Every day we read a new headline warning us that American leadership is about to erode because of budget cuts to 'science.'

We have been told tuberculosis was about to be eliminated by a vaccine but a grant got cut and, gosh darn it, now Republicans ruined it. We have been told we'll be set back for generations. 

If you don't want to spend a lot of time reading more, I can tell you plainly that after two decades of covering science in a way 'post whatever is new every day to sell advertising' corporate media will not; government is never why America leads in science. Government is barely even why America leads in Nobel Prizes.



Here are the reasons we could be fine with even less funding and a Republican president. Some of these are even why academic scientists should take off their political blinders and support reforms - because broad cuts followed by justifying restoration of grants would lead to more funding for actual science.

A lot more.

1. Government has spent billions in science funding to engage in self-promotion to scientists. That should stop and the money should go toward science.

Government does not fund some science because the private sector won't, that's the ridiculous NPR/PBS argument.(1) As you will read in Item 2 they instead won't fund revolutionary science, except by mistake. Government instead funds science to guide scientists into funding what their government panels want, and to make that easier have spent $10 billion that should have gone to labs to engage in public relations campaigns alleging that only government-funded science was real science and if you go to that stinky private sector, you have to be unethical or hide inconvenient findings.

They have continued to do it knowing that for every academic scientist that gets a grant, seven will not. They will instead have earned a Ph.D. but will work in someone else's lab as a post-doctoral researcher for low pay. The government 'stay in school' campaigns have worked so well even some post-doc jobs stipulate you have to bring your own funding source. And they still get filled.

Most labs are run rather lean when it comes to the science itself. Government self-promotion used science funding that could have supported over 3,000 labs.

2. We won't lose leadership. Government has never funded the bulk of science research, it doesn't even fund the majority of basic research. What government does do that has value is give out visas to scientists, which is why America laps the field when it comes to Nobel prizes. 

If government wants to improve science leadership without wasting money, get out of the way. The original Trump presidency was actually quite good for science - we got a COVID-19 vaccine in record time thanks to the "DOGE" efforts of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, to get rid of junk mechanisms that blocked progress. There was never any public benefit for FDA needing 18 months to approve a font color change on a drug label but it routinely happened.(4)

The COVID-19 vaccine came out fast but a key researcher behind it, Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., didn't have her own lab when she developed it. She couldn't get a government grant. She was working as a post-doc because the government didn't think her mRNA work was useful. The University of Pennsylvania not only refused to give her tenure, they demoted her because she believed in mRNA but the federal government did not.(2) She had to accept the pay cut and make less than the bench techs sitting near her because she had cancer and needed two surgeries when they told her she was being demoted.(3) They hoped humiliating her would make her quit. 

She instead has now won a Nobel prize while the University of Pennsylvania and the NIH that should have looked stupid and incompetent used science funding to take her work right to the publicity bank. They now do their best to take credit for it.

She is not special. The National Science Foundation also claims they basically invented Google.

She eventually left academia due to being jaded by the lack of interest in real science by government science funding panels. It is a pattern followed by many others who went on to happier lives. CNN nonetheless claimed we were going to lose leadership in science because disgruntled scientists sold a pipe dream by government and other academics were going to the private sector. Nearly a year before Trump took office. 

American science saved the world during COVID-19 but government had only an indirect relationship to that. The private sector did it while the Trump administration made government get out of the way.

We won't lose leadership with less science funding when most of it wasn't used for science anyway.

3. Much of government science funding does not go to science and never has. A lot of science funding is actually tied up in government administration on the front end and universities treating science labs they way they do undergraduate student loans on the back end; like piggy banks. Academic science labs are basically small businesses. A scientist does the work to get a grant and he pays for graduate students and techs and equipment plus nebulous university costs like electricity. Like sports, schools want science to be a profit center. Johns Hopkins spends an alarming amount of money they take from academics who got grants to recruit more academics who are proficient at getting government grants.

That doesn't help the public or even scientists.

Worse, they fund a lot of things you know aren't science. When Ebola was a concern 10 years ago, I wrote about how the NIH had refused to fund a vaccine trial for a modest amount. They didn't have the budget to do anything about Ebola at all, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Congress, they would need hundreds of millions of dollars more. Yet with the over $300 billion they'd already gotten just since the Bush years, when they couldn't spend $10 million to fund an Ebola vaccine, they spent $10 million on a video game that was supposed to teach kids to eat less. The last thing an obese child needs is to play a video game about eating too much pizza. It didn't matter, the $10 million was wasted. No one has ever played the government-funded vaporware. Yet the NSF lists it as one of their success stories.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation once even gave two academics $500,000 to create a "Science 2.0." Despite us being a registered trademark in existence for years, NSF does so little thinking about grants it paid academics to violate United States copyright law. 


When I wrote the duo to ask about what their grant would accomplish the one who replied said he didn't know very much about Science 2.0 anyway, and the "expert" refused to respond.

Are we really losing out when government wastes taxpayer money that way?

No, nor do we need 'science' funding so sociologists can write about why people play Farmville (actual science funding went to that) or chelation therapy ("") or why political candidates make vague statements ("") or any of the hundreds and hundreds more examples funded each year.

We lose nothing losing garbage that isn't science but media only talks about high-profile, obvious work caught in the broad net before being restored.

But even if funding declines we won't lose leadership. It has happened before.

4. Science survived with less funding and a Democratic president who distrusted science a lot more than Trump; Bill Clinton. He is the president who gutted nuclear energy because his constituents hated science. He gave supplements a free pass. He diverted NIH funding from science to provide a 1000% budget increase to an alternative medicine outfit, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He forced the US Department of Agriculture to create a marketing seal for Organic food, then made his own government exempt this new panel from USDA oversight. He prevented the Army Corps of Engineers from fixing the levees they wanted to fix because environmentalists objected, an anti-science decision that resulted in disaster when Hurricane Katrina hit.

NASA took a budget hit, so did the NIH.

All while he tightened the noose around medical companies. 

We didn't lose leadership because government didn't fund most science then any more than they do now. His team could ban nuclear research  and with a ban in place there was no sane reason for the private sector to pursue it, but that is the only reason why we haven't seen a giant leap in nuclear plants the way we did cell phones.

Government held nuclear back with a ban, not by funding too little. Government has instead spent the GDP of a small country subsidizing and mandating solar panels and they are no better than 15 years ago. 

America didn't want to fund the Large Hadron Collider because it was too limited. Academics and media insisted America was going to lose leadership in science due to Republicans then as well. Since it went online, 10 of the 15 Nobel Prizes in physics have gone to Americans. Letting Europe be the leader on the LHC clearly didn't ruin American physics.

5. The best thing for government-funded scientists is more awareness of how partisan and flawed the funding process really is. 

Fixing the government's problems, starting with, as Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University wrote in Nature, realizing that institutional arrangements are often more important than peer review in claims about the social value of science, would double the funding that goes to science. Yet awareness of government control of academic science remains a challenge as long as academia is partisan, corporate media is partisan, and social media algorithms remain easy for well-funded political groups to manipulate. What is gelatin wrestling in Antarctica really accomplishing for the world? The private sector can handle researching group dynamics in EverQuest 2, government doesn't need to fund "studies" of that, or why people are on <a href="http://Match.com" rel="nofollow">Match.com</a> either. The company knows why they are there.

There is no indication that President Trump will fix the problems as long as Secretary Kennedy manages to not fall out of favor with him, government will instead shift to false problems he wanted to highlight when he was a lawyer opposed to science at Natural Resources Defense Council, like food coloring and pasteurized milk, but it's not even been a year so there is hope.

You just won't find much of  hope in newspapers. Doom sells. 

6. Media simply cannot be trusted when it comes to Republicans. Was tuberculosis about to be cured before Trump took office? It was if you believe corporate journalism and Democratic pundits.

We have heard the supernatural 'about to be cured if Republicans would get out of the way' claims many times before, like with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Democrats trotted out a grief-stricken former First Lady, Nancy Reagan, to claim if Bush would just stop banning hESC research, her beloved Ronnie's Alzheimer's could be cured.

There was one big problem with that, and it wasn't just that they exploited an elderly woman whom they had previously derided as a moron for believing in astrology. Clinton had banned hESCs, not Bush. The technology to make an hESC was created without federal funding because Clinton had banned NIH funding for anything modifying an embryo. When the technology was invented anyway, using state and private funds, he didn't want to create any more votes against him during his impeachment hearings his bipartisan ban he had just signed three years earlier was popular. So he stalled requests about using hESCs to let Al Gore deny it funding.

Except that didn't happen. George W. Bush won. President Bush thought it over, listened to all sides, and told the NIH to fund hESC research, but only using the existing lines while the ethics were debated and its legal standing under Clinton's law. Despite being the president who funded it, media claimed during the 2004 election he banned it. 

Even in 2008 with him out of the picture they couldn't be trusted. They washed away Senator Obama's anti-vaccine statements and his decision to renege on limiting himself to public financing the way his opponent did, they dismissed his desire to put Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in charge of EPA and that he surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists. When he finally got into office in 2009 he did to hESCs what he did about Guantanamo Bay after making lots of campaign promises; basically nothing. His advisors said it was a very bad idea to undo the Clinton law so he added a few more lines to the ones Bush had already funded.(5)

Media are not suddenly going to become diverse any more than academic faculties are, one political side is too entrenched and it would take a generation of Affirmative Action for Republicans In Universities for them to get enough presence they could have a voice.

That is the beauty of science. That Harvard loses some science funding will not make a bit of difference because they do shockingly little science with it. We would actually benefit from less of what they do produce; papers using bad epidemiology to promote Miracle Diets or Scary Chemical narratives no one literate among the public believes.

NOTES:

(1) PBS and NPR simultaneously claim their government funding is too minor to be worried about and they are apolitical while telling advertisers they have the wealthiest, most liberal, best educated audience in media.

(2) Her academic boss before that, at Temple, got mad at her and threatened to have her deported. Academics are liberal when it comes to surveys but when it comes to their own labs, they are like any Republican construction company owner. 

(3) So much for the superior culture of academia. Her mental situation at Penn eventually improved, though not the financial one. Universities recruit "rainmakers" just like law firms do, and eventually they got Drew Weissman, and he got to know her and funded her drastically-reduced work from his own grant.

In 2005 they published a paper showing how an mRNA vaccine could work. Government panels still ignored them. She left academia, hoping she could monetize the patent. He was the co-recipient of their Nobel Prize. 

(4) Bureaucratic mechanisms still block out small companies with good products who can't raise enough money for a Phase III clinical trial due to FDA added costs that don't improve safety. So they sell to large companies. Epi-Pens should be $1 but despite needles and epinephrine being well-understood for 100 years, few want to spend $1.5 billion and 10 years just to sell cheaper than Mylan. The government keeps large pharmaceutical companies in place because small competitors can't afford the cost of government. 

(5) And it made no difference. hESCs never went anywhere while the induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) the private sector embraced have led to lots of breakthroughs.