In April 2025, less than three months after Donald Trump returned to the White House, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out its latest public health alert on so-called “superbugs”, strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

These drug-resistant germs, the CDC warned, are responsible for more than 3m infections in the US each year, claiming the lives of up to 48,000 Americans.

Globally, the largely untreatable pathogens contribute annually to almost 5m deaths, and health experts fear that unless urgent steps are taken they could become a leading killer, surpassing even cancer, by 2050.

“We’re in a war against bacteria,” said Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. He is on the frontlines of that war against superbugs; the NIH lab in which he works is driving what he described as “high-risk, high-reward research”.

But over the past year, the battlefield has toughened. Under the Trump administration, Morgan, 33, and thousands of other young American scientists like him have grappled with wave after wave of disruptions.

Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.