Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.
Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.
If the choice is between $0 in the US and >$0 someplace else, you emigrate to >$0 if you want to continue your research.
Way off, it's way closer, even if we're just talking EU. EU (the body) alone is about 200 billion/year. EU member states are like 1-1.5 trillion/year.
US: $848B (2024)
EU: $508B (2024)
---
UK: $102B (2023)
Switzerland: $22B (2023)
Norway: $8.2B (2024)
OECD "Gross domestic spending on R&D"
We fund science, research and we have accelerated programs for researchers affected by these kinds of things.
If you're interested, email me (see profile). I have been helping Americans emigrate to Europe (for free) for several years.
If you spend $900 Billions on BS you will lose to other countries that only spend 1/100th of that.
Quantity over quality doesn’t work in science because reality doesn’t care who paid how much.
I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.
Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.
Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.
Science should be guided by science, not ideology.
Congress being neutered is not an accident, hopefully it will be less fucked if the power balance shifts.
And as the OP is inherently political in what it's calling out, that is not the motivation -- it's the science. I get the fact that in the end, everything's political but partisanship itself is a cancer on the body politic. Just as we seem to be in late-stage capitalism, we are entering late-stage democracy. It pains me that we effectively arrive here by choice.
Those are the only people who get to decide. Congress can’t turn over the expenditure of taxpayer funds to people who aren’t politically accountable.
Or I can be a chickenshit, and praise Trump and have a career, however pathetic. I routinely ask them to approve my results before publishing, just in case. I apply for grants looking at vaccines and autism. Every Friday, I spend an hour talking about how Trump is America's chosen one.
The executive branch does not hold the power of the purse, and the fact that you can casually use that phrase in reference to the executive branch shows how far we’ve fallen as a country in a decade.
A very sad state of affairs.
You say "career bureaucrats" as if they can't be fired or controlled, but that's obviously wrong (since they're being fired and/or controlled right now).
QED, they ARE still under public oversight. (1) Voters vote for (2) elected officials who oversee (3) agency bureaucrats.
Isn't congress the elected, public oversight body? Or are you proposing that each and every employee of the federal govt be elected to prevent the horror of the 'career bureaucrat'?
Voters can always choose to turn over those decisions to scientists they trust. For much of the 20th century, that’s what voters did. But if they don’t trust the priorities of the current scientific establishment, they can also choose to put that control back in the hands of political appointees. The institutional principles of science cannot override the prerogative of voters to decide how their money is spent.
FTFY
But then your counter is likely some form of originalism as you've been instructed. The current administration and it's pet SCOTUS have no interest in the Constitution or they wouldn't be so hell bent on making POTUS king for life. A mad king at that.
Well no wonder we're so fucked. The constitution is a disaster.
If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled.
The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they are just cracking down on things that they see as subjectively bad, so it's fine. And there's an element of truth in that: so much of American policy for a long time has been subject to agency interpretation and judicial review, and there was always room for political maneuvering and corruption in the system. Where the truth becomes a lie is the omission that this is the systematic ramping up from something that happens occasionally in a mostly-functioning system, to something that happens constantly and is systematically designed to facilitate corruption and politicization.
It is unbelievable to watch my country give up its most unfair (and yet mostly positive) advantage -- a nearly free option on the top talent of the entire planet. Here's hoping that the increasingly multipolar research world can find ways to be even more efficient in creating new knowledge.
what about private companies making profits luring researchers?
Well, not all research is publicly funded. I think private funding is still fine for the most part. But yes, public research is dying a painful death.
Outsiders like to imagine that the pure pursuit of science without any agendas is what university research is all about. That is mostly a veneer.
ETA: Slightly off topic, but a colleague had his already-granted NSF grant killed by DOGE because it contained the word "censorship". He was researching ways to allow Iranian people to bypass their regime's Internet censorship.
We created laws to prevent this from being the case. They work(ed) most of the time.
The current administration believed that it didn't have to follow those laws. After being slapped down multiple times by courts for this, they want to change the law(s) so that what your father said becomes true. But worse - "what the administration gave you last week, they can take away next week".
Also as someone who lost a grant from this administration for supposed DEI (it was fucking biology, but ignorant fucks didn't give a shit), I also want to say fuck them.
What could go wrong?
Definitely not more corruption.
Definitely not more uncertainty that kills gross fixed capital formation.
That's how its always been, it's just that most people are not attuned to academic politics.
I don't think any practicing scientist of any political persuasion will think these are good for science.
Science progresses by sharing knowledge openly and publicly, so others can evaluate it, criticize it, and build on it. These severe restrictions on collaboration, publication, and public communication will damage science's naturally open, merit-based culture.
We will all suffer due to lost discoveries--maybe not today, but over years and decades.
On the other hand, if we can't get private citizens to donate to science research, then they are not likely to vote for it either--polls don't register much of a concern from the average citizen*. I don't think most of us want to be under a dictator or go back to having a king.
That means the only practical option is to act of our own volition and support science through vocal advocacy and private money. In this way, we can each donate to the research we care about the most with maximum academic freedom.
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...
Everyone knows that many things that are not directly beneficial to society would go unfunded because humans optimize for what’s around them, and things that are self-interested.
There isn’t even alignment. One person wants to fund science, the other wants to fund high speed rail, the other wants farm subsidies, one wants social security and the other wants the military. Government balances all of that together. Of course people will make value judgements about their pet interests and declare the other aspects to be better funded separately.
The USG is quite often the only group able and willing to fund most projects.
Contrary to what you said, there is actually quite a bit of private philanthropic funding for research, it's just that it's not evenly distributed. The vast majority of it seems to go to medical research, in particular cancer and Alzheimer's. That's obviously a good thing, but my point here is that we can't necessarily depend on private philanthropy to distribute funds optimally.
https://www.cato.org/blog/governments-should-not-fund-resear...
I'm generally a fan of Cato and a libertarian approach to economics, but I'm still not convinced that we should be spending zero public money on basic research. I would like to see a decent amount going into mathematics and theoretical physics for example, and I doubt those fields would stay afloat on donations.
This comment reflects a level of ignorance that would make Dunning & Kruger facepalm.
The idea that you compare a democratically elected government’s taxes… to that of an unelected tyrant show a complete lack of perspective.
Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.
In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?
I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.
~ https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/basic-science-curiosity-...
Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.
We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.
Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.
Yes
> It incentivises high-impact research
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
> common sense says aren't worth the public funding
who is deciding what is "common sense"?
Look at Russia, they jumped off a cliff to protect a regime from democracy, and people are checked out - they take no accountability and still act confused of why Russia is being despised - all while accelerating economic and demographic decline with more than one million casualties in a special 3 day military operation.
You can't make this up.
The flagrant corruption and voter suppression efforts underway at the moment make the next 2-3 years the final chance to bring it back from the brink. That doesn't just mean a Democrat winning. It means an actual democrat (lowercase) winning and building a coalition to repair what has been broken. I don't personally think that looks very likely, but I hope for all our sakes it can happen.
If these rules go into effect, is it not true that individuals, state governments, and non-governmental organizations could still fund scientific research that the federal government won't fund?
Of course there's still research that only the federal government could fund. A big example is e.g. DARPA and the Internet. Imagine if that was only funded and supported by a few states.
This administration’s actions towards Harvard and other schools would suggest not. If a state or university is doing verboten research, the federal government can make them stop. Previously, that didn’t happen - it was unthinkable. Now, it’s forever on the table.
You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago.
Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants - some might say theology - of the field. It’s basically a cartel for keeping a field of study alive, regardless of its value. True innovation happens when people collaborate outside their fields.
Steelman aside, there probably are better ways to solve this problem systematically than just let a politically appointee have final say. If we were serious about this problem, smart people thinking about scientific policy probably have some great ideas that are not being listened to.
Strong claims require strong evidence. The tenants some people want to challenge are climate change, gender identity, renewable energy, vaccinations, etc.
So its a hard bargain, I believe science benefits from being a bit stubborn.
And I’d argue all fields could use more dissenting opinions and new options. I don’t know if this would be the path to that but keep in mind there have been many things historically where someone needed to take a leap of faith to go against the current dogma.
Are you arguing that or not
Also: tenets
>some might say theology - of the field
Some might, I'm sure! Are you saying that?
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/steelmanning
Personally, I am sympathetic to the idea that science has stagnated. But I do not think this is the solution.
This is a case of correctly diagnosing the problem - but not actually having a real solution
The Trump 2.0 administration was already easily the most corrupt in American history well before these rules were proposed.
To their credit(?) they don't even try to hide it, they are just fully corrupt out in the open, because they know the cultists who support them will support anything they do.
In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.
With this, I guess the US will end up as a third rate country much quicker.
So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?
There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.
How the Russian interests have taken over significantly invalidates the purpose and existence of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
But then again, President Biden's administration had multiple grounds to prosecute Trump for crimes committed, whether the attempted coup or espionage with top secret documents or Epstein, and they just did not make it happen in a way that had any effect.
Science and Educational purposes are valid 501(c)(3) purposes. A donation to a 501(c)(3) that funds open-source scientific software, public STEM education, basic research, science grants, or public-interest tech research can be deductible.
Up to 60% of Adjusted Gross Income can be tax-deductible as charitable contributions to a qualified 501(c)(3) with itemization, depending on the contribution type.
This would create a non-partisan defined/dedicated non-profit funding layer with serious governance that will benefit all sides. Might be possible to go global.
This would need serious structure: independent board, conflict-of-interest rules, grant review, public reporting, no private benefit, and probably fiscal sponsorship first.
Maybe this deserves a separate Ask HN to avoid derailing this thread: would people here actually support or help design a 501(c)(3)-style vehicle for public-benefit science and technology funding?
But these very endowments have been special cased as additionally taxable, despite that status, under the 2025 OBBBA, resulting in research budget cuts [0].
Would independent endowments as you describe them be more immune?
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/college-endowment-tax...
Why a hypothetical? Plenty of options available to donate to or to contribute otherwise. Not help built it, help grow and maintain it.
I can only say Bravo to Americans who think this constant fighting is somehow going to help the country.
The upcoming midterms are very plausibly the last free and fair elections we will ever have in this country. As deeply unpopular as this administration is right now, the Democrats will need an enormous amount of luck for the size of historic landslide it will require to take the house and senate, and even then they need to do so by enough that they can impeach and convict.
That is just about the only plausible path towards preserving democracy at this point. And I’m not really holding out hope.
I’d be happy to be told that I’m wrong. So please, tell me I’m wrong.
I don't think Democrats will win the Senate this fall (though there's a chance they will, and I'd be happy to be wrong here). The House is reasonably likely. Either way, they won't have the supermajority needed to convict on impeachment.
Trump is doing a lot to try to destabilize elections and put his thumbs on the scale. His recent order telling USPS not to deliver mail-in ballots to anyone not on some list that the federal government is compiling is troubling. The SAVE Act is troubling, but fortunately still hasn't gained enough support to pass (though it's far from settled that it, or something like it, won't).
But I think a big strength in the US is that all elections, even for federal offices, are administered by the states. The federal government does have some constitutional say in how they're administered, but changes there generally require acts of Congress (which is hard, even with GOP control), and I expect any and all executive orders around election matters to be challenged in court, and hopefully largely thrown out. Red states will continue to do what they usually do to disenfranchise voters they don't like; nothing new there. Blue states will continue to be blue, and will do what they need to do to keep things as sane as possible. Purple states are a more difficult proposition, but there are few enough of them that it's easier for people to keep an eye on what's going on in them.
I think we'll know a lot more after we see what happens during the midterms (not by the outcomes, but in seeing what happens with the electoral process). I wouldn't expect the 2028 elections to be significantly different than what we see this fall. If the courts disagree with election-related changes the GOP have been trying to impose for this year, it's unlikely they'll be more amenable to them in two years.
I expect that the GOP (and MAGA folks in general) will reject the results of the 2028 presidential election if a Democrat wins. They'll dial up the "big steal" lies again, just as in 2020, and will push even harder with that narrative. Hopefully the law changes since then around vote certification will help avoid a repeat of all the crap we saw around that event. Will institutions stand up to that misinformation campaign? I'm not sure. I hope so, I think so, but I'm not sure. I'm cautiously leaning toward optimism.
My question is now: Which company is gonna buy the IRS now?
What is this, North Korea?
Hope china can step up and fill the gap.
This is not just picking which ideas the government supports. This sounds like it’s taking all the “fun” out of having grant funding.
Sure, that’s a flip remark, but doesn’t this have a similar sense of arguments against other government funded programs?
~SNAP food assistance is raising food prices~ [1] or ~SNAP food assistance is my tax dollars going towards anyone who says they’re hungry.~ [2]
And don’t forget to mention the replication crisis.
~Public funded grants let scientists go to parties and publish junk science.~
The cynical would argue it’s proof the scientific community is filled with charlatans milking a system that can’t police itself.
- With no workers working, no worker fraud problem, sure. If you cut core scientific processes, politicize science, and destablize paycheck predictability enough to chase everyone good out of science, then yes any small amount of waste is also caught in the cuts.
- This seems to increase what you call bad "fun": Increases abuse of tax funding being corruptly given to projects advocated by political appointees despite rejection by scientific peer review. Vicious feedback loop.
Surprise! I'm just a middle-age American reading HN with his coffee trying to wrap my head around the topic. I don't think this remark helps anyone understand your argument. Doth protest too much.
I'm wondering if you're focused on the "approved" science, and missing the idea this corruption is riding on the back of even a "small amount of waste", and an overall rejection of scientific activities in the face of the replication crisis. All part of the schism of your facts and our facts insanity.
it will take longer than this decade, maybe even next, to restore the brain loss and faith in secure jobs for research
basically this country will just become a highway of non-stop warehouses, alternating ICE prisons vs "AI" datacenters
science, medicine, all research and development just gone to other countries
Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:
1. prevention of DEI related grants
2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies
3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)
4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research
5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants
6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology
It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.
So they’ll be sued. The theories will be tested and we’ll see exactly where the line is (eventually). And probably somewhere uncomfortable, given SCOTUS.
There are legitimate ways agency political appointees can set funding priorities. Like this year we’ll focus on Alzheimer’s. But of course, we should take the least charitable reading of this - that it’ll likely be used for shenanigans. Punish enemies. Award cronies. Go after junk science, etc.
So now the administration is attempting to follow those rules to create these new procedures, which they believe will then be lawful.
If they are successful, challenges would have to be made judicially based on non-procedural grounds, or through Congress.
They can follow APA to come up with all kinds of illegal rules. And the actual rules are so broad they could be used from anything sane to something that might be just political revenge.
The actual language:
> “As part of the merit review process, Federal agencies must perform pre-issuance reviews to ensure that Federal award proposals selected for funding are consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest.”
Federal grants have always been subject to politics.
$2.4 million for "Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) Girls in a Robotics Leadership Project"
$1.2 million for "FW-HTF-R: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers"
$700k for "CAREER: Advancing Equity in Middle School Mathematics by Engaging Students and Families of Color in Participatory Design Research"
Etc., etc., etc.
If you want to be independent of the government, don't take money from the government. If you are mad because you don't agree with how the government is making decisions, say so. But don't pretend it has anything to do with "government overreach"
Perhaps more political oversight will make research more accountabile to the population at large. In this era I suspect it's far more likely to benefit the few, those born into power and fame who are consolidating their power. Scientists with resources and accountable only to other scientists are uniquely dangerous to those unwilling to give up their power.
We may not like it (I certainly don't), but this is one of the times when Trump seems to actually be acting within his authority, and not pushing at or past those limits.
The amount of capability that America is burning is impressive. I suspect that people outside of academia are not as alarmed, since its not part of daily life.
However it matters the same way that a drug discovery today is life saving 10 years down the line, after its gone through all the processes to go to market.
What's Happening to Science in America
It is all fascinating to me.
I highly doubt you could do that in the US without being shot.
Having incentive to produce useful outcomes seems like it would be something folks would be in support of, but it appears many here think this is the end of the world just because it's Trump doing it. At least there's consistency in that regard. Le sigh.
This is far scarier than any single rule about research grants, and I'm not sure why nobody's talking about this.
The OMB writes the budget to enact federal policy. And critically, no federal regulation can exist with the OMB approving it. By making this appointment explicitly political, they have carte blanche to completely rewrite all federal regulations to be exclusively conservative ones. This would have been crazy to attempt before, but with Trump 2.0, this is the new norm.
One of the things they are doing right now (it's been approved and the rules are now active and legal, so it is now happening) is converting 50,000 civil servant jobs into political appointments. This means having a job in government no longer serves the whole nation, it's now an ideological function to serve a single political party. Literally weaponizes the federal government to punish opposing political views and enforce one view on everyone (there's no other point to political appointment). And if the party in charge ever changes, it now means everyone will be laid off and replaced. Every few years. So nothing will ever get done in government now, except for extreme short-term pushes for radical political agendas, because nobody will stay long enough to know how the government works to do anything else. Move fast and break things with the largest economy in the world, radical political agendas, and 380M people.
The OMB also can review and block all proposed legislation going to Congress, vet all official congressional testimony, and block any agency from publicly disagreeing with the President. Military generals, health officials, science experts, ecologists, intelligence directors... they can block all of them from giving any testimony to Congress. That's an actual power the OMB has.
They can also block money Congress has already allocated, meaning that your representatives in government are now completely useless, because whatever party is in the Executive can nerf anything your reps have passed. The Supreme Court could do something about it, but won't, because it's now a Conservative Supermajority. There is no reason for them to disagree because they already ideologically agree.
Finally, the OMB can issue a rule that every agency that wasn't officially under the Executive before, has to submit all its rules for Executive approval. Meaning the Executive would control all government agencies.
In any other context, in any other country, this would be called a single-party authoritarian coup. When they create rules that outlaw other political parties (that's what authoritarian governments do to retain single party control) - and assuming the democrats don't just give up - it will be the official start of civil war. Coming to you Fall 2028.
Not sure what you mean. Lots of people have been talking about it since he was appointed to the role. I've known about it and been pissed about it for quite a long time now.
Things can definitely get worse.
Sure, of course.
But to even ask the question presumes that politics isn’t already overriding science within the academy, just from a different direction.
This new direction turns the magnet around and pushes away everything else.
Reply by Ben Franklin, when asked about what kind of govt the newly independent United States should have. The words seem particularly fitting in current times.
How can anyone realistically plan resources, staff, whatever, if they have no idea it’ll be funded for a month or 20 years? They really want to destroy American ingenuity, science, all of it.
Just a bunch of white nationalist drones existing to keep the engine going is what they want.
(Unless you're doing science for military development. Then the funding spigot is open.)
And to those who say "oh, it's the same as it was before, just different ideologies" -- no, it is not at all the same. Not even comparable.
They want to turn this place into a the real life version of idiocracy? So be it. The lay voter needs to see what voting badly does. They need to see consequences. The cure for cancer could be there in this research. WHO knows what could become of real mRNA research. But no. We just want to believe the world is 6k years old and some donor is gonna tell some begging scientists they get their funding or not.
From a naive perspective, this sounds a lot like the breeding ground for Lysenkoism (Stalin-approved). In that example, aligning science to the party line led to a couple of famines. I say naive because there were other factors at play (e.g. it was forbidden to criticize Lysenko's theories).
Example: "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats."
Cancel Haitian grants. And also round them up in deportation holding facilities.
