By KIM BELLARD
I’m starting to feel like I’m beating a dead horse, having already written a couple times recently about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science, but the hits just keep on coming. Last Friday, for example, not only did the Administration’s proposed 2026 budget slash National Science Foundation (NSF) funding by over 50%, but Nature reported that the NSF was ceasing not only making new grants but also paying out on existing grants.
Then this week, at an event called “Choose Europe for Science,” European leaders announced a 500 million euro ($566 million) program to attract scientists. It wasn’t specifically targeted at U.S. scientists, but the context was pretty clear.
Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called the proposed budget cuts “a crisis, just a catastrophe for U.S. science.” Even if Congress doesn’t go along with such draconian cuts and grant approval resumes, Dr. Parikh warns: “That’s created this paralysis that I think is hurting us already.”
One NSF staffer fears: “This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point.”
Nature obtained an internal NSF April 30 email that told staff members “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice.” Researchers can continue to spend money they’ve already received but new money for those existing or for new grants are frozen “until further notice.” Staff members had already been told to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities.”
NPR reports that some 344 previously approved grants were terminated as a result, as they “were not aligned with agency priorities.” One staffer told Nature that the policy had the potential for “Orwellian overreach,” and another warned: “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Yet another staffer told Samantha Michaels of Mother Jones that the freeze is “a slow-moving apocalypse…In effect, every NSF grant right now is canceled.”
No wonder that NSF’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last week, simply saying: “I believe I have done all I can.”
If you think, oh, who cares? We still have plenty of innovative private companies investing in research, so who needs the government to fund research, then you might want to consider this: new research from American University estimates that even a 25% drop in federal support for R&D would reduce the U.S. GDP by 3.8% in the long term. And these aren’t one-time hits. “It is going to be a decline forever,” said Ignacio González, one of the study’s authors. “The U.S. economy is going to be smaller.”
If you don’t believe AU, then maybe you’ll believe the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which estimates that government investments in research and development accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II. “If you look at a long period of time, a lot of our increase in living standards seems to be coming from public investment in scientific research,” Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and an author of the Dallas Fed study, told The New York Times. “The rates of return are just really high.”
It’s no wonder, then, that European leaders see an opportunity.
“Nobody could imagine a few years ago that one of the great democracies of the world would eliminate research programs on the pretext that the word ‘diversity’ appeared in its program,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said at the Choose Europe event.
President Macron went on to add:
“No one could have thought that one of the largest democracies in the world would erase, with a stroke of the pen, the ability to grant visas to certain researchers. No one could have thought that this great democracy, whose economic model relies so heavily on free science, on innovation and on its ability to innovate more than Europeans and to spread that innovation more over the past three decades, would make such a mistake. But here we are.”
“Unfortunately, we see today that the role of science in today’s world is questioned. The investment in fundamental, free and open research is questioned. What a gigantic miscalculation,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. She wants to “make Europe a magnet for researchers” over the next two years.
Here we are indeed, and, yes, what a gigantic miscalculation.
“In the United States, once a paradise for researchers, academic freedom is being challenged. The line between truth and falsehood, between fact and belief, is being weakened,” Elisabeth Borne, France’s education minister, said.
“The first priority is to ensure that science in Europe remains open and free. That is our calling card,” Ms. von der Leyen explained. President Macron echoed this: “We call on researchers worldwide to unite and join us … If you love freedom, come and help us stay free.”
America was supposed to be the land of the free, right?
We need to keep in mind that, while all this is going on, President Trump is waging war on major U.S. research universities, ostensibly in the name of fighting DEI or antisemitism. The New York Times estimates he has targeted some 60 in all, especially Ivy League institutions. Over 200 colleges and universities have signed on to a statement decrying the attacks:
As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education…We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.
The statement warns: “The price of abridging the defining freedoms of American higher education will be paid by our students and our society.”
Robert N. Proctor, a historian at Stanford University, told Reuters that Trump was leading “a libertarian right-wing assault on the scientific enterprise” that had been years in the making. “We could well see a reverse brain drain,” he said. “It’s not just to Europe, but scholars are moving to Canada and Asia as well.”
Last week Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, pointed out: “When you mix politics and science, you just get politics.” Starting with WWII, U.S. universities made a devil’s bargain with the federal government about research funding. That bargain served both parties, and the country, well over these past many decades, but we’ve never seen politics and ideology play such a role in what and who gets funded.
The Administration claims it values science, but only certain kinds of science and especially not “woke” science. It’s fair to question levels of federal funding, but when the political considerations outweigh the scientific ones, we run the risk that “America First” won’t be true of U.S. science anymore.
Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor
