Earlier this month, Eric Berger of Ars Technica reported that the White Houses’ first budget request of Donald Trump’s second term could be a fiscal reckoning for America’s government scientific enterprise. The National Science Foundation, a cornerstone of the country’s research infrastructure with its annual $9 billion purse, might face particularly savage cuts. According to Berger, Intelligence from within the administration suggested the agency’s budget could be slashed by up to two-thirds, potentially shrinking to a mere $3 billion.
Berger also reported that at fraught staff meeting, Susan Margulies, the NSF’s assistant director for engineering, delivered the grim forecast that between a quarter and half of the workforce may soon be on the chopping block. The appointment of Russ Vought as budget director—who previously advocated reducing the NSF to $3.9 billion while criticising its alleged “woke ideology”—signaled that America’s scientific community may soon experience the administration’s budget-cutting zeal in full force.
That was then, and this is now:
The National Science Foundation went beyond the staff cuts demanded by the Trump administration in a move that set off a frenzied backlash at the science funding agency.NSF fired about 10 percent of its staff at the end of Tuesday, removing 168 people who included most of the agency’s probationary employees and all of its experts, a class of contract workers who are specialists in niche scientific fields. The agency didn’t have to fire its experts but decided to in the interest of fairness, a top NSF official told staffers in an emotionally charged hybrid meeting Tuesday morning at its Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters. “The removal of experts was completely at the agency’s discretion. Because if we’re asked to remove probationers, then we also need to remove at-will employees,” Micah Cheatham, NSF’s chief management officer, said at the tense and tearful hour-long meeting, according to a transcript obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. “This is the first of many forthcoming workforce reductions,” he added.
As I write in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, America’s research ecosystem suffers from a growing imbalance threatening its technological edge. Private-sector R&D, focused on commercial applications, exceeds 2 percent of GDP. That’s great. Meanwhile, government funding — essential for fundamental scientific inquiry — has withered from its Space Race peak of nearly 2 percent to just 0.7 percent, with Biden’s initiatives making only modest corrections. While corporations excel at monetizing discoveries, they rarely fund the foundational science that enables transformative innovations.
Unfortunately, that lack of obvious real-word uses for basic research is often used as an excuse to diminish its importance. A number of great examples of how strange and impractical science has ofted yielded high-impact breakthroughs can be found in “A Defense of Weird Research” by Deena Mousa and Lauren Gilbert in Asterisk magazine. They write:
“Projects that seem odd or impractical — on animal behavior, obscure molecules, or fundamental physics — may be easy targets for ridicule, but such studies have repeatedly yielded transformative breakthroughs. While it makes sense to pursue efficiency in government spending, the returns on federal science funding are, on average, extremely high.”
A few examples from the piece:
- That amphibians could help solve a global health crisis seemed, at first, rather far-fetched. Yet research into frog skin secretions unlocked the mysteries of fluid absorption, paving the way for oral rehydration therapy. The payoff has been nothing short of remarkable: over 70m lives saved, most of them children in developing nations
- The intimate lives of Diptera might seem an unlikely catalyst for agricultural revolution. But scrutinizing fly reproduction yielded an elegant solution to America’s livestock pest problem: the sterile screwworm fly. This peculiar triumph of entomology now saves ranchers $200m annually.
- When scientists first examined Gila monster venom, they were hardly dreaming of treating diabetes and obesity. Yet this toxic cocktail held the key to developing GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic. Maybe you’ve heard of this drug?
- When Japanese scientists spotted peculiar repetitive sequences in E. coli DNA in 1987, they could hardly have known they were laying the groundwork for CRISPR. It took 25 years for their basic research to evolve into today’s revolutionary gene-editing technology.
Nations seldom create wealth by pinching pennies. America’s scientific pre-eminence, once unassailable, now faces stiff competition from geopolitical rivals. The prescription seems straightforward: a bold return to Apollo-era levels of government research funding. Yes, bureaucratic bloat certainly warrants a scalpel and reforms should be made so that out-of-the-box ideas are taken more seriously. But remember: As innovation increasingly determines economic might, America’s research austerity looks less like prudence and more like unilateral disarmament.