Way back when I was a young kid going into a science career, I knew ahead of time that the pay was going to be crap and I was going to have to scramble for a new position every few years, and that I was going to have to move multiple times to destinations unknown. That was the job. My expectations were low (maybe too low — who’s stupid enough to pursue a career like that?) but I just wanted to do science and teach and have a satisfying intellectual life. We made enough money to scrape by, and there was enough of a demand that I felt I could probably land a new position at a university somewhere if one job fell through. I came from a generation where science was a viable, if not particularly lucrative, career.

That has changed.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future.

These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears.

Chopping out a whole cohort of researchers is a catastrophe. What happens in 10 years, 20 years, the time when all these young people should be in their prime, producing great new ideas and data? There was a time 30 years ago when I was tempted by opportunities to work in industry, and I said no, and committed to academic research. I’d be deeply conflicted if I faced that kind of situation now. Or not…maybe those academic avenues would be simply closed.

Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported.

Or wait…what if you decided to leave the academic track and pursue a career in industry, just like all your peers?

Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.”

They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said.

I never thought my career timing was particularly good — I was always being informed that there was going to be a wave of opportunities as older faculty retired, but that it was going to be ten years in the future. It was always 10 years from now, kind of like Elon Musk’s predictions about when we’d be living on Mars. Those predictions always failed anyway, just like the fantasy of Mars colonies. But now I think maybe I got lucky. I’m reaching the end of my career just as American science is being taken out back behind the chemical sheds by a gang of psychopathic fascists.

That doesn’t help my daughter, who has just begun a career in science.

Help me…wait, who is going to help? The Rebellion has been coopted!

Tom the Dancing Bug

Spoiler: it’s not much of a plan.

He points out the magnitude of the problem: Trump has the backing of billionaires, who are rushing to fund his every desire; he has the media under his control; he’s a master of the “big lie”; he does not believe in democracy, at all. That’s what we have to overcome.

What do we have? We have high aspirations and grand values.

Healthcare is a human right and must be available to all regardless of income.

Every worker in America is entitled to earn a decent income. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage and make it easier for workers to join unions.

We must have the best public educational system in the world, from childcare to vocational training, to graduate school – available to all.

We must address the housing crisis and build the millions of units of low-income and affordable housing that we desperately need.

We must create millions of good paying jobs as we lead the world in combating the existential threat of climate change.

We must abolish all forms of bigotry.

Great! But I’m 3/4 of the way through his essay, and he hasn’t said how we will accomplish that. In the final few paragraphs, he gives us one goal: we have to defeat one particular and particularly significant bill.

In the coming weeks the Republicans in Congress will be bringing forward a major piece of legislation, a “reconciliation” bill, that encapsulates the value system of greed and their obedience to oligarchy. It is the economic essence of Trumpism.

At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, this legislation will provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the richest people in our country. It will make the rich even richer. At a time when the working class of this country is struggling to put food on the table and pay for housing, this legislation will make savage cuts to Medicaid, housing, nutrition, education and other basic needs. It will make the poor even poorer.

That’s it? Defeat this one bill? You know, I don’t get to vote on it, this legislation is entirely in the hands of the current crop of elected congresspeople, and we already know that a lot of them are spineless simps who will bow down before authority. I am confident my senators will oppose it, and that my representative is a terrible Republican MAGA-head who will support it. This is a plan that leaves me helpless, only pawn in game of life.

It also reflects a naive confidence in the rule of law. Trump is busy trampling over the Constitution, issuing executive orders that are both illegal and in defiance of all political norms, and we’re supposed to think that one political setback in congress will stop him? He doesn’t respect congress or democracy. The only thing that will stop him would be for the police/FBI/whatever to intervene, arrest him and his cronies, and lock them all up. We know that no one in government will have the spine to do what needs to be done.

But sure. I’ll tell my representatives to vote against the reconciliation bill. I hope it fails.

Now what do we do about the gutting of NSF and NIH, the dismantling of the parks service, the dissolution of the board of education, the selling out of Ukraine to Putin, the alienation of all of our allies in the world, and on and on and on?