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An analysis of 244 articles identified the administration’s conditional funding of federal grants as the most-cited mechanism that has constrained public health research.
Kathryn Palmer
Report Details ‘Patterns’ of Trump’s Censorship of Science
By Kathryn Palmer
Instances of self-censorship are harder to measure, researchers say.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | CFranke/F1online/Getty Images
Nearly two years after the Trump administration began upending the federal research enterprise, a new analysis shows how those policies have worked together to censor public health research.
The advocacy group Defend Research and Research Consulting published an analysis last month of 4,200 coded extracts from 244 scholarly and news sources describing individual incidents of changes to public health research policy between January 2025 and June 2026. The report, titled “From anecdote to evidence,” used artificial intelligence to identify how often those publications cited particular methods of constraining research at the individual, institutional and system level.
The analysis aims to deepen the scientific community’s understanding of how the second Trump administration’s policies have converged to assert more political control over the nation’s research enterprise. Since January 2025, the National Institutes of Health and other research agencies have terminated or frozen billions in grants, including many related to climate change, vaccines, race and gender; deleted tranches of federal data; fired masses of federal workers; and moved to politicize the grant-making process.
“I was watching with concern what was happening in the U.S., being very aware that this is part of the trend toward populist or right-wing governments,” Rob Johnson, managing director of Research Consulting, which is based in the U.K., told Inside Higher Ed. “We need to understand what’s happening, and it’s important to be able to pick out the patterns and tools being used to censor science.”
While numerous groups are already documenting the fallout of some of those changes, Defend Research and Research Consulting wanted to broaden the scope.
“Taken individually, the changes weakening a research system may look like routine administrative decisions or isolated exceptions. A dataset is removed, a survey question is dropped, a grant is canceled, a laboratory loses staff, or a researcher abandons a topic,” the report reads. “This report shows that these seemingly disconnected developments form part of a broader pattern.”
According to the report, “conditioning” funding—such as freezing a university’s federal grants until it agreed to change certain campus policies—was the most-cited mechanism the Trump administration has used to control research, with 253 quotations. The other top-cited mechanisms of control identified included “eliminating the machinery” through agency firings and consolidations (163 quotes) and the government’s efforts to “tamper with the record” by deleting or editing public health–related federal web pages and datasets (173 quotes).
Altering federal records is akin to the Trump administration “covering its footsteps,” Johnson said.
The Trump administration is “doing things that are going to damage public health, but at the same time [it’s] removing the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that will [show] that damage,” he said. “The simultaneous erosion of this knowledge infrastructure alongside the grant terminations and so on is going to make it increasingly hard to actually see what the impact has been.”
The report found far fewer instances of attempts to constrain public research on an individual level, with 28 quotes related to policing researchers’ speech and 25 related to “chilling the discourse.” The latter includes instances of pre-emptively altering programs and content and self-censoring or avoiding research.
However, self-censorship is an elusive metric to capture and “reaches a lot further than what we can necessarily see and describe,” Johnson added.
“Researchers look at what the administration is signaling as its priorities, and they change the focus of their research, the terminology they’re using, or move away from fields that seem to be out of favor,” he said. “We’re seeing a shift in the nature of the research system in line with the administration’s priorities. Some of it is through direct intervention, but some of which is just anticipatory compliance.”
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