>https://www.aip.org/statistics/impacts-of-restrictions-on-federal-grant-funding-in-physics-and-astronomy-graduate-programs
Surveys of physics and astronomy program chairs indicate that the freezes and cuts to federal labs and research funding and grants are having a significant impact on graduate admissions in the US.

As of June, NREL has lost 5% of its research and engineering staff, LLNL 10%, and PPPL has laid off more than a third of its research and engineering staff, and so on. 37% of departments at public universities report at least one faculty member expected to lose or who has already lost funding by Fall of 2025, and private universities are reporting 63%. As a result, first-year graduate admissions for the Fall are down about 13% already (nearly double the drop-off seen during Covid). These results are only for those departments that have already settled their graduate admissions for the Fall; many departments are still delaying admissions as they wait for confirmation of funding and some universities are reporting they may have to rescind graduate offers already made. UMD's physics department cut graduate offers by 20%, University of Iowa's cut theirs by 30%, Princeton by almost half, University of Oregon by two-thirds, and so on.

All of this, mind you, is just for physics and astronomy. As I understand it things in bio, chem, and medical fields are worse, and I've heard nothing about environmental science, meteorology, climatology, and other natural studies.

How has your department/program/school/lab been impacted this year?

>>16692612 (OP)
>bio, chem, and medical fields
Replication Crisis, Rx patenting, Corona.
>environmental science, meteorology, climatology
Political Sciences.

>>16692612 (OP)
https://www.aip.org/aip/policies-reports-financials
>501(c)(3) that solicits funds to pay itself to act as a gatekeeper of funds and hire more people to solicit more funds, while contributing nothing to the field it names itself after, thinks they should get more funds
Many such cases.

>>16692620
retard

Shit's pretty fucked ngl - half my department's lost some or all of their funding this year because it was tied up in DOE or NSF stuff, and the other half is expecting to lose funding if the cuts to science and outreach in the NASA proposal go through. We had to cut grad admissions by about a quarter for the Fall, and at least one of our current grads is probably going to leave because of visa shit.

>>16692612 (OP)
>How has your department/program/school/lab been impacted this year?
I applied to and accepted a faculty position at a smaller school. This meant accepting that I was going to have to give up a lot of the internal support that you get from being part of a bigger school with lots of research faculty and resources, but the flip side was that I could supplement this by applying for some small, external grants directed at primarily undergraduate institutions and taking advantage of NSF user facilities to keep experimental research going until I can get my own, much more modest, setup established.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the PUI grants I would have been applying for have been frozen, cut, or are expected to be cut within the year. On top of that, the NSF user facility I had planned on applying for runtime at is telling everyone they're probably going to be suspending operations if the uncertainty over funding continues into the Fall.

So, basically, I'm fucked. I've been talking to my new coworkers over the summer and they're all in a similar panic; people were anticipating *some* disruptions or reductions, but everyone's basically being told not to count on *any* external funding for the foreseeable future.

Nothing of value was lost

>>16693629
I have a feeling your faculty career will be short lived

Good. The whole system should be dismantled.

how did LLNL lose more staff than NREL? I thought nukes are good and windmills are bad

>>16694064
PPPL is the one that surprises me the most.

>>16692612 (OP)
I think Trump’s policy is a great shock therapy to US universities. The amount of drooling retards I’ve seen admitted to physics grad school is staggering. I’m not talking “this guy doesn’t know about Gromov-Witten invariants by 4th year of undergrad” /sci/ meme. No, I’m talking about people who can’t take an integral of a sine without Mathematica. And the number of times I’ve seen students defend their dissertations and failing to answer basic questions pertaining to their field and nonetheless getting postdocs because their professor needs shabbosgoyim is equally staggering. Hopefully admin will be more selective in the future.

>>16692925
Don't reply to namefags. We all know they're schizophrenic retards. Just add them to a filter. I promise you're not missing anything.

>>16694344
>Just add them to a filter.
How to do that?

>>16694064
roles terminated are a more meaningful metric than raw number of layoffs

Not sure about LLNL and NREL, but looking at archived staff pages for PPPL's theory group just before the inauguration
https://web.archive.org/web/20241221211629/https://theory.pppl.gov/people/people.php?cid=1&n=research-staff
versus last month
https://web.archive.org/web/20250501005219/https://theory.pppl.gov/people/people.php?cid=1&n=research-staff
They terminated 15 out of 35 research physicist positions in the theory group. Not sure on the hard numbers for how many engineering and technician positions were terminated in the experimental groups (trying to track down staff lists for those groups from archive/wayback, but no luck so far).

>(WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH ME!)

>>16695658
>fire all the white researchers
>promise to replace them all with indians and chinese as a negotiation tactic for a trade deal
this tracks, unfortunately