cuts to NSF are also circulating. 

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That said, it’s hard to tell how intentional or strategic the cuts to AI-specific staff are. As has been the case at many other government agencies, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targets probationary employees (who have fewer legal protections) and projects that it appears to misunderstand as DEI initiatives simply for using words like “diversity” in their program descriptions. An NSF staffer clarified to Bloomberg that, by “diversity of researchers,” these projects refer to people from “different fields, states and disciplines.” 

Just last week, OpenAI and Anthropic partnered with the US National Labs to test the companies’ latest models for scientific discovery. With the recent launch of ChatGPT Gov, OpenAI’s chatbot for local, state, and federal agency use, and Project Stargate, a $500 billion data center investment plan, the Trump administration appears to be shrinking existing AI infrastructure within the government while investing in partnerships with private AI companies — a move that has already undermined government regulation and oversight, and could concentrate AI power too singularly with those companies over time.