AINEWS
How DOGE Broke America's Deal with Science
A federal compact that funded basic research and missions like the x ray telescope AXIS is unraveling. One astronomer's 48 PowerPoints show what it costs when the engineers walk out the door.
A federal compact that funded basic research and missions like the x ray telescope AXIS is unraveling. One astronomer's 48 PowerPoints show what it costs when the engineers walk out the door.
Christopher Reynolds had 48 PowerPoints and no engineers. The slides, last June, still had the names embedded: the heater engineer, the project manager, the physicist named William Zhang who invented the mirrors. But the people whose work the slides described had taken buyout packages and gone. Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was trying to rebuild from their notes a mission the federal government had, for a generation, agreed to fund: a billion-dollar x-ray telescope called AXIS, designed to peer into the first black holes and the first galaxies the universe ever made.
AXIS, the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite, is one of eight competing concepts NASA selected in October 2024 to mature for a possible future launch. Reynolds's team won a $5 million grant to refine the mission's signature technology: mirrors carved from a single crystal of silicon, which can focus x-rays the way ordinary glass focuses light. The grant paired the university team with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland, where Zhang and a small group of specialists had spent years solving the manufacturing problem. The mission was real, ranked, and moving.
Then, starting in June 2025, the team "started to get hit by programmatic chaos," as Adam Rogers reports in Scientific American. The cause, in his telling, was the budget operation inside the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration's effort to shrink the federal workforce and the projects it pays for. Across NASA, roughly 4,000 employees took buyoffs, and an estimated 20% of the agency's workforce departed. At Goddard, the losses included a heater engineer, a project manager, and the mirror inventor himself. AXIS was left with a mission concept and no team to fly it.
To understand what was lost, it helps to know what was supposed to be happening. For most of the last century, the U.S. government has underwritten the kind of work that has no obvious buyer: basic exploratory research into the structure of matter, the behavior of cells, the contents of the sky. Federal money, channeled through NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, pays for roughly 40% of all basic research conducted in the country, a share universities, which perform the bulk of the work, depend on to keep laboratories open and graduate students paid. This is the compact: taxpayers fund discovery that has no near-term product, in exchange for a pipeline of trained scientists, technologies that spin out into industry, and the occasional mission that changes the picture of the cosmos.
The compact is older than the agencies that run it. It survived the Cold War, when the space race gave it popular cover, and the post-Cold War years, when it was justified mostly on economic and national-security grounds. It survived the 2010s, even as Congress narrowed the pipeline and flat-funded agencies for long stretches. What it could not survive, Rogers argues, is the collapse of the assumption that the arrangement is stable. The Trump administration's 2026 budget proposed zeroing out the program line that supported AXIS, along with related astrophysics work at NASA. The buyoffs were the visible half of the strategy. The zeroed appropriation was the other.
The damage runs past Goddard. NIH, the NSF, and the DOE's Office of Science have all faced grant terminations, hiring freezes, or restructuring in the same period. Private philanthropy, often invoked as a fallback, cannot replace the federal scale: foundations are smaller, more risk-averse on operating costs, and structurally unwilling to underwrite the long, expensive hardware of flagship science, which is exactly the work the compact was built for. Universities are trying to bridge the gap with internal funds, but research time is the first thing protected when endowments are tapped, and that time was already scarce.
What would restoring the compact look like? It looks like Congress restoring the program line for AXIS and related missions in the next appropriations cycle, and writing the protection into law rather than leaving it to administrative discretion. It looks like foundations accepting that they can fund people, fellowships, and proof-of-concept instruments, but not billion-dollar telescopes, and being honest with grantees about the gap. It looks like universities protecting research time for faculty who have lost grant funding, the way they protected teaching time during the pandemic, and using bridge grants to keep labs intact. And it looks like voters asking, during the next election, why a mission designed to see the first light in the universe is sitting in a folder of slides.
Reynolds still has the PowerPoints. The names are still in the footers. The mirrors he cannot yet build, because the people who knew how are gone, are the kind of technology that, once lost, takes a decade to rebuild. The compact that funded the work is recoverable. The years, if the buyoffs and the zeroed lines hold, are not.