By Kim Bellard
I am starting to feel that I am hitting a dead horse, after having written a couple of times recently about the attacks of the Trump administration against science, but the successes continue to arrive. Last Friday, for example, administration financing was not only the financing of the National Foundation of National Sciences of the Budget 2026 in approximately 50%, but also Nature He informed that the NSF was stopping not only the new subsidies but also paying existing subsidies.
Then, this week, in an event called “Choose Europe for Science”, European leaders announced a program of 500 million euros ($ 566 million) to attract scientists. It was not specifically aimed at American scientists, but the context was quite clear.
Sudip Parikh, executive director of the American Association for the advancement of science, described the cuts of the proposed budget “a crisis, only a catastrophe for the science of the United States.” Even if the Congress does not accompany such draconian cuts and resume of approval of subsidies, Dr. Ir. Parikh warns: “That has created this paralysis that I think is already hurting us.”
An NSF employee fears: “The state of this country as a world leader in science and innovation is apparently hung from a thread at this time.”
Nature Obentheed an internal NSF of April 30 by email that Toed staff “stop granting all financing actions until new notice.” Researchers can continually spend the money they already led to, but the new money for those existing or for new subsidies freezes “until it is coming more.” The staff members had already been to project subsidies proposals for “issues or activities that may not be aligned with the agency’s priorities.”
Npr As a result, the reports that some 344 subsidies approved previously ended, since “they were not aligned with the priorities of the agency.” A staff member said Nature That the policy had the potential of “Orwellian overreach” and another warned: “They are damn with the process of revision of standard gold merit that was established in NSF around decades.” Another employee told Samantha Michaels of Mother Jones That freezing is “a slow movement apocalypse … Indeed, each NSF subsidy at this time is the fee.”
It is not surprising that the director of NSF, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last week, simply saying: “I think I have done everything I can.”
If you think, oh, who cares? We still have many innovative private companies that invest in investigations, so who needs the government to finance research, then could this: a new investigation of the American University estimates that even a 25% drop in the reduction. And these are not unique successes. “It will be a decrease forever,” said Ignacio González, one of the study authors. “The US economy will be narrower.”
If you do not believe in Au, then the Bank of the Federal Reserve of Dallas will believe, which estimates that government investments in research and development represented at least one fifth of the growth of the productivity of the United States since World War II. “If you observe a long period of time, much of our increase in the standard of living seems to come from public investment in scientific research,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and author of the Dallas Fed study. The New York Times. “Performance rates are really high.”
It is not surprising, then, that European leaders see an opportunity.
“No one could imagine a few years ago that one of the great democracies of the world would eliminate research programs under the pretext that the word ‘diversity’ appeared in his program,” President Emmanuel Macron de France.
President Macron is used to add:
“No one could have thought that one of the world’s greatest democracies would erase, with a brain spill from the pen, the ability to give visas to certain researchers. No one could have thought that this great democracy, whose economic model is based so much on free science, about innovation and its ability to innovate more than Europeans and spread that innovation more about the last three decades, would make such a mistake.”
“Unfortunately, we see today that the role of science is questioned in today’s world. The investment in fundamental, free and open research is questioned. What a gigantic calculation error,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. She wants to “make Europe a magnet for researchers” in the next two years.
Here we are in fact and, what a giant bad taste.
“In the United States, once a paradise for researchers, academic freedom is being challenged. The line between the truth and the false hood, between facts and beliefs, weakened,” said Elisabeth Borne, Minister of Education of France.
“The first priority is to ensure that science in Europe remains open and free. That is our presentation card,” said Von der Leyen. President Macron echoed this: “We call researchers around the world to join and join us … If you love freedom, come and help us keep us free.”
The United States was supposed to be the land of the free, right?
We need to take into account that, while all this is happening, President Trump is the war against the main American research universities, ostensibertad in the name of Dei’s struggle or anti -Semitism. The New York Times He estimates that he has pointed to about 60 in all, especially Ivy League institutions. Around 200 schools and universities have signed a statement that denounces the attacks:
As leaders of the conferences, universities and academic societies of the United States, we speak with one voice against the overreach of the unprecedented government and political interference now that American education is endangered … We always reject the rejections of the rejections of the rejection of the breaths of respirators.
The statement warns: “The price of covering the defining freedoms of American higher education will be paid by our students and our society.”
Robert N. Proctor, historian at Stanford University, said Reuters Trump led “a libertarian right assault on the scientific company” that had years of developing legs. “We could see an reverse brain leak,” he said. “It is not only for Europe, but academics also move to Canada and Asia.”
Last week, Dr. Francis Collins, former Chief of the NIH, said: “When you mix politics and science, you simply get political.” Starting with World War II, American universities made a devil’s bargain with the federal government on research financing. That offer served both parties, and the country, in recent decades, but we have never seen that politics and ideology play a role in what and are financed.
The administration affirms that it values science, but only certain types of science and the science “awakens” is not specified. It is fair to question federal financing levels, but when political consultations exceed scientists, we run the risk that “United States first” is true in American science.
Kim is a former emarketing executive in an important blues plan, editor of The Late & larmente Tintura.ioAnd now regular THCB collaborator
