Trump's Inexplicable Attack on Science

There is much that the Trump Administration has done that is not at all surprising. While the scale of what Trump is doing may be surprising, I expected tariffs, immigration roundups and retaliatory actions of all types because, well, Trump told us what he was doing to do. One thing has surprised me: Trump’s remarkable slash and burn toward science budgets. Actually, I should not have surprised because Trump tried—unsuccessfully—to cut federal spending on science in his first term.

This is personal to me. I was a Chemistry major in College, and actually did research that led me to be a co-author of a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. If you wanted to know more about allene chemistry, I was your man. And while I left science to become a lawyer, much of my career touched on science and technology.

Our current system for federal funding of science arose out of the incredible role basic science played in World War II. The leader of the wartime science efforts—Vannevar Bush—developed a roadmap for how the American people could continue to benefit from science of technology. He recognized that the Nation’s national security and prosperity depended on basic research—and that science was best served by a bottom-up approach to choosing what research was done. The Government would announce broad areas of interest that would be funded by the federal government using competitive processes, rather than a top-down government decision on what specifically to research. He also recognized the need to create the infrastructure of science and technology—funding science education, labs and institutions, While Bush’s vision ultimately resulted in the creation of new federal institutions to fund science—starting with the National Science Foundation, and then expanding to many other agencies, including the Nation Institutes of Health and DARPA—much of the actual research was done by research universities.

While federal R&D spending has recently been flat, until very recently, the result of Bush’s vision was a rapid increase in federal spending on research that resulted in many major technological advances, including the GPS system, the technology that led to the shale gas revolution, the development of MRIs, the modern understanding of cardiovascular health factors, the Human Genome Project, mRNA vaccines and therapies. The NIH contributed to over 99% of all drugs approved in the United States according to one estimate published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The economic impact of the resulting innovation is significant. The National Bureau of Economic Research found “The returns to federally funded R&D appear to be substantially higher than the returns to other forms of federal investment such as physical infrastructure.” The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas did a working paper that government investments in R&D accounted for over one fifth of the U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

Given this background, it is stunning that the Trump cuts in science spending are so massive. The FY2026 budget includes staggeringly large cuts for science research. It includes a 55.8% cut in the budget of the National Science Foundation. The U.S. Geological Survey would see its budget almost cut in half. The budget also slashed the NIH budget by $18 billion (from $45 billion to $27 billion). NASA’s budget would be cut by 24.3 percent, which is the largest cut in NASA’s budget ever proposed. Most disturbingly, the cuts to NASA’s science programs are even higher—47%.

A team of American University economists have done an assessment of what cuts of this magnitude will do to our prosperity. They found:

• Budget cuts to public R&D would significantly hurt the economy in the long run, with large negative effects on GDP, investment, and government revenue.

• A 25 percent cut to public R&D spending would reduce GDP by approximately 3.8 percent in the long run. This effect is comparable to the decline in GDP during the Great Recession.

• Cutting annual public R&D spending in half would decrease GDP by approximately 7.6 percent, making the average American approximately $10,000 poorer (in today’s dollars) than the value implied by the historical trend in GDP.

• Cutting public R&D would also shrink federal government revenue. A 25 percent cut in R&D would decrease revenue by approximately 4.3 percent annually, while a 50 percent cut would decrease it by 8.6 percent annually.

And these cuts are on top of other initiatives that will devastate science infrastructure, including the cut in NIH’s indirect cost reimbursement (which I discussed in this post) and the suspension of research grants to Harvard and Columbia.

Why?

There are several explanations. One is that this reflects the views of Elon Musk and the other Silicon Valley technologists who have become skeptical of the value of government funded scientific research and who think that it should be done with private funds. Nature explains:

Some conservatives have long questioned the value of federal investments in fundamental research, and these views have gained traction with some modern technology industrialists, says William Press, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. The idea that the private sector can pick up the slack has gained ground as the Trump administration works to scale back public investments in science. Press calls it a risky experiment. “There’s going to be a lot of roadkill.”

This is consistent with the views expressed in Project 2025, which accused federal workers at federal science agencies of waste, corruption and “woke” propaganda.

To be clear some of the criticisms have merit. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in their outstanding new book, Abundance, there is much that needs to be fixed with how the government now does science. Innovation seems to be slowing down. The federal government is doing a bad job of funding young scientists, and risky long shot ideas—like mRNA technology—don’t get funding. And scientists now need to spend about 40% of their time doing paperwork—drafting grant applications, drafting progress reports and the like—instead of doing science. Still, these programs can be fixed and don’t justify massive cuts in science spending.

Another factor is the large decline in trust in scientists in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by a recent Pew Research poll. Over a third of all Republicans express distrust scientist, and even among those who express trust, only a small number express great trust.

This hostility is often expressed DOGE and other conservative voices by citing examples of “weird” or “silly” research projects as an example of wasted spending. The problem is that the history of some of the most important scientific innovations have been the result of seemingly silly research projects. Deena Mousa and Lauren Gilbert collected several examples, including GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic (which originated in a study of Gila Monster venom).

Senator William Proxmire famously gave “Golden Fleece” awards to research projects that he deemed wasteful. Years later, it turns out many of these “wasteful” research projects led to important discoveries. For example, he ridiculed a study of the mating habits of the screwworm, but this research eld to the ultimate eradication of this agricultural pest saving the U.S. cattle industry $20 billion. In recognition of this fact, Congressman Jim Cooper created a “Golden Goose” award to honor seemingly silly research that leads to important discoveries. Unfortunately, the DOGE coder twenty-somethings seem not to have learned this lesson.

I think that all of these explanations for the Trump attack on science have merit, but I think that they miss the biggest factor: this is an effort to “own the libs” and to “defund the left.” Universities are a huge target for conservatives who claim that American institutions have been captured by the Left, and are also the largest recipient of federal research grants. Conservative activist Chris Rufo has the ear of Trump, and has been advocating this for years. His position is that the Left has taken over major American institutions and that these institutions need to be defunded.

In his first term, Trump tried hard—several times—to make massive cuts to federal support of science. Congress rejected this effort each time. This time, Trump is not waiting for Congress to act. He asserted executive authority to cancel and suspend billions in federal grants, and he has terminated thousands of federal employees at science agencies. Even if the courts and Congress ultimately come to the rescue, much damage will have been done. This is the concern of David Goldstone of MIT as reported by Nature:

“There is a very real question about whether the current system of US research universities will remain intact at the end of this year,” says David Goldston, who retired in April as head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s government-relations team in Washington DC, and previously worked on science issues as a staff member for the US Congress. He says US science is built on the long-standing belief that the country is a stable and welcoming place to do research. “Once you break that spell, it’s gone,” Goldston says — and it won’t magically reappear after another election.