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A quick report from the world of science and academia.
Strange times indeed. Grant proposals my lab has been working on for months have disappeared. I’m seeing and hearing of several nodes in my network which are in federal positions just disappearing.
I also advise students who are building software products for clients, and of both clients that are government agencies, NASA and US Forest Service, today I have learned that one has essentially cancelled the project at its end stages and the other has been MIA for weeks (Ironically, the cancelled product was a system that would significantly improve the efficiency of a key NASA analysis workflow).
Today I see news that the NSF research experiences for undergraduates, which trains undergraduates to conduct real research and which I personally credit with making me into a scientist, is being shuttered across much of the country.
The grant I’m relying on to complete my PhD is on shaky ground according to people close to the problem, and I fear that funding cuts could affect the only backup plan I have, which is continuing working as a teaching assistant. (A luxurious $15k per year + tuition remission). The key expert on my committee in the tech I’m using is at NASA and I fear for the longevity of his position.
Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.
I’m in a hard science field with direct applications to societal benefits. I believe that what I’m working on is something many would recognize as important. And I also think there’s a pretty clear link between training people who do this sort of thing (STEM generally) and national wellbeing and competitiveness.
I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.
When DOGE was first announced I thought, great! I deeply dislike Trump but maybe this will make it actually be quite worth it in the end if we can fix the behemoth of government and make it more efficient. Maybe the country will be able to start to build things again, like the tech guys say, it’s time to build! But what we got was quite different from that hopeful version of me had in mind. SV types spearheading the dismantling of the US institution of science. That was not on my bingo card! Why was this the first move of DOGE? Noah Smith argues that it’s an ideological purge rather than an attempt at efficiency, and I guess that makes sense. Ultimately science funding is quite small potatoes in the federal budget. So why is it among the first major target of the administration and DOGE?
I don’t want to catastrophize here. Science in the US is being weakened and downsized, and somewhat purged for touchy topics, but it’s not being destroyed. I’ll probably be able to pull through and finish my program, at least that’s my current hope.
Yet it seems quite obvious to me that these moves are going to significantly weaken the US against competitors such as China. Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine. I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as a big picture, long term thinker who understands the role of science and technology in human advancement. So I’m at a loss for why he would direct focus onto weakening science in the US as among his first moves if his interest really is with the medium to long term success of the US.
Your entire post hinges on your audience trusting this to be true. I have no reason to believe any bureaucrat in the proximity of the chopping block has any better reason to decry DOGE's mission than "saving my own skin".
I’ve semi doxxed myself on this platform by saying what I work on before, so I don’t really mind doing it again.
I work on developing models that estimate the water content of vegetation from satellite imagery. This has direct relevance for fire risk forecasting, and I use it to study where droughts affect forests most.
You can judge for yourself the usefulness of this, but also, I think the thinking generally reflects a wrong perspective about where benefit in science comes from.
Some systems are weak link chains, and others are strong link chains. The quality of a weak link system depends on the strength of the weakest link, and the strongest is somewhat irrelevant. An example of this is food safety inspection. One key mistake and the mission is a failure.
However, science is more of a strong link system. There can be a lot of low quality papers, sure. But really the benefit we gain from science arises from top quality research that gets done. You can have 100 people doing low impact research, but if you get out of that investment even one big breakthrough, it can be very worth it.
The problem here is that science is sort of a blind search as well, we don’t know where big breakthroughs might exist. Who would have been crazy enough to say that studying Gila monster venom would lead to one of the most important drug class discoveries in the 21st century. You might say, ah ozempic type drugs, who cares, I’m not fat. But maybe the next unexpected discovery reverses Alzheimer’s, who knows. Maybe you are destined to get Alzheimer’s, at that point, would have been nice to have some strange new drug class that combats it.
Saying, “hey, random PhD student, I don’t think your work is that important in the end and thus I’m fine with weakening science in the United States across the board”.. it’s certainly a position one may take, but I’d say it is not at all a smart one regarding human or national advancement.
I think that work sounds really cool. I hope a private company wants to continue it and you get hired.
But I mean come on "you have to give me and my friends money or your country will fail" is obviously not a compelling argument. If it don't make dollars it don't make sense.
There are totally things which don’t make dollars but make sense. Nobody benefits personally from running fair courts, or from building roads.
Do you mean that people do benefit personally from having fair courts and roads? The key question to if something should be state funded is not "is it beneficial," to be funded by tax dollars something should be a public good, as in non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Generaly the courts are supposed to be designed this way. Roads on the other-had depend on the type of road. Roads can be excludable, see toll roads. Probably most interstate and express roads should be paid by user fees that full capture the externalities of those roads. So some set of roads are both beneficial and monetizable. They can "make doallars."
Knowledge as derived from fundamental research can be non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but some not-insubstantial fraction of useful knowledge is excludable.
This can be done in two ways. First, you can patent some knowledge. Much of the development of GLP-1 agonists from Gila monster venom was funded by Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, etc. If the drug companies are going to be granted a monopoly on the beneficial results of this type of research they ought to pay for all of this class of research. It makes no sense for the tax payer to pay for the research and then grant a pharmaceutical company the exclusive rights to capture all the benefits of the research.
Second, you can keep knowledge as a trade secret. If @Jesweez research actually has "...direct relevance for fire risk forecasting..." then the actuarial teams at the insurance companies should be willing to pay him for it. If it's not something that can actually be incorporated into a risk model then it does not actually have "direct relevance," it has some sort of hypothetical indirect potential relevance. Alternatively, if it can actually give you an edge understanding where drought is affecting most, you should be able to sell it to a hedge fund trading agricultural futures. Or an industry consortium or publication in the vein of the some sort of new Old Farmer's Almanac.
There is probably some small set of research that is useful, novel, can't be patented, and can't be sold as a proprietary model. It is a vanishingly small fraction of total federal research funding though.
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