The U.s. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine
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A recent New York Times analysis reveals a concerning trend: the U.S. is funding fewer grants across every area of science and medicine. Commenters are weighing in on the root causes, with some pointing to the politicization of funding agencies like the NIH and NSF, where political appointees now control funds at the whim of the administration. Others counter that the issue is more complex, highlighting the long-standing tension between political appointees and civil servants, with some noting that civil service reform 150 years ago was meant to mitigate this problem. The discussion highlights a shared concern about the stability and meritocracy of government funding for scientific research.
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When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.
Conflating the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court.
This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires.
There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired.
DOGE vs USAID
My impression is that many of Trump's political appointees simply don't understand due process requirements, and interpret any legal obstacles to executing their will as sabotage by shadowy figures. You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
I think you are correct here, but it still leaves the open question whether the government's case is weak because it is weak on merits or because the people in charge of defending/executing/prosecuting the case intentionally made holes in it or botched it to make it weak. I won't claim either is the case, only point out either or a mixture of both is hypothetically possible.
I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.
I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally botched. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true it wouldn't prove what you claim.
If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...
Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.
Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.
Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 60s and 70s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level of 100 years ago circa 1920.
Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, because today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).
Which makes sense when you considering the ENTIRE Executive Branch reports to the President (aka chief executive) and leverages that authority for anything they do. They cannot exist counter-to or independent-of that individual.
The "decision-making independence" concept is newer and came about just around WW2, likely due to FDR's control of the system, threats to pack the courts, and more.
Any "independent" agency, activity, etc should be inherently suspicious as it doesn't have checks & balances defined and OFTEN defines its own authority.. inviting abuse and trouble.
Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.
For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).
Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.
Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS. It cannot be the case that the electorate can just vote 50.00001% for a POTUS and the priorities of the 49.99999% get instantly vaporized. That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority. If POTUS gets to decide that because he won by the slimmest majority, he has has a mandate to unilaterally and immediately destroy everything the other side has ever done, then the American project is just over; it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in and actually does wage war on Right-leaning institutions the way the Right is waging war on left-leaning institutions.
Yeah, this is the hack that's being run right now. Indeed, the United States runs on norms to a large degree, and a small group of people have decided that if something isn't spelled out explicitly, that gives them untold unilateral power in the gray areas to do whatever they want because again, they've achieved a >50% margin in a single election, so therefore that makes them king for 4 years.
The norm that has worked out well for everyone for decades has been that we trust experts to run their own systems, because we understand that political interference from the government is suboptimal and leads to cronyism. Now, for some reason it's the conservatives who have a problem with this arrangement, and want to involve themselves to the point they are filtering by keywords what's allowed to be researched, big government at it's best.
So now, a system that took decades to build, which was the envy of the world in terms of research output, and which has been beneficial to US GDP and national security, is decimated in a few years time because a small group of people didn't like what they saw.
In this new Unitary Executive world, long-term research projects can only happen as long as long as Democrats have political control, because every time a Republican president comes into office they will shut down all research projects they don't like. I don't think it will work out well but we will see.
> The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
But Congress cannot reliably affect a tyranny -- they're too fractious, they are reelected as a whole every 2 years, and their priorities are too local. Moreover, the minority actually has power in Congress, even if it's just power to block progress. This is why they are supposed to be invested with more power than the President.
> Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
They did and they have (Project 2025) which is why we got torture prisons, rampant bribery and corruption, and a complete power / money grab from the Oval Office on down. I actually love that this is happening because we finally get to see the Conservative political project come to fruition. Finally we can stop pretending it was about "maintaining US institutions" and "preserving the soul of the nation". They are finally saying "we will go to war for the oil" instead of pretending it was about defending freedom and liberty. It's a nice change of pace that they're finally saying the quiet parts out loud.
But anyway, I don't agree this is something that should happen. What you're proposing will just going to lead to political instability as subsequent administrations flip back and forth. In feedback control systems we call that a "divergence" and it usually precedes total system collapse.
Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
---
The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.
Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.
We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
But really, running for state legislature is like a mid-level manager position, and you're an entry-level candidate. I'm curious if you've ever volunteered for more than just door knocking. Do you know what it is like inside the logistics of a state legislature campaign? It's good to start with school board, city council, county commissioners, and similar positions. That gets you experience, connections, and a track record. Politics is inherently about relationships and coalitions.
Unless you're very wealthy and want to blow it all, you're going to need to fundraise and get volunteers. The people who donate and volunteer for political candidates don't just blow their money and time on whoever sounds good. They want to help candidates who can actually win and who can actually make change once they win. So they also pay attention to track record and the endorsements from incumbents who they voted, donated, and volunteered for.
And even if you do run and win, you need experience in politics to know how to actually get things done. Imagine you do challenge the Dem incumbent and win the primary, then the general. Now you're the lowest ranking rep in the minority party in a red state. That's a tall order. If you want to get into politics to make change on this issue (versus just wanting to be a politician), then you have to know how the system officially works and how the backroom coalition building negotiations work.
Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.
Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.
optimizing processes =/= removing goals
Only if those programs aren’t legislatively established or mandated.
Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.
Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?
The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.
I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
Yes, they could, by paying their taxes.
But we’ve all seen that they really don’t want to share any of their wealth for any purpose, other than propping up a geriatric orange clown that campaigned on lowering their taxes.
PS: I said their taxes, not yours. Yours are going up, they’re just called tariffs, but that’s a tax: tariffs are your money getting collected by the government.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
The challenge is to convince Republican voters that science has utility.
Who is "they" and where is the proof there was widespread "system abuse" that warrants voluntarily abdicating any lead we have in research to other countries?
The results are damning.
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.
We know this information because the colleges give it out. They are transparent.
There's not much the colleges can do if somebody is commenting without researching.
If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Academia in particular loves to push one-track thought and cancel culture. Hard to believe it used to be a place for diverse thought and DIScourse. Now if you disagree with the groupthink you are a racist. It's a very 2001 George Bush "you are either with us or against us" culture that absolutely deserves to have its funding cut.
Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
That's going away too with the ban on immigration. A large amount of high margin tuition is from overseas students.
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations. Other bright ideas they've proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
That's because organizations get bigger as projects become more complicated and varied. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of the operating costs. 30 years ago many schools didn't even have Computer Science departments. Today schools are now starting to stand up Artificial Intelligence departments. It's not cheap to maintain these organizations.
Anyway, it really comes down to a simple tension: you can have big science, good science, or cheap science. Choose two.
For a long time we've optimized for big and good. This has yielded dividends in terms of science and technology output, but it's very expensive. Yet, the ROI is decidedly, emphatically positive.
For some reason people seem to think we can do this all cheaper, somehow, by pulling funding and making all these organizations smaller. I don't see how this is possible. What I think will happen is the money will dry up, the talent will go to places that want to spend the money, and the remaining programs will be cheap, small-stakes research better suited for the 20th century, unable to compete with countries that actually want to invest in the future.
Who's doing the research? Who's benefiting?
VC backed companies are often slotted in as the for profit version of academic R&D without the "encumbrances" of non-profitable blue-sky pure research.
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
That does help, and is part of the reason I myself engage with these folks from time to time, but it requires discipline to recognize when you're throwing good effort after bad.
You want to give your voice the greatest chance of being seen. Strategically responding to upvoted bad faith in a highly visible thread is a good idea. Keeping an argument alive 5-6 levels deep in a subthread that was already flagged is less so.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding. That's always been true in my lifetime.
You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.
I mean, yes...but everyone on this thread admits that it's still true (in fact, worse today), so I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
> The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
OK. I never claimed it was universal. I was in science, not engineering. I'm not claiming experience in economics or english literature, either.
Again, I don't dispute that things might be worse today.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
They did understand something most scientists I know don't which is how to communicate to farmers in Iowa, Kansas, and Idaho. If you can figure that out, you can get to the farmers to bend to your will the way the Saudis do with FoxNews and Newsmax.
Nothing inflates my ego more than when people on Hacker News repeat the stupidity my system propagated. I built something that controls their minds and thinking. I am the best in the world!
I've seen to many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently it you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the words "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the words "equity" in your proposal. New boss is same as the old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
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.
Natural sciences such as biology or chemistry are different from physics or maths or engineering fields.
More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.
I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.
We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.
Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.
I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.
And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
The idiocracy is a global trend
Sure thing. It's all fraud and conspiracy. Fundamental science is worthless if it cannot be immediately monetized. All scientist are money-hungry crooks. Let's just stop all research then. Who needs antibiotics, or vaccines, or cancer research, or food safety. Who needs to know about the universe, or about quantum mechanics. It's all just elite stuff... Let's get rid of it.
Government is precisely the place to fund stuff that does not fit into the free market.
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/cannabis-logistics-startup...
https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/13/telemedicine-adderall-vyva...
Trump relaxes cannabis classification:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/trump-cannab...
Which will be guaranteed by strict monitoring of your private chats!
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