Thousands of people gathered Friday in cities across the United States to protest the Trump administration’s jobs and funding cuts to science agencies and research programs.
"The banning of federally funded research in my own field of climate science, the normalization of anti-science in our government agencies and institutions — the NIH, the NSF, the EPA — these are among the most chilling developments," University of Pennsylvania professor and climate scientist Michael Mann said in a speech at the Washington, D.C., protest on the National Mall.
Dubbed “Stand Up for Science,” the movement organized protests on Friday in more than 30 U.S. locations.
"We call on policymakers, institutions, and the scientific community to uphold the integrity of science, protect its accessibility, and ensure its benefits serve all people. To achieve this, we seek the following policy actions," organizers said on their website.
The first two months of President Trump’s second term have witnessed an assault on scientific institutions, including the elimination of global health programs, the overturning of climate policies passed during the Biden administration, funding cuts to federal science research and the dismissal of federal science agencies like the NSF, NIH, CDC, EPA, NOAA, NPS, NWS, NASA, FWS and FDA.
In response, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University, announced in a social media post that she intended to hold a March 7 protest, the New York Times reported.
"I've never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world," she wrote in a post on Bluesky on Feb. 8.
In New York City's Washington Square Park on Friday, several hundred people joined the nationwide protests, including Ren Hinks, 39, who works for the Humane League, an international nonprofit organization that focuses on animal rights and the environment.
“A lot of our work is on improving conditions for chickens — which also improves the conditions of people: Fighting bird flu,” Hinks told Yahoo News. “The Trump administration’s denial over how big of a problem bird flu is, and the fact that they kind of want to ignore it and stop the vaccine research, directly impacts our work.”
Several of the executive orders Trump has implemented so far directly affect the Humane League, Hinks said, such as orders regressing wildlife protection and the U.S.'s withdrawal from the World Health Organization.
“This research that the NIH and climate scientists [are doing] has an impact on everyone, has an impact on the strength of our economy and our standing in the world,” Hinks said. “The defunding of some of these programs is going to affect our food supply, biodiversity and it’s going to have an impact on [our] children and [our] children’s future if we’re not putting money into vaccines.”
Dr. Edith McCarthy, who has spent more than 30 years in New York working as a pediatrician, decried what she sees as a recent rise in vaccine skepticism..
“It is shocking,” McCarthy told Yahoo News at the New York demonstration, adding that the political decisions being made by the Trump administration worry her.
One of McCarthy’s daughters, she said, was attending a "Stand Up for Science" rally in Chicago and is currently working in a research lab at Northwestern University. Trump’s announcement on Friday that his administration planned to withhold $400 million in federal grants from Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” was just one more bad sign, McCarthy said.
Another "Stand Up for Science" participant, who did not want to reveal her name, said she hopes these public gatherings help people who feel paralyzed.
“If you’re feeling scared, if you’re feeling powerless, you are not powerless [and] you are not alone,” she told Yahoo News. “There are people who are gathering to make this a better, fairer society — a healthier society, a more diverse and inclusive society, and if you keep looking, you’ll find us.