That is the case with so much of what is happening now. If these things are possible, the system was already broken.
The three branches of government are supposed to be checks and balances against each other. But turns out two of the three don't have any actual power to enforce their mandates. This has worked as long as the three branches grudgingly respected each others role. But now that the executive branch simply decided to ignore the other two whenever convenient, turns out there is no recourse.
The problem is that a big percentage of the population is ok with this, and in that case it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal or not. There is a reason why, even if allowed, governments didn’t do these kind of things: population didn’t want it.
https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs#european-funding-initiati...
You can't really enroll graduate students for a 5 year PHD project if their funding can be pulled at a moment's notice like this.
- science funding is controlled by the state (and thus politics) in many leading countries, especially China. Doesn't seem to hold them back
- the US pays people vastly more than other countries, and will continue to have the ability to fund expensive research more than others. Maybe it will regain the political will to do so in coming years
You're right that uncertainty is deadly to investment, and signing up for 5 years of a PhD is certainly an investment. But it's hard to see this turn into an actual brain drain, if only for lack of a better place to go.
Probably not. Grants were always under political control, right? This is just shifting political control from one part of a government agency to another part of the government agency.
> The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they're considered to "no longer advance agency priorities."
The best and brightest simply aren't going to want to come to the U.S. for an uncertain future where they'll be harassed at the airport every trip and then defunded or deported at any time for "political" reasons (a.k.a. racism, bigotry, religion, ignorance and anti-intellectualism).
Amazingly, we're only 200 days into this administration.
We have 3 years, 5 months and 12 days left, assuming we still have free and fair elections in 2028.
For the next several years, the administration is going to continue to dismantle our country's foundations brick by brick, enabled by Congress and SCOTUS. The attack on immigrants is in full swing, but the total takeover of science, public education, universities and mass media is actually just beginning.
Hopefully people remember this for next time.
Nah, there was nothing "poor communication" about it. It was very well done bad faith communication from bad actors. It was intentional lies. This was not a fault of communication of these institutions. They can not match the lies machine from well founded and motivated political groups. And that is about it.
My understanding is the grants you're talking about are generally for small student salaries as they work on a given project simultaneously with their continued education. Is there not another way to fund these projects? Is there not a better way to engage students into these projects? I don't recall most students having a wide array of choices when it comes to taking on these opportunities.
Is this not a chance to improve a rather ancient and clumsy system?
I seriously doubt that there is any will to improve the system.
> My understanding is the grants you're talking about are generally for small student salaries as they work on a given project simultaneously with their continued education.
Grants cover a much larger part of the work at labs. Basically, a grant could be paying anything except tenured salaries and administrative costs.
In addition many scientists involved (like Oppenheimer) later faced political persecution during the McCarthy era.
American atomic research succeeded despite, or perhaps because of, intense state control and funding
Consider that at the same time the Third Reich also had a nuclear weapons research program, and it went nowhere.
I don't particularly think that the secrecy or control of a single group really reflects on the overall culture however. We wouldn't call phreakers authoritarian just because they weren't publishing their exploits in the newspaper or letting any new person fully into their circle.
Also the prosecution and harassment of communists/leftists and minorities in the US during that era is why I stipulated less oppressive rather than unoppressive.
The Manhattan project succeeded because it was consuming a significant portion of the US GDP at the time, the scientists were forced to live on site with their families and every word they said was monitored.
Military projects, especially making the most powerful weapon in history for use in the largest war up to that point, are always done with as much secrecy as is feasible. Living on-site was also practical: the reason the site was as isolated as it was was in part because of secrecy, the families being there was both to improve security and for convenience. Finally, yes, every word they said was monitored. But they were scientists and their families working on top secret machinery of war, which ended up changing the course of history in a significant way, they quite literally ushered in a new age. They knew they were monitored and that this was one part of the price to pay for working on that project.
In contrast with that age: now all our words are monitored, even inane ones that are exchanged between people who would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
Adding to @eastbound's comment the Soviets were also responsible for the first remote operated "robot" on the moon.
When applied to medicine that same attitude becomes parasitic: you may be able to make much more money by restricting the distribution of the knowledge that could save people or prevent their suffering. This is where Martin Shkreli and other such characters come in to play.
That is quite the claim !
An Australian nuclear scientist working for the UK Rutherford (New Zealander) labs | Tube Alloys | MAUD program told them how to.
It took a while to convince the US scientists who were mainly interested in making big hot piles for power.
The actual building of atomic weapons (Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy) took place under a fully authoritarian ultra secret State directed militarily controlled program that cost a significant chunk of national GDP.
The example you chose appears to be both incorrect and the very opposite of whatever point you wanted to make.
Anyways, we have the Internet, I'm not sure it matters _where_ innovations are created anymore. It certainly does not seem to be stopping China on any level.
America is going to have to give up the "World Police" (a.k.a. The Military Industrial Complex) badge and move into it's relative political middle age with a little more care and aplomb than the last 6 decades have allowed for. The haze of WW2 is far behind us now.
My crude take on the underlying root cause is resentment, discontent, and similar feelings. Happiness is reality minus expectations, and a whole lot of folks are unhappy life did not turn out how they thought it would.
https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/researchers_point_t...
Nothing in physics requires us to buy into the political documents; if the average person isn't owed anything under the rules, no one is.
Either we're science driven where only politics makes someone special and we should then moderate that because in reality, they are not special, just a button pusher, just a signature. Or we're a bunch of idiots living in a trailer park.
Seems you subscribe to the whole "everything is a mystery to politics" when it's just biology self-selecting and we should fucking moderate that. With violence if necessary. Because fuck them. They aren't owed anything either, they're just manipulating politics.
It probably is both ways. Research has also been used by the opposite party in harmful ways, and this is the story of life.
I doesn’t help that chapters of Mein Kampf were successfully approved as research papers after replacing “jews” by “white men”, and that none of the other scientific fields called out social sciences for it.
The History could have gone the other way:
- “Social sciences being called out by physics, chemistry, IT, economics researchers as social engineering”
or:
- Social sciences being defended by other science bodies, reaching the apogee of credibility of science, resulting in Trump removing funding.
The parties involved had plenty of time to position themselves.
"Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds"
Wtf US
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jd-vance-ohi...
"The Trump administration has suspended the funding of Terence Tao and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA."
But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of those “enlightened centrists.”
The opponents of "the side you totally are not supporting no" wont get any benefits of doubt, will have words super scrutinized and instead sanewashed will be exaggerated.
They didn’t get to where they are without playing a conformance game. That limits the degree to which they can object to anything.
If they’re vulnerable, it’s the psychological need to keep adding to their pile of money that does it.
Keep in mind that “money” is not some sort of concrete thing like a pile of gold - it’s dependent on factors like the value of companies. The wealthier someone in the US is, the more their wealth depends on their ultimate cooperation with the prevailing powers.
And the only reason their money depends on factors like the value of companies is because they want to add to the pile. It could literally be a pile of gold if they wanted it to be, that's just not the best way to make it grow. More realistically, it could be invested in index funds or something similar that the administration can't selectively destroy.
Worst case the government finds a way to confiscate everything, or imprison/kill them, in which case they're exactly as vulnerable as a normal person.
UCLA has $8 billion in endowments and the state universities in total have $30 billion in endowment funds. How many years could they fund Tao and his institute if they really wanted to?
This last election was the end of American democracy.
Until we have actual penalties for the people in charge, it doesn’t even matter whether the courts uphold this stuff or not.
yes, actually, it is bad if a bunch of racist lunatics are personally in charge of things, and increase their personal power to make arbitrary decisions based on their stupid hobby horses or deeply dumb opinions.
yes, actually, this is different to when Biden or Obama or Bush presided over a functioning government, that had people you may or may not disagree with having some influence on things, this Trump Reign system is personalised autocracy.
yes, actually, it is bad if the government's sole agenda is "implement dumb ideas from dumb people" and "fuck the left/non-whites/immigrants/scientists".
it's especially dumb to be so unaware of why the world is so good now. it's not luck, it's centuries of hard work by our ancestors. why don't 50% of children simply die? because of medical research, healthcare, food subsidies, etc etc etc. why does the internet exist? because the US government funded a dumb thing for a while then a lot of other people and countries spent a lot of money and effort to make it this.
Trump has been learning from Winnie the Pooh. How very Communist of him.
We also have a strategic interest in draining intelligent individuals from other countries and nationalizing them in ours, which science funding plays a major part in doing.
One of the reasons why its complicated, however, is that the University environment has changed significantly in the US. What used to be academically-motivated institutions dedicated to the pursuit of education are now, essentially, just boring businesses, with more middle managers than educators. As one example, UCLA has a $9.8B endowment. Their athletics programs brought in $120M last year (though, they spent more, and the university itself had to provide gap funding of $30M. yup.) IPAM was receiving $5M/year in NSF funding (DMS-1925919). One obviously extreme way of looking at this: UCLA could have funded Terrance Tao's mathematics research group for six years with the money they used to save a hundred million dollar athletics program that's somehow still losing money.
This is a priorities issue for universities, through and through. But, Universities have slowly evolved their priorities to bloat their managerial class, which has forced them into impossible financial situations where the only way out is to bias investment into revenue generating verticals like maximizing the size of the student body at any cost on the backs of no-default student loans, international students, and athletics programs. Research takes a back seat.
I am all for public funding of science, but even many university researchers would argue, as a part of the system, that its broken (for reasons which extend even beyond those I've brought up). That's why I struggle to take a solid side on this issue; I want science, but what I want more is a University system that actually takes education and research seriously.
With most actions, there's nothing being remedied, just an assertion of control. The action isn't tied to an improvement goal or a remedy with rationale.
As Tao noted, in cases where a remedy for a wrong is mentioned, the remedies being proposed by the administration do far more harm to any ostensible victims than the original asserted wrongs.
Nothing about their actions is in good faith in terms of improving academics in the US, nor do they even try in most cases to pretend to be trying to improve academics at all.
Two reasons.
First, private philanthropy is neither sustainable nor sufficient in scope.
Second, because government funded science is free from having to produce immediate results in order to satisfy the whims of a specific patron such that funding is continued.
> It seems like an obvious channel for corruption of science.
Yes, relying on private entities to fund scientific research does seem like an obvious channel for corruption.
I agree with you but there's irony (and a possible lesson about motives) in the current situation.
The problem and paradox is that it's hundreds of elected representatives and a handful of judges entirely abdicating their responsibility to make it just one guy.
The market can't provide public goods like basic research since it's non-excludable. This is a market failure, causing inefficient allocation of resources.
Therefore, the government has to provide it. This can improve efficiency of resource distribution, if done well.
Whether it's done well is not a foregone conclusion. That's why we need effective and technocratic state capacity, free from corruption and independent of political influence.
> I don’t really understand why so much of science is funded by the government instead of by private philanthropy.
Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
For instance, the Chan Zuckerberg Institute before Zuck decided he had to appear to hate science in order to curry favor with the current regime.
"This work was funded in part by NSF Award CNS-2054869 and gifts from Apple, Capital One, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla."
That said, private grant funding is just of a completely different scale than government grant funding. For example, NIH's annual budget is 48 billion and most of that goes to research (https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget).
If you want them to do a specific experiment you’ll likely first need to convince them that it’s a good use of their time.
Harvard itself plays approximately zero role in the decision to do a study or not. (There are ethical oversight committees, etc.)
$1M total cost ($600-800k direct cost depending on terms) will buy you a postdoc’s time and effort for 5 years. Unfortunately most labs aren’t set up for a time/money tradeoff, so 5 postdocs for 1 year would be unlikely absent a really exciting project.
It definitely happens quite a bit!
Office for Sponsored Programs
1033 Massachusetts Avenue
5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
617-495-5501
osp@harvard.eduAnd those tend to be: things that are perceived by the donor as having high immediate returns, things that are perceived by the public as having high immediate returns and thus are good for buying status, and things that provide a convenient channel for the donor to exercise power via the donation, making it away to enjoy wealth while also getting a tax break for it.
Basic science doesn't tend to fit any of those, which is why science funded by private philanthropy is small compared either to government funding of basic science or total private philanthropy.
Companies and their shareholders only do things that are profitable.
Would would ANY private enterprise (i.e. pharmaceutical company) want to fund research that would enable that?
The immense money (the US spends over $200B a year in cancer 'treatments') that these companies would not be making anymore would deter any such research.
Same goes for many other scientific discoveries. Some are for the greater humanitarian good, not for private enterprise profit maximisation.
Of course any company would take this deal and make a boatload of money (though less than the $200B / year).
Undercutting all its competitors would be a bonus, not a deterrent.
This has happened so many times throughout history. New tech comes in, does the same thing cheaper and better, old companies die out kicking and screaming.