In late January, President Donald Trump, his grand vizier Elon Musk, and their henchmen at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) enacted a funding freeze on all existing and new federal grants, sending the United State’s scientific research enterprise into catastrophe. Following the drastic action, the administration moved to slash funding for indirect research costs down to 15 percent across institutions. This sudden brake, which affected several government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which supports biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports non-medical science and engineering research, has prompted an outpouring of criticism and outrage but fell short of that observed during Trump’s first presidency.
The funding freeze and cuts to indirect research costs also signal a break from an era of U.S. investment in scientific enterprise that dates back to World War II. At the conclusion of the war, which had prompted research and scientific advances that helped the United States prove its mettle as a rising global power, Vannevar Bush, the science and technology adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, advocated for increased federal government funding for basic research conducted at universities and industrial laboratories. This investment, he argued in his groundbreaking 1945 report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” would improve national security and economic prosperity, and cement the U.S.’s status as a global hegemon. Under Truman, the United States expanded funding for the NIH and established the NSF in 1950.
Since Truman’s administration, subsequent Presidents have continued expanding the NIH and NSF budgets, as Trump’s administration did during his first term. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, when former President Ronald Reagan increased funding for research and development, that scientific research, especially biomedical research, became an engine of private sector growth.
The confluence of Reagan’s largesse for basic research, the passage of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, and the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty—which allowed companies and individuals to patent human-made living things, like bacteria developed in labs—was instrumental in the growth of private biomedical research. Universities, where the majority of basic biomedical research takes place, became a hotbed for both public and private funding: By 1984, 42 percent of all industry-supported university research went into biotechnology. By 2000, universities across the country had been awarded 3,200 patents.
But the passage of Bayh-Dole also precipitated a series of policies that encouraged further privatization of the fruits of publicly funded research, such as the 2004 Critical Path Initiatives at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016, and then Vice President Joe Biden’s 2016 Cancer Moonshot. Such policies have pushed scientists towards entrepreneurship and have left those at the bottom of the food chain, including graduate students and postdocs, in a state of increasing precarity.
When viewed within this historical context, the current funding freeze and indirect research cost cuts are a logical endpoint to the cascade of neoliberal policies, especially when the oligarchs who championed Trump’s campaign are now vying to win over his favor in attempts to line their own pockets with government funds. For example, while DOGE is cutting NASA’s budget under the so-called “anti-woke” crusade, Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX were awarded $18 billion in government funding. Despite the crucial role of the NIH to fund biomedical research and development, biotech industry leaders have been quiet about the NIH cuts—an unsurprising response given the industry’s ties with Trump. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks, for example, visited Mar-a-Lago in January to meet with Trump before he was even inaugurated.
The biotech sector, where Silicon Valley heavyweights and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have significant investments, has yet to recover from the ongoing slump of the past five years. A 2022 analysis by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that overall federal government funding for basic research has declined over the decades, and that the private sector is stepping up to fill the gap. So it makes sense that biotech profiteers like Bourla and Ricks, and their Silicon Valley counterparts are keen on looting federal research funds to keep their own interests afloat.
DOGE’s gutting of federal research funds has met a surprisingly timid resistance from scientists. In 2017, when Trump first announced cuts to scientific research, millions took to the streets under the March for Science. Congress went on to pass a 2017 appropriations bill that increased the budgets of the NIH and the National Cancer Institute. The 2018 March for Science, focused on the climate crisis and environmental issues, saw a dramatically lower turnout; biomedical scientists were conspicuously absent. The pro-science movement also suffered from allegations of politicizing science, which led to its fracturing within a year. The March for Science devolved into 314 Action, a super PAC that endorsed and ran scientist candidates for political office, with minor victories. One such victory was the election of U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, who currently holds one of the most Trump-aligned voting records in his party.
This time around, the senior scientist stratum is absent in the fight against DOGE’s funding freeze and research cuts. In February, at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference—the largest congregation of scientists in the United States—senior leaders provided diplomatic answers (and without mentioning Trump), while early career researchers tried to agitate around the issue. Such agitation culminated in the Stand Up for Science rallies on March 7 across two dozen U.S. cities, with thousands in attendance. But the rallies still did not rise to the 2017 furor against Trump’s attacks on science, and, crucially, maintained that science is apolitical. How can we make sense of this current relatively lackluster response as compared to 2017?
The simple answer is that not all scientists are at risk of losing their livelihoods. The rise of the “scientist-entrepreneur” has meant that tenured faculty, principal investigators, and scientific leaders increasingly hold significant investments in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries—and if the government funds being cut for NIH will instead be spent towards helping their own private interests, why would they intervene? Universities, which have a track record of “anticipatory obedience,” are acquiescing to Trump’s anti-woke crusade by disposing of their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Instead of confronting the Trump Administration as they did back in 2017, universities seem more keen on squeezing their workforce by slashing graduate admissions and reducing faculty hiring in response to the indirect research cost cuts. Unsurprisingly then, the frontlines against Trump’s attacks on science are manned by unions who represent workers bearing the brunt of such cuts: graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and now, federal government employees.
The rift within the scientific community is growing, as the material interests of junior scientists and senior scientific leaders diverge amid growing precarity. What’s more, while U.S. government funding for basic research has fallen, China has ramped up its own government investments in the biomedical sector. Between 2004 and 2012, China’s investments tripled, while the U.S.’s share of global research funding fell by 13 percent. As the U.S. hegemony that scientific research and its resulting innovation helped shepherd dissolves amid the rise of a multipolar world, the Trump Administration’s crusade against research funding spells the end of Vannevar Bush’s “endless frontier,” if left uncontested. To effectively counter Trump’s attacks on scientific research, we need to abandon the notion that science is apolitical, an idea rooted in the history of anticommunism. Collective action against funding cuts need to begin by embodying the realization that science, like all else, is inherently political.
