Nearly 2,000 Scientists, and One Republican Senator, Warn of Grave Dangers in Cutting U.S. Science Support

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There’ve been heaps of warnings since the start of the final term of President Trump (“second term” implies too much flex on what might follow) about the short- and long-term damage to American welfare and security from the Doge-led demolition of funding for research and budgets of relevant agencies and programs.

But two of the most recent alerts stand out. One is today’s open Letter to the American People from nearly 2,000 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The signatories describe their statement as an S.O.S. and their main plea is for American institutions and citizens to join in defense of science:

Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding…. If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge…. We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk. The voice of science must not be silenced. We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.

The full statement is below. Note that it goes well beyond opposing funding cuts to decrying Trump’s ideological assaults and threats to science and academic enterprises.

But almost as important, to my eye, is the recent op-ed in the Washington Post from Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana and Matt Pottinger, who was a deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021 in the first Trump administration. Their commentary doesn’t directly criticize Trump or Musk or anyone else, but stands as a subtle rebuke to the administration from a GOP lawmaker, particularly given the utter spinelessness of nearly all of Young’s colleagues in Congress. Here’s that piece (also posted on Young’s Senate page with no paywall):

Funding for R&D isn’t a gift to academia

Investing in scientific research and development is vital to U.S. security.

As President Donald Trump pledges to win the artificial intelligence race, send Americans to Mars and sustain U.S. military dominance, we would do well to remember a key reason the United States achieved its technological edge in the first place: federal investment in ambitious research and development. The U.S. is racing against its adversaries to lead not only in artificial intelligence but also biotech, quantum computing, robotics and other technologies that will be pivotal for U.S. prosperity and security. The pace of innovation and deployment of these next-generation capabilities will only accelerate.

The Chinese Communist Party — our primary strategic adversary — is leveraging China’s engineering talent and manufacturing prowess to advance the regime’s interests, diminish U.S. power, and assert a totalitarian model of censorship and surveillance on users of China’s technology products worldwide. Beijing’s explicit strategy for global technological dominance hinges not only on its well-known theft of American technology but also on significant investment in China’s own R&D efforts.

China’s public spending on R&D has grown 16-fold since 2000, placing it second in the world behind the United States for total spending. This month, China announced an 8.3 percent increase in science and technology spending, among other investments unveiled in an effort to surpass the United States’ lead. In several critical technologies — from drones to advanced manufacturing using robots to quantum communications — China is gaining on or already beating the United States in terms of making discoveries and applying them in the real world.

Just as China’s commitment to research and development has grown, the U.S. government’s has waned. Federal funding for R&D has declined significantly as a share of total spending since its Cold War peak, leaving strategic blind spots in our research ecosystem.

Our private sector and capital markets are the best in the world. But investors tend to gravitate toward easily marketable solutions in sectors such as health care, energy and consumer software apps, while avoiding more challenging or long-term investments in emerging technologies critical to our national security. Beijing’s heavy subsidies for its national champions make it even less enticing for American private companies to try and compete in many strategic sectors — further jeopardizing U.S. national security.

Just as we did when the Soviet Union drew ahead in the space race, the U.S. must meet the moment by accelerating strategic investments in scientific research and development of future technologies. The space race and U.S. commitment to putting a man on the moon led directly to our world-leading aerospace, microelectronics and internet industries — as well as the trillions of dollars in private economic activity it spurred.

Borrowing lessons from this and other successes from the Cold War, the United States can again widen its technological lead. We should follow two steps:

One, policymakers must sufficiently fund federal investment in basic and applied science research as part of the annual congressional appropriations process. The United States’ biotechnology innovators, our electronics wizards and our military leaders uniformly point to the importance of a strong science-and-technology ecosystem that starts with the university. Through public funding sources such as the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, these targeted investments lead to advancements in materials, lifesaving therapies, and weapons for warfighters. Importantly, this research is often driven by curiosity, not profit.

Second, these innovations need to find pathways out of the labs and into boardrooms and factories. It is not enough for smart scientists and researchers to discover new solutions in the U.S. We need to make sure they develop them and bring them to market here, too. To make this a reality, we need a regulatory and business environment that incentivizes talented people to make things in America. Policymakers must take steps to streamline outdated regulations that hinder cutting-edge research.

Sustained investment in fundamental and transformational science is consistent with the president’s stated vision of a new Golden Age, particularly in the area of innovation. Just days into his second term, Trump issued an executive order to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence.

Our policymakers should lock arms with the science-and-technology dreamers and doers across the country — from Silicon Valley to the Silicon Prairie — and recognize that basic research isn’t a federal handout to help sustain academia.

Instead, it is a vital ingredient in our innovation future, economic and geopolitical competitiveness, and national security.

Here’s the open Letter to Americans from members of the National Academies (you can sift the authors here):

To the American People

We all rely on science. Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care. We count on engineers when we drive across bridges and fly in airplanes. Businesses and farmers rely on science and engineering for product innovation, technological advances, and weather forecasting. Science helps humanity protect the planet and keeps pollutants and toxins out of our air, water, and food.

For over 80 years, wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world. Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.

The undersigned are elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, representing some of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment. We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated. [One quibble from me; decimate means to reduce by 10 percent. Many of these cuts go far deeper.]

The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration. The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students—the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.

The administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message. Columbia University was recently notified that its federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration. Destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education—and the research those institutions conduct.

The quest for truth—the mission of science—requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence. It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.

A climate of fear has descended on the research community. Researchers, afraid of losing their funding or job security, are removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as “climate change”) that agencies are flagging as objectionable. Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.

If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.

We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk. The voice of science must not be silenced. We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.

The views expressed here are our own and not those of the National Academies or our home institutions.

There’s lots more out there, including this New York Times article, also published today, rounding up economists’ worries about science cuts:

Trump’s Science Policies Pose Long-Term Risk, Economists Warn

Since World War II, U.S. research funding has led to discoveries that fueled economic gains. Now cutbacks are seen as putting that legacy in jeopardy.

And of course, as Young and Pottinger note, the decline in U.S. funding and support for the science > innovation pipeline is a longstanding and bipartisan failure. I wrote about one of several related National Academies reports 21 years ago:

Five years after the National Academies released Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a stark report showing America’s lagging capacity to innovate and compete, a sequel is out, and — no surprise — the trends are still mostly in the wrong direction.

The update has the same name, but a new subtitle: “Rapidly Approaching Category 5.”

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited