National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has dreamed big under the current US president, Barack Obama. Now the future of major projects to study the brain, personalize medical treatments and cure cancer is in flux. The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative seems likely to survive, given that the US Congress has increased its funding each year since its launch in 2013. The future of the Precision Medicine Initiative, which launched in 2015, is uncertain, but the Cancer Moonshot proposed this year seems unlikely to get the funding it needs to get off the ground. . .
Food and Drug Administration
Widespread speculation that Trump will push to relax drug approval standards at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent pharmaceutical stocks rising and set consumer watchdogs on edge. Those who watch the agency — which is widely considered to have insufficient resources to enforce its ever-increasing regulatory mandate — are also concerned about Trump’s talk of a federal hiring freeze. And Trump’s campaign-trail musings about “the FDA food police” suggests that food-safety regulations may also be in jeopardy . .
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Environmental Protection Agency
Trump, who has railed at the “draconian” environmental policies of Obama, has pledged to roll back many of them. These include climate regulations formulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); among these are rules to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. The EPA is required by law to regulate carbon and and conventional air pollutants, and environmentalists are prepared to launch lawsuits to ensure that it does. But the Trump administration could cut the agency’s budget to hamper its ability to make new rules or enforce existing ones.Trump has appointed Myron Ebell, a high-profile climate sceptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, to lead the EPA transition.. .

Department of Energy
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science spends more than $5 billion on research each year, on topics such as high-energy physics, energy, climate change and biology. The energy department’s National Nuclear Security Administration also oversees the nation’s $8.8-billion nuclear-weapons programme. The Obama administration tried to increase investments in applied clean-energy research, but Trump could shift the focus back to advanced fossil fuels and nuclear power. . .