On March 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) canceled subscriptions to nearly 400 of the roughly 2,000 journals carried by the agency’s National Agricultural Library. The library, one of five national libraries, provides USDA staff scientists full access to paywalled journal articles and loans papers to researchers at institutions that do not have their own subscription.
Most of the cancelled subscriptions affect university or nonprofit scientific publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, the American Phytopathological Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The cuts did not include for-profit publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley.
According to one Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist, “We can’t do science without these.” The USDA press office called the cancellations part of the move by the Trump administration to “improve government [and] eliminate inefficiencies” and said that the agency had “determined the subscriptions contracts with minimal use will be terminated.”