I have written a number of times about what’s happening to federal funding of scientific research in the US, but I have some updates, and they are grim.
Let’s first consider the policies reported here at Science on collaboration with scientists and institutions outside the US. It appears that the NIH and NASA (so far) want permission in advance for any such proposal, with grantees also saying that they have been directed to remove papers with foreign co-authors from their annual progress reports to the agency. This is even if all the actual lab work occurred in the US. And it doesn’t stop there: the National Institute of General Medical Sciences is asking research centers that have been awarded to promise to avoid future work with United States authors of papers the institute has flagged as having a “foreign component”.
Add this to the various legislative attempts to restrict any collaboration with Chinese researchers specifically. This latest proposal (the “Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries” Act) is another iteration of several attempts at this sort of thing, and all of these fit together into an ugly nativist, isolationist framework. Apparently scientific progress in the US is supposed to take place behind a moat and guard towers, safe from prying foreigners and their devious intentions.
Well, I don’t trust the intentions of my own government, because my own government is now a vile collection of incompetents, hacks, and grifters. In the rare case when the people involved display any principles at all, these seem to be rooted in a complete miscomprehension of how science actually works and a reflexive hostility to it when they see it. As I said earlier this year, these people hate academia, they hate the idea of openly competitive federal funding of basic research in general, and they want to hit the entire system with shovels over and over again until it stops twitching.
If there’s to be money doled out, it seems, they want to be the ones deciding exactly where it goes. This has been clear for many months now, with the administration’s orders that political appointees be given ever more power to overrule any granting committee decisions. For the people who just hate science and hate professors and hate people who seem to know more than they do, this provides a convenient way to strangle a lot of it right at the start. For the ones who are more concerned about lining their pockets and those of their friends and supplicants, it gives an obvious mechanism to route the cash to the preferred destinations. And just as with the dang-furriners rules mentioned above, it gives the nativist yahoos something to crow about as well. The whole thing is incompatible with US science as the world has come to know it, and for some of these people, that's by design.
Occasionally someone says something like "Well, you work in industry, why should you care?" And my response is that every single person working in industrial science and engineering came up through academic scientific training, and that the US has been responsible for a huge amount of the basic research that we've been building the whole scientific enterprise on. We're now engaged in tearing all of that down, and it's a crime against this nation, against its people, and against the rest of the human race - an unforgivable one.
I’ve fielded a number of questions from journalists (from inside the US and out) about all this over the last few months, and I have to say, some of them understand this well. Others, though, keep asking with increased bafflement and incomprehension about the plans, the motives, the reasons behind all of it. Sometimes that’s because they’ve seen the administration’s blather about “Gold Standard Science” and “diversity of opinion” and they’re having a hard time squaring this with the evidence of their own eyes - understandably.
I’ve done what I can to get these points across, but here they are again. The plan is to kill off publicly funded academic science in this country. The motives include sheer bloody-minded hostility along with a desire to get their own hands on the funding. A few of the more tech-oligarch-addled perpetrators seem to have convinced themselves that it doesn’t matter anyway because we’re just about to invent Artificial General Intelligence and that will of course immediately start inventing everything that humans could have invented anyway, so who cares, y’know. But it’s mostly stupidity, arrogance, and greed.
I mean, look around you. Of course it is.