Destroying American Science – The First 100 Days

It’s reasonable to argue that ‘modern science’ is an American creation. By ‘modern science’ I really mean the rise of science as a profession. Europe was the intellectual home of ‘western science’, until the rise of Nazism in Germany and subsequent destruction of WWII shifted much of science’s intellectual home to the United States, at the same time that the US was rising to become a world power industrially, politically, culturally, and now, scientifically. While the intellectual component of science is key to its curiosity driven discovery, and method, it is the institutionalization of science that has led to the current envelopment of science and technology into modern life, or as it sometimes seems, the envelopment of modern society into science and technology.

            The institutionalization of science in the US is centered around government agencies, principally the creation of the National Science Foundation by Vannevar Bush after WWII, and development of the National Institutes of Health, originally as a small public health service in the first half of the 20th century that has grown to be the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, outside of China. Subsequently, many other branches of the federal government including the Department of Defense have created science and technology funding branches, and it can be argued that other agencies like Energy, and EPA are basically science and technology departments. This has created a number of national laboratories, but most of the science funding has gone to academic and private nonprofit and for-profit research laboratories. Allied with this public sector growth in science and technology is the major expansion of the industrial research and development as technology underpinned by science has permeated every aspect of modern life from food to mobility to communications. Ultimately this has created a professional class of scientists and engineers akin to other professional classes like architects, lawyers, and doctors (whose work is now wholly dependent on modern science). Furthermore, this model has been exported to the rest of the world, most recently China.

            The training for advanced degrees in many scientific disciplines, and virtually all of the natural sciences, is more akin to training in the arts or the trades where a master’s or Ph.D’s training is done close association with a mentor, often with a small cohort of fellow trainee’s. The focus is on hands on training in gaining both the practical skills and critical thinking necessary to carry out advanced research. It is primarily the work of our academic ecosystem -- universities and research institutes whose funding comes from a variety of sources, with federal funding being the most important. It’s this system that trains nearly all the scientists working in industry and government. It’s clearly a system that works, like all complex systems, not always as well as it could, nonetheless, it’s well- curated system and has evolved over decades, and put American science at the forefront of the world.

So why destroy American Science in 100 days as the 47th presidents administration seems dead set on doing? And after you have destroyed it, what will it be replaced with? What’s the plan? And if the goal is solely to destroy it without a well-thought out plan to quickly rebuild it better and more efficiently, then it’s logical to conclude that you are a traitor to the United States of America, and no one should be shocked to discover you have an offshore bank account being fed with rubles, yuan, or some other foreign currency.  

It really is hard to keep up, especially if you have an actually demanding job, like doing world-class science, with all the destructive ideas for science put forth by this administration, but here are some bullet points of destruction that caught my eye:

• Capping institutional overhead rates at 15%

        • Randomly firing government researchers

        • Cutting back staff that oversee and administer the federal research apparatus

• Sending a clear message to foreigners who come to study science in the US that they are not welcome

        • Threatening to deport and actually carrying out deportations of foreign researchers

• Cancelling legally binding research contracts with immediate effect.

• Halting or greatly slowing down major federal research granting agencies

        • Proposing drastic cuts to the budgets of federal science funding agencies.

• A fetish-like obsession with destroying Harvard University, consistently ranked the top research university in the world.

Much of this program, or ‘pogrom’, seems to be taken from the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 Report. I’ve read some sections and here’s my politically incorrect take on the two chapters that seem most relevant to the federal science enterprise in the USA penned by two bureaucratic lawyers, Bernard McNamee and Roger Serverino.

Pg 365

“American Science Dominance. Ever since the age of Benjamin Franklin, the United States has been at the forefront of scientific discovery and technological advancement.”

This is a ridiculous statement, the United States was largely a backwater of scientific innovation throughout the 18th and 19th centuries with some notable exceptions, but it’s difficult to point to a fundamental scientific discovery in physics, chemistry, or biology that originated in the US before around 1920.  Technologically we have done better with the likes of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish born, Canadian-American), nonetheless the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, the telegraph were not invented here (although Samuel Morse, an NYU professor, developed the Morse code).

Pg 365

 ‘Beginning with the groundbreaking science of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. has developed 17 National Laboratories that conduct fundamental and advanced scientific research. The National Labs have been critical in supporting national defense and ensuring that the United States leads on scientific discoveries with transformative applications that benefit America and the world.’

This is an interesting take on the role of National Labs, it’s ironic that a document that seems primarily aimed at reducing the role of the federal government focuses much of its attention on the National Labs funded under the Department of Energy. I have a number of colleagues, whose work I greatly respect, that work at National Labs, nonetheless, in terms of numbers of Nobel Prizes awarded, they lag far behind our universities, and probably even privately funded R&D labs, furthermore they don’t train undergraduates or graduate students to any significant extent. Finally, they have overhead rates that can exceed 100%, so how would they operate on 15% overhead!

Pg 365.

‘In addition, the National Labs have been too focused on climate change and renewable technologies.’

This is quite a statement with little to no data (like the majority statements in this entire document) to back it up. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is the only National Lab with a mandate to focus on renewable (I presume energy?) technologies, and it has one of the lowest budgets (<$400,000,000/yr) in the National Lab system, well below the National Energy Technology Laboratory under the office of Fossil Fuel and Carbon Management ($700,000,000). Of course, the real screamer in this is that federal funding for solar energy research has accounted for about 18% of DOE’s R&D spending over 40 years, while fossil fuels and nuclear accounted for 61%, yet new installation solar energy is now cheaper than either fossil fuel or nuclear.

Pg 394

‘The United States is losing its dominance in scientific discoveries and technological development. China and other adversaries have been stealing American science and technology for years and are now on the verge of dominating science—a development that is fraught with negative strategic and economic implications for the United States. The next Administration must commit itself to ensuring that the U.S. continues to dominate scientific discovery and technological advancement.’

It would be naïve to think that our international engagement of the scientific community and openness to inviting scholars from all nations to come and work in the US has not led to ideas developed in US labs being taken illegally to foreign countries, China in particular. Interestingly Wikipedia has a detailed list of science and technology espionage cases involving China, listing 75 individuals being convicted in some way, and 14 exonerated. Also interesting, the great majority of convictions have been against individuals working in the defense (i.e. directly for a branch of the military), or commercial sectors with only a few academics, while the majority of the exonerated cases are academics. On the other side of the coin, US research has benefited greatly from a large number (>>1,000s) of hard-working, motivated, and often poorly remunerated, Chinese scientists (among many other foreign nationals from developing countries) coming to work in US laboratories as grad students and postdocs to provide the hands, and no doubt in many cases the brains, for a number of important discoveries made here. These points are all largely now academic in the most literal sense, because while our politicians (and I put a much greater onus on Republicans) have spent the last 10 years debating who should use the girl’s bathroom in Dubuque Iowa, homegrown research coming directly from Chinese laboratories, funded by the Chinese government, now dominate the leading science journals in many critical technology areas like Nanotechnology, Materials Science, Artificial Intelligence,  Chemical Engineering, and Biotechnology.

Pg 452.

“Unaccountable bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci should never again have such broad, unchecked power to issue health “guidelines” that will certainly be the basis for federal and state mandates. Never again should public health bureaucrats be allowed to hide information, ignore information, or mislead the public concerning the efficacy or dangers associated with any recommended health interventions because they believe it may lead to hesitancy on the part of the public. The only way to restore public trust in HHS as an institution capable of acting responsibly during a health emergency is through the best of disinfectants—light.”

This is an absolute howler coming from a professional think tank bureaucrat whose contribution to fighting the AIDs epidemic was exactly what?? Absolutely fitting though about light being the best of disinfectant. I can only assume this bozo immediately followed the 45th president’s advice that sticking a four foot long UV light bulb up his rectum would cure Covid, AIDs, Tuberculosis, or whatever (but not stupidity).

Pg 452, some truth here.

“All National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration regulators should be entirely free from private biopharmaceutical funding. In this realm, “public–private partnerships” is a euphemism for agency capture, a thin veneer for corporatism. Funding for agencies and individual government researchers must come directly from the government with robust congressional oversight. We must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma. Regulators should have a long “cooling off period” on their contracts (15 years would not be too long) that prevents them from working for companies they have regulated. Similarly, pharmaceutical company executives should be restricted from moving from industry into positions within regulatory agencies.

There’s some truth to this statement, and the revolving door between government and Big Pharma, like, say the adjoining corridors between defense department and defense contractors, could use some judicious oversight, rebalancing, and real jail time for significant abuse. Nonetheless, there’s value for these industries that spend a large share of government monies employing people with experience in how government agencies work, and vice versa, people with industry experience working in government. Of course, this system will be gamed for unfair competitive advantage and outright greed, so there’s plenty of room for some good debate on what’s fair and what’s not.

Pg 452, but then this little ‘all-knowing gem’:

“COVID-19 exposed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government. CDC continually misjudged COVID-19, from its lethality, transmissibility, and origins to treatments.”

Where could I possibly start, other than to say this is absolute proof, especially for those of us privileged enough to have first-hand knowledge of the archetype: that there is no smarter idiot than an Ivy-league trained idiot (Severino claims to be Harvard, JD).

The 2025 manual is largely a series of bullet points, while every 2nd or 3rd sentence seems to have some variation of accusing government agencies of liberal bias, at the same time preaching a strong conservative bias (the only transparent part of the document).

I’ve no doubt that if gone through point by point, this document has some valid points about how the federal government could operate more efficiently, and become more accountable for not being overzealous in developing regulatory policies that Congress and the Executive Branch, often fuzzily, mandated.

But regarding useful advice to science agencies that support scientific research this document is so abysmal it makes the Mariana Trench look like a chasm a three-year old could step across with nary a wobble. On the other hand, you could gather any dozen academic type scientists, the majority will most likely call themselves liberals/progressives, and after a beer or two they would be happy to wax on and on and on about how the federal agencies could do a better job of managing US science. Of course, number one with a bullet would be provide more funding (see comment about the rise of Chinese science above). After that there will be a variety of opinions from which commonsense consensus could certainly emerge. At the end, they would all say, some grudgingly, that yeah, US science is the best in the world, or Was!

In my humble opinion, the 33 guy and 7 gal chuckleheads whose names are associated with Project 2025 are the personification of having just enough knowledge to be dangerous…really dangerous.