Physics graduate student and faculty perspectives on the impact of federal cuts to science funding

The recent cuts to research funding by the current administration have had major impacts on the scientific community, most of which have been negative. With much of the discourse being mired in confusion and uncertainty, it can be difficult to decipher how this funding crisis has affected faculty members and graduate students based on the perspectives of only a couple of sources. With this in mind, we present a mixed-methods analysis of surveys asking associate-level professors and graduate students to report on the impacts of federal budget cuts to their research. Our aim is to identify researchers' perceptions of the effects of budget cuts on both the financial and personnel aspects of research groups. The results consist of two sections: quantitative analysis of a 5-point Likert-scale response question asking respondents to rate the impacts of national-level cuts on their research (whether positive or negative), and a qualitative analysis of written responses describing the specifics of those impacts. Our associate-level dataset comes from a sample of N=54 professors who are funded by the Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Initiative and responded to a survey sent out by the Foundation in early 2025. Our graduate-level dataset comes from N=98 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who registered to attend the 2025 American Physical Society Conference for Graduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics.