Public Awareness of Threats to Public Health and Science in March 2025

The Trump administration’s disruption of federally funded public health and science began immediately after the inauguration. Executive orders in January 2025 forbidding federal support for diversity, equity, and inclusion activities and opposing trans rights signified opposition to these concepts as research topics. An extended “communications pause” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) meant scheduled grant review meetings were cancelled, effectively blocking the continued processing of scientific review. And a new NIH policy to restrict indirect costs included in research grants to just 15%, announced on February 7, further undermined critical federal support for research at universities across the United States.

Since those early weeks, the threats to public health and science have only continued, with health workers fired; USAID-supported global disease prevention and treatment ended; US researchers’ grants focused on LGBTQ+ populations, vaccines, HIV, and other topics terminated; and enormous sums of federal support halted at prominent universities—all of which are likely to damage public health.

Scientists and professional societies have expressed outrage over these changes, drafting commentaries for leading journals, authoring op-eds in major news outlets, and sharing personal narratives of terminated grants on social media. Thousands attended Stand Up for Science rallies across the country on March 7. Yet, while many court cases have been filed, mitigating the impact of some of these changes (such as an ongoing injunction on the NIH funding cap on indirect costs), the courts—and the scientific community—can only do so much. An activated public is also an important vehicle for mobilizing response to these threats to public health and science. But with so many issues competing for the public’s attention, how many of these federal actions is the public even aware of? And how does the public perceive the consequences of these actions?

To answer these questions, we fielded a short survey module on the NORC AmeriSpeak Omnibus, a biweekly, nationally representative, mixed-mode survey of US adults drawn from the AmeriSpeak Panel (N=1,176). The survey was fielded from March 20-24 (which followed all events described above, but preceded the April 1 firings of 10,000 workers from the US Department of Health and Human Services [HHS]). Analyses use NORC survey weights—based on national census benchmarks and balanced by sex, age, education, race/ethnicity, and region— to produce nationally representative estimates. Below, we discuss our key findings and implications.

Public Awareness of Actions Threatening Public Health and Science

We found that a high proportion of the American public (almost 80%) had heard about the firing of federal scientists and health workers, and a substantial number had heard of federal cuts to health research and treatment abroad (73.7%), to indirect costs (73.3%), and to specific research grants (70.2%) (see Exhibit 1). Far fewer were aware of changes to the process or conduct of scientific research, such as cancelled meetings (49.8%) or suspended scientific review (58.7%); 58.8% had heard about removals of publicly available data from federal websites.

We observed a significant partisan gap in awareness, with Democrats more aware than Republicans or Independents of all actions. These differences likely result from a confluence of factors, such as different news sources, with varying degrees of coverage of these issues; response bias; or different levels of attentiveness to health and science issues generally. (We included a measure of general attention to health topics in the media, and Democrats reported significantly higher levels [“a lot”] of attention [21.6%], compared to Republicans [13.4%] and Independents [10.5%].) But while Democrats are more aware of these actions, a large proportion of Independents and Republicans still registered substantial awareness of these recent changes.

Exhibit 1: Reported Awareness of Key Actions Affecting Public Health and Science, by Partisanship (N=1,176)

Source: authors’ analysis.

Note. Any reported awareness calculated by combining “a little,” “some,” and “a lot” responses.  “Don’t know” responses (<5 on any item) collapsed into “none”; <15 missing on any item. Items were randomly ordered. P values based on chi-square analyses.

Perceptions of Consequences of NIH Funding Cuts and Personal Experience with Federal Firings

We also asked participants to indicate their agreement with five potential negative and three potential positive consequences of NIH funding cuts (see Exhibit 2). Overall, we observed greater perceptions that funding cuts would have negative (versus positive) consequences, both in terms of economic and patient care impacts. Across perceptions, roughly one-half of participants agreed that cuts would have negative outcomes, compared with one-quarter who agreed that cuts would have positive outcomes.

About one-third of participants indicated “neither agree nor disagree,” which suggests considerable uncertainty and/or unfamiliarity with potential consequences. The percentage of those expressing the neutral option was as high as 40% for some consequences: higher tuition costs (negative impacts), and more streamlined operations and money for patient care (positive impacts). This makes sense, since many of the putative outcomes are uncertain or unknown at this point, or they may be more a component of rhetoric (i.e., efficiency gains in research) than reality. That said, there is good reason to believe that there would be both negative economic and patient care impacts of, for example, a 15% cap on indirects to universities and other research institutions—as well as on undergraduate tuition costs, which had the lowest reported agreement.

Exhibit 2: Agreement with Positive and Negative Consequences of NIH Funding Cuts (N=1,176)

Source: authors’ analysis.

Note. Overall agreement calculated by combining “agree” and “strongly agree” responses. “Don’t know” responses (<10 on any item) collapsed into “neither agree nor disagree”; <20 missing on any item. Items were randomly ordered and did not include the headers suggesting “positive” or “negative.”

We also asked respondents whether they or someone they knew (e.g., family member, friend) had been personally affected by the recent firings of any federal workers. Overall, 18% said that they had been personally affected (and another 12.8% weren’t sure). Moreover, this experience varied by partisanship, with almost one in four Democrats (23.9%) indicating a personal impact, compared to only 12% of Independents and 14% of Republicans.

Finally, to understand the correlates of perceiving potential positive and negative impacts of NIH funding cuts, we created summary indices by combining the five negative consequence items (weighted mean=3.40, SE=0.04, alpha=0.89) and three positive consequence items (weighted mean=2.73, SE=0.04, alpha=0.83). We found that, after adjusting for demographic characteristics (age, sex, race/ethnicity, income, and education) and partisanship, people who had personal experience with layoffs were 13% more likely to perceive negative impacts than those without such experience. Adjusting for demographics and personal experience with layoffs, Democrats were 28% more likely to perceive negative impacts than were Republicans.

Implications for the Future

Given the thousands of HHS layoffs on April 1, the percentage of US adults who reported being aware of federal firings in late March is undoubtedly an underestimate of current levels—and it was already at nearly 80%. Nearly one in five participants reported being personally affected by federal firings, and that figure is also likely higher now. As personal impact grows, we might expect that so, too, will people’s perceptions of the negative consequences of these actions. It will be important, however, to assess whether such perceptions vary along partisan lines moving forward, given the political patterning of both awareness and experiences of firings to date.

It is important to acknowledge that these findings do not suggest that the public is inattentive to issues and threats in other equally important domains, whether it be immigration, education, or the economy. From an information-processing perspective, individuals have limited cognitive capacity to attend to and make sense of the myriad changes occurring on a daily basis; attention and cognitive effort will necessarily go toward those issues that are most personally salient. And awareness does not automatically mean understanding, especially for topics as complex and seemingly distant from many people, such as how research gets funded.

This reality provides all the more reason to proactively and continually raise the public salience of threats to public health and science. After all, the indiscriminate slashing of funding and support for health and science research—and the federal and state agencies, universities, and research institutions that carry out this work—affects all Americans. The cuts impact the cancer care we receive, our children’s access to vaccinations, our vulnerability to infectious disease, and much more. Some of these outcomes may occur almost immediately, while others may take years to manifest. If the connections between research funding and patient care are not currently recognized by many members of the public, it could be in part because for years some scientists have not prioritized communicating, in a public facing way, what they are doing and why it matters.

These data are a call to action for greater storytelling around the indispensability of public health and science. Such narratives should be shared with news media, but cannot be limited to news alone given ongoing evidence of news avoidance among the public. Rather, these stories should also be told at the individual level, within personal networks, as well as the organizational and institutional level by professional organizations/societies and state/local health departments. And these stories should leverage theory- and evidence-based communication strategies if they are to bolster public understanding and bridge divides. At the same time, it is important to recognize that many scientists may be vulnerable and increasingly limited in their time and resources for such communication efforts, rendering public health and science storytelling a shared responsibility.

Authors’ Note

This work was supported by the Collaborative on Media and Messaging for Health and Social Policy (COMM HSP) and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (grant #79754). The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

About the Authors