Trump science-funding proposals incite media uproar
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8211
President Trump signed the NASA Authorization Act on 21 March. His budget proposal calls for support of human spaceflight over Earth-monitoring research.
White House
The Trump administration’s proposals to slash federal science funding have inspired in the media not just passion but figurative war talk. The figurative casus belli is plenty clear. What’s not clear is whether science’s defenders will place faith in plain, ordinary engagement to exploit public strategy statements from their adversary’s bugler, the Heritage Foundation .
“The war on science and the environment is underway,” announced Steven Cohen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute to open a Huffington Post op-ed . The Union of Concerned Scientists demands that Congress “reject the attacks on science .” Above an op-ed by Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, the New York Times published the headline “An assault on health and science.”
Especially for a physics-focused audience, David Kramer’s Physics Today piece offers a brief, informative picture of the cuts in Trump’s budget proposal. It begins:
President Trump’s budget proposal for the year beginning 1 October would slash funding for the Department of Energy’s basic research programs while adding 11% to the agency’s nuclear weapons activities. It would cut the Environmental Protection Agency by nearly one-third from its current-year level, including a 48% reduction to the agency’s R&D program.
Kramer notes a proposal that’s drawing particular attention in the media: a cut of 8%, or $5.8 billion, to the National Institutes of Health. He reports that about $2 billion would be cut from Energy Department applied research, that the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy would be terminated, and that certain NASA Earth science efforts would be cut.
And then there’s climate science. Kramer joins others in quoting White House budget director Mick Mulvaney: “We’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money.”
Judging by reactions reported in the press, physicist Rush Holt speaks for many other science leaders. Holt serves as CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Concerning the administration’s science-budget planners, he asked in the New York Times, “Do they not think that there are advances to be made, improvements to be made, in the human condition?”
Nature‘s editors were harsher. In an editorial , they indicted “a fire sale of the US government’s knowledge base.” They elaborated with mockery, mimicking fire-sale advertising: “31% off the Environmental Protection Agency! 20% off the Department of Energy’s Office of Science! More big savings to come!” Scientists are both furious and anxious, they reported.
Holt asked another question about the Trump science-budget architects: “What are they thinking?”
Great question. Columbia’s Cohen sees in them “a world view . . . seriously out of step with reality.” Varmus declared that “this is not about Republicans versus Democrats.” Instead, it’s “about a more fundamental divide, between those who believe in evidence as a basis for life-altering and nation-defining decisions and those who adhere unflinchingly to dogma.” In a commentary at Science, Jeffrey Mervis writes that the Trump budget planners actually have “no overarching strategy.”
But they actually do set forth a strategy, a rationale, and principles. And as has been pointed out here and there in the media, the budget planners got their thinking, such as it is, from a conservative think tank: the Heritage Foundation, which has been publishing on the subject for years. A week before the budget announcement, E&E News described Heritage as “poised to have a major role in President Trump’s federal budget” and reported that several Heritage people had joined the administration.
Unmistakable influence
The Heritage document for science’s defenders to focus on appeared last June, titled “Science Policy: Priorities and Reforms for the 45th President.” It explicitly invokes as its starting point a 1945 report , “Science, the endless frontier: A report to the president,” by Vannevar Bush, director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. Heritage says that report “declared science a legitimate concern of the government, popularly marking the beginning of modern science policy.”
The Heritage document’s opening recalls that “federal participation in science and technology has aided the nation in meeting national security needs and exploring the frontiers of human knowledge.” So far, so good; it sounds just like Bush. Immediately, though, the Heritage document summarizes much of what Heritage makes available for science’s defenders to rebut. Concerning that federal science participation, the document says:
However, it has become ill-fitting and poorly rationalized for today’s needs. There is little guiding rationale for the appropriate role of government in research and development, which too often interferes in the free market and now spans everything from basic research to commercialization of politically preferred technologies. Executive agencies and bureaucrats have exploited science to evade accountability for policy judgments.
When Heritage gets more specific, it provides specific grounds on which the administration, or at least its proposals, can be debated. The Heritage authors reintroduce assertions that have been debated piecemeal over recent years but which the administration is now—in effect, thanks to Heritage—adducing in support of its science-budget proposals:
Federal R&D spending quickly becomes wasteful once it expands beyond the scope of basic science. Basic science is research that has no determined application other than the simple advancement of human knowledge. While basic R&D is not in and of itself a necessary role of the federal government, Americans could decide through the political process to pursue basic science through federal funding where the private sector is not already working. The federal government’s role in this scientific research and development should be minimal, fiscally responsible, and apolitical. However, this line has been blurred to the point of no distinction.
Heritage singles out DOE and its Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA–E) program. Although the program aims to fund high-risk, high-reward energy projects, the Heritage authors accuse ARPA–E of “merely subsidizing projects that already had investment from the private sector.”
Inevitably some will argue that there’s no point in debating the administration’s Heritage-enunciated science-budget-slashing principles. They’ll refuse, disdaining it all as hopeless antiscience that’s not to be lent dignity. Nonetheless, some science defenders have already begun responding, taking the debate opportunities seriously.
Fighting back in the press
The E&E News article “Should DOE get out of the research business?” engages the Heritage proposition that federal involvement is misapplied in US technological advance. It quotes a prediction from Saul Griffith, founder of Otherlab, a private California research facility that gets half of its funding from DOE: “This is the worst time in history to do this, and it will lead to America losing in the next 10 years.”
The counterattack on ARPA–E in the media has also begun. James J. Greenberger, the executive director of a trade group for the advanced battery industry, announced the ARPA–E elimination threat to industry colleagues at a conference. He told the New York Times, “We’re absolutely stunned . … I don’t know what’s going through the administration’s head. It’s almost surreal.” At the Washington Post, Joel Achenbach consulted Ellen Williams, who served as director of ARPA–E for the last two years of the Obama administration. She “noted that the Trump budget is modeled on a blueprint put out a year ago by the conservative Heritage Foundation.” Later in the article , she adds, “For an administration that says it wants economic growth, prosperity, new jobs, killing ARPA–E is absolutely the wrong thing to do.”
Achenbach also reported an objection to saving comparatively tiny amounts by sacrificing large investments already made, as with the proposal to kill four NASA Earth science missions. He quotes Phil Larson, a former Obama White House staffer who worked on space policy: “Cutting budget for science missions that are already in space and just beginning their work is quite baffling. The hard and costly part was getting them up there. Why turn them off early?”
The Trump strategy also gets criticized for failings even on its own terms. A news report at Nature quotes an expert’s belief that drastically reducing the EPA’s budget would actually undercut, not further, the administration’s attempts to reform environmental policy. “If you cut an agency too much, all you’ve really done is hand the agency’s priorities over to the courts and litigants,” says Jonathan Adler, who heads the Center for Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University.
So will the Trump administration find itself engaged in, or at least challenged by, serious debate concerning federal science funding? Will Heritage be held to account intellectually and politically?
Especially when it comes to climate science, accumulated years of bitter standoff make that seem doubtful. Where can you even start when confronted with a government official who flatly denies that human activities alter climate?
Accordingly, organizers of the April 22 March for Science in Washington charge that the “mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue . . . has given policymakers permission to reject overwhelming evidence.” It’s time, the organizers declare, “for people who support scientific research and evidence-based policies to take a public stand and be counted.”
Is it also time to at least try for serious, substantive debate?
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.