There are not many scientists in Congress. Jim Baird is one of them.

He earned a bachelor's and a master's in animal science at Purdue, and after Vietnam he went on to a doctorate in monogastric nutrition from the University of Kentucky. He served on the advisory council for Purdue's Dean of Agriculture. All three of his children are Purdue graduates. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and he co-chairs the Congressional R&D Caucus.

And Indiana's 4th Congressional District contains Lafayette and West Lafayette — which means Purdue University is his constituent.

If any Republican in the House was positioned to defend federal research money, it was this one.

Here is what happened instead.

What happened at Purdue

In April 2025, the Purdue Exponent went out and talked to the graduate students and faculty living through the first months of the administration's research cuts. The paper reported that "almost $170 million worth of Purdue's NIH and NSF funding may be on the chopping block" — two agencies that are, as the story put it, "responsible for doling out almost two thirds of the federal money appropriated to research."

The students were not subtle about what it felt like. One Ph.D. student, Izaak Gilchrist, told the paper:

"No one knows whether a future in science is even feasible in this country anymore."

"We are in graduate school to prepare for a career in science, and then (the cuts and layoffs are) opening up this whole question of, will there be careers in science in the United States?"

Another student, Montse Robles, said she had come from Mexico because "it was always a huge deal for me to do a Ph.D. here," and was now thinking about leaving for Europe. Nationally, nearly 2,000 scientists had signed an open letter on March 31 describing "a climate of fear" in the research community.

This is a newspaper published on the campus in Jim Baird's district, describing his district's largest research institution, in the field he holds a doctorate in.

The receipts: 13 grants, $5,917,472

You don't have to take the students' word for it. The National Science Foundation published its own list of terminated awards — a spreadsheet of every grant the agency killed, with the recipient and the obligated dollar amount.

Purdue University appears on it 13 times, for a combined $5,917,472 in cancelled research money, as of the list's June 5, 2025 export. Among the projects terminated:

• $1,500,000 — a knowledge-graph warehouse for neighborhood information
• $721,716 — a career-award study on the mechanisms of dehumanization
• $644,957 — engineering education for sustainability
• $555,089 — a long-term study of identity development in Black science students
• $513,506 — a career award on reducing bias in engineering assessments
• $349,516 — engineering research on diversity, equity and inclusion
• $336,877 — research on reducing racially biased beliefs through genetics education

Eight of the 13 came out of NSF's engineering and STEM education directorates. These are not line items in a budget document. They are people — graduate students on assistantships, postdocs, lab technicians — whose salaries stopped.

What Baird said while it was happening

In March 2025, as the cuts were landing, WISH-TV asked Baird about the Department of Government Efficiency. He told them that an audit of the entire federal government for waste, fraud and abuse was "long overdue", and treated DOGE's recommendations as proof the cuts were needed.

Asked separately about the damage DOGE was doing, he offered the national debt and not much else:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's what he told Fox59. Apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that. A scientist watching the machinery of American science get taken apart, describing it as a bookkeeping method.

DOGE itself is gone now — its charter expired on July 4, 2026 without a final report. The grants it helped cancel did not come back.

He knows exactly what the numbers are

This is the part that's hard to explain away.

In June 2025, Baird appeared at a Capitol Hill briefing — in his capacity as R&D Caucus co-chair, alongside Democrat Bill Foster — on what proposed NSF cuts would do to community colleges and STEM training. As Forbes reported it, NSF was facing cuts of up to 56 percent, with a 75 percent cut to the agency's STEM education directorate, if Congress followed the administration's proposed budget.

He introduced the NSF and USDA Interagency Research Act that same month. He shows up to the briefings. He knows the numbers.

And the President's budget request keeps coming back for more. In April 2026, the administration asked Congress for $4 billion for NSF — a 54% cut from the enacted level, and proposed funding STEM education at $428 million, another 54% cut.

Baird has not stopped any of it.

The part where he takes the credit

On April 28, 2026, Baird's office put out a press release with this headline: "Congressman Baird Announces Purdue University to Gain Over $2.7 Million in Research Under USDA Reorganization."

Read what he's actually celebrating. Purdue picked up a research project worth $2.701 million and seven Agricultural Research Service employees — because the USDA was decommissioning the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the department's flagship research campus in Maryland. Baird's statement:

"Purdue University and the State of Indiana continue to solidify their standing as the premier location for agricultural research and opportunity. As a farmer and lifelong Hoosier, I am pleased to see the USDA expanding opportunities in Indiana as the agency refocuses on its core mission…"

Expanding opportunities. A federal research center was being shut down and its pieces scattered, and the co-chair of the R&D Caucus described the scattering as an expansion because seven jobs landed in his district.

Do the arithmetic on his own district. NSF cancelled $5.9 million of Purdue research. Baird's press release claims $2.7 million of salvage from a shuttered federal lab. He put out a statement about the $2.7 million. Search his press page for the $5.9 million and there is nothing there.

This is a familiar pattern on this site. Robert Aderholt chairs the subcommittee whose bill eliminates the adult job training program, the youth job training program and the jobs program for low-income seniors — and announced $22 million for rural hospitals back home out of that same bill. Cut it in Washington, cut the ribbon at home, and hope nobody puts the two next to each other.

Why this one stings more

Most members of Congress have never run a lab, never written a grant proposal, never sat on a university advisory council.

Baird has done all three. He knows what a terminated award does to a graduate student in year four. He knows that the research pipeline he came up through — a land-grant university, a doctorate in animal science, a career in agricultural extension — was built with exactly the kind of money now being cancelled.

He also isn't hearing about it, because he doesn't put himself in rooms where people can tell him. Baird does not hold in-person town halls. In late March 2025 — the same weeks the Exponent was interviewing frightened graduate students a few blocks away — more than 250 of his constituents packed the West Lafayette Public Library and held a town hall without him, chanting "Where is Jim?"

He wasn't there. He was in Washington, calling the audit long overdue.

Source

Trump cuts leave Ph.D. researchers, professors questioning future — Ronak Mohanty, The Purdue Exponent, April 22, 2025. Photo: The Purdue Exponent.