WASHINGTON, D.C.—Scientists, advocates and lawmakers gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol Saturday for the second annual Stand Up for Science rally. Addressing the crowd, government scientists spoke out against the Trump administration’s moves to cut or censor their work.
“Science needs integrity,” Jenna Norton, a scientist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, who was one of the speakers at the Washington D.C. rally, told Scientific American. "It's important we speak out on how we are affected, and the future of our country."
Norton, who filed a whistleblower complaint after the National Institutes of Health placed her on administrative leave in November, told demonstrators on Saturday that the Trump administration is “opposed to science itself. Eventually they will come for your science, too.”
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More than 2,000 people turned out for the protest on the National Mall; similar rallies took place in more than 50 cities around the country, according to the organizers—up from about a dozen a year ago. There were almost as many signs in the crowd as there were people, as well as a large inflatable duck standing next to the stage as a visual protest against “quack” medicine, a nod to how federal vaccine and nutrition recommendations have changed under the Trump administration’s vaccine-skeptic health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Since the new Trump administration took office in 2025, U.S. science agencies have lost more employees than over the previous two decades. A further 10,000 or so Ph.D.-level experts in technical fields employed by the U.S. federal government have been lost to retirements, firings or buyouts, Science reported.
Speakers at the D.C. protest included Steve Volz, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellite division, who said the Trump administration had sidelined him in order to privatize federal weather reports. (The agency did not respond to a request for a comment.) Also addressing the protest were young researchers at the National Institutes of Health, whose union in March received a letter from the agency saying the government would no longer recognize it. Lawmakers and political figures, including Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and conservative-lawyer-turned-Trump critic George Conway, also filled the speakers’ lineup.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland backstage at a March 7, 2026, protest in Washington D.C.
Dan Vergano/Scientific American
Congress’s decision to pivot away from making the cataclysmic cuts to science funding that the Trump administration had proposed in 2025 is a “ray of sunshine,” said Van Hollen, speaking backstage to Scientific American. But he added that an upcoming presidential budget request focused on defense spending will almost certainly again call for those cuts. “The pushback has made a difference,” Van Hollen said, adding that Congress has written into law requirements that science funding be spent on the research purpose it has been earmarked for. The administration could ignore those laws, he said, triggering lawsuits and ultimately putting science on hold. “That’s why I say a ray of sunshine, not that the sun has come out,” he said.
In the last year “we have seen scientists mobilize for various days of action defending science, [which] has become a rallying cry for the broader resistance movement,” says sociologist Dana Fisher of American University, who studies and surveys protests. Scientists fit squarely into the demographics of expected Trump administration protestors: white, highly educated and middle-aged or older, she says.
“I expect we’ll continue to see science as a focus and mobilizer of action,” she adds.
Editor’s Note: This story is in development and may be updated.