The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/upshot/trump-science-funding-cuts.html

by karakoram • 7 months ago

220 213 7 months ago

nytimes.com

karakoram• 7 months ago

https://archive.md/F42n9

rayiner7• 7 months ago

The new policy is being carried out as the Trump administration has tightened its hold over federal science funding

Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

gammarator• 7 months ago

The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.

For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...

dzdt• 7 months ago

In the before times the close eyes were by directors and funding committees at the institutes like NIH and NSF. Now those roles are played by political appointees and funds controlled at the whim of the office of the President and their fundamentally anti-science agenda.

teraflop• 7 months ago

"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.

When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.

Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.

mothballed7• 7 months ago

Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.

This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).

There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.

This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.

SoftTalker3• 7 months ago

This isn't new. My father told me 50 years ago, "never work for the government, because your job exists at the whims of whoever gets elected."

rayiner7• 7 months ago

You're conflating two very different things. You're correct that civil service reforms sought to ensure employees would be hired based on merit. But that does not mean they were granted "decision-making independence." The point was to have highly qualified people executing the agenda of the elected President--not to allow them to exercise discretion independent of political forces.

In Federalist 70 Hamilton emphasizes that a key feature of the Constitution is "unity" of executive power in the President: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Hamilton explains that the Constitution expressly rejects a model that had been adopted by several state governments, where the exercise of executive power was subject to the independent check of the executive's subordinates:

The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.
That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.
This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.

So the view being espoused here is not a "recent development." Hamilton was explaining back in 1788 the problems with a model where the President was "ostensibly" the head of the administration, but was "subject, in whole or in part, to the control and cooperation" of his theoretical subordinates.

The constitution was understood this way from Hamilton until Myers v. United States in 1926--which held that the President could fire agency heads without Congressional approval because that was necessary to secure his authority to carry out his will as the executive. The Supreme Court only discarded the traditional view of the executive in the 1930s when FDR created the modern administrative state. And what's now labeled "unitary executive theory" is a legal movement that arose in the 1980s to restore the original view of how the executive worked. The new development wasn't the view of executive power, but instead the idea that we should try to restore how things worked prior to the 1930s.

nijave• 7 months ago

It tightened its hold by shrinking its portfolio as the article describes.

SpicyLemonZest6• 7 months ago

That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.

ModernMech6• 7 months ago

grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.

For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).

Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.

Is the system we have perfect? No. But no one has proposed anything better; most of the time what people propose just reinvents the system we have and all its problems (because they don't understand how the system works in the first place), or invents new (worse) problems this system doesn't have.

rayiner7• 7 months ago

The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate. To the extent that the electorate trusts experts to set those priorities, it will vote for politicians that delegate a large amount of discretion to those experts. If the experts lose the confidence of the electorate, then a properly designed system will retract that discretion.

For the most part, the system that exists today actually reflects that design. The statute and associated regulations for the most part invest authority in "the Director." The Director can rely on committees of experts, etc., but it's more by convention.

amanaplanacanal• 7 months ago

I expect China will pick up the slack.

YJfcboaDaJRDw• 7 months ago

Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china

nneonneo• 7 months ago

China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.

viccis2• 7 months ago

China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed

...the one that was changed a decade ago?

riskeet• 7 months ago

???

piva00• 7 months ago

The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.

If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.

We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.

A_D_E_P_T• 7 months ago

Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.

If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.

niceguy1827• 7 months ago

Don't you worry. If they do, we will just call them copycats. /s

gosub100• 7 months ago

Gotta stop those people who don't look like us, right?

drstewart• 7 months ago

Great. Can I start blaming China for not solving all the worlds problems yet?

threethirtytwo• 7 months ago

Not yet. This is the transitional period where the US is blamed and laughed at and then finally abandoned for China.

mc32• 7 months ago

Specially when their research is more hard science focused and spend very little on the soft sciences that tend to get way more funding in the US.

biophysboy4• 7 months ago

For basic research, which tends to be non-excludable/non-rival, this isn't even a bad thing! I hope India and other fast-growing nations join them!

lossolo• 7 months ago

Seems like they already do:

"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.

Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."

Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:

---

Q: How do you view basic research?

A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.

We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.

---

ghjv5• 7 months ago

How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"

Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.

limagnolia• 7 months ago

Become a politician or a lobbyist? Possibly work in a charity that funds research, as a fundraiser for them?

conartist6• 7 months ago

work to restore public trust in science and technology. look at the ways that trust has been lost.

Starman_Jones• 7 months ago

There has been a decades-long push by a consortium of the wealthiest companies in the world to undermine faith in science by pushing money directly to media companies. I'm not sure how you work to undo that, but that seems like the best place to start.

arunabha• 7 months ago

That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.

The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.

Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.

We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.

add-sub-mul-div• 7 months ago

Trust was "lost" through naked demagoguery.

the__alchemist• 7 months ago

I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.

I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.

SoftTalker3• 7 months ago

You have to focus on the primary elections and even then it will be tough. The party will have its favorites, who are people who have devoted years of work or a lot of money or both. If your message resonates with your constituents however, if you have time to get out and talk to people, and you are reasonably charismatic and don't come off like a complete noob or wacko, you can win a primary election and then you're on the general ballot.

Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.

davidw• 7 months ago

There are also plenty of behind-the-scenes roles where you can help elect people and influence them. Start showing up at your local Dem meetings and talking to people and see what clicks.

sseagull• 7 months ago

I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.

Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.

brightball• 7 months ago

Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.

Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.

thfuran2• 7 months ago

No, they really haven't.

SpicyLemonZest6• 7 months ago

DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.

ghjv5• 7 months ago

reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.

optimizing processes =/= removing goals

thinkcontext• 7 months ago

There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.

hombre_fatal• 7 months ago

That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.

Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.

SoftTalker3• 7 months ago

Why is "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself" off the table?

Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?

ghjv5• 7 months ago

It's certainly on the table, I'm only pre-empting it as a clever answer since it's one I'm already aware of.

light_hue_1• 7 months ago

Companies and wealthy individuals don't fund the same research as the government.

The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.

Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.

thrance2• 7 months ago

In the end, charity, philanthropy and patronage can't achieve much more than help us feel good about massive inequalities. Not that it is completely useless, but if we want to have actual institutions carrying serious research we need public funding.

asoplata• 7 months ago

I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.

jltsiren• 7 months ago

There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.

Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.

I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.

mdhb2• 7 months ago

Move to Europe.

ghjv5• 7 months ago

Elaborate?

JeremyNT• 7 months ago

Run for election on this platform.

The challenge is to convince Republican voters that science has utility.

bane• 7 months ago

The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.

What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.

4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.

SubiculumCode• 7 months ago

Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.

ModernMech6• 7 months ago

This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.

I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.

When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.

Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.

timr5• 7 months ago

This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.

Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.

epolanski3• 7 months ago

Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.

If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:

- they cost much less

- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.

Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.

reilly3000• 7 months ago

Even if you’re looking outside your field, the prestige of a PHD is offset by the fact that they assume (accurately) you’d rather be elsewhere.

jkubicek• 7 months ago

I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.

bonsai_spool• 7 months ago

Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.

Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.

svara• 7 months ago

You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there.

More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.

I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.

We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).

exceptione4• 7 months ago

  > It might take decades to recover our research programs.

Mission completed. Make sure the plane will never fly again.

neoromantique• 7 months ago

4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.

It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.

The idiocracy is a global trend

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/upshot/trump-...

pfdietz2• 7 months ago

Not caring about global positive externalities of science is the flip side of not caring about the global negative externalities of pollution. So at least the Trump administration is being consistent.

bgwalter2• 7 months ago

Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.

Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:

https://xcancel.com/DavidSacks/status/2003141873049952684#m

Getting favors for billionaires is all that these people are concerned about.

smileson2• 7 months ago

It's like three body problem but fintech chuds are the sophons

indubioprorubik• 7 months ago

Well, the purpose of the whole thing is to harden humanity against downfalls, distribute it all away from the people (who might become religous fanatics and analphabets) and away from the governments these people produce (insane clerics and tyrannical military dictators). The idea is to get infrastructure and software that can keep humanity going regardless. If you get research done beneath a bhurka under the taliban after a regional nuclear exchange then we reached the mile-stone of "civilizational" root hardening this whole affair aims towards.

bgwalter2• 7 months ago

If you need links for the "substance" part. Investments of Sacks:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/cannabis-logistics-startup...

https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/13/telemedicine-adderall-vyva...

Trump relaxes cannabis classification:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/trump-cannab...

oulipo25• 7 months ago

We WARMLY welcome all researchers here in Europe! Please come, we love science (and arts) and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!

stemlord• 7 months ago

Trust me, every scientist in America has been clawing for every eurpoean research grant opportunity there is. Competition is stiff

parineum• 7 months ago

and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!

Which will be guaranteed by strict monitoring of your private chats!

oulipo25• 7 months ago

Well, we're still fighting against this. Still better than the US situation though

BJones12• 7 months ago

You might welcome them all, but you don't have jobs for most of them.

oulipo25• 7 months ago

Still better than the US where they have no jobs AND they are persecuted...

wek• 7 months ago

Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.

dragonwriter• 7 months ago

Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America.

“Good” is never an objective question, its always one dependent on values, and values are often not bipartisan.

Everyone believes everyone should share their values, but if they did, there wouldn't be different ideological factions in the first place.

dmix3• 7 months ago

I don't even think this one is a bipartisan issue. This just seems to just be coming from the White House.

The article said

The Senate and House rejected the White House’s proposed budget cuts

Since WH can't control the budget they are changing how it's doled out by giving larger payments to a smaller group.

spott• 7 months ago

there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.

Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.

Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.

watwut2• 7 months ago

It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor.

Not bipartisan. One specific party is literally against already existing medical progress, because it helps weak people they thing should die.

It helps business.

Not bipartisan unless it benefits super rich millionaires businesses. The moment it benefits their competition, it ceases to be bipartisan.

nphardon• 7 months ago

The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.

ryandrake2• 7 months ago

Unfortunately, "Griefing people we don't like" is the central defining principle behind everything the current administration does. It's the promise that got them elected. And they really don't like scientists and medical professionals. This is not going to be reversed until we get griefing out of politics.

esalman2• 7 months ago

It is not a bipartisan winning issue.

Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.

It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.

If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)

If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950

Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.

hyperadvanced• 7 months ago

The response (usually) is “OK but whatabout the $X billion we spent on the military?”

Which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it doesn’t answer why or whether we should be spending so much money on everything else

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

I actually agree here too. America (and Americans) spend waaaay too much, and especially on niche things that profit very specific subgroups. We need to get back to the basics. Johnny can't read[1], or do math. That should be funded long before we worry about today's PhDs, those kids are the pipeline of future PhDs.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2024/11/15/kids-cant-...

jswny• 7 months ago

So only opportunities with a path to economic profitability should be researched?

That is a very narrow view of advancing society

tw600040• 7 months ago

Research anything and everything on your own dime. if it's taxpayer's money, then yes, it has to have at least a probability of profitability.

biophysboy4• 7 months ago

How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?

The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

Capital will seek the best opportunities, let's keep the incentive structure sane. Which means first tackling the biggest problems, with the highest probability of success, for the most people. As the opportunity space is explored or saturated, we'll move on to lower EROI opportunities. By getting the highest EROI initially we'l be richer still for chasing down philanthropic spaces (for the opportunities which do not make economic sense, but make moral, humanitarian sense)

enragedcacti2• 7 months ago

It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.

FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

Can you please name/educate us on some of those game theories and how they apply? (Please don't just point me to prisoners dilemma on wikipedia unless it lays out how it applies to research funding)

mullingitover2• 7 months ago

We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways.

Zero sum thinking.

It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

The problem is the competitive landscape by which other nations which are Anti- us, are taking but not giving. And are happy to see us go down the drain to their own profit.

It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)

jandrewrogers2• 7 months ago

That is not zero sum thinking. It is a classic free rider problem.

exe342• 7 months ago

fix the deficit and kill off the debt? he added $2tn by giving tax cuts to corporations...

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

I agree. Just because I agree with 1 thing "He" did doesnt mean I agree with everything.

paddleon• 7 months ago

1) Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.

2) How do you feel about the money going to ICE?

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

Increasing money supply vs taxation is kinda just misdirection. It's politically disadvantageous to increase the tax % versus just siphoning purchasing power out of cash holders pockets silently and through the back door of increasing money supply.

Not sure why it matters what I feel about ICE, besides an attempt to categorize me or my affiliations. However, in general I believe the US has a large amount of very silly self inflicted wounds, a terrible immigration policy has lead to a situation where people only/primarily get in illegally, and then those people have to make compromising choices based on their legality. Attempting to reset the playing field is noble, but fixing the path to legality would have been nobler. A big chunk of it is a waste of money in an attempt to chase the holy grail in America... "Jobs".

ahyattdev• 7 months ago

Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.

There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185

lawlessone• 7 months ago

As a taxpayer

So like everyone else in the world that pays taxes?

acuozzo3• 7 months ago

The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis

You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.

To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.

We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.

charcircuit• 7 months ago

no immediate pathway for economic viability

Investing in research towards creating digital computers and a global messaging system are pathways towards economic viability.

QuercusMax2• 7 months ago

As a taxpayer you should go after wasteful military spending, not scientific research.

mindslight2• 7 months ago

Or the ballooning wasteful paramilitary spending to wholesale trample our Constitution and attack US civil society. Destroying an apartment building on suspicion that it houses some illegal immigrants makes negative economic sense.

yongjik2• 7 months ago

As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.

Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"

...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.

danaris2• 7 months ago

No, they absolutely will not.

Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.

And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.

tarsinge• 7 months ago

The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis

The private sector can only fund easy low hanging fruit productization projects (Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, …) once the hard public fundamental research and infrastructure (Internet, Rocket Science, Physics, etc…) that has no short term economic value investment is done.

oulipo25• 7 months ago

You don't understand how science works... you wouldn't have nuclear reactors or GPS etc if it wasn't for government run projects

PhotonHunter4• 7 months ago

I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.

One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.

Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.

didibus• 7 months ago

I think you're asking a good question and it's not unreasonable at all.

The way I see it, the private sector is in a place to even potentially be able to fund research because of prior publicly funded research.

The capital expenditure needed to fund research in a way that leads to breakthroughs is massive. Private sector doesn't always have the cash needed. Definitely this was true for a long time, and is true for many countries still.

Then generally the private sector is pretty risk adverse, the majority of private sector funds are retirement and savings. People don't want to risk that, so it tends to invest in short term or more known ventures, which is rarely research.

Some private funding is research moonshots, but the pool of private money interested in that is a lot smaller.

That means, at least historically, private funding simply isn't incentivized to properly fund research, and may not always have the means to do so.

Now should the public still fund it? What kind of ROI does society gets?

Again, at least historically, the ROI has been massive. Let's just look at a short list:

- Internet - GPS - Semiconductor - MRI/CT scans - Vaccines - Jet engine, aviation - Lithium Ion batteries - Touchscreens - AI - Fracking - Mass agriculture - Space exploration

You could also question investment in art and humanities. Private sector simply isn't interested. Do we want to learn about our history, preserve our arts, these don't have financial ROI, but depending on your opinion on the matter they could be societal ROI because you might want to live in a society with a rich culture and record of its heritage and a good understanding of its evolutionary roots and what not.

To be honest, it's hard to find a single private sector breakthrough that wasn't off the back of the public sector either through direct funding, prior discovery or indirect subsidy.

I feel the issue is that after the public funding achieves breakthrough, the private sector quickly capitalizes on the profits. At the same time, the private sector is really good at commercializing and finding efficiency and market fit. The ROI happens indirectly, society modernizes through access to new things, the private sector creates jobs, taxes are paid on private transactions and income generated from the discovery, etc.

At the end of the day, it's all opportunity cost. What else do we do with the money. You said paying down the dept, what's the societal ROI of that? Why not lay down the dept with some of the other tax money? Etc. It's a complex question.

frankzinger• 7 months ago

So many discoveries only find an application decades later. If you stop persuing knowledge purely for its own sake you will never again be able to compete with countries that are serious about science and you will never again live up to your past achievements.

From the perspective of somebody outside the US it really is a shocking tragedy what the Republicans have done to what used to be the greatest country in the world. I hope you can manage to right the ship soon because I fear it may already be too late.

thisisit2• 7 months ago

This logic is funny.

Because majority of the tax payers who might agree with the non-funding of "everyone's project" have another problem. They are also afraid of the unknown "They" and big industries - like Big Pharma. Private institutions research can be easily dismissed as biased. But given that like you they believe even public research is politically motivated - might as well not do any research at all.

Full charge towards third world country standards.

(PS: While I see you asking for proofs from others, you haven't provided any of your own. Do you have proof to show how this is going to fix the deficit and kill the debt?)

maerF0x013• 7 months ago

I dont think it's a leap too far to suggest that spending less on any line item is a step towards a balanced budget ie eliminating the deficit. And once a deficit is eliminated we can begin to work on the debt. What proof is required when it's very simple maths.

Here's a reference if you need one - "“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90487-annual-income-twenty-...

Eddy_Viscosity2• 7 months ago

I feel this way about government sponsored sports stadiums. But not research. Public funded research is is a net benefit, even when some of it is wasted.

sebow2• 7 months ago

Please convince me how gov. funding is better than the private sector. Before people jump to the "late capitalism and everything will be profit-incentivized" bandwagon, I fail to see how things like finding a new good medicine/the next propulsion system/new most efficient energy solution/etc. cannot be linked into the more theoretical fields, which I'm assuming are some of, if not most of the positions/areas of science affected by this.

Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).

watwut2• 7 months ago

Cause goverments funds basic research and private sector does not. Also, results of private sector research are secret, patented and generally dont create competitive markets.

jandrewrogers2• 7 months ago

The amount of basic research funded by the private sector has been growing for decades. It is now a large percentage of the total in the US.

Government investment didn’t decline, private investment massively grew. Same thing happened in applied research decades earlier.

Calavar• 7 months ago

Let me counter with this: Can you point out one country in the post world war era that had minimal government investment in science but had very productive scientific output? Or can you point out one country where scientific productivity increased after public sector investment in science was slashed?

acuozzo3• 7 months ago

Everything can be "sold"

How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?

If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?

The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.

For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.

scoring1774• 7 months ago

This is anecdotal but as a current PhD student who was doing research at a large tech company for a few years prior to this, the incentives as an individual are very different across the two programs. In tech even in a research role there was little to no incentive to dive deeper into potential high-risk, high-reward research because your career trajectory was determined by maximizing certain metrics for promotion cases. The general vibe among my coworkers was spend your day on the guaranteed progress projects and then go home. This was actively incentivized by leadership who asked for frequent progress updates especially as AI began to takeoff.

As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.

It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.

sebow2• 7 months ago

Thank you for the detailed insight. You've touched on an aspect that outsiders (like me) cannot truly grasp but can only guess about: motivation. And it's definitely true, motivation in the private sector is somewhat harder (you've explained it best), or at least motivation compared to the majority of the private companies; but, like you've mentioned, it doesn't seem like it's a problem with the system itself but with the kind of environments that grow in companies. Corporate culture is, more often than not, very toxic, especially when big money is involved (and/or big ideas; the subject of research could be even more important than money in science).

Or maybe it is a problem with the structure that fosters an environment. What comes to my mind is the exceptional case of OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit. Sure, it "ended badly" because of the known drama, but my guess is that besides the money that was poured into it, it thrived because researchers had kind of an "emotional safety net," meaning that they wouldn't be pressured for results as much. Probably the reason some startups perform much better too.

I think career continuity matters, and you don't necessarily get that in the private sector for sure. This discontinuity then leads to practical work discontinuity, which means less work done (which is amplified by the non-decentralized nature of working in private compared to shared science in public, as you've explained).

My bottom line is that the private field could do better, and frankly it's kind of their loss. What I'm curious about is whether a "semi-private" approach is better: a non-profit or some kind of foundation. I guess in practice they're still private, but whether the money part can be "solved" through crowdfunding/some modern methods and whether they're viable long-term remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: a culture appreciative of science will definitely open more doors into novel methods of funding and organizing (maybe in the future these methods could rival the "traditional ways" of public science).

oulipo25• 7 months ago

That's not how science works. Fundamental science works on much longer timescales (10/20/50/100 years), that are not accessible to companies

jacobgorm• 7 months ago

Not if you’re a vaccine skeptic and personal friends with the CDC director https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/cdc-grant-controversial-...

blindriver• 7 months ago

More wood behind less arrows.

This is good.

Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.

We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.

great_tankard• 7 months ago

We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those.

Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.

softwaredoug• 7 months ago

What’s sad is how tiny an investment this is relative to their parts of the Federal budget. It will have almost no impact on the Federal deficit (which will be higher than ever this year)

It’s entirely performative

guywithahat• 7 months ago

A critical analysis of this article is that they got a staffing cut, and since they were afraid they wouldn't spend their yearly budget in time the Office of the director simply paid themselves 138% of their prior budget despite having fewer employees to avoid losing the money.

One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.

One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.

jp573• 7 months ago

...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.

Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"

It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.

This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.

This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.

The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.

exceptione4• 7 months ago

Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.

However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.

I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...

jp573• 7 months ago

"This programme is not available in your country." (i.e. USA) Oh the irony. You'll have to make the argument yourself, I guess.

jp573• 7 months ago

If the problem is, as I posit that it is, that universities cynically exploit cheap labor in the form of grad students and postdocs in order to keep indirect funds flowing into the universities' accounts', then many earnest efforts to improve would necessarily involve putting a lot of researchers out of work, and that improvement would be a good thing.

My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.

thrance2• 7 months ago

Usually, when something is broken the correct course of action is to fix it, not demolish it utterly.

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine

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