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The dominance was so remarkable, in fact, that Sune Bergström, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, had to deny that there was a pressure campaign to coincide with the American bicentennial. Instead, he credited the United States’ investment in science, the preeminence of its universities, and its ability to attract the world’s best scholars. American research was fueled by “dynamic openness,” Bergström said, praising the country as a “democracy of research workers.”
Nor was 1976 a fluke — the United States has produced nearly three times the number of Nobel laureates as any other country.
Its success dates back to World War II, when the foundation of the present-day research and innovation system was laid, brick by brick. The compact between research universities and the federal government — that the government provides funding for basic scientific research, and universities execute it — has led to biomedical and technological breakthroughs, prosperity, and national security.
But as the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the country’s research edifice is in danger of collapse, battered by a wrecking ball known as the Trump administration.
It’s hard to build a reputation but easy to break one. And then it’s hard to restart.
In a matter of months, government officials have slashed support for research infrastructure and pushed steep cuts to the budgets of federal agencies that fund science. Visa restrictions and invasive border screening have begun to keep out foreign students and rattle international collaborators. Efforts to decide what can and cannot be studied, with grant revocations seemingly carried out by keyword search, resemble the dictates of a central education ministry rather than the workings of a flourishing ecosystem of open research.
“It’s hard to build a reputation but easy to break one,” said Alan I. Leshner, a former chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “And then it’s hard to restart.”
The stakes of the current reform — which the administration said is needed to improve efficiency and “correct scientific information” — are not confined to the cloisters of campus labs. Government-funded, university-conducted research underpins much of modern life, including lifesaving medicine, commercial agriculture, and virtual communication. Take something as humdrum for many of us as calling an Uber. The GPS technology that connects driver to rider relies on satellites calibrated according to Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. The smartphone in your hand, too, is the product of discoveries made by thousands of university researchers.
Innovation has powered the American economy. A recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that government spending on research and development has spurred at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II.
But some day in the not-so-distant future Americans may find themselves on the sidelines when a major discovery is made, said Jason Owen-Smith, author of Research Universities and the Public Good. While the Trump administration’s many swings at the research edifice may be blocked or ultimately reversed, the country’s labs may not have the capacity to bounce back.
“The United States used to be the unequivocal center of gravity for science,” said Owen-Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and founding executive director of the Institute for Research on Innovation & Science. In the global competition for research and innovation, he said, “we might be disarming ourselves.”
Until that point, the federal government had done little to support research, outside of agricultural experiments carried out by land-grant colleges. During World War I, a group of chemistry professors offered their expertise, but government officials turned them down — they’d already employed a chemist, said David F. Labaree, a professor emeritus and historian of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Higher education instead relied on support from philanthropists and industry. Local businessmen gave Alexander Graham Bell, a professor at Boston University in the 1870s, the money to develop the “harmonic telegraph,” or telephone. Companies began to look to colleges for solutions to workplace challenges, and in 1908, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set up the first academic division for industry-sponsored research.
In truth, there wasn’t much research to fund. Europe was the world’s hub for scientific research and training, attracting the “intellectually ambitious” by the thousands, Americans included, said Miguel Urquiola, dean of social sciences and a professor of economics at Columbia University. In the decades before World War II, Germany produced the most Nobel Prize winners — more than Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union combined.
The social returns of investing in science and innovation “are not just good — they’re enormous. The only question is, why don’t we invest more?”
But the quality of American institutions was improving. As one indicator, Urquiola points to the large number of Jewish scientists, dismissed from German universities by the Nazis, who chose to go to the United States rather than other destinations like Britain or Canada.
College leaders weren’t exactly clamoring for closer government ties, either. The United States’ hodgepodge of institutions had grown without government direction and with an ethos of local control. Skepticism of Washington bureaucrats was compounded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which many in higher education thought tipped leverage too far toward the federal government.
If the Great Depression heightened their wariness, it also pushed colleges toward working with the government, as their traditional sources of revenue, industry and philanthropy, dried up.
Then came World War II. To meet the urgent need for sophisticated technology and weapons, the government looked to academe, with its existing resources, including its immigrant scientists. Before the war, two-thirds of American research was supported by private companies, with just a sixth paid for by the federal government; by 1944, the government underwrote three-quarters of all research.
Science would be decisive in winning the war, but before fighting had even ended, Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, who headed up the wartime Office of Science Research and Development, to draft a plan for postwar research policy. Bush’s report, “Science — The Endless Frontier,” played on the patriotism of the moment and evoked particularly American symbolism:
“It has been basic United States policy that government should foster the opening of new frontiers. It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. It is in keeping with the American tradition — one which has made the United States great — that new frontiers shall be made accessible for development by all American citizens.”
The war had helped define the relationship between government and higher education, and its technological successes gave Bush and his fellow researchers extraordinary credibility with both politicians and the public. It set a template for keeping both physical and human capital within universities, rather than hiring government scientists and building government labs.
Making pathbreaking discoveries, all while training the next generation of researchers, would be a hallmark and a strength of the American approach. It was good for the government, whose funds were basically doing “double duty,” said Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities. And the arrangement strengthened the scientific ecosystem within universities, establishing an apprenticeship model of graduate education and ensuring that those on the cutting edge of research were also in the front of the classroom. “It’s why other countries, like China, want to copy our playbook,” Smith said.
“Science — The Endless Frontier” reflected Bush’s experience not just during the war but as a scientist and administrator at MIT, where he had developed machines for mathematical analysis, predecessors to the computer. In his conception, the government would set broad goals — create a bomb, go to the moon — but it would leave it to researchers themselves to reach them, awarding grants through a peer-reviewed process and insulating science from government influence. The idea was that “the government says ‘what,’ but it doesn’t say ‘how,’” Owen-Smith, the Michigan professor, said.
Bush’s vision emphasized the centrality of fundamental research. The Manhattan Project expedited the building of the first atomic weapon, but it rested on decades of scientific theorizing and experimentation. Much like frontier explorers setting off into unfamiliar territory, researchers would go down paths that might not lead to a breakthrough for a generation, if ever.
While science’s political champion, Roosevelt, was the architect of the New Deal, Bush’s ideas indicated higher education’s continued mistrust of such government-works programs. To Bush’s thinking, scientific grants “were not gifts or handouts,” said David I. Kaiser, a professor of physics and the history of science at MIT. Instead, they had more in common with the deals Bush and his MIT colleagues hammered out with private companies that had supplied much of their prewar research funding. “They were binding contracts between two parties, subject to the rule of law.”
By the time Bush submitted his report, however, Roosevelt had died, and Harry S. Truman, who wanted greater presidential oversight of science policy, was in the White House. Congress backed the idea of government investment in science, but some key lawmakers believed that funds should be distributed across higher education (and in their districts) rather than concentrated at elite institutions like MIT. They also took issue with the prioritization of basic research, saying that the real need was for science with immediate economic and real-world impact — an idea Bush dismissed as “support of inventors and gadgeteers.”
Wrangling over their differences took five years, but Bush’s vision won out. In 1950, Truman signed legislation establishing the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund both research and science education.
Other government agencies, such as the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, also deepened their relationships with higher education, collaborating on projects related to the space race as well as basic science and medicine. By the mid-1960s, the United States was spending 10 percent of the federal budget on research and development.
Economists agree that spending on research offers an exceptionally effective bang for the taxpayer buck. Its economic impact is as big, or bigger, than government spending on highways, water systems, and other public infrastructure — despite the fact that infrastructure expenditures outpace investment in research, said Andrew J. Fieldhouse, an assistant professor of finance at Texas A&M University at College Station. Each dollar of investment yields $5 in economic gains.
Between 20 and 25 percent of American productivity growth over the past eight decades is attributable to nondefense research spending, said Fieldhouse, a co-author of the Federal Reserve paper.
The spillovers from publicly funded research are consistently higher than from spending on science by the private sector, Fieldhouse said, in part because companies tend to invest more narrowly and not in fundamental research. And when the government opens its pocketbook, the private sector does, too — for every $1 in federal research investment, private spending increases by 20 cents.
Those metrics don’t capture other benefits like improved health and a better quality of life, said Benjamin F. Jones, an economist at Northwestern University. The social returns of investing in science and innovation “are not just good — they’re enormous,” he said. “The only question is, why don’t we invest more?”
The net benefits don’t mean that each project shows the same sorts of returns. But the effects aren’t abstract — although Bush set out to fund basic research, the knowledge generated on campuses has found its way into everyday life.
The internet started as a defense-funded college network of computers. Google, a company now worth $2 trillion, spun out of a $4-million grant to Stanford to build digital libraries. Of the 356 new drugs approved over the past decade, 354 received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research.
Even an area of science as seemingly blue-sky as quantum mechanics is the basis for the development of lasers, grocery-store checkout scanners, and the tiny semiconductor crystals that light television screens and computer monitors. “Basic science unlocks doorways to all kinds of new discoveries,” Jones said.
The partnership between academe and government has also been good for American higher education, helping cement it as the world’s leader by just about every measure in the years following “Science — The Endless Frontier.” Researchers in this country have published more papers, more influential papers, and more influential papers in leading journals. Their work is highly cited by peers and in patents. The United States has dominated the Nobels, various global university rankings, and lists of the alma maters of heads of state. American colleges have minted more Ph.D.s in critical science and engineering fields, and attracted the largest share of international students.
“Success attracts success, and brilliant talent attracts more talent,” said L. Rafael Reif, a former president of MIT who came to the United States from Venezuela for graduate school. Like Reif, many foreign students stayed, comprising the next generation of college professors, research scientists, and high-tech entrepreneurs.
And other countries, including Singapore and Saudi Arabia, looked to emulate the American model — linking government and higher ed, research and teaching. They brought on American colleges as consultants to help them start their own MITs.
While lawmakers largely adopted Bush’s idea of a union between government and universities in support of science, they did not initially budget for that vision. It took the launch of Sputnik and the specter of the Soviet Union pulling ahead in the innovation race for Washington to rush in to buttress science spending.
Nor was funding consistent. In the 1970s, with inflation squeezing the economy and the goal of landing a man on the moon met, the urgency to support research funding waned. Likewise, appropriations shrunk with the end of the Cold War, as the Soviet challenge dissipated, leaving the United States as the sole superpower in geopolitics and innovation.
Even when spending decreases were rooted in unrelated causes, research was often on the chopping block. A quarter of all cuts in recent deficit-reduction bills came from research budgets, said Fieldhouse, the Texas A&M professor, in part because the public more readily sees the imprint of other government spending, like highways or health care, in their daily lives.
Today, although government dollars going to research have increased, they account for less than 3 percent of the federal budget, a far cry from the high of 10 percent in the mid-1960s. Public expenditures on research as a share of GDP are at the lowest levels in 60 years — a lessening of support that predates President Trump.
Political decisionmakers have previously sought to dictate scientific priorities. President George W. Bush restricted federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, seen as key to finding a cure for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congress doubled the NIH budget, but the sudden infusion wasn’t an unqualified good: The upswing in funding supported the projects of the moment, which didn’t all end up making sense for a long-term strategy. A subsequent and rapid drop in spending on biomedical and life sciences also hurt young researchers as universities had less money for stipends for graduate students and had to cut postdoc positions.
This is another Sputnik moment in front of us. This is time for us to double down.
The Trump administration’s push to cap indirect funding — a portion of federal grants that pays for facilities, equipment, and costs not directly tied to scientific work — also has its antecedent: More than three decades ago, Congress investigated colleges for misuse of indirect funds after Stanford was accused of illegally billing the government for items like monthly deliveries of flowers to the president’s house and depreciation on a yacht donated to the sailing team. Lawmakers subsequently tweaked the funding formula to limit reimbursement for administrative expenses, and Stanford’s president resigned.
There’s no smoking yacht this time around; the Trump administration argues that indirect spending diverts resources from core research. But this not-so-new fight is one consequence of the original compact in which federal agencies contract with colleges for research on a project-by-project basis. Indirect funding enables institutions to maintain their own infrastructure to do such research. Companies, too, pay colleges for indirect costs as part of sponsored research.
Would today’s debates be different if Vannevar Bush hadn’t gotten his way and science funding had been allocated by geography, as his congressional critics wanted? Britain took this approach, giving colleges greater discretion in distributing resources, and it hasn’t been as effective as a competitive, merit-driven process, said Smith, the AAU vice president. Still, constituencies for science might be broader if the bulk of academic-research spending wasn’t concentrated among just the top 130 institutions.
There are legitimate questions to ask about the legacy of “Science — the Endless Frontier,” said David H. Guston, a professor at Arizona State University at Tempe and a scholar of American science policy: “It was successful for whom? Did it create scientific good for everyone?” But those aren’t the debates the United States is having today, he said.
Likewise, Bush’s original emphasis on basic research has led to impressive innovation, but its incremental nature can make it difficult for politicians and the public alike to appreciate its impact, except in hindsight. The ability to effectively replicate DNA, for instance, has led to more accurate genetic tests, better forensic analysis of crime scenes, and cutting-edge drugs to fight diseases — scientific advances that are easy to rally around. But a couple of solitary scientists mucking about in Yellowstone National Park to identify a bacteria growing in its hot springs? That doesn’t capture public imagination in the same way, even though the microbe those scientists discovered led to current breakthroughs in genetic science.
“Higher education invests in questions that haven’t even been asked yet,” said Labaree, the Stanford historian of education.
There has been a push for researchers to do and for the government to fund more work that focuses on finding answers to immediate societal problems — in other words, more applied research. But as recent fights over vaccines and climate change have underscored, there isn’t necessarily public consensus about which issues most need to be tackled and whether to trust the expertise of academics in identifying them.
And doing more of such research is no reason to undercut a longstanding system of scientific support, said Kaiser, the MIT professor. Bush’s plan “has evolved imperfectly but stably over the last 80 years.”
The overhaul of indirect costs is just one of a wave of changes that has come crashing into American research in the five months since President Trump returned to office. The administration has cut funding to projects, many longstanding, on topics it doesn’t like, including racial disparities, transgender health, climate change, and Covid-19, and has ordered a temporary freeze on spending to review grants’ compliance with presidential orders.
Scholars at campuses with diversity, equity, and inclusion programming have been barred from federal competitions, and government-funded researchers were warned against publishing in prominent scientific journals, like The New England Journal of Medicine. The White House halted — and, in some cases, clawed back — awards based on institutional affiliation. Hundreds of grants to Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and other universities were throttled.
Officials called off reviews of new research applications, canceled programs to support young and minority scientists, and gave pink slips to federal employees, many of whom oversaw projects with colleges. The administration said it would stop underwriting scientific collaboration with overseas partners, and stepped up scrutiny of research contracts and other funds to colleges from foreign sources. In its budget, the White House proposed paring NIH spending by 40 percent; funding for the NSF is slashed by 57 percent in the budget plan.
It’s not unusual for a new president to seek cuts to research spending — or to redirect monies toward pet projects, experts said. But the swiftness, scale, and comprehensiveness with which the Trump administration is acting is unprecedented.
In its partnership with higher education, the government’s role is to set the direction for research. “They set the priorities,” Owen-Smith said. Still, even given his wariness of politicians and bureaucrats, it’s unlikely that Vannevar Bush could have imagined such a sweeping and overnight rewriting of the scientific agenda.
The administration’s actions run roughshod over the safeguards built into the system, Kaiser said, subverting the compact between government and academe, not just philosophically but practically. Each grant is a signed contract for service — research — rendered to the government by a university and its investigators. Just as in business, research contracts can be canceled for cause or adjusted when they come up for renewal. That’s not what’s happening. “This is not a renegotiation between two parties,” said Kaiser. “It is a unilateral move.”
Trump has instead acted as if science spending was a form of largesse, awarded at the sole discretion of the executive branch.
Confronted with one-sided change, higher education has scrambled to meet the new terms. Administrators renamed research institutes and combed through funding proposals, seeking to excise phrases that might trigger executive-branch backlash. One professor was told to replace every mention of “climate” in a grant with “disaster resilience.”
As Trump officials try to assert the government’s primacy in research, Kaiser and others fear that they are trying to squeeze the scientists out of science — or at least out of scientific decision-making. Even as they ordered up internal audits, agencies shut down the peer-review process, postponing advisory-panel meetings and stymieing the awarding of new grants. Only weeks after a judge intervened did they begin rescheduling sessions.
“It’s revealed the fragility of the scientific compact,” said Bhaven N. Sampat, a professor of public policy at Arizona State University at Tempe, who has studied the politics and economics of publicly funded science. “It’s an institution we took for granted, and it can be broken.”
Why has the administration drawn battle lines over research? It may reflect broader societal divisions — a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that Americans are split about whether scientists should play a role in public-policy debates. As with many issues, views on science, and trust of scientific expertise, largely reflect partisan differences.
Democratic candidates have generally aligned with scientific expertise, dating back to Al Gore’s emphasis on climate change during the 2000 presidential campaign, and the research community itself also bears some responsibility for stoking the politicalization of science, said Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He points to Scientific American’s endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris in her race last fall against Trump.
“The embrace of one party makes people think science is partisan,” said Pielke, who also criticized the administration’s attacks on research as “reckless” and “irresponsible.” “These folks are angry at science.”
But other observers think science has little to do with it. “This isn’t dissatisfaction with science but with the institutions that do science,” said Daniel P. Gross, an economist at Duke University who studies innovation policy.
In other words, universities.
The embedding of the national research enterprise within universities has long been seen as part of the genius of the American approach. Now, though, it could be its undoing, yoking science to various other beefs the president and his supporters have with higher education, among them high tuition costs, the expansion of diversity programming, and the sidelining of conservative views.
Because research is part of higher education’s confederation of missions, the administration has pitted funding for science against other policy demands. Want money for cancer research? Then comply with a White House directive banning transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams or take a harder line against pro-Palestinian protests. “It creates zero-sum conflicts,” Owen-Smith said.
While recruitment of the world’s best and brightest has been upset by the uncertainty around science funding, the administration has also pursued particular policies that target international students, a reflection of the president’s antipathy toward both illegal and legal immigration. Officials have threatened to kick out Chinese students; tried to terminate the legal status of thousands of student-visa holders, often for minor legal infractions; and suspended visa interviews in the summer, the busiest months for college applicants. A newly enacted travel ban bars all visitors from Iran, which sends more graduate students to the United States than all but a handful of countries.
Curbs on foreign students have an impact far beyond enrollments. At the Ph.D. level, the vast majority of graduates stay on in the United States, forming the backbone of research and innovation, in both higher education and private industry. Some 40 percent of the American STEM work force with a doctorate is foreign born.
“Universities are key magnets for talent, but all sectors benefit,” said Britta Glennon, an assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania.
Glennon and her colleagues looked at the fallout of policies during the first Trump administration on both American and international science, including a federal investigation into academic collaboration with China. As geopolitical tensions between the United States and China rose, Chinese enrollment in American doctoral programs declined by 15 percent. The most qualified students were the most likely to stop coming — and no surprise, Glennon said. “They have other options.”
The administration’s stances reverberated more broadly. Chinese citations of American work sank. The productivity of Chinese American scholars dipped by as much as 11 percent, Glennon discovered.
Other scholars have examined the consequences of policymaking on research. One study charted the aftereffects of large federal budget cuts at various times: Faculty members published fewer papers, and the loss of funding pushed people, particularly recent graduates, out of academe.
There are worries that funding cuts and program eliminations under the current administration could have an even greater impact. Already, a number of institutions, including Penn, the Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California system, have instituted hiring freezes or laid off employees, hoping, they said, to head off more drastic action down the road.
Government changes can have a long tail. In the 1920s, the United States put quotas on immigration from eastern and southern Europe as part of an effort to stop low-skilled migrants. The quotas, however, had the effect of discouraging professors and graduate students as well — some 38 fewer came annually between 1925 and 1955, the equivalent of eliminating a major-university physics department each year.
The immigration restrictions affected U.S. innovation. American-born researchers, especially those in fields with large numbers of eastern and southern European scientists, produced fewer patents after the quotas were imposed, likely because of a decline in research collaboration.
Or look at what happened in Germany, the United States’ predecessor as scientific superpower. In April 1933, little more than two months after the Nazis came to power, they ordered that civil servants, a group that included college faculty, “who are not of Aryan descent are to be placed in retirement.” More than 1,000 Jewish academics were dismissed from their posts, including 15 percent of all physicists and nearly 20 percent of mathematicians. When Germany annexed Austria, in 1938, the policy was extended to that country’s universities.
German universities didn’t just lose people, they lost some of their most gifted researchers, said Fabian Waldinger, a professor of economics at the University of Munich. The dismissed physicists, for instance, produced nearly a quarter of the top journal articles, and their papers accounted for almost two-thirds of citations in Germany, then the discipline’s center of gravity. Among the ousted scientists were 11 Nobel laureates, including Einstein, fellow physicist Max Born, and the chemist Otto Meyerhof.
The destruction unfurled over generations. The quality of new hires, as determined by citation-weighted papers, began to decline at many Germany universities. That lessened departments’ appeal to graduate students and made it tougher to compete for funding.
As late as the 1980s, the dismissals’ effects were still being felt, said Waldinger. He estimates that the policy of driving out Jewish scholars had nine times the impact on German science than did the destruction of college campuses by wartime bombing.
Not long after Trump was sworn in, Waldinger visited Stanford for a work trip. All his American colleagues could talk about were threatened funding cuts. As an economic historian, he said, “I never thought my work would be so relevant.”
Yes, the administration’s actions are being challenged in court, and higher education has notched some early wins. Budget cuts aren’t enacted through administrative fiat; Congress will weigh in, although it’s not clear how willing lawmakers are to defy the president. In a May speech to the National Academies of Science, Michael Kratsios, the White House science adviser, called for a “golden age of innovation,” leaving observers to wonder whether President Trump, so far focused on tearing down, could have some sort of vision for American science.
Divestment is not easy to come back from. Experiments will be brought to a standstill and clinical trials disrupted, putting patients’ lives at risk. Departing scholars are unlikely to pick up their lives again and move back to the United States. Students who had planned to earn degrees in science will be forced to find different career paths.
Even if policy does change back, it won’t be as easy as flipping the “on” switch for American research. Grants must be rewritten, graduate students recruited and postdocs hired, labs rebuilt. Critical momentum will be lost. The damage will already be done. “The risk is that you close off from the leading edge of innovation,” said Caroline S. Wagner, an expert on global science policy at Ohio State University.
Other countries, most notably China, have been and will continue to invest in science. China is seeing results. A decade ago, just one institution there was included among the leaders in Nature’s index of universities based on research impact. In 2024, seven Chinese institutions were in the top 10. Harvard was the lone American representative.
“This is another Sputnik moment in front of us,” said Reif, the former MIT president. “This is time for us to double down.”
Just two years ago, Congress passed legislation to spur American science and technological competitiveness. An earlier draft of the bill was known as the Endless Frontier Act.
Now, rather than reinvestment, the United States is in a moment of retrenchment. For American science, the golden age may have been only a golden moment.
