US will pay for Trump's war on science

Ian Ritchie / The Herald Business HQ / July 2025

THE WELL-KNOWN phrase “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” is being robustly tested by the current US government. President Trump’s administration has declared war on US elite universities and science research funding and is attacking many established scientific norms.

He wants to make America “great again” which, according to his logic, prioritises re-opening coal mines and pumping as much oil and gas as possible, rejecting scientific advice on the likes of climate control and vaccine safety, and striving to return low margin manual manufacturing from overseas.

This type of logic is even forcing the US Post Office to sell off its modern fleet of battery powered electric delivery vehicles, a move that is likely to result in a huge unnecessary financial loss.

The US government is taking an axe to a science and technology pipeline that has been widely recognised as the envy of the world.

The budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) is being cut by 55 per cent; the DOGE exercise having already eliminated 1,600 NSF grants worth $1.5 billion.

Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr has reduced his workforce by 10,000 with another 10,000 to go. His National Institute for Health (NIH) which has financed studies which over the years has led to the most revolutionary new drugs are facing cuts of 43 per cent – about $20 billion.

He has decided that his government scientists should no longer be permitted to publish in leading scientific journals.

Donald Trump is also attacking elite Ivy League universities, saying he wants to take all of Harvard’s research funding away and give it instead to vocational colleges.

It is difficult to imagine such colleges developing breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s treatment, cancer management, strokes, sickle cell anaemia or any of the other world-class research currently being undertaken at Harvard.

Fifty years ago, when President Trump seems to assume the US was great, the largest companies were oil and automobile manufacturing companies like Ford, Exxon and General Motors, but today’s biggest companies are all technology giants.

The top US businesses today are Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, leading a pack of other innovative tech companies such as Tesla and Eli Lilly.

Many assume that it is the dynamism of such entrepreneurial companies that create all this innovation and wealth, but this belief was challenged several years ago by Mariana Mazzucato, the Professor in Innovation and Public Value at University College London. In her book “The Entrepreneurial State” she pointed out that it was US military research funding that developed GPS positioning, touch screen technology, and voice activated “digital assistants”.

In particular, the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” (DARPA) supported the early development of the internet and crucially underwrote the technology developed by Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in California which pioneered the computer interface techniques which went on to be adopted by all modern personal computers, phones and tablets.

The development of semiconductors and powerful computer chips were initially underwritten by the Department of Defense, NASA and the NSF; research that have gone on to create the US global leadership in computing technologies.

It was public backing that funded the development of the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the technology that enabled the World Wide Web to become the fastest growing new technology in the mid 1990s. Other key innovations include Google’s search algorithm which was developed, inevitably, by a grant from the NSF.

US Federal support of university-based research has led to the development of world-leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

Advances enabled by research funding include magnetic resonance imaging, the Human Genome project, LASIK eye surgery, weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and drugs that have saved countless lives among AIDS and COVID patients.

All these cuts in US research spending are being seen as good news in competing innovative nations such as China, France, Canada and the UK, which are all increasing, not cutting, their funding of innovative research.

In March Beijing announced a $138 billion government fund which will invest in key research fields such as AI, quantum computing and hydrogen energy.

A “Choose France for Science” scheme has been launched by President Macron, offering €100 million dedicated to recruiting foreign researchers, especially from the US.

Here in the UK the “Royal Society Faraday Fellowships” is a £30 million fund supporting individual academics or groups relocating to UK and a £50 million government scheme has been established targeted at attracting global research teams, focusing on AI, life sciences, and green energy

That phrase “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance“ has been attributed to several people, but it seems most likely to have been said by Derek Bok, then President of Harvard University, an appropriate statement from the institution that Donald Trump has chosen to punish for being excellent