Trump’s Agenda Is Undermining American Science
The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During the Second World War, the balance shifted. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development
The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During the Second World War, the balance shifted. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development and tapped Vannevar Bush, a former dean of M.I.T., to lead it. In the span of a few years, the agency spurred development of an antimalarial drug, a flu vaccine, techniques to produce penicillin at scale, and, less salubriously, the atomic bomb. Bush became a champion of state-sponsored research, helping to establish the National Science Foundation and to modernize the National Institutes of Health. As he wrote, “Without scientific progress, no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation.”
Bush’s vision may be as responsible as any other for nearly a century of American scientific dominance. Research funded by the federal government has found useful expression in many of the defining technologies of our time: the internet, A.I., crispr, Ozempic, and the mRNA vaccines that saved untold lives during the covid pandemic. Between 2src1src and 2src19, more than three hundred and fifty drugs were approved in the U.S., and virtually all of them could trace their roots to the N.I.H. The agency has grown into the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a forty-eight-billion-dollar budget, supporting the work of tens of thousands of scientists. By some estimates, each dollar that the U.S. invests generates five dollars in social gains like economic growth and higher standards of living.
Donald Trump, since his return to the White House, has upended the long-standing bipartisan consensus that the government should fund scientific research and then mostly stay out of the way. His Administration has paused communications from health agencies, wiped data from their websites, fired hundreds of government scientists, and proposed slashing the budget of the National Science Foundation by two-thirds. It has announced that the N.I.H. will no longer honor negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on the grants that it administers—money that institutions use for such things as laboratory space, research equipment, removal of hazardous waste, and personnel to help patients enroll in clinical trials. “This will likely mean that fewer experimental treatments will get to children,” Charles Roberts, the head of the cancer center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, said. “More children will die.”
A federal judge has temporarily blocked that change to indirect costs, but many scientists have been contending with an even bigger problem: the N.I.H. has functionally stopped awarding new grants. In the weeks since Trump took office, it has released about a billion dollars less than it did during the same period last year. In defiance of court orders, the Administration has largely maintained a freeze on funding, using procedural tactics to impede meetings where grants are discussed or awarded, thereby stalling research into Alzheimer’s, addiction, heart disease, and other conditions. (Some scientific-review meetings have been allowed to resume, but a moratorium remains on high-level gatherings at which funding decisions are finalized.)
The disruptions are already cascading through academia. Medical schools have paused hiring; labs are considering when they’ll have to let employees go; universities are curtailing Ph.D. programs, in some cases rescinding offers to accepted students. Meanwhile, biotech investors are warning of a contraction in medical innovation. “Drug development requires government support of basic science,” a partner at an investment firm said last month. “Nobody else can step in to fill that void.” There is nothing wrong with reform—it is, in fact, the hallmark of a healthy system. The N.I.H. could stand to restructure its institutes to minimize duplicative work, to fund projects with greater transformative potential, to demand more transparency in how institutions calculate their administrative overhead. But what Trump is doing is not reform, it is subversion. And it could not come at a worse time.
America has long been the global leader in scientific output, but by various measures China is now surging ahead. In recent years, it surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S., and, even before the current funding turmoil, it was projected to match spending on research and development by the end of the decade. Trump may speak of America First, but his Administration’s playbook will insure that the U.S. comes in, at best, second.
If today we have effective treatments for lethal conditions such as H.I.V., heart disease, and leukemia, it is because of historic investments in foundational research. Without such investments, people would still be dying from those illnesses at unconscionable rates. A retrenchment of American science could mean that people will continue to suffer from the many illnesses for which we currently have little to offer: Parkinson’s, pancreatic cancer, dementia, and others. The economist Alex Tabarrok has described patients who die before a medical innovation can be developed and approved as being buried in an “invisible graveyard.” It’s easy to see when a drug you take has a noxious side effect; it’s harder to envision how the absence of a treatment harms people.
The Administration’s actions could also mean that people who were getting lifesaving treatments will no longer be able to—that they will start to populate not invisible graveyards in the future but visible graveyards today. The Administration has dismantled the President’s Emergency Plan for aids Relief, or pepfar, which is credited with saving some twenty-six million lives globally. Amid the worst flu season in years, the F.D.A. cancelled the meeting at which experts discuss how best to update the vaccine for the fall. As the threat of bird flu mounts—the virus is tearing through farms and mutating in ways that increasingly threaten human health—the country’s response has been woefully inadequate.
In the meantime, childhood vaccination rates continue to fall, and a measles outbreak has spread to nine states. Two people have died—a child in Texas and a man in New Mexico—marking the country’s first measles-related deaths in a decade and prompting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who serves as both the nation’s top health official and its foremost vaccine skeptic, to belatedly advise parents to consider immunizing their children. He also spoke favorably about cod-liver oil.
“Science, by itself, provides no panacea,” Vannevar Bush concluded. “It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team.” But our government doesn’t seem to want to play ball. ♦
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