American Science, Shattered. So says is the title of Part 1 of a ten part series in STAT News. Since STAT articles are usually paywalled, I will summarize them here as they appear. Unlike most accounts of the current state of science in the United States, the authors of this article have found scientists who are reflective, who realize that while we (once a member, always a member at some level) are currently on a one-way street to perdition, actions and inactions of the scientific community helped pave that right-of-way from sidewalk to sidewalk:
For a substantial group of U.S. researchers, 2025 will be remembered as the year their path to a career in science was closed off, their dreams dashed. For others, it will go down as a chaotic game of red-light-green-light that left them constantly unsure of what work would be funded or halted, but that they managed to survive. For nearly everyone, the last 10 months have revealed that the research enterprise that catapulted the country to the technological fore was much more brittle than expected.
Sure, the courts have stepped in to restore billions of dollars in terminated grant funding to colleges and universities. Yes, the National Institutes of Health, despite layoffs and seemingly endless hurdles, managed to spend its entire budget for the fiscal year. And Congress, in a rare rebuke to the president, has so far refused steep cuts to the NIH budget in 2026 as well as a White House plan to consolidate its 27 institutes. But in the larger scheme of things, the Trump administration has, with shocking speed, ripped up the longstanding social contract that existed between scientists and the federal government.
This social contract made American science the world leader in basic research in all disciplines beginning with the vision of Vannevar Bush after World War II. This has been covered here before. The realization of Bush’s vision from the mid-1950s until recently spread the scientific wealth around the country. Yes, the research universities and private research organizations that received the most money at first have remained at the top of the funding lists (National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, Department of Defense) but virtually other institution that is willing to support research has received support. Contrary to the apparent views of the Current Administration, this outreach into the heartland has been a good thing.
Vannevar Bush wrote Science: The Endless Frontier as a report to the president in 1945 as a plan to make American science great. It did just that:
“Science: The Endless Frontier”…is the foundational document to which the past eight decades of technological winning can be traced. If you’ve enjoyed living in an era where doctors can find cancer with scans and DNA tests, where HIV is treatable, where lasers can correct your vision, GLP-1 drugs fight your food cravings, and premature babies don’t have to suffocate and die within their first few hours, you can thank its author, Vannevar Bush. The internet? GPS? The core learning algorithms that form the basis of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT? Bush. Bush. Bush.
Plus, virtually every other drug and medical intervention we have benefited from for the past eighty years, funded by NIH, and the research in other scientific disciplines funded by the National Science Foundation.
The one rule that made American science was the requirement that research proposals be evaluated by other scientists, who pledged to make awards as objectively as possible to fund research that was “meritorious.” This, of course, can be somewhat “subjective.” Ask any scientist who has ever had a research proposal not funded (that would be every one of us). But every scientist also knows that failure comes with the life of a research scientist. As long as the batting average stays substantially above the Mendoza Line (20%), survival is possible. Based on my long experience writing and reviewing grant proposals, about one-third are worthy of support upon first submission and another one-third should be funded after revision. The others are likely to remain unfunded for the duration. That success rates are now below 20% is an opportunity cost that is incalculable but large:
Perhaps the biggest rupture arrived in August in an executive order giving political appointees sweeping new powers over the awarding of research grants. The move directly undercut a core principle of the Bush blueprint — that projects should be supported based on scientific merit, not ideological whims. While the pendulum has swung back and forth over the years between scientific independence and political influence, never has it swung this far toward the latter.
Since the end of the government shutdown last month, several moves suggest the grip of political appointees over the NIH will only grow. An internal memo, obtained by STAT, reads: “Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” Simultaneously, the White House and top administration officials have become more involved in NIH processes than in the past, and in October a friend of Vice President JD Vance was made the head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences — without a research background in that area. The day the government reopened, it also placed an NIH staffer who was a vocal opponent of the Trump administration’s handling of the agency on leave. Then in recent days, health secretary and longtime vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his subordinates at federal science agencies escalated their campaign to impugn vaccine safety, bypassing normal procedures to revise website language stating vaccines don’t cause autism and assert that Covid shots caused the deaths of at least 10 children.
“My fear is that they don’t even realize what they’re doing,” said Elias Zerhouni, who led the NIH under Republican President George W. Bush from 2002 to 2008. In recent months, Zerhouni has repeatedly reached out to members of the Trump administration. In each of those conversations, he told STAT, he has found administration officials earnest in their desire to strengthen American scientific competitiveness, but lacking both a firm grasp of how the research system fits together and a cohesive plan for how to overhaul it.
“They connect this complete chaos to an intent to make it stronger, not realizing that by doing what they’re doing — and not coordinating what they’re doing in the right titration — it’s basically taking an axe to the system,” Zerhouni said. “They’re destroying it and they don’t really understand that when you tell them.”
The deal, as Bush saw it, was pretty simple. Newly created federal scientific agencies — staffed by scientists — would set scientific priorities and then vet investments in those priorities across the nation’s universities and academic medical centers. They would cut the checks and stand back, confident that scientific breakthroughs would, in time, translate into improved health, economic growth, and global technological dominance.
But it is also true that Vannevar Bush of MIT was a bit parochial, as those of us in the provinces might say. And that led to conflict with certain politicians, one of whom was Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia:
Kilgore wanted politicians, who would be more attuned to the desires of the taxpayers funding the research, to set priorities. Bush, who spent much of his life in the academic bubble of Boston, thought that only scientists would have the expertise to judge where money was best sent. Kilgore also thought that some funding should be dispersed geographically, which Bush saw as inconsistent with a merit-based system. (NIH listed “geographic balance” as one of the criteria in its grant strategy announced last month.) Kilgore also wanted the government to hold the patent rights on advances that were publicly funded, which Bush thought would hamper innovation. Just this year, the Trump administration has threatened to take control of patents held by Harvard that were the product of federal funding.
Vannevar Bush went behind the back of Senator Kilgore, who was not wrong on the politics. About thirty years later, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, sponsored by two US Senators, did great damage to basic biomedical research in the United States by formalizing the, well, theft of “intellectual property” that would not have existed without public support (another battle lost, so far, with so-called march-in rights remaining unused for the most part).
And all the while, the transmissible viral infection of “expertitis” among scientists often got in our way:
That ivory tower mentality also fostered a “tendency on the part of scientific experts to talk down to the public,” and exclude them from discussions about funding, said Nicholas Dirks, a historian at Columbia University and president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences. “That has really backfired big time,” he added. “We’ve been very blind about how that leaves the public outside of those committee rooms, not knowing how these decisions are made and what science is really doing and whose interests are being served.”
Yes. And during the early days of the current pandemic expertitis was fulminate. But scientists are not always so obtuse. A review panel I served on last April included lay members of the community. They asked some of the best questions during the meeting. And politics has always had an effect on scientific research, as it should outside of the laboratory. Richard Nixon declared War on Cancer in 1971. For a long time, cancer stayed ahead of the scientists, but because of generous support for basic and clinical science, cancer is in retreat in many places. Childhood leukemias are often not the death sentence they were before Sidney Farber and others started the long, incremental project to understand the molecular causes of cancer. Millions, including yours truly have, benefited from this research. AIDS became a manageable chronic infection for the vast majority of those infected with HIV who have access to and can afford treatment (another matter altogether). Vaccines have made the childhood diseases I had (rubella, rubeola, and chickenpox, all before I was seven years old) mostly a thing of the past. Ditto for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B (which eventually causes liver disease, including cancer, in virtually everyone infected) and polio. And going forward respiratory syncytial virus and rotavirus will disappear, unless the current Secretary of Health and Human Services succeeds in his time travel mission back to the nineteenth century (when his brain worm would probably have killed him).
The cluelessness of the academic scientific establishment on the matter of “indirect costs” (overhead) has not been healthy. This has led both the people and the politicians to believe that scientists “are getting rich off grant money.” No, actually. While there is the occasional thief or cheat who escapes notice, for a little while, for the other 99% of us every dime of grant money has been audited, usually in real time (with the audit paid for by overhead). When Vannevar Bush eventually came around, the idea of spreading science across the country made perfect sense. Universities, medical schools, and independent research institutes would house the researchers and the funding agencies would contribute to the costs of research for the people doing the research and the materials they needed.
The current overall indirect cost rate for research supported by NIH in medical schools is less than 30%. The rate is generally higher for individual grants to laboratories, which need higher levels of support. But this means that institutions other than NIH are paying about 70% of the total costs. This is a very good deal by any reasonable metric. As an aside, that private funding agencies limit overhead to 15% is irrelevant. Virtually no research laboratory without a research program funded by NIH or NSF or equivalent gets these grants, which are a very thin layer of icing on the top of a rich, thick cake. But they often lead researchers in new directions and are essential for that reason.
Research is expensive, and has gotten only more so during my career, usually for good reasons of safety and good practice, particularly in the care and use of research animals and the safe conduct of research using toxic materials and experimental model organisms that can be pathogenic. Still, there was a consensus building that the current funding mechanism needed modification:
Addressing that weakness means changing the incentive structures that induce academic institutions to become increasingly reliant on federal grants. Under the current system, the federal government reimburses grant recipients’ costs of building and maintaining new laboratories, creating an incentive for expanding their research capacities indefinitely. These “indirect cost” payments also reward universities for not paying the salaries of scientists to staff them, because salaries paid through a grant come with indirect funding that accrue to the university.
“The incentive system is just terrible,” said Bruce Alberts, a professor emeritus at the University of California San Francisco, and former president of the National Academy of Sciences. Known as “soft money,” grant-funded salaries are not guaranteed, keeping scientists in a constant state of needing to find more support, which draws their attention away from dreaming up ambitious new projects and focusing on what’s going to get them their next paycheck.
“Besides all those problems, teaching has been suffering from this, and public service too,” said Alberts. “If the institution’s not paying your salary, you’re not really paying attention to the institution’s needs either.”
Another thing that has been discussed but not acted upon, is capping the percentage of a salary of the Principal Investigator (the scientist who submits the research proposal and is responsible for its completion) covered by grant awards. But this, in contrast with the current administration’s strictly performative alternatives (tariffs, sanctions, bluster) to developing industrial policies that might work, would have to be phased in over a period of 5-10 years. This is doable and would be a rebalancing win-win for the people and the scientists who do the work that leads to scientific advances that benefit all of us.
Still, it is clear that the wholesale attack on the scientific establishment and its scientists, most of whom have viewed their work as a calling or vocation has done great damage:
Arguably the most insidious fallout is that many scientists who work at universities no longer feel they can count on the U.S. government as a reliable partner in the pursuit of research for the public good. “That’s the most devastating part of all this,” one NIH official told STAT. “Why would anyone trust the NIH ever again?”
“That social compact is being systematically undermined at the moment by a group of ideologues whose real target is not science; its real target is what they perceive to be the power and the arrogance of elite institutions, starting with the great research universities of this country,” said Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and former president of Princeton — one of those universities. To onlookers like Tilghman, what has happened since January seems to be a tragedy of unintended consequences. “The intention was to punish elite universities, it was not to destroy the scientific capacity of the United States, but that’s what they’re doing,” she said. “It’s one thing to destroy something. It is quite another to destroy it and have nothing to replace it with. I think that’s the moment we’re in.”
So, where do we go from here? How can any still-working academic scientist advise an aspiring scientist to go for it when the likelihood of success is so small? I have no idea. But whatever the ultimate outcome, the past ten months have been a teachable moment for American science and its scientists. That this has followed the uneven-to-poor performance of the biomedical science establishment during the current pandemic is not an accident.
Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the C-suite title is not reassuring):
describes the U.S. research ecosystem of today like a densely packed terrarium. Over the decades, new species have been added, intermingling their roots and growing up and on top of and into each other in a way that makes it difficult to trim areas that have become overgrown without sacrificing the whole. “All of this was ripe, maybe overripe in November of 2024,” he said. “This president has come along, and for better or for worse — many times for worse because it’s been done without a plan right away — and he’s taken that terrarium and shaken the hell out of it.”
Yes he did shake the hell out of it, because he could. Not because he has a plan to improve anything. Undoubtedly the president enjoyed the disruption he caused. In any case, Sadip Parikh was on the job early, in August 2024, when he:
starting holding a series of late-night Zoom calls with a self-appointed task force of more than 70 influential leaders across science, academia, industry, policy, and philanthropy, including CRISPR inventor Jennifer Doudna; (Kelvin) Droegemeier, the former OSTP director; and Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. The group came together to form a set of policy recommendations — intended for whomever came to power in the November elections — to push American science and technology to new heights. Bush’s vision, they had decided, was increasingly irrelevant to the pace and scope of 21st century science.
In February, the task force released VAST, a Vision for American Science and Technology. The roadmap makes 14 pro-innovation policy recommendations. Over the next year, this shadow science cabinet intends to pull in mid-career scientists from across a wide range of disciplines to start to identify discipline-specific policy needs.
Whatever they come up with, Parikh doesn’t want to call it a social compact, or a social contract. That framing puts scientists outside of their communities. And they need to be inside, as essential members, every bit as essential as the people who drive buses and fix toilets and bag groceries.
VAST is very polished indeed! And Sudip Parikh does hit on something essential for the science-adjacent Professional Managerial Class (PMC) to take to heart. We are not outside of anything in society. Our expertise is limited but our interests are universal. This, of course, applies to everyone, including the plumbers to grocery baggers Mr. Parikh mentions. However, we, scientists and non-scientists alike, do not need to be led by a blue-ribbon panel of the PMC who made this complete mess because they were not paying attention to anything beyond their next grant application. The vision of Vannevar Bush, without the snobbishness, will do just fine.
Science, in its vastness, is still the endless frontier. But so is every other human endeavor. Instead of a revolution led by a congeries of VAST Contributors, the only thing science writ large needs is to regain its sense of purpose. And that is to improve our understanding of the natural world, from the interior of the atom to the entire ecosphere of planet Earth, and beyond (not including mining the moon or terraforming Mars, however; Star Trek is science fiction, Mr. Musk).
Given what science and its handmaiden technology have “achieved” during the past 250 years, perhaps we should refocus our attention on the ecosphere. Yes, this will be expensive, but that all depends on how costs are accounted and benefits reckoned. Our children and grandchildren might even have reason to thank us, one day.
See you next week in the usual format!
