It's become a popular trope each week to read claims that a government funding cut to universities that have raised education costs 1000% greater than inflation due to the twin spigots of unlimited student loans and government grants will mean less science, but it is not accurate. It instead shows why the public is right not to trust the political claims of university science departments that may be 94% for one party.
The reality is that America does not lead in science because of academia, universities have instead treated labs poorly, knowing scientists are often stuck, and a shocking amount of science funding has not gone to science at all.
Here are various claims you have read this year and the real cultural milieu.
Academic cuts will harm public health
We have seen many headlines warning us that American leadership is about to erode because of budget cuts to 'science.' One Harvard researcher, Dr. Sarah Fortune, got media attention claiming she was about to create a tuberculosis vaccine and save 1,250,000 people per year until the NIH halted grants for review. Anyone with critical thinking knows that claim is suspect. It requires us to believe that all those pharmaceutical company executives that spend $1 billion and 15 years in the regulatory cycle to cure 2,000 people won’t pay $60 million to cure 1,250,000 people and be heroes all over the world when the payoff is only two years away.
It's not true. Scientists know animals are not little people, the vaccine is nowhere close to reality, but they did not speak up the way they had if someone outside their tribe claimed a miracle was about to occur if they got a government grant.
These claims are often repeated when the truth is that academia only produces a third of America's basic research, and no applied science like vaccines.
Academics and journalists instead often engage in populist work against a President they don't like. A $12 million grant to study infant food allergies, halted because of Harvard’s unwillingness to treat antisemitism the way it treats other hate speech, will not kill 800 infants, but you would believe that is the case if you trust media accounts.
You cannot. Media have very rarely objectively covered science policy issues or more would note that instead of funding science that will save lives, the federal government tends to ignore it.
The government refused to fund mRNA research for decades
Academics and journalists are claiming we are doomed because of a cut to mRNA vaccine grants. While Secretary Kennedy is absolutely wrong in his reasons, he received little criticism from his political allies - Democrats - when he helped California, overwhelmingly Democrats, become the country's leader in vaccine denial. There were some schools on the coast, America's progressive enclaves, that had under 30% of school children vaccines. Dr. Richard Pan, M.D., bucked the scorn of his own party leadership and voters and worked tirelessly to get arbitrary vaccine exemptions banned. Kennedy lauded organic food stores that advertised 'measles parties' so he hasn't changed, his treatment only changed because his political party did.
Government didn't care about mRNA vaccines for over 20 years before COVID-19 so claiming they are vital to development is odd.
For example, NIH took credit for the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. Except they had little to do with it. They had even opposed funding the underlying technology.A key researcher behind the mRNA technology that created the vaccine, Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., didn't have her own lab when she developed it. She couldn't get a government grant. She was instead working as a post-doc because the government didn't think mRNA work was useful, and The University of Pennsylvania refused to give her tenure because the government wouldn’t fund her.
Universities can claim they are here for the public good but Penn not only refused Karikó tenure, they demoted her. She accepted that humiliation for the same reason they knew they could cut her pay; she had cancer and needed two surgeries and couldn’t lose health insurance.
Despite both the government and Penn blocking her work, they now take credit for her Nobel Prize. She quit academia in 2005 because of their dismissal of her work, now they claim they created it.
She is not special in that regard. The National Science Foundation also claims they basically invented Google. Government may refuse to fund innovation, but they will take credit for it.
This “politicization of science” with media assistance has a long history. Most readers remember the human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research controversy. Before and during the 2004 Presidential election a campaign platform against President George W. Bush was that he had banned embryonic stem cell research. He was instead the first president to fund it. The research that led to it had been banned by President Clinton in 1996. That is why hESC technology was invented without federal funding. Only once it was created did academics ask for the NIH to put money into it.President Clinton ignored them, he wisely did not want to undo his own law and left the matter to his successor.
President Bush saw the potential and considered arguments from both sides and decided to fund it. He limited it to lines that had been created during the previous three years while the ethics of potential human experimentation were worked out. Critics pounced on that and claimed he had banned it. They trotted out a grief-stricken Republican former First Lady, Nancy Reagan, whom they convinced that if Bush would lift his ban, the Alzheimer’s that devastated her beloved Ronnie would be cured.
In the 2008 election, Senator Obama continued to campaign on how Republicans were anti-science, and he invoked hESCs many times as proof. As Scientist-In-Chief, he proclaimed, he would ‘lift the ban.’Campaigns are one thing and reality is another. Five months after he took office, President Obama finally added a few more lines to the ones Bush had already funded. The Clinton law remained in force.
What did academic outspoken academic scientists say about this Democratic continuation of the ‘ban’? Suddenly, a cure for Alzheimer’s was not right around the corner, hESC breakthroughs were going to take a lot of time and we shouldn’t rush to expect a Magic Bullet. Nearly three decades later, the miracles we were promised if Republicans would get out of the way have not happened while the alternative promoted by the private sector, uncontroversial induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), have led to lots of breakthroughs.
Claiming there will be declines in public health if funding is cut for universities is not based on experience. Reading surveys about why some people hesitate to take vaccines can’t be vital to public health or academics would’ve studied it for the 23 years that Democrats claimed vaccines cause autism. Yet they did not.
America will not be left behind if we don’t study gelatin wrestling in Antarctica or pay sociologists to write about people playing Farmville or why political candidates make vague statements. Science funding certainly should not go to asking people why they are on “Match.com” The company knows why they are there.Government has a long history of funding garbage using money earmarked for science.
America will lose leadership if we use less taxpayer money
You may believe that government is the driver of science research, but that is an invention. Government has never funded the bulk of science research, it doesn't even fund the majority of basic research, studies of things like fruit flies and roundworms. The most important thing government does do per dollar spent is give out visas to scientists. America laps the field when it comes to Nobel prizes in large part because while it’s impossible to turn all Americans into great scientists, it is possible to turn all great scientists into Americans.
We can increase science funding without raising taxes, by making the bureaucracy of science more manageable.
The Clinton administration was anti-immigrant and alleged that foreign workers were stealing jobs from Americans so H1B visas had to be curtailed but there was no evidence for it. Paying immigrants less was illegal long before he took office. Yet a lot of the mechanisms for his 1990s xenophobia remain in effect and science would be improved a lot by using less money to keep people out.
And we could remove obstacles for science in other ways. The first Trump presidency was good for science. We got a COVID-19 vaccine in record time thanks to DOGE before it had a name; the efforts of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, to get rid of bureaucratic mechanisms that saved no lives but increased costs.
Most importantly, government should stop funding nonsense using science budgets.
Pillaging science funding to give to cultural pet projects began with President Clinton. He gutted nuclear energy, NASA took a budget hit, and the NIH had its budget siphoned off to give a 1000% increase to an alternative medicine outfit, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
He even 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. All while he tightened the noose around medical and pharmaceutical companies with the demand for more expensive clinical trials and government regulation, which have to-date saved no one.
Yet during the darkest days for American science in the 20th century, America did not lose leadership. The private sector continued to fund it.
In the few cases where U.S. taxpayers did not fund something, it didn’t harm us. Europe built the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) and America chose not to be involved because impartial physicists said its capabilities were too limited. Despite that, partisan academics and media again insisted America was going to ‘lose leadership’ due to Republicans.
Since the LHC went online, 10 of the 15 Nobel Prizes in physics have gone to Americans.
We can increase science funding by just stopping universities and agencies from wasting money
Left out of media narratives about how science will collapse is how much 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; as piggy banks. The American public often thinks academic science must be funded by universities but science labs are basically small businesses. A scientist does the work to get a grant and pays for graduate students and bench techs and equipment.
Yet the lab also saddled with nebulous university costs like office space and electricity and emptying trash cans. There is no fixed amount, universities charge what they charge, and the government wants to make it a fixed percentage of grants. This is quite sensible but, like sports, schools want government-funded science to be a real profit center.
Academics who have complained about universities charging them so much for years or even decades have suddenly started defending the system. They'd be wiser to stay silent. A cap on how much universities can extract from science grants. If academic scientists buck their political allegiance and stand up for their own interests, all of America will win.
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