As a part of alleged budget slashing and cost-cutting initiatives, the Trump Administration commenced its second term by freezing over 1,800 federal research grants, sending shockwaves through the scientific community. Between February and June of this year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) distributed $8 billion less to universities and other research institutions than it had in the past two years by this time.
It seems like the pro-science consensus that we took for granted has come crashing down. Documented “attacks on science” under the Trump Administration involve cutting funds, misrepresenting data, and undermining scientific independence. Many outraged American scientists are confused by how the value of science has suddenly become a polarizing topic. To thoroughly comprehend how this happened, we can examine the impact of how we treat both science overall and individual projects and researchers.
Science has always been political. Federal researchers have always worried for their jobs and salaries as administrations with differing priorities passed through the White House. But only in the past few years has the value of scientific research itself become the partisan issue that it is today. Catalyzed by the controversies and confusion surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, public mistrust of scientific and expert opinion has seeped into political debate ranging from education reform to vaccine mandates. However, COVID-19 alone cannot be blamed for this stark mindset shift. Prominent political figures have taken advantage of the doubt stirred by the handling of the pandemic, recognizing its potential to push MAHA ideology and anti-intellectualism. While these factors are primarily responsible for the gutting of our scientific system, we must consider how the American research system has failed in its own right. Perhaps, in exploring its deeply embedded (and maybe irreparable) flaws, we will be able to understand where exactly we went wrong.
The problems begin with how researchers secure funding for their experiments. Private funding, such as venture capital, involves impressing investors with a unique, high-potential idea. After getting seed funding, researchers must make good on their promises of growth and advancement for continued funding. This is common for start-ups, whose mission is to practically and innovatively apply a known concept.
Fundamental concepts are discovered through “basic” or “pure” research, where our knowledge of natural science is expanded without the goal of application. Because this research is so high-risk, lengthy, and not immediately monetizable, a tiny fraction is funded by private investors. The majority of funding for academic research comes from federal sponsors, primarily the NIH. These federal grants are extremely challenging to obtain and renew, with an 18.5% success rate across all federal institutes in 2024. There is extreme pressure to find quick results that prove experiment validity, because first-time renewal requests have lower acceptance rates than subsequent requests.
Finding something statistically significant becomes the top priority, a strain that can promote misconduct like obfuscation and falsification. Pure science gets distracted by whatever spits out the quickest results, marginalizing a lot of worthy research. When science is devalued into a short-term investment, it is easy to convince populations that long, slow-moving projects are a waste of tax dollars and resources.
Once completed with their projects, researchers are often left with “null results,” meaning they had no significant or impactful findings. As a result, it becomes challenging for them to get their paper published by a reputable journal. High-quality journals want to produce impactful content, and null findings are usually inconclusive and don’t make for a persuasive paper. Among the scientific community, it is general knowledge that it is remarkably harder to publish a paper with null results than with positive results.
This trend, widely known as “publication bias” or the “File Drawer problem”, creates a multitude of problems for scientific advancement. It is wasteful, as other scientists use more resources repeating experiments that have already been done. It has also been proven that it is more resourceful for the community to publish every finding than to pick and choose.
Publication bias affects entire fields of research. Because hypotheses are established after reading and interpreting past literature, they are likely influenced by seeing exclusively positive reports, rather than the whole picture. When repeated, this practice deceives people into thinking there exists a comprehensive set of literature on a certain subject, when there does not. Innovation is hindered and integrity is, yet again, undermined.
It is a well-established truth that funding science yields positive economic results. Moreover, it is suggested that economic returns from federal funding (which lie between 140 and 210%) are much more impactful than from the private sector (55%). Funding science leads to integral, measurable societal growth.
But within our current system, both private and public funding generate this pressure for immediate return on individual projects. The individualized fight for funding and publication causes a slow but steady decline in scientific integrity. Combine this with an increasingly pervasive and impractical expectation for instant cost-effectiveness and sensational results, and it’s easier to digest how the Republican party was able to rally around grant freezes.
As long as fundamental research is solely rewarded for immediate efficiency and results, like any other industry, it is being catastrophically diminished and mishandled. While we can expect that increased federal funding results in higher scientific output, the mistake the current administration has been making is attempting to identify projects that “waste” money. Science is a collective effort, not an individual one.
By turning science into a competition, the US created cascading issues that slowly ate away at public trust and productivity. The Trump era was able to take advantage of this, and quickly raised a national culture in which natural science is no longer considered a critical long-term investment. If we want to maintain dominance in the biotechnology industry, the federal government must reconsider how we allocate grants and work to disrupt this businesslike attitude towards science.
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