The way we fund scientific research is undergoing a tectonic shift, shaken by some of the Trump administration’s early executive orders. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are fighting in court to cut grant money, mostly in higher education. Grant renewals are in limbo, which threatens care for patients in clinical trials. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds STEM projects, has already fired 10 percent of its workforce. More cuts can be expected in other agencies that fund scientific research, like the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture. Critics have called the Trump administration’s actions an attack on science; supporters say that these cost-cutting measures lower the taxpayer burden and streamline the agencies.
For fifteen years, I’ve worked in the administration of several institutions of higher education, doing what’s called “research administration.” It’s a grab bag of roles: shepherding researchers from proposal to grant award, managing budgets, ensuring compliance with modern research ethics, and handling patents and inventions. My job is to smooth out the endless roadblocks that incredibly smart people encounter while pursuing their research. Most of my experience in federal grants has involved the NSF and the NIH. I’ve helped launch some fascinating projects, ranging from research into the mysterious nature of prion diseases to public-health projects in developing nations.
I come by this interest in research honestly. My grandfather, Dr. William Sinkabine Miller, worked in biological-warfare research at Fort Detrick in Maryland in the 1950s and ’60s, quarantined Apollo 11 astronauts coming back from the moon in 1969 (for fear of Andromeda Strain superbugs), and concluded his career in the private sector. Not only was my grandfather a good research scientist, he also knew how to change with the times. His move to the private sector came after the Biological Weapons Convention of 1975 dried up his research opportunities.
But the “good old days” of government-funded research that I’m used to are probably behind us. Even if a future administration restores 2024’s status quo, uncertainty will reign over the enterprise for a long time to come. In a recent New York Times op-ed, former NIH director Dr. Harold Varmus recalls a federal-government culture in which both Congress and the president saw themselves as “caretakers of a precious commodity—the scientific and technological communities.” The culture he points to is arguably being dismantled. Picking up the pieces, if the American public wills it, could take years.
Dr. Varmus’s point is well-taken, but I think the current discussion is missing nuance. Overlooked in the conversation about “attacks on science” and the research funded by the federal government is that the federal government remains the single largest funder of basic research in the United States, even as its share of basic-research funding is shrinking.
Calling someone “basic” turned into an insult in the 2010s, but basic research, also known as “blue sky” research, is about as pure an undertaking as you can find. It’s research undertaken not to generate a specific product, but to explain the natural world and satisfy curiosity. Its product is often useless, in the sense that results have no immediate utility. But basic research can also generate remarkable discoveries or data sets that become useful years later. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) research into data transmission and distributed networking was as basic as it gets, but it led to the creation of the internet.
Basic research’s cousin, applied research, is the application of research to a specific problem, advancing human flourishing through practical solutions: the internet to DARPA’s ARPANET project. Applied research uses data from basic research to help create those solutions. In turn, the solutions can create better methods for the pursuit of basic research.
The federal government has long been the largest funder of basic research in the United States, and that’s an important distinction. There’s no other entity pouring as much into research for its own sake. The lion’s share of the private sector’s research activity, meanwhile, involves applied research, the creation of a marketable service or commodity (though the federal government is a significant player in applied research as well). That product is subject to the cutthroat nature of competitive advantage. In contrast, the results of the government’s basic research must, by law, be publicly accessible: the government funds basic science for the good of the citizenry and perhaps the wider world.
Taxpayer dollars chasing the pure knowledge creation of basic research, and doing so for the public good, isn’t an accident. Vannevar Bush—the famed director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, the administrator who kicked off the Manhattan Project and was FDR’s right hand when it came to science—is arguably the person most responsible for the federal government’s aggressive leadership in basic research. In his famous 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush advocated for the creation of a national science foundation. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” he argued. The federal government had a key role in basic research as a matter of international competitiveness: “A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.” America’s primacy as a technological superpower today speaks to Bush’s prescience.
These are all good reasons to defend the government’s role in funding basic research. But what critics of Trump’s actions miss is that our national investment in basic research began changing before he entered office, and seemingly on a bipartisan basis. According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, the federal government’s share of the basic-research funding pie has shrunk. Federal funding has remained flat, while the private sector has poured more of its resources into basic research. Government-funded basic research’s high-water mark was in the late 1960s, when the government was responsible for 70 percent of all dollars spent on basic research. That has shrunk to about 40 percent as private corporations find value in blue-sky research.
On reflection, my grandfather’s move from federal government to private sector makes him look like a man ahead of his time. He had an idea of which way the wind was blowing—that funding for basic research was moving from the public to the private sector—and even though he retired in 1993 and passed away in 2007, I don’t think he’d be surprised by what he’s seeing now. It’s been in the works for a long time.
The gargantuan tech and pharmaceutical giants, among other industries, have taken basic research into their own hands. For instance, Google researchers behind “Attention Is All You Need,” a landmark research paper in development of large-language models like ChatGPT, changed the trajectory of machine learning. Remarkably, the paper was presented publicly at the 2017 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, a gift to the wider research enterprise around AI. The development of what we call artificial intelligence has jump-started the post-pandemic economy.
But in the boardrooms of major corporations, the decision to make basic-research findings public is dependent on whether keeping it public or private benefits shareholders more. Open-sourced, basic-science research spanning decades led to discoveries like CRISPR gene editing and mRNA vaccination. While there are legitimate complaints about scientific journals, paywalls, fees, and taxpayer subsidizing of open-access journals, there’s no stronger paywall than competitive advantage.
The distinction between basic and applied research is lost in the discussion of harm that cutting federal research funding will do to “the scientific community,” particularly at institutions of higher education. Scientific research has been and will continue to be done without the taxpayer. Some scientists and institutions will pursue basic research for the sake of creating new knowledge. But there’s a risk of a significant portion of basic research slipping into the world of industrial secrets, driven by profit motive and the whims of shareholders.
As journalist Noah Smith pointed out recently, federally funded basic research unexpectedly fosters enormous opportunities for entrepreneurship and startup creation. Smith points out that industrial countries without robust startup cultures—Japan, Korea, and Germany, for example—are dominated by large corporations that crowd out entrepreneurs pursuing new avenues of applied research. Without a transparent basic-research regime, such as one funded by taxpayers, the United States risks depriving our best minds of the data needed for discovery, and even national security.
I think we’ll also mourn the changing flavor of basic research as it shifts to the private sector. I’ve worked with people pursuing long shots and chasing the esoteric. One researcher described how his basic research with nanomaterials resembled alchemy: a car driving down the road a hundred yards away could change his lab results. But the long-term payoff of mundane-looking basic research could be huge.
Will the character of basic research pursued in the private sector allow for creativity? It’s hard to say. Research has shown that federal agencies are nervous about risk-taking and less likely to fund long-shot research. Leadership is clearly terrified of raising the ire of Congress. Are private corporations more or less prone to risk-taking? America has an incredible culture of adventurous entrepreneurship, but most private companies close a decade after their creation.
Even though federal funding has driven most of my career, I’m not going to declare that the world is ending if there’s less of it. There are a few reasons for this. First, the free market is a powerful mechanism for creating a higher standard of living. As Google researchers demonstrated, there’s no reason that privately funded basic research will be kept as secret as the marketable products derived from it. Second, I have a hunch that a simmering anger exists in America about the results of scientific research: many people seem to believe they are not receiving the benefits of the research their taxes fund. If we are headed for a future in which private interests dominate basic research, public sentiment will put pressure on the private sector to produce results that provide material benefit.
Third, even if some government funding is cut, I seriously doubt it will entirely disappear. Not even the Trump administration’s proposed budgets write out the NIH and NSF. Finally, there’s a significant number of individuals who want to pursue research for its own sake and without the pressures of profit-making. Academia, the usual site of not-for-profit science, will have to adjust to these new realities. But there will always be those who want to participate in a life of scholarship rather than quarterly revenue targets.
Further, after being in the industry for most of my career, I believed before Trump’s election that a shakeup of federally funded research was justified. I have waded through hundreds of grant proposals and awards, learning arcane rules about how grant money should be spent, what salaried research effort looks like on paper, and the changing mores of how to conduct ethical science. I’ve seen botched updates to government IT systems and watched the seemingly endless process involved with federal rule changes. As with any government initiative, there’s waste in federally funded research. Taxpayer scrutiny of grants has led to outcry about frivolous use of funding. But the problems also involve what’s asked of grantees. Unfunded mandates have made compliance with federal regulation increasingly difficult: for example, export controls on research results of national-security concern make grantees responsible for being a front in the greater project of national defense, but doesn’t provide them the funds they would need to take on such a responsibility. The major federal research grantors fund fewer proposals each passing year, but those proposals, and the resulting grants, have become more complicated and time-consuming. NIH and NSF’s “hit rates,” the rates at which they fund proposals, are about 20–30 percent. In other words, most proposals are not funded. Researchers spend far too much time on administrivia and the grind to obtain government funding.
I have long wanted to see reasonable reform in federal research funding. That is not what is happening now. The Trump administration is approaching the federal government’s research funding with a hammer instead of a scalpel, and as a result, people have been hurt. Clinical trials involving standard of care have been halted, jeopardizing patient welfare and in some cases cutting off medications or therapy. Many funding cuts involving DEI and climate change initiatives have a distinct flavor of ideological revenge.
Importantly, the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in grantee overhead (called “indirect costs” in grantee jargon) might appear to release the government from funding vague “administrative costs.” But academic institutions with one-of-a-kind research labs are a national asset. They have recurring costs that don’t simply disappear because taxpayers don’t want to pay for them. Given the expenses of running state-of-the-art labs, the proposed reduction (about two-thirds of all overhead) will hamstring current research programs not prepared to eat the costs. It will make further investment in research by grantees a questionable proposition. Federal grants may now be a net loss for grantees.
We appear to be on a fairly bipartisan march, decades in the making, to shrinking federal participation in basic research. The Trump administration is merely accelerating the trend. A real problem we will face as federal investment in basic research continues to fall is an uncertain path for our best minds. The academic-federal partnership in basic research has a predictability that the private sector doesn’t. Will American scientific supremacy fall during that time of displacement?
It’s hard to say if we’ll ever know what we’re risking as we grind down the government basic-research apparatus. Our imperfect hybrid approach is likely responsible for some of the powerful advances that the American scientific community has made over the past half century. A combination of government, academic, and private interests have brought us this far. The problem with a “cultural revolution” in basic research is lost years and missed opportunities to expand knowledge.
America will need to decide what it might lose as the transparent, publicly funded pursuit of basic research fades. What America still has, for the time being, is people like Dr. William Miller, who want to push the limits of human knowledge. We just need to decide how to get those people what they need to better explain the world around us.
