Are scientific and medical journals the latest target of efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to reshape U.S. research?
The Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia has sent multiple journal editors letters asserting their publications are “partisans in various scientific debates” and asking for responses to a variety of questions. Meanwhile, the Trump administration plans to cut funding for two open-access, peer-reviewed journals published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) and Preventing Chronic Disease (PCD)—according to a leaked draft of an internal 2026 budget proposal for the Department of Health and Human Services.
The letter, first reported by MedPage Today, is signed by federal prosecutor Edward Martin Jr. A version addressed to the medical journal CHEST was circulated widely on social media yesterday and the journal confirmed its authenticity. Science has learned that another journal has received a nearly identical letter. Martin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The prosecutor’s letter makes reference to U.S. regulations, stating that journals have a “position for which they are advocating either due to advertisement (postal code) or sponsorship (under relevant fraud regulations).” It asks journal editors to respond to questions such as “How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?” Responses are expected by 2 May, it adds.
Martin has issued a series of letters on matters unrelated to publishing that Democrats have argued use the threat of legal action, including prosecution, to “intimidate government employees and chill the speech of private citizens.” Martin’s letter to journals touches on a common accusation leveled by people affiliated with the Trump administration, such as new National Institutes of Health Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, who has argued that journals (including Science) were biased against certain viewpoints during the COVID-19 pandemic. This claim has received pushback from journals.
CHEST was established in 1935 and focuses on pulmonary medicine, critical care, and related fields. The journal said its legal counsel was reviewing the letter’s requests. Online commentators were quick to point out confusing language and apparent errors in the letter sent to the journal. For example, the missive includes the line, “I look forward to I look forward to and appreciate your cooperation with my letter of inquiry after request.”
The letter has befuddled some researchers. “The author of the letter seems to misunderstand what scientific research does,” says Marcus Munafò, a biological psychologist at the University of Bristol and advocate for research reproducibility and integrity. Scientists “criticize each other all the time, and journals are full of scientific disagreements, reinterpretation of data, and so on,” he says. He acknowledges there are issues with a lack of political diversity in academia, and says science is not without its flaws. However, on the whole, “Scientists are trying to determine what is true [and to] advance knowledge,” he argues. “What policymakers (and others) decide to do with evidence is a separate issue.”
Daniel Kulp, chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a nonprofit focused on scholarly publishing, tells Science the organization “fully support[s] the independence of journals from undue, external influences. However, journals should be aware of the risks associated with noncompliance, within the context of any existing law, so [seeking] legal advice is very highly recommended.” CHEST has posted a statement on its website noting it adheres to COPE’s ethical guidelines and other standards in scholarly publishing.
Some other journals and publishers Science contacted did not respond to questions about whether they had received or responded to the letter, whereas others said they had not received such a letter. AAAS, Science’s publisher, also declined to comment on whether it or any of its journal editors got the missive. (The news team operates independently of Science journals and AAAS.)
The proposal to kill funding for the two CDC journals is instead part of a broader restructuring of CDC that aims to “refocus [the agency] on emerging and infectious disease surveillance, outbreak investigations, preparedness and response, and maintaining the Nation’s public health infrastructure,” according to a draft budget document obtained by Science earlier this week. The budget has not been finalized, and the cuts would have to gain approval from Congress to become reality. The document states that funding will continue for a third CDC publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That publication was briefly paused when the administration temporarily froze public communications earlier this year.
A spokesperson for CDC tells Science the leaked budget proposal “is a draft, predecisional document, and CDC won’t speculate on the future of publishing” the journals.
EID was established by CDC in 1995 and handles papers dealing with the surveillance, prevention, and elimination of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases around the globe. Its table of contents is emailed out to more than 65,000 people worldwide, and it publishes more than 500 articles a year. It had an impact factor of 7.2 last year, placing it among the higher ranked journals in infectious diseases research and epidemiology.
PCD was started in 2004 by CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion—one of several centers that would be eliminated under the proposed budget. The journal publishes about 100 articles per year, often as collections on particular topics. Recent themes included diabetes prevention and management, strategies to eliminate health disparities, and connections between sleep disorders and chronic disease. Neither journal charges fees to authors or readers, which has made them widely accessible to researchers and the public around the world.
People affiliated with the journals who responded to requests for comment from Science said they had not been informed of the plans. A public health researcher and associate editor at PCD who asked not to be named says the journal’s defunding would be “a huge loss for public health.” In addition to being free, the journal runs paper and essay competitions to encourage students to get involved in public health research—an opportunity that few other journals provide, the editor notes.
David Heymann, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a member of EID’s editorial board, says that although there are other open-access journals in the same field, EID has been especially “valuable to low- and middle-income countries and to people around the world.”
Jennifer Head, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health who has published research in EID, reiterated the rarity of open-access journals that are free to authors. That removes “barriers … that might otherwise prevent researchers from underfunded contexts from sharing their scientific findings,” she says—something that is particularly important given the global nature of many public health threats.
U.S. science agencies publish a variety of other research journals. It’s not yet clear whether the White House will propose eliminating other titles, or whether the CDC journals will be singled out. Global Health: Science and Practice, a journal funded by the now-dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development, hasn’t accepted any new manuscripts since the Trump administration froze funding for agency grantees in January.
