The 2026 midterm elections are finally here, and as the results roll in on Tuesday night and through this week, scientists will be watching closely. That’s because the results could influence the very foundations of U.S. science, from funding decisions to data center expansion to research agency budgets.

Those foundations have been rocked by the second Trump administration. Since 2025 the government has sought to redirect grant money toward artificial intelligence, technology, and nuclear energy and has reduced funding for climate, health and social science projects. The administration has repeatedly proposed mass cuts to NASA and National Science Foundation budgets and has laid off thousands of federal workers, including researchers. At the same time, universities have come under federal investigation, while the number of international students and early-career researchers has been limited by new visa rules. Amid all this, the administration has also sought to discredit vaccines, slash climate regulations and pull the U.S. back from global collaborations in science.

“This election’s critical,” says Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It will determine a lot of what happens next, especially with this administration and their actions. This cycle is critical in terms of how the federal government is run and what kinds of checks and balances we’ll have in the next two years.”

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The results of Tuesday’s vote could determine both how money is allocated to science and how much of that is actually dispersed for research, she says.

Should either the House of Representatives or the Senate, or both, flip to Democratic control, Goldman anticipates there could also be a flood of investigations from subcommittees into what has happened to federal science under the Trump administration.

“There’s a tremendous need for oversight investigations, really taking a hard look at what this administration has been doing to federal science,” she says, for example, “from [the Committee on] Environment [and] Public Works on the Senate side…. I think the House [Committee on Science, Space, and Technology] will be an interesting one, to see what they can do. This is a key place where we can really provide more accountability on the administration’s defiance of Congress’s will to fund science.”

Should Democrats win Congress outright, there would still be limits to whatever they might do, says Arthur Caplan, a professor emeritus of population health and bioethics at New York University. The White House would still exert control over federal agencies and departments, and the Supreme Court, which has often ruled in the administration’s favor, is dominated by a conservative majority. But a stronger political opposition in Congress could lead to more dealmaking, he says.

“It’s not just [that the Democrats are] going to come in and say, ‘Your science policy has been retrograde; we hate it. We don’t agree with all this diversity, equity and inclusiveness censorship; we don’t agree with many of your appointments,’” he says. “But you then are in a position to barter and bargain to get what you want because you have the purse strings and are willing to use them.”

Science funding rarely surfaces as a major issue for voters. But Collette Delawalla, founder and CEO of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science, says there are ample science-based issues on the ballot this year that could prove pivotal. Health care costs are one of the top issues that voters are considering while voting, one recent poll found. Delawalla adds that many voters may also be worried about public health, particularly given the ongoing measles crisis and the summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak.

“People are concerned about the food system not being safe,” she says. “They’re concerned about rollbacks at the [Environmental Protection Agency] and their water not being safe to drink or data centers polluting their air around them.”

While the Trump administration has scrapped or weakened several climate-related laws, including the recent decision to roll back methane gas limits, Delawalla acknowledges that climate change isn’t an issue that has received much attention during the campaign—but gas prices are focusing attention on fossil fuels.

“I don’t think it’s clean energy for clean energy’s sake” that may be motivating voters, she says, “as much as it is: gas prices are really high, and people are absolutely looking for alternatives. And obviously, the alternative is green energy.”

The election could prove pivotal for several pieces of pending science legislation. In September Congress passed a stopgap funding bill that didn’t include a proposed rule change to put political appointees in charge of awarding science grants—that pause is set to expire in December. There is also the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), which was recently introduced to the Senate and has drawn fire for promoting fossil fuels at the expense of renewable energy. These and other questions, such as future budgets for NASA and other critical science agencies, will likely be settled after the winning lawmakers are sworn in in January 2027.

“I think there’s a lot of potential in a new Congress to reimagine what we can do there,” Goldman says, “to think about new policy ideas to take different pathways if there’s a different political makeup.”