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France has urged the country's research institutions to consider how to welcome scientists abandoning the United States in response to President Donald Trump's policies.

Since Trump returned to the White House, his government has cut federal funding for life-saving research and moved to dismiss hundreds of federal workers working on health and climate.

"Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the United States," France's minister for higher education and research Philippe Baptiste wrote in a letter to the country's institutions.

"We would naturally wish to welcome a certain number of them."

Baptiste urged research leaders to send him "concrete proposals on the topic, both on priority technologies and scientific fields".

This week, Aix-Marseille University in the south of France announced it was setting up a programme dedicated to welcoming US researchers, notably those working on climate change.

Besides the scores of cuts overseen by Trump's billionaire tech tycoon ally Elon Musk, the US leader has withdrawn Washington from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement.

In protest, scientists rallied in cities across the United States on Friday, with many of their French counterparts in the southwestern city of Toulouse attending a solidarity demonstration.

Trump's appointment of noted vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services has also angered many scientists.

It comes as a US judge on Wednesday blocked Trump's administration from carrying out steep cuts to federal grant funding for research that universities and Democratic-led states warn would lead to layoffs, lab closures and a curtailment of scientific and medical studies.

US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston issued a nationwide injunction, opens new tab at the request of 22 Democratic state attorneys general, medical associations and universities that argue the National Institutes of Health's planned funding cuts were unlawful.