Last month, The New York Times reported that the National Science Foundation, the government agency that funds non-medical research, was distributing money at the slowest pace in at least 35 years. Compared to the year-to-date average over the previous decade, funding for math, physics, and chemistry was down 67%; 52% for biology; and 57% for engineering. The crisis at the NSF isn’t accidental. It reflects the Trump administration’s hostility toward basic research, part of a wider assault on science.
It is also a case study in the weaknesses of the Trump movement’s simplistic approach to punishing enemies, and how instincts that can be healthy in one situation can be disastrous in another.
Partly, the delay in disbursing funds has been caused by a combination of incompetence and the time it’s taken to scrutinize research projects for “DEI” and other politically disfavored themes. Nonetheless, as if to leave no doubt of its ultimate intentions, the White House is proposing a budget that would cut funding for the NSF by 57%, and for the National Institutes of Health by 40%. Cancelling grants to Harvard while making impossible demands is another sign that the administration doesn’t think that support for science is worthwhile, as is its crusade against foreign students.
This is a bizarre set of priorities in light of what the empirical research says about American science, and even the nature of the forces that supported Trump’s 2024 campaign: above all, the Tech Right. Of the 210 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2016, every single one was connected in some way to NIH funding. Qualitative estimates tend to find massive returns on investment.
The benefits of American innovation go well beyond pharmaceuticals. Seminal advances in artificial intelligence, from deep-learning algorithms to foundational natural language processing models, often trace back to basic research funded by the NSF and the Department of Defense. mRNA vaccine technology — which enabled the rapid response to Covid despite its current poor reputation on the Right — drew on decades of NIH-backed research into RNA biology and lipid nanoparticle delivery systems.
The Human Genome Project not only transformed biomedical science, but catalyzed entire new industries in genomics and precision medicine. The Global Positioning System, initially developed by the Department of Defense, underpins modern navigation, logistics, agriculture, and ride-sharing platforms. Even touchscreens and voice assistants depend on publicly supported breakthroughs in materials science and speech recognition. Far from being wasteful, these investments are the root infrastructure for entire sectors of the 21st-century economy.
Moreover, a major political theme of the last few years has been the rise of the Tech Right, which preaches a positive attitude toward science and innovation. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is perhaps the most famous document reflecting this outlook. Many believed that the involvement of successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would make Trump a more pro-science president. While the Tech Right has always been more interested in deregulation than government support for innovation, many of the individuals involved, particularly Elon Musk, have greatly benefited from subsidies and built their companies on work in the public sector. There was reason, then, to hope that they would guide the administration in the right direction.
What, then, is behind the current delays and cuts, along with the proposals for massively reduced budgets?
First of all, there is a kind of zombie fiscal conservatism, which has been seen most clearly in the DOGE project. A rational fiscal conservatism would make use of cost-benefit analysis and think about where the most useful cuts can be made. Scientific funding is a minuscule part of the federal budget. Funds going to the NSF and NIH combined are less than a 10th of what the Pentagon receives. If you count all science funding across the federal government, including in the Department of Defense, you end up with only 3% of the budget. DOGE failed in its attempts to make major spending cuts, and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, despite some reductions, will increase the deficit.
“MAGA World doesn’t see American institutions, even the best-functioning ones, as shared inheritances”
Unable to claim major victories on the spending front, therefore — and for political reasons unwilling to touch entitlements or the Pentagon — fiscal hawks have fallen back on attacking the NIH and NSF to at least feel like they are doing something. This will have negative downstream consequences for the country. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the administration has shown that it prioritizes short-term political wins over the long-term future.
The other factor here seems to be the degree to which the culture war dominates thinking on the Right. Like Leftist radicals who want to burn down the entire system, MAGA World doesn’t see US institutions, even the best-functioning ones, as shared inheritances that Americans have an obligation to cultivate and defend. Most scientists vote Democratic, and work in universities and research labs that Trump supporters accurately perceive as hostile to their values. To the Trumpians, it is irrelevant that the average scientist devotes a lot more time to thinking about cellular development or the latest innovations in quantum computing than to destroying the nuclear family. Among the intellectually inclined Trumpians, enthusiasm for the work of Carl Schmitt — the Nazi jurist who defined politics as enmity — gives rise to an all-encompassing and zero-sum approach to our common life.
There has always been one MAGA movement in theory, and another in practice. Since Trump rode down the escalator in summer 2015, he has been a grassroots-driven political phenomenon that actors have tried to shape for their own purposes. Some, like immigration restrictionists and anti-woke activists, have succeeded in getting much of what they wanted out of Trump. Others, like the Tech Right, have found themselves out in the cold when their priorities have conflicted with the views of the president and his most fervent supporters. For those who have a vision of American greatness, the results have been mixed.
The assault on American science has unfortunately been a case of the Trumpian id triumphing over any kind of rational policymaking. Musk’s role in the administration prior to his falling out with the president has only reinforced its natural inclinations. A healthier vision of nationalism would appreciate the successes of American science, take the things that are working, and try to build upon them, while surgically targeting shortcomings. There is certainly room for improvement, through initiatives such as cutting DEI funding and reducing bureaucratic red tape.
In some cases, the Trump administration has in fact moved the nation in the right direction. It appears that many if not most of the grants that have been outright cancelled had a DEI component, including education programs aimed at women and minorities that get classified under the category of STEM funding. An executive order ended a half-century ban on overland supersonic flights within US airspace. The Department of Health and Human Services under RFK, despite embracing anti-vaccine positions and other forms of quackery, has taken some positive steps in terms of deregulating the ability to manufacture and bring new drugs to market.
Then, too, the Trumpian urge to spite bureaucrats and those seen as political enemies has done a bit of good. During Covid, it was public-health and bureaucratic elites who insisted normal precautions be taken while expressing doubts about the feasibility of delivering a vaccine quickly, despite all forms of reasonable cost-benefit analysis suggesting at the time that the government needed to move as fast as possible. There are certain jobs in the government-scientific establishment that harm rather than promote innovation. This includes not only enforcers of DEI orthodoxy, but also much of the field of ethics, which is overly cautious in seeking to prevent harms regardless of how much doing so restricts individual choice and makes it more difficult to provide new drugs and treatments that can help people and save lives.
The two sides of Trump administration policy towards science are a microcosm of the strengths and weaknesses of the populist movement writ large. Elites have regularly failed in their duties, and often made themselves ridiculous to the point that they’ve discredited the entirety of American science in the eyes of much of the public. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the United States remains the innovative engine of the world, particularly in the field of biomedicine. As conservatives used to preach to liberals, change should always come with a clear-sighted appreciation of what is currently working well and may not easily be rebuilt once it is destroyed. The slash-and-burn approach can’t but wreak havoc on American scientific and industrial capacity.
The DEI bureaucrat does not represent every American scientist. And every individual who votes against you is not an implacable enemy who must be defunded, if not destroyed, regardless of whatever merits they may have. Many scholars and academic leaders are all too aware of the blind spots of their institutions. This means that, by working with greater precision and sophistication, the administration could potentially find support for reform within the academy. If something good is going to come of the Trump movement going forward, it will need to keep these nuances and tensions in mind.
