The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Friday told staff members it has canceled subscriptions carried by its National Agricultural Library as part of a drive by President Donald Trump’s administration to cut federal spending. The move appears to drop nearly 400 of the library’s roughly 2000 journals, including many prominent in various agricultural subfields—but curiously none from the world’s three largest scientific publishers, all of which are for-profit. USDA staff members depicted the move as hasty, indiscriminate slashing.
“We can’t do science without these,” says an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “This is [like] burning down the Library of Alexandria. You can’t call it the National Agricultural Library if you don’t subscribe to the main ag journals.”
The library provides full texts of paywalled journal articles to USDA’s staff scientists—at the start of the year, ARS alone employed about 2000 scientists and postdoctoral researchers—and loans papers to scientists across the country whose host institutions lack a subscription to a particular journal. The agricultural library is one of five U.S. national libraries.
USDA’s subscription cancellations, which an internal email says were carried out under the supervision of the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency, eliminated all journals produced by any of 17 publishers, according to a list circulated internally at USDA on Friday and obtained by Science. (The library will still be able to provide users access to back issues published in 2023 or earlier—a standard provision of contracts in the event of cancellations.)
Most of the affected publishers are university or nonprofit scientific society presses, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society; the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and AAAS, which publishes Science. (Science’s News section is editorially independent.) Several of the journals whose subscriptions were canceled rank in the top quartile for impact factor in their subfield—for example, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Food & Function and Oxford’s Journal of Integrated Pest Management.
The National Agricultural Library cuts didn’t include journals at Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. Together those publishers accounted for more than half of the library’s journal subscriptions before the cuts, according to an analysis by Science. Studies of journal subscription fees indicate that on average, scientific society publishers charge less than such for-profit companies.
In response to a list of questions and a request for an interview by Science, USDA’s press office provided an emailed response. As part of the Trump administration’s efforts to “improve government [and] eliminate inefficiencies,” the head librarian of the National Agricultural Library “determined which subscriptions were the most widely used, and USDA determined the subscriptions contracts with minimal use will be terminated,” the statement says.
On Friday, USDA told staff members it would consider restoring some of the journals but gave them only a few hours that day to submit justifications, according to internal messages seen by Science—a tight timetable some agency researchers considered head spinning given the volume of journals involved.
“Peer-reviewed publications are literally the cornerstones and building blocks of science, and taking these away from scientists at USDA is like you’re building a house and pull out the foundation: Everything else above becomes more unstable,” said Chris Stelzig, executive director of the Entomological Society of America. “USDA scientists are doing this work to protect the American food supply, and it frustrates me that that’s not being recognized here.”
In recent years, some U.S. academic libraries have also decided to cut journal subscriptions, as their price increases have outpaced inflation while library budgets have stayed flat. But university librarians typically review data about how often users on their campus access the journals, and consult with faculty members to identify journals critical to a field that may not receive many downloads, before terminating any deals—far from what unfolded at USDA.
