Currently, English is the lingua franca of science. It wasn’t always that way, and there’s no reason to expect it always will be. A century ago, all the great physicists who wanted to be part of the quantum revolution went to study in Germany. “Been to Germany” was a desirable bragging point on a cv. Then this little thing called WWII happened, and the gravitational center of physics research, and science more generally, moved to the United States. Now “Been to America” is a bragging point for a German cv.
American Science – the world’s gold standard
The post-war success of American science wasn’t happenstance, it was an outcome of intentional government policy. Investment in science research was seen as an essential element of national security. It also became a phenomenal engine for the growth of knowledge and technology that underpins many essential elements of modern society that we’ve come to take for granted but shouldn’t, like this here internet*. The relatively modest investments (as a fraction of the federal budget) that made this possible have been repaid many times over in economic growth.
Part of the way in which the federal government has invested in science over the past 75 years is through research grants from agencies like NSF, NIH, and NASA awarded to individual scientists via their university employers. This has created a web of interconnected success: grants fund the science, develop new technologies and facilities, train new scientists, help support the environment that makes this possible (including universities), and enable a society where science thrives. American leadership in science seems to be taken for granted, but it only happens with effort and investment. The past three quarters of a century give a clear answer to whether this investment is worthwhile: Absolutely YES.
A legitimate question is what level of investment is appropriate. America’s scientific leadership has been slipping because other nations have witnessed our success and many have taken steps to replicate it. That’s good. But if one wants to maintain leadership for all the value that provides, or even remain competitive, one needs to invest more, not less.
Instead, the budget currently before congress can only be described as a rampage of draconian budget reductions. NASA science is down 47%; NSF 56%. Even NIH, the core agency for research that impacts medicine that we all rely on at some point, is down 37%. Heck, a military unit is considered destroyed if it suffers 30% casualties; these cuts are deeper. This is how you destroy something while pretending not to do so. Rather than simply murder American science outright, the “big, beautiful bill” drags it behind the woodshed, ties it up, thrashes it half to death, and leaves it to bleed out, killing it slowly enough to preserve plausible deniability.
This is a prescription to abandon American leadership in science:
This is all being done in the name of rooting out fraud, waste and abuse. This is an excuse, an assertion without merit. In other words, pure, unadulterated political bullshit.
I’ve worked closely with NSF and NASA. NSF is incredibly efficient – an achievement made largely in response to years of congressional complaint. Funny how the same congresspeople keep complaining even after the agency has done everything they asked. NASA is less efficient, but that’s largely on the side that funds crewed spaceflight, which is super expensive if you don’t want to routinely explode. The science-funding side of NASA is basically pocket change.
Whether any of this research spending is wasteful depends on your value system. But there is no fraud to speak of, nor abuse. Grant budgets are closely scrutinized at many levels. Success rates are low (typically 20% before the cuts; they’re projected to be 7% afterwards. One might as well shoot dice.) The issue is not that fraudulent grants get funded, it is that there isn’t enough funding to support all the excellent proposals. One could literally double** the funding of the science agencies and there would still be meritorious grant proposals that went unfunded.
Personal Experience so far in 2025
I thought I would share some personal experience with how this has been unfolding, both as a member of a research university where I sit on university-wide committees that oversee such things, and as an individual scientist.
Overhead
In February, the Trump administration announced that the overhead rate for NIH grants would be limited to 15%. This is an odd-sounding technicality to most people, so first some background. I didn’t invent the federal grant system, and I do think there are some ways in which it could be improved. But this is the system that has developed, and changing it constructively would require lengthy study and consideration, not the sudden jolt that is being applied.
When a scientist like myself applies for a grant, we mostly focus on the science we want to do. But part of the process is making a budget: what will it cost to achieve the scientific goals? This usually involves funding for junior researchers (grad students and postdocs), money for laboratory equipment or travel to facilities like observatories, and in the system we have, partial funding for the PI (principle investigator). How much salary funding the PI is supposed to obtain from grants varies by field; for the physical sciences it is usually two or three months of summer*** salary.
For my colleagues in the School of Medicine, the average salary support from grants is around 50%; in some departments it is as high as 70%. So cuts to NIH funding are a big deal, even the overhead rate. Overhead is the amount of support provided to the university to keep the lights on, the buildings open, for safe and modern laboratories, administrative support, etc. – all the ecological support necessary to maintain a thriving research environment. Each university negotiates its overhead rate separately with one of the federal funding agencies; there are only a handful of federal employees who know how to do this, as it involves complicated formulae for laboratory space and all sorts of other factors affecting operations. The typical overhead rate is ~50%, so for every two dollars of direct spending (e.g., grad student salary), another dollar**** goes to the university to keep things running. This has gradually become an essential portion of the overall budget of universities over the years, so cuts to the overhead rate are de facto cuts to everything a university does.
The CWRU School of Medicine is a very successful research college. Its cancer research group is particularly renowned, including the only scientists on campus who rank ahead of yours truly in impact according to the Stanford-Elsevier science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators. It is a large part of the overall campus research effort and is largely funded by NIH. The proposed cut to the overhead rate to 15% would correspond to a $54 million reduction in the university’s annual budget (about 6% of the total, if I recall right).
Not many organizations can gracefully miss $54 million dollars, so this prospect caused much consternation. There were lawsuits (by many universities, not just us), injunctions, petitions by the government to change venue so as to dodge the injunctions, and so far, no concrete action. So spending on existing grants continued as normal, for now. There was guarded optimism in our administration that we’d at least get through the fiscal year without immediate tragedy.
Then another insidious thing started to happen. NIH simply ceased disbursing new grants. Sure, you can spend on existing grants. You can apply for new grants and some of you will even be successful – on paper. We just won’t send you the money. There were administrative hijinx to achieve this end that are too complicated to bother explaining; the administration is very creative at bending/reinterpreting/making up rules to obtain the outcome they want. They did eventually start slow-walking some new grants, so again giving the appearance of normality while in practice choking off an important funding source. In the long run, that’s a bigger deal than the overhead rate. It doesn’t matter what the overhead rate is if it is a percentage of zero.
Now maybe there is some better way to fund science, and it shouldn’t be the role of the federal government. OK, so what would that be? It would be good planning to have a replacement system in place before trashing the existing one. But no one is doing that. Private foundations cannot possibly pick up the slack. So will my colleagues in the School of Medicine suffer 50% salary cuts? Most people couldn’t handle that, but their dean is acting like it’s a possibility.
From the outside, the current situation may look almost normal but it is not. There is no brilliant plan to come up with some better funding scheme. Things will crash soon if not all at once. I expect our university – and many across the country – to be forced to take draconian budget action of their own. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. What that looks like I don’t know, but I don’t see how it fails to include mass layoffs. Aside from the human cost that obviously entails, it also means we can’t do as much in either research or education. Since this is happening nation-wide, we will all be reduced as a consequence.
As a nation, this is choosing to fail.
My own recent experience with grants
I can’t begin to describe how difficult it is to write a successful grant. There is so much that goes into it; it’s like cramming everything I’ve ever written in this blog into 15 pages without leaving anything out. You don’t dare leave anything out because if you leave out obscure reference X you can be sure the author of X will be on the panel and complain that you’re unaware of important result X. More importantly, every talented colleague I have – and there are many – are doing the same thing, competing for the same shrinking pot. It’s super competitive, and has been for so long that I’ve heard serious suggestions of simply drawing proposals at random, lottery style. Strange as this sounds, this procedure would be more fair than the multiple-jeopardy merit evaluation we have at present: if a proposal almost succeeds one year, and a panel tells you to just improve this one thing; next year a different panel may hate that one thing and ask for something different. Feedback from panels used to be extremely useful; now it is just a list of prefab excuses for why you got rejected again.
NSF
I’ve mostly worked with NSF and NASA. I had an NSF proposal that was really well received in 2023; the review was basically “we would have funded this if we had enough money but we didn’t and something else edged you out.” This happens a lot, so I resubmitted it last year. Same result. There was a time when you could expect to succeed through perseverance; that time had already seemed to have reached an end and dissolved into a crap shoot even before the proposed cuts.
In the good old days of which I hear tell, but entirely before my time, NSF had something called an accomplishment-based renewal. Basically you could get a continuation of your grant as long as you were doing Good Things. I never experienced that; all my grants have been a standard three years and done. Getting new grants means writing an entirely new proposal and all the work that entails. It’s exhausting and can be a distraction from actually doing the science. But the legacy of accomplishment-based renewals lives on; as part of the fifteen pages of an NSF grant, you are required to spend five saying what great things you accomplished with previous funding. For me, as it relates to the most recent proposal, that’d be SPARC.
SPARC has been widely used as a database. It is in great demand by the community. So great that when our web server was down recently for the better part of a week for some extensive updates, I immediately got a stack of email asking where was it and when would it be back? The SPARC data paper has been cited over 600 times; the Radial Acceleration Relation based on it over 500. Those are Babe Ruth numbers, easily in the top percentile of citation rates. These are important results, and the data are clearly data the community want. The new proposal would have provided that and more, a dozen-fold, but apparently that’s not good enough.
NASA
While waiting to hear of that predictable disappointment, I tried to rally for NASA ROSES. These Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science are traditionally announced on Valentine’s Day. ROSES on Valentine’s day? Get it? Yuk, yuk. I didn’t, until it didn’t happen at the appointed time. There were any number of announcements from different parts of NASA saying different things, mostly to the effect of “any day now.” So in March, I logged into my NSPIRES account to see what was available. Here’s the screenshot:
OK, those are the dregs from last year: the last of the proposal opportunities from ROSES 2024. The program appropriate for my project already passed; I’m looking for the 2025 edition. So let’s filter for future opportunities:
OK. Clearly NASA is going through some things. Let’s all just take a chill pill and come back and check on them three months later:
Huh, same result: future opportunities? ( There are none ) Who coulda guessed? It’s like it’s a feature rather than a bug.
Maybe NASA will get around to slow-walking grants like NIH. But there will be a lot less money at whatever rate it gets dolled out – to the manifest detriment of science in the United States and everyone everywhere who is interested in science in general and astrophysics in particular.
The bottom line
Make no mistake, the cuts congress***** and the administration intend to make to US science agencies are so severe that they amount to a termination of science as we’ve come to know it. It is a willful abandonment of American leadership in scientific endeavors. It is culture-war hatred for nerds and eggheads rendered as public policy. The scientific endeavor in the US is already suffering, and it will get much worse. There will be some brain drain, but I’m more concerned with the absence of brain nourishment. We risk murdering the careers of a generation of aspiring scientists.
I am reminded of what I said in the acknowledgements of my own Ph.D. thesis many years ago:
As I recall the path that has brought me here, I am both amazed and appalled by the amount of time, effort, and energy I have put into the production of this document. But this pales in comparison to the amount of tolerance and support (both moral and financial) required to bring a person to this point. It is difficult to grasp the depth and breadth of community commitment the doctoral process requires, let alone acknowledge all who contribute to its successful completion.
S. McGaugh, Ph.D thesis, 1992
Was that investment not worthwhile? I think it was. But it will be impossible for an aspiring young American like me to do science the way I have done. The career path is already difficult; in future it looks like the opportunity simply won’t exist.
Science is a tiny piece of American greatness that the Trump administration – with the active help of republicans in congress and a corrupt, partisan Supreme Court – has idly tossed in the bonfire. I have focused my comments to what I know directly from my own experience. Millions upon millions of Americans are currently experiencing other forms of malignant maladministration. It’s as if competent government matters after all.
In the longer term, a likely result of the current perfidy is not just a surrender of American leadership, but that the lingua franca of science moves on from English to some other language that is less hostile to it.
I hate politics and have no interest in debating it. I’m not the one who chose to suddenly undo decades of successful bipartisan science policy in a way that has a very direct negative impact on the country, my field, and me personally. Since politics invites divisive argument, the comments section will not be open.
*I don’t know who doesn’t know this, but the internet was developed by universities and the NSF. It grew out of previous efforts by the military (DARPAnet) and private industry (DECnet), but what we now know as the internet was pioneered by academic scientists funded by NSF. I’ve sometimes seen this period (1985 – 1995) referred to as NSFnet to distinguish it from the internet after is was made available to the public in 1995. But that’s not what we called it back then; we called it the internet. That’s what it was; that’s where the name came from.
I’ve been on the internet since 1987. I personally was against sharing it with the public for selfish reasons. As a scientist, I was driving truckloads of data+ along narrow lanes of limited bandwidth; I didn’t want to share the road with randos sharing god knows what. That greedy people (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg) would fence off parts of the fruits of public investment and profit by gatekeeping who could see what and harvesting gobs of personal data had not occurred to me as something that would be allowed.
I relate this bit of personal experience because I’ve seen a lot of tech bros try to downplay the role of NSF and claim its successes by asserting that they invented the internet. They did not; they merely colonized and monetized it. It was invented by scientists to share data.
+I once personally choked what is now known as arXiv by submitting a preprint with galaxy images larger than the system could handle at the time. The submission set off a doom-loop of warning emails that throttled things for many hours before I succeeded in killing all the guilty unix processes. That’s why the comments of that preprint have a link (long since defunct) to a version of the paper on the Institute of Astronomy’s local server.
**I’m old enough to remember, not all that long ago, when there was a bipartisan commitment to double science funding. That didn’t happen. It really did have widespread bipartisan support, but the science budget is a tiny portion of discretionary spending which itself is a tiny portion of the overall federal budget. The effort got lost in reconciliation.
***I would prefer a system that is less focused on the the individual PI; it is a very American-social Darwinism approach to get you to compete by dangling the carrot of more pay. But that carrot long ago evolved into a stick; getting grants is a de facto job requirement, not merely an occasional success. Overall I can’t complain; I’ve been very successful, managing to remain fully funded over the course of my career, up until very recently. Now my grants are finished so my salary is down 25%. In the current environment I don’t expect to see that again.
****Is this a fair rate? I have no idea – not my specialty. But we recently had external consultants brought in to review our expenses; I think the board of trustees expected to identify wasteful spending that could be cut, and that was certainly the attitude the consultants brought in with them. After actually reviewing everything, their report was “Geez, this operation is super-efficient; there’s no fat to cut and really the whole operation should cost more than it does.” While that’s specific to my college, it seems to me to be a pretty accurate depiction of NSF as well.
*****The republicans are pushing through this poisonous budget with a one seat majority in the House or Representatives. One. Seat. It literally could not be closer to a 50/50 split. So don’t go thinking “Americans voted for this.” Americans couldn’t be more divided.
Sad to think how much tragedy could be averted if a single republican in congress grew a spine and put country before party.