“Scientists, prepare to tighten your belts.”
This was the opening line of an article written by the news staff at Science. Except it was not written in 2025 under President Trump. It was written last year, in 2024, when Congress once again cut and flattened budgets for core scientific agencies.
It’s easy to blame Trump for our current scientific losses, and we should. In mere weeks, he’s slashed national research spending at unprecedented rates and is likely to continue doing so. He’s also cut jobs, mistreated sensitive data and actively undermines facts with lies and disinformation.
Yet just as scientific principles are nuanced, so, too, should be the finger-wagging when it comes to deciphering how American science came to be deprioritized. Because if we know anything about the current president, it’s that he’s a brilliant conman, not a political mastermind. To this end, his greatest strength was in capitalizing on the already weakening appreciation for science and technology in America, not for creating the sentiment.
For me, this topic is personal. When I began my career in research nearly 20 years ago, I was applauded for my dedication and aptitude. At gatherings, people were impressed and grateful that I wanted to spend my time studying neuroscience and research methodology. It was an admirable profession, and I was excited for the opportunity to help people.
My peers and I gave up a lot to pursue the sciences. We skipped social events to study or work in the lab. We missed lucrative years of making money after high school and college to work for free as teaching and research aides, often accumulating daunting amounts of student debt along the way. The work was hard, long and at times tedious. But a greater good kept calling, so we continued on.
By the time we reached graduate school and post doctoral fellowships, some of us gave up on the promise of having a family. Not because we didn’t want it, but because the time it would take to seek and create one might interfere with the critical years of an early career. This is especially true for women. To some extent, self sacrifice seemed synonymous with academia.
We also accepted that our careers would be forever funded primarily by public taxpayer dollars. Few of us truly worried. Who would possibly want to cut cancer research for kids or the National Weather Service? After over a decade of increasing federal scientific spending in the 1990s and early 2000s, a false sense of security had prevailed.
In retrospect, this complacency was a grave mistake. While I could never have imagined that public opinion would shift so heavily so fast, history has always ebbed and flowed. The new trend of anti-science and disinformation was setting in, and from personal experience I know it started years before Trump took office.
It began small. Perhaps a patient in a clinical trial would casually suggest our team members were part of a government conspiracy — that was new. Perhaps a student would suggest a textbook was wrong because they had Googled the topic — odd. Or, perhaps, people in yoga class would talk about how all chemicals are bad and everything natural is good, seemingly ignoring the realities of arsenic and chemistry.
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At first, these were blown off as eccentricities. But soon, these were the people who stopped taking vaccines. Some stopped going to doctors altogether, instead seeking alternative and unproven treatments. At the research clinic, more patients started saying we were part of a deep state conspiracy.
This was all before Trump.
At the same time, federal funding for the sciences had become stagnant. Beginning in 2003, a notable flattening can be seen in federal research and development spending data, with further drops seen shortly after the financial crisis. Today, we spend less in federal funds on R&D across major agencies in constant dollars than we did in 2003.
In some ways the private sector stepped up. Even when federal funds for R&D dipped, gains from private businesses offset some losses. The problem is that the private sector is by and large focused on short-term profits for CEOs and stakeholders, not long-term overall good for society. This can’t be made up for in private dollars, even with philanthropy.
For example, federally funded researchers employed at academic institutions help offset institutional overhead, including the facilities and teaching and mentoring of students. It’s probably not a coincidence that as public taxpayer dollars decreased for higher ed, colleges responded by becoming more business minded. Given most students go into the private sector, what happens when education gets so expensive we eventually stop producing as many engineers and physicians?
Federal funding and support for American research and development is critical to national security, the economy and overall democracy. The more we invest in jobs that build core skills in education, critical thinking and innovation, the more we secure our domestic and international status. Put most simply, if the next world war breaks out tomorrow, we need American talent to win. Can we do that with Trump’s new cuts?
There is always room for improvement. I support measures of efficiency for taxpayer dollars. But willy-nilly cuts to key scientific agencies and programs are not the answer. As they say, never use a hatchet where a scalpel will suffice. Besides, science may be imperfect, but it’s like democracy: It’s the worst form of knowledge seeking we have except for all the others.
Scientists and doctors are regular people. Most of us struggle to pay bills, find housing and buy eggs just like everyone else. Yes, we spent years honing our skills to perform at elite levels, just like professional athletes. That makes us experts, not out of touch. You wouldn’t want an amateur soccer player in the World Cup. Why would you want one performing your surgery?
Incidentally, you also wouldn’t suggest you know more about soccer than Lionel Messi or Mia Hamm. So why would you suggest you know more than scientists about vaccines or climate change? Google is good, but it can’t replace the years of practice and consultations with colleagues.
In America, we’ve come to take a lot for granted. If your child is sick, we have doctors. If you want to contact a loved one, we have computers in our pockets. Most of us have heat, water, electricity, indoor plumbing, cars, planes, buses and trains to take us where we want to go and live with comforts of air conditioning, high-definition television, satellite radio and food on demand. These are luxuries, all rooted in scientific innovation and technology.
It’s not perfect. Access to these services can vary based on wealth and geographic location. Yet this lack of access is not due to a lack of technical expertise. It’s due to a lack of equitable distribution by policymakers, a critical distinction. Anger and resentment for inequities and inaccessibility are being pushed in the wrong direction. Scientists and doctors can only make the technologies possible. We need policymakers to make them accessible, and they haven’t been doing this for a long time — a lot longer than Trump has been around.
So make no mistake: Trump will be the cliff American science finally falls off of unless we come together and stop him. But Trump didn’t push us to the edge alone. We’ve lagged on growing federal scientific investment for a long time, and if we want to fix it, we have to recognize that Trump is a symptom of a much larger problem.
If only we’d invested in the cure.
Trish Zornio is a scientist, lecturer and writer who has worked at some of the nation’s top universities and hospitals. She’s an avid rock climber and was a 2020 candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado.
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