War On Science Will Make US Irrelevant

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While the world is celebrating the superior deal-making skills of the failed US president, the mainstream press is dutifully ignoring the more nefarious action of his administration. Here’s a recent example of outrageous behavior by the Madman of Mar-A-Loco, but it’s just one of many. Quoting from an article published by the journal Nature on May 1, 2025, Dan Garisto writes in Scientific American that the staff at the National Science Foundation were told recently to freeze all outgoing funding.

The administration has installed a new leadership team at NSF, which has instituted a new policy that requires all grants to be screened for “alignment with agency priorities.” That’s code for, “None of this namby pamby progressive stuff that is the product of liberal thinking. If it doesn’t support solutions to the mythical energy emergency, no grant funding for you!”

Many readers will recall that the Soviet Union had a cadre of party apparatchiks at every level of society whose job was to ensure that everyone was toeing the party line at all times. Apparently, this administration thinks that is a wonderful idea. Readers are free to make up their own minds about that.

The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. Another new policy announced at NSF recently requires staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities.” That policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature.

The Exodus From NSF Has Begun

Nature spoke with five NSF staffers, all of whom requested anonymity. One said that although good science can still be funded, the policy could lead to “Orwellian overreach.” Another said, “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Some NSF staff members said they are resigning rather than being muzzled by political hacks. In a story for TIME dated May 13, 2o25, Alondra Nelson wrote:

Today, I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. Even as the White House threatens the foundational tenets of constitutional democracy and continues to slash funding for essential social services, it is tempting to hope that the public institutions charged with promoting and protecting knowledge will, nevertheless, soldier on with their mission. I did.

Since January 2025, scientists and librarians, program officers and policy analysts at the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, and other federal offices and agencies have focused on their work, despite an increasingly hostile political environment. We’ve also seen civil servants fired and accused of not making the mark, vendors’s contracts ignored, and grants and fellowships cancelled.

Perseverance has its limits. The erosion of these institutions’ integrity—and the growing realization that it is impossible to fulfill their missions in good faith—has made the cost of continuing untenable. This is why I must step away from my work with two federal institutions I care deeply about.

Freedom of expression is not merely an abstract principle, or even a constitutional right, but a practical necessity for meaningful advisory work. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published as short stories in the late 1940s and as a novel in 1953, warned not only of the destruction of books, but of a society in which people had lost the desire to read them (emphasis added). The parallel today is not only the administration’s effort to destroy and suppress knowledge, but also the institution’s willingness to accept the cultivated irrelevance of it — a challenge that undermines any serious effort to conduct research, inform policy, or guide public institutions.

Europe To Lure Science Projects

In an email to CleanTechnica today, Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Dryad Networks, a leader in AI-powered wildfire prevention, decried the politicization of the NSF and emphasized the importance of scientific funding for business growth. “The planned cuts in funding of science will affect business in a profound way, slowing down economic progress not just in the US, but worldwide. There’s no surprise that the EU is now positioning itself as a science superpower. This may be a historic opportunity to bring back and accelerate long-term, science-driven economic growth to the EU by attracting US talent to Europe and building deep tech businesses on the results.”

Writing in Science earlier this month, Barbara Casassus said that Europe is getting serious about its attempts to lure US researchers who have lost their jobs or want to leave the country because of the assault on research by the current administration. At a conference at the Sorbonne in Paris earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched a new campaign called Choose Europe for Science, and said the European Union would budget €500 million in new money in the years 2025–27 “to make Europe a magnet for researchers.”

“Unfortunately … the role of science in today’s world is questioned. The investment in fundamental. What a gigantic miscalculation,” she said, without referring specifically to the US. Europe is “choosing to place research and innovation, science and technology at the heart of our economy.”

Von der Leyen also said she wanted to create a new, 7 year “supergrant” from the European Research Council (ERC) that would go to “the very best” researchers, enabling them to take a long term perspective. The ERC will double the value of grants that cover the cost of relocating to Europe and setting up a new laboratory from €1 million to €2 million. Von der Leyen said the EU would “enshrine scientific freedom” in a new EU law. “Because as threats rise across the world, Europe will not compromise on its principles. Europe must remain the home of academic and scientific freedom.”

How odd that the US once brought German scientists to its shores to do critical research but now the flow of talent is going the other way. Unless Congress shakes off its torpor and finds some actual courage, the current so-called president will turn the US into the very kind of “shithole country” he rails against with such venom.

At the conference in Paris, David Paltiel, a public health and management researcher at Yale University, said he hoped Europe’s defense of science would nudge timid US university presidents to speak out against the Trump administration, instead of engaging in what he called “the silent acquiescence that teaches the autocrats what they can get away with.”

In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated roughly 1,040 grants that would have awarded $739 million to researchers and their institutions. The agency’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, a Trump appointee, resigned last month.

Cuts to NSF spending this year could be a prelude to a dramatically reduced budget next year. Science previously reported that the administration will request a $4 billion budget for the agency in fiscal year 2026, a 55 percent reduction from what Congress appropriated for 2025. Similarly, the proposed 2026 budget for the National Institutes of Health calls for a 44% cut to the agency’s $47 billion budget in 2025, according to documents leaked to the media. During the alleged president’s first term, Republicans in Congress rejected many of his proposed cuts to science funding. Whether they will do so again is an open question.

In the long term, severe reductions to science funding could damage the economy, according to a report by economists at American University. They estimate a 50 percent reduction in federal science funding would reduce the US gross domestic product by approximately 7.6 percent. “This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point,” one NSF staffer says.

Winning elections is easy; governing is hard. Much of the actions taken by the team of bozos assembled by the tyrant in chief are products of a broke mind virus rather than actual intelligence. America deserves so much more than these warped ideologues. The country shot itself in the foot in many ways as it alienated its allies and cozied up to demagogues. It will take decades to repair the damage done since Inauguration Day, all of which has been self inflicted. “Everything Trump touches dies,” is an expression often heard. America may yet be the proof of that aphorism.