By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
We live in a brain-based economy where innovation and newly invented products are the center of economic strength. From Artificial Intelligence to battery storage, new inventions continue to transform the way we live and our standard of living. Sadly, the scientific illiterates in the Executive Branch of the American government continue to dismantle our scientific enterprise. They have orchestrated a series of attacks on scientists and their laboratories, implemented through funding cuts, grant interruptions, and immigration restrictions. Scientists are gravitating to Canada, Europe, and China, and we are rapidly losing the depth of our innovative and essential scientific community.
The cuts began with a reduction in overhead or indirect costs to federal grantees. Before the 2nd Trump Administration, there were extensive accounting rules detailing allowable indirect costs, which averaged about 28% nationally and, in some high-cost areas like New York City, Los Angeles, Princeton, and Cambridge, could exceed 50%. These funds covered laboratory equipment, routine management, and the costs of meeting the federal government’s extensive regulations and reporting requirements governing the use of federal research funds. The federal government argued that cuts were justified since foundations rarely allowed overhead costs to exceed 15%, but neglected to mention that foundation rules and reporting requirements are far less cumbersome than those imposed by the federal government.
The war on science continued with attempts to cut the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research budget by 40%, a cut that was rejected by the Senate. But then Trump’s NIH started to delay the grant-making process and started to focus research on the “make America healthy” agenda of the conspiracy-minded Secretary of Health and Human Services. These delays have had devastating impacts on lab functioning, particularly at universities. We have seen medical research interrupted in the middle of controlled experiments. Longitudinal field research requiring periodic field samples stopped, and was therefore destroyed. Additionally, researchers who are not yet American citizens have been made to feel unwelcome and unsafe, leading to a devastating impact on morale and lab operations.
On the computing side, the issue is that the research agenda is now being set by politicians rather than scientists. Peer-reviewed science funding has been reduced to increase funding for Artificial Intelligence. In general, these politicos do not want scientific experts pursuing research for the sake of scientific discovery. Due to the over-reach of experts during the Covid crisis, when scientific uncertainty was poorly communicated, scientific expertise has been discredited by politically potent attacks from politicians more interested in power than knowledge. The result has been that research once based on scientific priorities has been displaced by research set by political priorities. Instead of learning from the scientific mistakes of COVID, those lessons are obscured by the fog of political ideology.
The worst set of cuts is in the field I consider central to my own work, earth systems science. The attack on environmental and climate science has been as extensive as it has been mindless. The most recent attack took place last week as the National Science Foundation announced plans to dismantle its extensive system of ocean monitors. According to Annika Hammerschlag of the Associated Press:
“A portion of one of the most ambitious ocean monitoring networks ever built will go dark this month when scientists board a research vessel and motor off the Oregon coast to pull a research buoy from deep out of the Pacific. The buoy 80 meters (260 feet) below the water’s surface will be removed June 16 from the Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386 million that has continuously collected real-time data for more than a decade. But last month, the National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027. Funded by the foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather. Its data has been freely available and has informed more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run for another 15 to 20 years.”
While the United States cuts back its commitment to earth science, Europe is moving in the opposite direction by increasing its investment in ocean observation. Surrendering world leadership in ocean science is shameful and self-destructive. Europe and the United States share the same ocean, and while our degree of ignorance of basic earth systems conditions should alarm us, our national government couldn’t care less. At least the Europeans understand the importance of ocean health. According to Chico Harlan of the New York Times:
“Days after the Trump administration vowed to dismantle a deep-ocean observation system, the European Union said it would bolster its own monitoring of the world’s oceans to improve climate forecasting and better anticipate changes to marine ecosystems. The European Union announcement was long in the works, and not a response to the U.S. pullback. Still, officials in Brussels highlighted the contrast. “To position the E.U. at the forefront of ocean observation is not a goal per se, it is a necessity, especially now that extremely worrying signals are coming from the other side of the Atlantic,” said Costas Kadis, the European Union’s commissioner for fisheries and oceans…The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said it would invest $107 million, or 92 million euros, in ocean observation. More than half of the funding would be directed to an existing international ocean observation program sponsored by UNESCO, the World Meteorological Organization and other groups.”
Ocean observation cuts are literally the tip of the iceberg. Proposed environmental research cuts in NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency), and the Department of Energy were dramatic and draconian. The cuts in NASA were labeled an “extinction event” by Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society. According to Dreier:
“An extinction-level event can be thought of as a sudden, external calamity wiping out a given species. For the dinosaurs, it was the Chicxulub impactor. For NASA’s science program, it very well may be the FY 2027 Presidential Budget Request. The President’s Budget Request for NASA in fiscal year 2027 was released on April 3. It proposed a $5.6 billion cut (23%) to the space agency, of which a disproportionate $3.4 billion would be taken from science activities, a decrease of 46% from the prior year. NASA’s proposed top-line amount, when adjusted for inflation, would be its lowest in 66 years. And the agency’s workforce, having already lost a fifth of its staffing last year, stands to lose thousands more.”
While the President’s proposed budget is rarely the last word, federal research budgets are being significantly reduced, and more importantly, we now have an administration that does not consider the budget approved by Congress and signed by the President to be binding. They have utilized scores of budget implementation tricks to slow down the grant process and even slow down the process of disbursing funds they have already approved. Unless the laboratories or their parent organizations have significant cash reserves, interrupted cash flow can result in layoffs, interrupted experiments and data collection, and can significantly damage the research enterprise.
The attack on science is multifaceted and a result of a bias against expertise and a profound misunderstanding about the foundations of economic wealth in the modern global economy. President Trump, with a mindset locked into the 1980s, believes that manufacturing, particularly heavy manufacturing like steel, is the heart of our economy. Belching smokestacks are a sign of economic might. That is why he thinks we are being taken advantage of by China and the rest of the world. It is his rationale for a constant barrage of destructive tariffs. Wealth in this part of the 21st century comes from innovation, technological breakthroughs, and creativity. Manufacturing is an ever-decreasing part of the economy. In the United States, 80% of our Gross Domestic Product is in the service sector. Wealth is in the software, not the hardware. Apple builds hardware, which makes small profits to addict customers to software, where the profits are massive. If America is being taken advantage of by so many other nations, why do we remain the richest nation in the world?
Our creativity and innovation are built on science and the freedom to create felt by our entrepreneurs, designers, scholars, and artists. This administration has attacked freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry with its ideologically based attacks. Those attacks are deep threats to our economy and standard of living. The loss of earth observation, medical research, immigration, and the demise of the 60 Minutes news magazine, along with Stephen Colbert’s Tonight Show, are interrelated. They are mindless and destructive threats to what actually makes America a great nation. We are fortunate that we are in a federal system and one with multiple centers of political and economic power. States, cities, communities, and corporations can operate intelligently and strategically in the face of federal idiocy and destruction. But we would all be far better off with a strategic, competent, and functioning national government.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
