COLUMN: Science funding cuts threaten economy

If you’ve ever been treated for a medical problem, used a cellphone or a computer, or been excited by robots exploring Mars or gene-editing therapy, then your life has been profoundly impacted by federally funded science. Mine certainly has, which is why I’m so distressed that federal funding for science is now under the most serious attack in its history, one that is destroying the hopes and dreams of young scientists, firing people from jobs they love, and risking our heath and future. Scientists, whose life purpose is to understand and improve our world, need the public’s help to defend their research and their jobs.

For the last 80 years, our federal government has used a small proportion of tax dollars to fund science, because, as U.S. science leader Vannevar Bush wrote in 1945, “Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.”

The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are the two primary federal agencies that fund science in the U.S. NIH is the nation’s central agency for biomedical and public health research. NSF supports all other areas of basic scientific research. Together they fund projects in all 50 states, supporting hundreds of thousands of researchers, students and other workers. The benefits of this research are legion; it’s hard to imaging what our country and world would be like without it.

Yet, the very government that has long sustained U.S. scientific leadership is now, under the Trump administration, planning a systematic decimation of federal science funding, along with Draconian controls over what federally funded scientists are allowed to study and publish. Already, thousands of staff at NIH and NSF have been fired. Grantees fear that their funding will soon be on the chopping block. Universities are reeling under the threat of drastically reduced “overhead rates” — the percentage of grants that goes to support essential operating costs of doing research. High school and college students who have dreamed of careers in science are finding their scholarships eliminated, their graduate school admissions denied, and their summer internships cancelled.

Also under threat: the freedom of scientists to pursue their interests and to discuss and publish their results. In the name of suppressing “radical ideologies,” the administration has instructed NSF, NIH, and other agencies to ferret out grants or publications mentioning topics such as “diversity,” “disability,” “climate change,” “clean energy,” and even “gender,” and “women.” Such documents are then subject to special review or even outright banning. On Jan. 29, all NSF grantees received a chilling email from the agency warning them to cease any research activity “that uses or promotes the use of DEIA principles,” where DEIA stands for “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.”

This dire situation will hurt all of us. Among other damage, we’ll lose many economic benefits that science brings. In New Mexico, NIH and NSF together provide well over $100 million per year to support universities, tribal colleges, research labs, hospitals, clinics, and small businesses. Nationally, federal research and development funding has been responsible for about one quarter of all productivity growth since the 1940s.

This engine of economic growth is under grave threat. Scientists need the help of the public to defend them, as well as to protect science itself. Our representatives and senators need to hear from ordinary people urging them to reverse these dangerous cuts to science funding and threats to freedom of inquiry and scientific discussion.