Emily Woodruff’s coverage of the effects of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act on health care in her area started with one big awful number: 33 rural hospitals in Louisiana at risk of closure, the second most across U.S. states. To get to the bottom of the bill’s fallout for her readers, Woodruff, a health reporter at The Times-Picayune, combed through a Senate report on how the law will cut funds for Medicaid and found the list of threatened hospitals. Then, she needed to bridge the data and the reality for rural patients in the state—people, “at the heart of it,” she says. “Being able to go somewhere and just depict a hospital and what it sees and what it does each day was really one of the only ways I felt like I could do that.”
Woodruff started making calls to the listed hospitals and eventually landed on Hood Memorial Hospital, a 25-bed rural hospital in Amite, Louisiana, which allowed her to tour the facilities, speak with the CEO, and interview patients willing to go on the record. Her 2025 story about endangered rural hospitals incorporates the experiences of two patients, including Tim Cowell, a 63-year-old who arrived at Hood Memorial after collapsing at his son’s graduation. Doctors there discovered an infection from a dog bite that could have progressed into sepsis if left untreated. Woodruff learned that for many patients like Cowell, the next available hospital is more than 45 minutes away, which would make closure catastrophic for emergent cases.
Under the second Trump administration, decimated health and science funding in the U.S. has become everyday news. An ever-growing crop of cancelled federal grants and crippled programs leaves journalists with the challenge of what to cover and how to contextualize cuts for their audiences. Reporters covering these stories in the U.S. are not alone—they can learn from their colleagues in many other countries, where aggressive budget cuts to science funding are, unfortunately, not new.
By tracking funding losses and finding angles that illustrate the impacts of those cuts beyond the numbers, journalists can give readers a deeper understanding of how fiscal decisions have profound consequences for their daily lives. Local reporters like Woodruff can find voices in their communities that speak to real-life ramifications, stepping beyond the immediate news cycle and humanizing policy choices. Journalists can also zoom out, hammering home the sweeping stakes of these decisions for the scientific enterprise at large.
Finding and Deciphering Funding Data
Reporting on science-funding data requires slightly different skills than reporting on research itself. “You kind of have to turn a business-reporter brain on versus a science-reporter brain,” Woodruff says.
When an executive order or new legislation makes headlines, many reporters will want to get specific about how much funding a particular agency, program, or grant stands to lose. Often, policy documents, such as appropriations bills and budget requests, will list dollar amounts being doled out or cut. To confirm the status of individual grants, reporters covering research in the U.S. can search through the Department of Health and Human Services’ database of terminated grants, Grant Witness for NIH and NSF cuts, and Trials Tracker for clinical trials jeopardized by funding losses.
Reporting on the numbers is only the first step in helping audiences understand the implications of funding cuts, especially when they dominate the news cycle for a prolonged period.
Detecting broader shifts in science funding over time might require more sleuthing. In the U.S., for example, reporters can examine current and past Monthly Treasury Statements to reveal how funding levels have changed in the past year or from one administration to the next. By searching the word “research” within those documents, for instance, reporters can find payouts to a variety of research funders, including the National Science Foundation and the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, says Clark Merrefield, a senior editor at The Journalist’s Resource.
Journalists can also fish for shifts that could lead to story ideas at the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, where data tables include broad spending categories, such as health, general science, space, and technology, as well as federal funding amounts given to individual universities and nonprofits; America’s Essential Data, which lists real-life uses of data generated with federal support; and the R&D Budget and Policy Program from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which houses federal budget dashboards and visualizations.
To come up with local stories tied to funding fluctuations, Merrefield recommends reconstructing the flow of public funds across government levels. “Start at your local level,” he says, “and try to work your way up to the state and then see how the money has flowed from the state or from the federal [level] to the state.” When doing so, avoid mistakes like comparing spending amounts across time spans without accounting for inflation. To get a better idea of funding shifts, look at other indicators such as government spending as a proportion of GDP, Merrefield says.
Academic researchers who specialize in public spending can help journalists sort through complicated financial documents and spot the stories that hide behind the numbers. And the regular sources on your roster, such as local researchers or city officials, can speak to shifts they’ve observed. Merrefield suggests asking: “How has this money you’ve gotten from the federal government to the state to the local level helped in the past? How has that changed in the last few months?”
To transform numbers on spreadsheets into narrative tools, focus on one specific number to anchor your story, Woodruff says. While she mentions other figures in her Medicaid cuts piece—such as the percentage of patients at Hood Memorial and its health clinic who access health care through the government program—the story centers on the telling statistic of 33 endangered hospitals and what their closure could mean for individual patients.
Zooming In on Local Impacts
Reporting on the numbers is only the first step in helping audiences understand the implications of funding cuts, especially when they dominate the news cycle for a prolonged period. “It’s hard, because it stops being news at some point,” says Martín De Ambrosio, a freelance science journalist in Argentina, who has been covering libertarian President Javier Milei’s severe reductions to science funding since he took office in 2023. The key, he says, is finding angles that go beyond the cuts themselves.
When De Ambrosio covered the defunding of Argentina’s National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development, and Innovation (Agencia I+D+i) for the Argentine newspaper La Nación, for example, he wanted his story to highlight specific projects about to halt and what the consequences would be. He asked scientists he already knew for leads about projects severely affected by the lack of funding. One anecdote led to another, and his 2024 story captures the breadth of loss across scientific fields. One researcher facing funding cuts, for example, had started studying how Argentina’s milk production might be modified to reduce the spread of antibiotic resistance in humans. Another was exploring whether Argentine women with Indigenous ancestry are at higher risk of developing aggressive forms of breast cancer than other groups.
Often, funding cuts fuel political tensions—yet another angle for journalists to explore as they try to gauge broader effects.
De Ambrosio has also found ways to convey how U.S. funding cuts can affect already underfunded Argentine science institutions. While tuning in to a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources discussing layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), his ears perked up at a brief mention of how the terminations affected other countries’ agencies that rely on NOAA’s data. His resulting story for La Nación covers how Argentina’s local weather forecasts—and those of weather apps on phones—could worsen due to NOAA cuts.
While investigating the ripple effects of federal spending shifts, Alexa Robles-Gil, a reporting fellow at The New York Times science desk, has also drilled down to citizens’ lives. “I was very interested in finding a story about how the cuts not only affect biologists or research projects, but really affect the people who benefit from those scientific results,” she says.
This approach led Robles-Gil to her 2025 story on the unlikely relationship between bird hunters and the Bird Banding Laboratory, a U.S. Geological Survey program threatened by proposed budget cuts. Hunters frequently report banded birds, and those gathered in hunters’ forums online were critical of the cuts, even though some were Trump supporters, Robles-Gil says. “That told me there was a nuance,” she says.
Asking similar questions about how federal cuts play out in individual communities led Woodruff to focus on specific rural hospitals in Louisiana to contextualize pending Medicaid losses. “As a local reporter, you’re always looking at every federal thing that comes down [in terms of], ‘What does this mean for us? How is Louisiana the same as other places? How is Louisiana different?’” she says.
Zooming Out to Broader Fallout
Systematic funding cuts, such as those rolling out in the U.S., will have decades-long, global consequences. To capture these sweeping effects for readers, reporters can explore how one particular administrative decision could affect the overall enterprise of science and development in a country. What, for example, are the goals a country prioritizes with its funding? Which priorities does it neglect when certain programs are gutted? And what will that mean for the international landscape of science?
Brazilian journalist Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade thinks in these terms while covering funding cuts there. “In Brazil, we [could] have a huge role in protecting the environment, and we could invest more in strategies and technology to preserve the Amazon,” he says. “Journalists should write more about that. What are the [medium] and long-term impacts of funding cuts? What are we missing?”
Following the fallout of funding cuts makes clear the far-reaching stakes of these decisions for a country’s standing and the future of science.
Journalists can also track long-term consequences by reading academic literature on funding trends. For instance, a paper in an ecology journal tipped de Oliveira Andrade off to unequal allocation of federal dollars for biodiversity research in Brazil. His resulting 2024 story for SciDev.Net covers how disproportionate funding cuts primarily affecting Brazil’s northern regions could weaken crucial research in the Amazon.
Sometimes, academics are so invested in their own research that it’s hard for them to predict the wider impacts of funding changes in science. “You have to put the pieces together by gathering information from different sources,” de Oliveira Andrade says. Those sources include associations dedicated to analyzing investment in science and technology, such as the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência). In the U.S., the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program provides periodic reports on topics such as the effects of grant availability on talent migration and the impacts of government shutdowns.
Often, funding cuts fuel political tensions—yet another angle for journalists to explore as they try to gauge broader effects. “It’s important to give the full context and the full scope of this problem,” de Oliveira Andrade says. For example, he wrote a 2024 story for Nature about a face-off between left-leaning Brazilian President Lula da Silva—who had promised to make science a priority—and a conservative Congress, which slashed research dollars in that year’s budget.
Following the fallout of funding cuts makes clear the far-reaching stakes of these decisions for a country’s standing and the future of science. These stories, alongside those that bring the stakes down to the daily lives of citizens, will resonate far more than the latest budget cut rundown. “Spending decisions and policy decisions are in a very real sense a statement of what an administration thinks [a] country is or should look like,” Merrefield says. “Spending decisions are ethical decisions at the same time.”
Lucila Pinto is a freelance science and technology journalist. Her work has appeared in Nature, Science, Rest of World, and La Nación, among other publications. She is a Pulitzer Center reporting fellow and a graduate of Columbia University’s science journalism program. She is currently an early-career fellow at The Open Notebook supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Follow her on X @luchipaint and on LinkedIn.