When federal science agencies became the focus of sweeping budget cuts earlier this year, the national debate quickly took on a familiar shape: Conservatives approved of the budget cuts while liberals opposed them.
But new research from the University of Florida suggests this storyline is incomplete and maybe even misleading. The real driver of distrust in agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation isn't ideology per se, but a form of scientific populism that goes beyond political parties. Instead, scientific populism reflects a belief that scientific "elites" are out of touch and that ordinary people should have more authority over what research gets funded and conducted.
The findings suggest that scientists must work to communicate the value of their work to the taxpayers that fund it while engaging in democratic institutions that can influence what research is prioritized.
"There's a lot of conversation around support or distrust in science, and a lot of it boils down to partisanship," said Austin Hubner , Ph.D., a professor in UF's College of Journalism and Communications and lead author of the new study . "But when you start breaking it down into specific issues, it really goes deeper than that."
Her team surveyed 500 Americans in early 2025 when scientific agencies were facing large budget cuts. The strongest predictor of distrust was anti-elite sentiment directed specifically at scientists. Respondents who scored high on science-related populism were significantly more likely to distrust every agency surveyed and more likely to support cutting federal research budgets.
In every model the researchers tested, science-related populism was a stronger predictor of distrust in federal agencies than political ideology itself. And scientific populism is not limited to one political party but rather reflects skepticism about scientific power structures rooted, at times, in confusion about the bureaucracy.
Unlike political affiliation, this scientific populism may be more flexible and responsive to efforts by scientists to reach out and explain the value of their work, Hubner said.
"Science-related populism is a potentially hopeful way of looking at distrust in science," Hubner said. "Ideologies are really baked in. But scientific populism has so many different aspects of trust and distrust that we can potentially move the needle if we understand what's driving it."
Hubner is now testing what factors help people trust scientists more, such as how similar they perceive scientists to be to them.
That means the path to sustaining federal research funding may depend less on political messaging and more on relationship-building, plain language and showing clear public benefits, especially to groups who worry that scientific elites operate in isolated ivory towers, she said.
"You need to make it concrete — what does this mean for ordinary people in their lives?"
