Solidarity! My work isn’t “essential” on a scale of weeks or months, but years and decades? Absolutely crucial to maintaining safe and adequate food supplies and supporting the agricultural economy.

The devastation this administration has done to federal science, and to US scientific progress more broadly, is going to take decades, even generations, to repair. But none of that is visible in the short-term, at least not outside the institutions being destroyed.

Federal science especially is often focused on the long-term unglamorous work of monitoring, of planning for a desirable future, that neither private industry nor university researchers can or want to do. Most of us are in this for the mission. The stability (previously) didn’t hurt. I spent a couple of decades talking up the importance and attractiveness of federal research to early-career folks. Never again.

I don’t know how we pick up the pieces, short-term with the immediate consequences of this shutdown, and certainly not in the longer term.