Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.

Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.

If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:

- they cost much less

- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.

Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.

  > It might take decades to recover our research programs.

>4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.

It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.

The idiocracy is a global trend

Staff being underpaid in academia is nothing new. Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money for funding academics? Instead of a new $100m "student center" and high-rise dorm buildings.

Unfortunately, "Griefing people we don't like" is the central defining principle behind everything the current administration does. It's the promise that got them elected. And they really don't like scientists and medical professionals. This is not going to be reversed until we get griefing out of politics.

> Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America.

“Good” is never an objective question, its always one dependent on values, and values are often not bipartisan.

Everyone believes everyone should share their values, but if they did, there wouldn't be different ideological factions in the first place.

It is not a bipartisan winning issue.

Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.

It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.

> It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor.

Not bipartisan. One specific party is literally against already existing medical progress, because it helps weak people they thing should die.

> It helps business.

Not bipartisan unless it benefits super rich millionaires businesses. The moment it benefits their competition, it ceases to be bipartisan.

The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.

Scientists started spouting far-left propaganda. That’s when they lost half of the voters.

> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis

You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.

To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.

We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.

It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.

FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.

I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.

One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.

Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.

How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?

The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.

> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis

The private sector can only fund easy low hanging fruit productization projects (Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, …) once the hard public fundamental research and infrastructure (Internet, Rocket Science, Physics, etc…) that has no short term economic value investment is done.

So only opportunities with a path to economic profitability should be researched?

That is a very narrow view of advancing society

As a taxpayer you should go after wasteful military spending, not scientific research.

> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.

Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"

...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.

The response (usually) is “OK but whatabout the $X billion we spent on the military?”

Which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it doesn’t answer why or whether we should be spending so much money on everything else

>As a taxpayer

So like everyone else in the world that pays taxes?

I think you're asking a good question and it's not unreasonable at all.

The way I see it, the private sector is in a place to even potentially be able to fund research because of prior publicly funded research.

The capital expenditure needed to fund research in a way that leads to breakthroughs is massive. Private sector doesn't always have the cash needed. Definitely this was true for a long time, and is true for many countries still.

Then generally the private sector is pretty risk adverse, the majority of private sector funds are retirement and savings. People don't want to risk that, so it tends to invest in short term or more known ventures, which is rarely research.

Some private funding is research moonshots, but the pool of private money interested in that is a lot smaller.

That means, at least historically, private funding simply isn't incentivized to properly fund research, and may not always have the means to do so.

Now should the public still fund it? What kind of ROI does society gets?

Again, at least historically, the ROI has been massive. Let's just look at a short list:

- Internet - GPS - Semiconductor - MRI/CT scans - Vaccines - Jet engine, aviation - Lithium Ion batteries - Touchscreens - AI - Fracking - Mass agriculture - Space exploration

You could also question investment in art and humanities. Private sector simply isn't interested. Do we want to learn about our history, preserve our arts, these don't have financial ROI, but depending on your opinion on the matter they could be societal ROI because you might want to live in a society with a rich culture and record of its heritage and a good understanding of its evolutionary roots and what not.

To be honest, it's hard to find a single private sector breakthrough that wasn't off the back of the public sector either through direct funding, prior discovery or indirect subsidy.

I feel the issue is that after the public funding achieves breakthrough, the private sector quickly capitalizes on the profits. At the same time, the private sector is really good at commercializing and finding efficiency and market fit. The ROI happens indirectly, society modernizes through access to new things, the private sector creates jobs, taxes are paid on private transactions and income generated from the discovery, etc.

At the end of the day, it's all opportunity cost. What else do we do with the money. You said paying down the dept, what's the societal ROI of that? Why not lay down the dept with some of the other tax money? Etc. It's a complex question.

fix the deficit and kill off the debt? he added $2tn by giving tax cuts to corporations...

You don't understand how science works... you wouldn't have nuclear reactors or GPS etc if it wasn't for government run projects

> We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways.

Zero sum thinking.

It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."

1) Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.

2) How do you feel about the money going to ICE?

Run for election on this platform.

The challenge is to convince Republican voters that science has utility.

I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.

Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.

work to restore public trust in science and technology. look at the ways that trust has been lost.

Why is "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself" off the table?

Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?

Become a politician or a lobbyist? Possibly work in a charity that funds research, as a fundraiser for them?

I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.

I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.

I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.

Move to Europe.

Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.

Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.

For basic research, which tends to be non-excludable/non-rival, this isn't even a bad thing! I hope India and other fast-growing nations join them!

Specially when their research is more hard science focused and spend very little on the soft sciences that tend to get way more funding in the US.

Seems like they already do:

"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.

Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."

Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:

---

Q: How do you view basic research?

A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.

We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.

---

Great. Can I start blaming China for not solving all the worlds problems yet?

Don't you worry. If they do, we will just call them copycats. /s

Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china

Gotta stop those people who don't look like us, right?

Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.

However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.

I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...

Usually, when something is broken the correct course of action is to fix it, not demolish it utterly.

You might welcome them all, but you don't have jobs for most of them.

Trust me, every scientist in America has been clawing for every eurpoean research grant opportunity there is. Competition is stiff

> and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!

Which will be guaranteed by strict monitoring of your private chats!

It's like three body problem but fintech chuds are the sophons

If you need links for the "substance" part. Investments of Sacks:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/cannabis-logistics-startup...

https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/13/telemedicine-adderall-vyva...

Trump relaxes cannabis classification:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/trump-cannab...

Let me counter with this: Can you point out one country in the post world war era that had minimal government investment in science but had very productive scientific output? Or can you point out one country where scientific productivity increased after public sector investment in science was slashed?

> Everything can be "sold"

How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?

If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?

The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.

For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.

That's not how science works. Fundamental science works on much longer timescales (10/20/50/100 years), that are not accessible to companies

This is anecdotal but as a current PhD student who was doing research at a large tech company for a few years prior to this, the incentives as an individual are very different across the two programs. In tech even in a research role there was little to no incentive to dive deeper into potential high-risk, high-reward research because your career trajectory was determined by maximizing certain metrics for promotion cases. The general vibe among my coworkers was spend your day on the guaranteed progress projects and then go home. This was actively incentivized by leadership who asked for frequent progress updates especially as AI began to takeoff.

As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.

It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.

Cause goverments funds basic research and private sector does not. Also, results of private sector research are secret, patented and generally dont create competitive markets.

>We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those.

Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.

The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.

For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...

It tightened its hold by shrinking its portfolio as the article describes.

"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.

When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.

Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.

In the before times the close eyes were by directors and funding committees at the institutes like NIH and NSF. Now those roles are played by political appointees and funds controlled at the whim of the office of the President and their fundamentally anti-science agenda.

> That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.

> grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.

For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).

Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.

Is the system we have perfect? No. But no one has proposed anything better; most of the time what people propose just reinvents the system we have and all its problems (because they don't understand how the system works in the first place), or invents new (worse) problems this system doesn't have.