The federal agency that funds science research says the staff reduction came in response to a White House directive.

The government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.

The National Science Foundation fired 170 probationary employees and experts Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, the agency confirmed.

The overhaul of US science kicked off within hours of Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, when he signed dozens of executive orders, which are presidential directives on how the government should operate inside existing laws. The Trump White House did not respond to Nature ’s request for comment.

Fox News aired a joint interview with President Donald Trump and Musk conducted by Sean Hannity Tuesday evening, in which the president and his adviser were full of praise for each other. Trump promised the U.

Another prong of the administration’s actions is an attempt to influence what research is funded. Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, has previously suggested cuts as a way of ensuring scientific institutions like the NSF cannot “propagandise for woke ideology”.

In response to executive orders from President Donald Trump, the University created an Executive Orders and Agency Memos resource page, which the Office of the Provost sent in a community-wide email Thursday afternoon.

The loss of staff “will severely impact research and innovation across the United States, especially for some of those topics where NSF is the majority of the funding,” one of the former program directors says.

At an event hosted by WUD Society and Politics Monday, UW-Madison political science professor Mark Copelevitch voiced concerns about President Donald Trump’s remaking of the federal government.