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The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.
Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
> It might take decades to recover our research programs.
>4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
The idiocracy is a global trend
Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.
Unfortunately, "Griefing people we don't like" is the central defining principle behind everything the current administration does. It's the promise that got them elected. And they really don't like scientists and medical professionals. This is not going to be reversed until we get griefing out of politics.
> Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America.
“Good” is never an objective question, its always one dependent on values, and values are often not bipartisan.
Everyone believes everyone should share their values, but if they did, there wouldn't be different ideological factions in the first place.
> It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor.
Not bipartisan. One specific party is literally against already existing medical progress, because it helps weak people they thing should die.
> It helps business.
Not bipartisan unless it benefits super rich millionaires businesses. The moment it benefits their competition, it ceases to be bipartisan.
The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.
It is not a bipartisan winning issue.
Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.
It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.
As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.
If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)
If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950
Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.
To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.
We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.
It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.
FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
The private sector can only fund easy low hanging fruit productization projects (Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, …) once the hard public fundamental research and infrastructure (Internet, Rocket Science, Physics, etc…) that has no short term economic value investment is done.
So only opportunities with a path to economic profitability should be researched?
That is a very narrow view of advancing society
So many discoveries only find an application decades later. If you stop persuing knowledge purely for its own sake you will never again be able to compete with countries that are serious about science and you will never again live up to your past achievements.
From the perspective of somebody outside the US it really is a shocking tragedy what the Republicans have done to what used to be the greatest country in the world. I hope you can manage to right the ship soon because I fear it may already be too late.
I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.
One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.
Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.
>As a taxpayer
So like everyone else in the world that pays taxes?
This logic is funny.
Because majority of the tax payers who might agree with the non-funding of "everyone's project" have another problem. They are also afraid of the unknown "They" and big industries - like Big Pharma. Private institutions research can be easily dismissed as biased. But given that like you they believe even public research is politically motivated - might as well not do any research at all.
Full charge towards third world country standards.
(PS: While I see you asking for proofs from others, you haven't provided any of your own. Do you have proof to show how this is going to fix the deficit and kill the debt?)
As a taxpayer you should go after wasteful military spending, not scientific research.
I feel this way about government sponsored sports stadiums. But not research. Public funded research is is a net benefit, even when some of it is wasted.
> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.
Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"
...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
The response (usually) is “OK but whatabout the $X billion we spent on the military?”
Which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it doesn’t answer why or whether we should be spending so much money on everything else
> We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways.
Zero sum thinking.
It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."
fix the deficit and kill off the debt? he added $2tn by giving tax cuts to corporations...
You don't understand how science works... you wouldn't have nuclear reactors or GPS etc if it wasn't for government run projects
I think you're asking a good question and it's not unreasonable at all.
The way I see it, the private sector is in a place to even potentially be able to fund research because of prior publicly funded research.
The capital expenditure needed to fund research in a way that leads to breakthroughs is massive. Private sector doesn't always have the cash needed. Definitely this was true for a long time, and is true for many countries still.
Then generally the private sector is pretty risk adverse, the majority of private sector funds are retirement and savings. People don't want to risk that, so it tends to invest in short term or more known ventures, which is rarely research.
Some private funding is research moonshots, but the pool of private money interested in that is a lot smaller.
That means, at least historically, private funding simply isn't incentivized to properly fund research, and may not always have the means to do so.
Now should the public still fund it? What kind of ROI does society gets?
Again, at least historically, the ROI has been massive. Let's just look at a short list:
- Internet - GPS - Semiconductor - MRI/CT scans - Vaccines - Jet engine, aviation - Lithium Ion batteries - Touchscreens - AI - Fracking - Mass agriculture - Space exploration
You could also question investment in art and humanities. Private sector simply isn't interested. Do we want to learn about our history, preserve our arts, these don't have financial ROI, but depending on your opinion on the matter they could be societal ROI because you might want to live in a society with a rich culture and record of its heritage and a good understanding of its evolutionary roots and what not.
To be honest, it's hard to find a single private sector breakthrough that wasn't off the back of the public sector either through direct funding, prior discovery or indirect subsidy.
I feel the issue is that after the public funding achieves breakthrough, the private sector quickly capitalizes on the profits. At the same time, the private sector is really good at commercializing and finding efficiency and market fit. The ROI happens indirectly, society modernizes through access to new things, the private sector creates jobs, taxes are paid on private transactions and income generated from the discovery, etc.
At the end of the day, it's all opportunity cost. What else do we do with the money. You said paying down the dept, what's the societal ROI of that? Why not lay down the dept with some of the other tax money? Etc. It's a complex question.
1) Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
2) How do you feel about the money going to ICE?
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"
Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
I expect China will pick up the slack.
What’s sad is how tiny an investment this is relative to their parts of the Federal budget. It will have almost no impact on the Federal deficit (which will be higher than ever this year)
It’s entirely performative
We WARMLY welcome all researchers here in Europe! Please come, we love science (and arts) and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
Not if you’re a vaccine skeptic and personal friends with the CDC director https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/cdc-grant-controversial-...
A critical analysis of this article is that they got a staffing cut, and since they were afraid they wouldn't spend their yearly budget in time the Office of the director simply paid themselves 138% of their prior budget despite having fewer employees to avoid losing the money.
One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.
One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.
More wood behind less arrows.
This is good.
Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.
We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.
Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:
https://xcancel.com/DavidSacks/status/2003141873049952684#m
Getting favors for billionaires is all that these people are concerned about.
Not caring about global positive externalities of science is the flip side of not caring about the global negative externalities of pollution. So at least the Trump administration is being consistent.
> The new policy is being carried out as the Trump administration has tightened its hold over federal science funding
Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
Please convince me how gov. funding is better than the private sector. Before people jump to the "late capitalism and everything will be profit-incentivized" bandwagon, I fail to see how things like finding a new good medicine/the next propulsion system/new most efficient energy solution/etc. cannot be linked into the more theoretical fields, which I'm assuming are some of, if not most of the positions/areas of science affected by this.
Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).