On Wednesday afternoon in New York City, it hovered around 30 degrees, the sort of cold outside that makes your face sting. Despite the sub-freezing temperatures, hundreds of PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and other scholars gathered in the West Village’s Washington Square Park to protest cuts to public research funding and the Trump administration’s crackdown on science. Signs reading, “Science Saves Lives,” “Fund the Future,” and “Defund Billionaires, Not Cancer Cures,” peppered the crowd.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have put research funding on hold; paused communication and travel at the National Institutes of Health; removed or edited websites related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) at NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration; slashed funding for universities’ “indirect costs” (a move academics say will limit research); and fired hundreds of federal employees across the government’s health agencies.
“Everything’s really bad,” a postdoc named Ian told me at the protest, asking to be identified only by first name. “I needed to come out and do something about it.”
The cuts have threatened all sorts of research, from cancer and HIV studies to plant biology and climate science. “A lot of us depend on federal funding,” said Paco, a math graduate student. “It’s scary to see the tone that the current administration has taken toward science.”
“It’s sad that we have to do this,” Rayna Birnbaum, a postdoctoral researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and one of the event’s organizers, said after the protest, “but it was amazing to see the support”—Birnbaum noted that the crowd was bigger than expected. “It felt very powerful.”
The protest, billed as a rally to “Defend Public Research Funding,” was part of a national day of action organized by a coalition of academic unions called Labor for Higher Education. It was possibly the first city-wide protest led by academic unions, according to Andrew Little, president of UAW Local 4100, which represents postdocs at Columbia University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and which led the protest. In part, that’s because of sheer numbers: In 2020, UAW Local 4100 became the first postdoc union at a private university. And in the years since, “There’s been this huge wave of organizing among postdoc and researchers and grads” in New York City, Little said. (Disclosure: A separate UAW local represents Mother Jones and Reveal employees.)
The trend isn’t limited to New York. According to a 2024 report from researchers at Hunter College, first reported by the Guardian, between 2012 and 2024, graduate student unions across the country saw a 133 percent increase in membership, with 38 percent of graduate students now reportedly belonging to a union. Over the same period, faculty unionization also grew by 7.5 percent. (Union membership, in general, has dropped by about half nationally since the ’80s.)
“The growth of non-tenure-track faculty, postdocs, academic researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students shows how unionization is becoming a tactic of choice for change,” Adrianna Kezar, professor and director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, told the Guardian last year.
For anyone who’s been to grad school, the rise of academic unions may not come as a shock: As Samantha Snodgrass, an NSF postdoctoral fellow who studies maize domestication and genetics at the University of California, Davis, explains, the work of an early-career researcher is often a precarious job. It’s typically funded by federal grants given out on short-term contracts and usually pays less than an industry job. “Part of the nature of being an academic worker and trying to make a career as a public scientist is financial insecurity”—at least right now, Snodgrass said. “It’s not always clear or stable how you’re going to make it from where you’re at now in your career to where you’re going to be in a couple of years.” Even before Trump, unions like Snodgrass’ UAW 4811, where she serves as a recording secretary, have worked to secure better job security—and therefore, she argues, better research.
And as a result of their growth, academic unions are well-positioned to fight back against attacks under Trump 2.0. After the administration paused funding for many researchers, for example, Snodgrass, Birnbaum, and hundreds of other researchers joined a virtual phone bank, hosted by a coalition of academic unions called Fair Research Careers Now, to call their elected officials. As my colleague Henry Carnell and I previously reported, so many people joined the Zoom call that the organizers had to increase its capacity. “When we come together as unionized researchers, we can have a lot of power,” Isabel Low, a neuroscience postdoc at Columbia who also joined the call, told Mother Jones earlier this month.
At the same time, some researchers fear burnout: “There’s a lot of people who feel really agitated, ready to organize,” said Mia Carmen Villegas, a staff scientist at the University of California, Irvine, studying psychosis and mental illness in adolescents, and a trustee on UAW 4811’s executive board. “And people who are also genuinely scared that there won’t be a field for them in academia for much longer.”
At the protest, most people I talked to expressed uncertainty about their work. Robert Woodry, a neuroscience grad student at New York University, said he waited months for NIH to consider a grant application—only to have the agency cancel its scheduled review shortly after Trump took office. “It’s just been a shit show since then,” he said. Amid the Trump administration’s DEI rollbacks, the grant, designed to support neuroscientists from underrepresented groups, was marked as expired and then later reopened, with little to no communication from NIH. While Woodry had been able to apply because he is Cuban American, he said, his research isn’t related to DEI. (Currently, his work focuses on brain imaging to better understand memory, schizophrenia, and PTSD.) And with the grant still technically under review, he can’t apply for other funding—putting him in research limbo. “I’m just so fed up and frustrated with this whole thing,” he said.
In addition to rallies and phone banks, a big part of unions’ effort right now, Birnbaum said, is simply to inform the public about why publicly funded research matters. As she notes, nearly 40 percent of people will develop cancer during their lifetimes, and about one in nine people will get Alzheimer’s after the age of 65. “We are the ones that develop all of these cures,” she said. “We are the ones that figure out how these diseases work in your body.”
Birnbaum herself studies wound healing and therapeutics, research she said provides a basis to heal nerve damage twice as fast as the human body typically can. “If my lab can’t get the funds they need, that therapeutic will never be used in the clinic,” she said. “We’re only here to try to make Americans and the world healthier.” It’s disappointing, she said, to see life-saving research come under attack.
Those attacks are likely to continue, Snodgrass said, but not without pushback. As she put it: “People are fired up.”