Sweeping job cuts across the nation’s science agency this week have been foreshadowed for months, but the sheer scale of them has left many researchers within laboratories and offices across the country shocked.
Up to 350 research roles are on the cutting room floor across key areas – including environment, human health and minerals – as leaders of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) attempt to steer the agency from a steep funding cliff.
The CSIRO is a household name for many Australians, a national pride for its involvement in developing technologies like the total wellbeing diet, plastic banknotes, and even Twisties.
But over the next financial year, a number of its research and development units will cease to exist as the CSIRO looks to restructure and “narrow” its focus in line with the Albanese government’s priorities for Australia’s future technologies.
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One former long-serving researcher, watching from outside the tent after being made redundant in 2024’s cuts, said the CSIRO now resembles the twisted up popular Australian snack it helped invent.
“It’s the most shortsighted lack of investment by a federal government since before the Abbott government. And they were stupid,” the researcher told Guardian Australia.
“Now, CSIRO itself is a Twistie.”
‘Musical chairs’ with declining funding
On Tuesday afternoon, when leaders of the CSIRO held a town hall to share the grim news, the mood was particularly sombre. Research staff learned that in the new year, hundreds would be losing their jobs and some research programs would be changed or cut entirely.
Several more town halls were held on Wednesday for staff in affected research units, including Data61, energy, manufacturing, health and biosecurity, agriculture and food, environment, and the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness.
While early consultation is still under way, the town halls showed management already had an indication of which roles would be on the chopping block.
The environment unit, which has more than 700 full-time equivalent roles, will be reduced by 130 to 150. Four of its nine research focuses will not continue, while some of its activities will be relocated elsewhere within the CSIRO.
They include: climate intelligence and advice; unlocking net zero; waste; and valuing and restoring biodiversity, nature and healthy ecosystems.
A long-serving researcher within the unit told Guardian Australia, under the condition of anonymity, it was hard to see why such critical research programs were being reduced during a time of increasing biodiversity decline and broadening climate impacts.
“Refreshing structure? It can invigorate research, right? There’s no quibbling with refreshing structure,” they said.
“But what we’re talking about is basically playing musical chairs with those people who track and understand our environment on a national scale.
(June 20, 2014) The Abbott government’s decision to cut the CSIRO’s budget by $111m over four years – which would result in a 20% workforce cut over two years – sparks national protest by the agency’s workers
(February 20, 2016) Up to 350 positions made redundant, with climate research divisions bearing the brunt of job cuts
(May 20, 2021) Up to 70 jobs are cut from Data61.
(June 20, 2024) The Community and Public Sector Union warns 500 jobs across CSIRO’s corporate services and some research units will be cut in the coming months.
(October 10, 2025) The federal science minister, Tim Ayres, provides an updated statement of expectations to the CSIRO’s board chair. The CSIRO’s chief finance officer, Tom Munyard, tells Senate estimates the agency is undergoing a restructure, which has amounted to a 12.7% headcount reduction – about 818 jobs – since July 2024.
(October 17, 2025) The CSIRO updates its board charter.
(November 18, 2025) CSIRO leaders announce further cuts of 300 to 350 staff.
“I feel cynical … the direction appears to be, at the moment, that we are prepared to drop the ball on our extinction crisis, our global leadership in biodiversity science or in Southern Ocean science.”
The remainder of the anticipated job losses will be felt across health and biosecurity (between 100 and 110), agriculture and food (45 to 55) and minerals (25 to 35).
The agency’s chief executive, Doug Hilton, told staff on Tuesday it was too early to speculate on whose jobs were being lost at this stage of the consultation process.
But later on Tuesday, the science minister, Tim Ayres, singled out the nutrition team within the agriculture and food unit as an area being “pulled back” because “that work has matured, or it’s been undertaken by other scientific and research organisations in our university community”.
The nutrition team, whose major claim to fame is its work on the total wellbeing diet, was previously reduced in 2024. A former staff member with knowledge of the unit said the announcement was “inevitable” after its staff and funding had been cut significantly.
“Eventually you can’t sustain anything if you don’t have critical mass,” they said.
A number of research projects, such as looking at algae and seaweed as alternative sources of protein, or studying the nutritional value of some First Nations traditional foods for potential market ventures, were abandoned.
“Nobody has ever eaten [these new products] at scale. What’s the long-term implications from that? No idea,” they said.
“These are the things that CSIRO should be doing, in my opinion, because those small startup industries haven’t got the scale that CSIRO did. And now we don’t [have that].”
The former employee said the CSIRO team could be tackling a number of emerging research areas critical to the country’s health: just this week, a major global report found Australia has some of highest consumption rates of ultra-processed foods while the emergence of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is changing obesity rates at national levels overseas.
The political and academic reactions have come swiftly. Labor MP and former science minister Ed Husic, who oversaw job cuts to CSIRO administration and support teams last year, called upon his own party to “pry open the jaws of Treasury” to properly fund the agency. ACT senator David Pocock said Australia could not “build a prosperous future on managed decline in our scientists and researchers”.
The public sector union described the cuts as “the worst” CSIRO had ever seen and a “very sad day for publicly funded science in this country”.
But the cuts announced this week have not come in isolation. They add to the 818 roles lost since July 2024, which was confirmed by the CSIRO’s chief finance officer, Tom Munyard, at a Senate estimates hearing in October.
A funding cliff into the valley of death
Despite funding woes, the CSIRO is often described as punching above its weight. On the international stage, it consistently ranks in the top 1% of research laboratories across multiple fields.
Historically tasked with “public good” research that doesn’t necessarily have commercial benefit, the agency has also been successful at bridging what is known as the “valley of death” between research and application – we have the agency to thank for fast wifi and Aerogard, among other developments.
But funding for the organisation as a percentage of GDP has been steadily dropping, with few exceptions since 1978.
Prof David Karoly, an internationally eminent climate scientist who retired from the CSIRO in 2022, is more familiar than most with cuts at the agency. Karoly returned to the CSIRO in 2018 after deep cuts former executive Larry Marshall made to the organisation’s climate science capacity.
Karoly says this week’s news of staffing cuts “doesn’t surprise” him at all. Annual increases in funding are required to support the same number of people, he points out, and a decline in government investment as a proportion of GDP “may well be part of the problem”.
“For a number of years, they have been trying to generate more income … to support their research activities,” he says – an approach he has previously likened to a “very extravagant consulting company”.
It’s a point Hilton acknowledged in his speech to staff this week. The agency’s head said the CSIRO’s funding had increased 1.3% each year over the past 15 years while the average inflation rate sat at 2.7%.
“The cost of doing science is increasing faster than our appropriation funding,” Hilton said in a note to staff on Tuesday, noting a backlog of urgent refits for the CSIRO’s ageing laboratories and offices.
“And we are facing soaring computing costs, as greater amounts of data are generated, and the cost of protecting our data and people from cybersecurity threats has risen dramatically compared to just a few years ago.”
Research funding plummeting across nation
For those in the research sector, the cuts, though troubling, are a symptom of a wider decline in funding.
“We as a nation have not been investing enough in research,” Prof Chennupati Jagadish, president of the Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS), says.
Total research and development spend across the country as a proportion of GDP has declined from 2.25% in 2008-09 to 1.69% in 2021-22, the latest year for which figures are available. The AAS estimates that, in dollar terms, government investment in R&D is $1.8bn less than the OECD average.
“If we continue to decline at the rate at which we’re declining, we will be at the bottom of the OECD in five years’ time,” AAS’s chief executive, Anna-Maria Arabia. “That’s a worrying trend because science and technology is so central to all of our national interests and priorities.”
A review of R&D in Australia, announced in 2024, is due to hand down recommendations in the coming months.
This story was amended on 22 November 2025. An earlier version incorrectly referred to the CSIRO’s health and biodiversity department. It is called health and biosecurity.
