Is the Golden Age of American Science Ending?

Vannevar Bush - American scientist, inventor, and administrator

“…basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress.” – Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier

On November 17, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, recognizing the importance of scientific research in the American war effort, wrote to Vannevar Bush, Director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), requesting that he develop a post-war national science policy. Roosevelt sought recommendations on how America’s success in applying scientific knowledge to wartime problems could be carried over into peacetime. Bush was the right person to ask.

As director of OSRD, Bush oversaw the U.S. military’s research and development efforts during the war, which included important developments in radar technology, the mass production of penicillin, and the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt and Bush understood that the wartime partnership between science and government was crucial to winning the war. They also understood that scientific progress was essential to the future health, security, and prosperity of the United States.

On July 5, 1945, Bush presented his report, "Science: The Endless Frontier," to President Harry S. Truman. Bush contended that “[t]he most important ways in which the Government can promote industrial research are to increase the flow of new scientific knowledge through support of basic research and to aid in the development of scientific talent.” Moreover, the report noted, America’s research talent existed in its universities. Five years later, President Truman signed legislation that implemented Bush’s vision and created the National Science Foundation (NSF), thus laying the foundation for the present-day partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities.

Under this compact, the federal government funds basic scientific research at the nation’s colleges and universities—research driven not by profit motive or private corporate interests, but by curiosity and discovery. For the past 75 years, this system has worked immensely well for the United States. It has been the Golden Age of American Science.

Government-supported university research has been an integral part of U.S. science policy since the end of World War II. It has contributed to post-war economic growth and greatly enhanced modern American life, leading to biomedical and technological breakthroughs, including, among other things, the development of lifesaving medicines and surgical procedures, advances in commercial agriculture, the blossoming of GPS technology, and the evolution of smartphones. A recent report of the Federal Reserve of Dallas confirmed that nearly a quarter of American productivity growth over the past eight decades is attributable to non-defense government-funded research. Investing in science and innovation has improved the health and quality of life for all Americans. As noted by Karin Fischer in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The internet started as a defense-funded college network of computers. Google, a company now worth $2 trillion, spun out of a $4-million grant to Standford to build digital libraries. Of the 356 new drugs approved over the past decade, 354 received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research.

Even an area of science as seemingly blue-sky as quantum mechanics is the basis for the development of lasers, grocery-store checkout scanners, and the tiny semiconductor crystals that light television screens and computer monitors.

The partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities has allowed the United States to build the world’s most productive scientific enterprise and helped American higher education become the world’s leader in science, engineering, and medicine. American universities dominate global university rankings, produce the most Nobel laureates, and graduate more PhD’s in science and engineering than any other country. It is why American universities attract so many international students, many of whom choose to stay in the United States and become doctors, college professors, research scientists, and high-tech entrepreneurs. Four in ten doctoral students in the sciences are from overseas. Indeed, attracting talented international students is partly what makes American research the envy of the world. And it is why many countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East have sought to emulate the U.S. model and compete directly with the United States for those foreign scholars.

Unfortunately, the past eight decades of U.S. scientific and research dominance will soon come to an end if the Trump administration has its way. By waging a war on higher education to score ignoble political points against transgender athletes, DEI programs, and a woefully misguided effort to combat alleged antisemitism on college campuses, Trump has wiped out billions of dollars in previously approved federal grants and awards to America’s top research universities. Although much of this unitary executive action is being litigated in federal court, the Trump administration has successfully eliminated or frozen funding for thousands of research projects. Trump has also ordered restrictions on awards from the NSF and NIH, cut funding on any projects he does not like, and clawed back research grants based simply on institutional affiliation, affecting thousands of grants to Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and other universities Trump believes are too “woke” and elitist for his tastes.

These funding cuts (made even worse by the arbitrary budget slashing of DOGE) are not only absurd and misguided, but they are moving with a swiftness and scale that will destroy and reverse America’s historically dominant role in science and education. It reflects an unhinged contempt for science and the institutions that conduct scientific and medical research. And it is being irrationally combined with Trump’s overzealous and racist immigration policies. The impact is already being felt on many American college campuses, with some of the most talented professors and international students transferring to more welcoming foreign universities.

Any question as to the impact on America’s research capabilities in the future can be answered by history. In April 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power in pre-war Germany, the German government ordered the dismissal of all civil servants and college faculty who were “not of Aryan descent.” All Jewish academics were terminated from their positions. As a result, German universities lost 15 percent of their physicists and 20 percent of their mathematicians, including physicists Albert Einstein and Max Born, chemist Otto Meyerhof, eleven future Nobel laureates, and a large segment of their most gifted researchers. Not only did many of these emigrated scholars help defeat Germany in World War II, but according to University of Munich economics professor Fabian Waldinger, the negative impact on Germany’s scientific and research establishment by the dismissal of Jewish scholars in the 1930s was nine times more destructive to the future of German science than was the wartime bombing of Germany’s universities, and it was felt for generations. (Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2025, at 21).

Since the inception of the Nobel Prize, the United States has produced almost three times the number of Nobel laureates as all other countries combined, with the majority awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, and medicine. Do we really want this to change? What policies and values are the Trump administration promoting when it cancels university research grants in support of medical, health, and scientific research? Depriving a university of a federal grant in support of cancer research because it has not taken a harder stance against pro-Palestinian protestors or banned transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports makes no sense. There is no correlation between those things, and the harm caused is immeasurable. It does nothing to fight alleged antisemitism and, in fact, causes harm to many Jewish graduate students and professors. And it is a wrongheaded effort to implement destructive policies designed to reverse considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion in college decision making.

The harm caused by each grant cancellation is something the administration has apparently not even considered. Patients’ lives are at risk when clinical trials are disrupted. Graduate education is in turmoil. Even if the policy changes are reversed and the federal funding restored, one cannot simply flip the “on” switch for groundbreaking research projects that have been cancelled or halted midstream. As Karin Fischer notes in The Chronicle, “Grants must be rewritten, graduate students recruited and postdocs hired, labs rebuilt.” Even if the courts ultimately determine that these executive actions are illegal and unconstitutional, as they appear to be, the damage is already done.

In his 1945 report to President Truman, Vannevar Bush understood the importance of curiosity-driven research with people working on “subjects of their own choice.” He also understood that private investment alone could not compete with the powerful collaboration of a government-university research partnership, and that private companies would by necessity limit their R&D efforts to advance the companies’ profit-making endeavors. Curiosity-driven research that to the layperson’s eye may not have obvious application can yield breakthroughs that advance the national interest in profound and lasting ways. Take, for example, a couple of scientists in Yellowstone National Park collecting samples from its hot springs in an attempt to identify the bacteria growing in them. This may not at first seem worthy of federal funds until one learns that their discoveries contributed to more effective genetic testing, better forensic analysis of crime scenes, and innovative disease-fighting drugs. Similarly, NIH-supported research has transformed the American health care industry, improving the lives of millions of Americans and establishing the United States as a global leader in research for an industry that constitutes nearly one-sixth of the American economy.

By congressional mandate, decisions on what research is funded are to be based on the scientific and health needs of the nation, with research projects approved according to long-standing scientific principles and a rigorous, academic-based peer review process. This includes the processes by which federal agencies award, manage, and if necessary, terminate grants. Grant applications are highly competitive and require multiple layers of scientific review. Grant proposals take several months to complete and require detailed information about a project’s objectives, methodology, significance, and budget. Many grant applications require a great deal of time and institutional resources in support of the process.

Trump’s en masse termination of thousands of federal grants for his own political agenda is not only arbitrary and capricious but violates long-standing principles of science-based decision-making and threatens every aspect of the U.S. research foundation. His top-down directives eliminating the research projects at issue involve no individualized inquiry and cite no scientific justification. Many NIH-funded projects critical to understanding human health and disease have been cancelled. Trump’s mass terminations and funding cuts have disrupted research and shut down clinical trials testing potentially life-saving treatments for breast and cervical cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, HIV and sexually-transmitted infections, suicide risk and prevention, opioid addiction, Covid-19, alcohol-use disorder, and many other areas of vital concern to public health.

The Executive Branch has the right to pursue policy objectives that differ from previous administrations. But changes to government policy must be implemented pursuant to the law, established regulations, and the scientific principles that have always governed the funding decisions of the federal agencies that oversee and implement America’s scientific research. Trump’s unlawful and politically-vindictive approach is doing immense harm to the United States and the nation’s scientific-research capabilities. Indeed, this administration has put the future of the entire American research enterprise in jeopardy.

Science: The Endless Frontier is a powerful reminder that American scientific progress depends on the close partnership that has existed for 75 years between the scientific community and the federal government. This arrangement has provided tremendous returns on our investments in everything from public health and scientific exploration to engineering and physics, national security, environmental protection, and clean energy. Originating with a commitment to America’s postwar responsibilities and ambitions, the government-academic compact has set the standard for the world. It is a key reason the United States has always been capable of addressing the planet’s greatest challenges.

Science is not a static enterprise. Knowledge evolves. Universities are best designed to nurture and sustain life-saving, ground-breaking research. The purpose of science and research is to advance knowledge and improve the well-being of everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Investing in American scientific and medical research should never be a partisan exercise. The Trump administration’s massive cuts to federally funded research are causing widespread chaos, creating a lost generation of scientists and a major brain drain from America. It goes way beyond bad policy. It is completely and utterly stupid.