US Science Policy at a Crossroads

The U.S. science and engineering enterprise’s rigid defense of the Vannevar Bush model and its full-throated embrace of ideological DEI has left it politically exposed.

With Donald Trump’s return to the political stage, the U.S. science community faces significant challenges—chief among them, drastically reduced federal funding. As such, it can respond in one of two ways. It can double down on the longstanding Vannevar Bush model of science policy, bolstered in recent years by a staunch and often radical embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and likely see continued cuts. Alternatively, the enterprise can chart a new course, explicitly aligning science policy with national priorities, especially the techno-economic competition with China, while rejecting “woke science” and limits on free speech.

The Stages of U.S. Science Policy

U.S. science policy has evolved through several distinct eras.

Before World War II, federal support for science and research was limited. The establishment of land-grant colleges and mission-oriented research in agriculture, aeronautics, and natural resources were the main exceptions. Universities relied primarily on foundations and industry to fund research. In some ways, this is the world President Trump wants to go back to, one with extremely minimal federal support for research universities.

That changed with WWII. Science was suddenly viewed as indispensable to addressing a host of national challenges, including postwar rebuilding, national defense, and competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Near the end of the war, a bipartisan consensus emerged: The federal government must expand wartime funding for science and research.

But how? The appropriate model was far from clear. One camp, led by Senator Harley Kilgore (D-WV), wanted a federal science agency focused on advancing explicit national goals. The other camp, championed by MIT President Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 report to the president Science, The Endless Frontier, advocated for a scientist-led system with minimal societal interference.

Bush’s vision prevailed, and five years later, Congress established the National Science Foundation (NSF). With this model came five foundational principles:

1. Generous federal funding. By the early 1960s, federal research investment soared to nearly 2 percent of GDP.

2. Merit-based grants. Funds flowed to top universities and researchers, with no focus on geographic parity.

3. No strings attached. As Bush put it: “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown. Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science.”

4. Disciplinary neutrality. In theory, all fields were treated equally to ensure science was investigator-led and the government did not favor certain disciplines. Astronomy was considered as valuable as computer science. That said, in practice, Cold War imperatives privileged physics, engineering, and later computer science—at least outside the NSF.

5. Global openness. Bush believed the science enterprise should transcend borders and encouraged the government to “take an active role in promoting the international flow of scientific information.”

This system was maintained and eventually complemented by a focus on international competitiveness. In the mid-1980s, growing techno-economic competition with Japan and Germany triggered greater interest in leveraging universities to support national competitiveness. The passage of the Bayh-Dole Act and the creation of NSF’s industry-university partnership programs signaled a modest pivot toward viewing academic research not just as a scientific endeavor, but as a strategic driver of U.S. economic and industrial strength.

However, these were add-ons to the prevailing Vannevar Bush model, not a system rewrite—tolerated but by no means fully embraced. This was clear when academia intensely and successfully lobbied to shrink the share of CHIPS and Science Act research funding earmarked for NSF’s Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate from two-thirds down to just one-third. The majority of the authorized funding went to traditional NSF principal investigator-led grants. (In reality, congressional appropriators kept the overall funding on a short leash.)

However, since the mid-2010s, science has become increasingly politicized, particularly by the left. Radical DEI initiatives reshaped the science enterprise—from hiring and admissions to research topics and more. New Ph.D. students were often required to sign DEI statements that included a pledge to mentor the “disadvantaged.” University departments began openly hiring based on race and gender rather than merit. Prominent scientists were not allowed to speak at conferences and academic gatherings due to infractions against DEI orthodoxy. A Nature editorial even declared, “The enterprise of science has been—and remains—complicit in systemic racism.”

John Sailer reported that in 2017, a UC Berkeley search committee rejected 600 of over 800 applicants for a life sciences position based solely on their DEI statements. The University of Waterloo limited a Canadian research chair position in AI to those identifying as “women, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-Spirit.” (Straight, Indigenous men need not apply, I suppose.) And in recent years, leading science and tech policy journals, including Issues in Science and Technology and MIT’s Technology Review, have increasingly shifted toward progressive politics. Meanwhile, the near-totalitarian atmosphere within U.S. academia has left many scientists reluctant to say or write dissenting views out of genuine fear of professional repercussions or reputational damage.

Finally, we cannot ignore the shocking controversy surrounding NIH’s role in COVID-19 and the resulting damage to public trust. Many in the virology community were quick to dismiss the possibility that the virus originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan—although it now appears that this is a plausible, if not likely, scenario. At the same time, officials obfuscated NIH’s involvement in funding research in China. This lack of openness, perceived by many as evasive or dismissive, eroded public confidence in the scientific establishment.

So did the fact that leading public health officials and epidemiologists politicized COVID guidelines in support of racial politics. Case in point: a tweet from Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, stating, “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment, the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” One might reasonably ask: Who, exactly, gave you the authority to selectively suspend pandemic guidance based on political beliefs?

Where Are We Now?

The U.S. science community now faces its most severe reckoning in decades. Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on challenging what he views as the overreach of progressive DEI initiatives. Regardless of one’s personal stance on the science establishment’s embrace of DEI, it is clear that many Republicans—particularly those aligned with Trump—saw it as a significant overstep. Rather than simply mandating universities and federal agencies to return to a strictly merit-based approach to science, the Trump administration has imposed consequences in the form of funding cuts.

Indeed, under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a review of all funded projects was ordered to identify flagged language associated with DEI efforts, such as “gender,” “ethnicity,” and “systemic.” This reaction is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon, particularly if academic institutions remain unwilling to acknowledge how far they encouraged the “overreach pendulum” to swing.

The second challenge is fiscal. Across many OECD nations, science budgets are being squeezed as aging populations consume an ever-larger share of public spending. In the United States, the massive national debt and annual deficit—driven largely by entitlement programs for retirees and tax rates too low on individuals—are putting everything else, including science, on the chopping block. Both American parties remain largely unwilling to consider meaningful entitlement reform or significant revenue increases. Without those options, deficits continue to balloon, and research funding becomes an easy target, especially when few outside the scientific community will notice these changes in the short term.

But the fiscal pressure is only part of the story. Among Trump-aligned conservatives, there is a deeper ideological hostility toward federal science funding. Many see it as just another symbol of “big government”—something to dismantle, not defend. This gets to the most important point: Even if the federal budget were balanced, Trumpians would likely still push to shrink the scientific enterprise.

One of the four major “promises” in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025’s blueprint for a second Trump term, is to “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” The report’s foreword goes even further, suggesting that the executive branch should reclaim authority over federal spending from Congress. As New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore put it, “If it can get its act together, the Republican-controlled Congress is expected to rubber-stamp legislation that decimates the federal government in part to finance tax cuts and in part for the sheer ideological hell of it.”

This helps explain their broader belief regarding federal science funding. For Trumpian conservatives, “Science spending, student loan forgiveness—what’s the difference?” Both are seen as big government redistributive programs funded by tax dollars “stolen” from hardworking Americans. The value of federal R&D is, at best, suspect. Their view is that public investment simply displaces what the private sector would do anyway.

The Heritage Foundation, architect of the Project 2025 blueprint, writes, “By attempting to force government-developed technologies into the market, the government diminishes the role of the entrepreneur and crowds out private-sector investment.” The conservative Mercatus Center agrees, contending: “Government R&D crowds out more efficient private research spending… If anything, the fall in federal R&D should be good for technical progress.”

That view, however, is simply wrong. It is contradicted by decades of empirical research. Rather than “crowding out” private investment, public R&D tends to “crowd in” additional business spending, resulting in more industry R&D than would otherwise occur and boosting total innovation. For example, in a comprehensive review of more than 60 academic articles on public-private R&D interactions, Cockburn and Henderson found strong evidence that federal science investments yield a high rate of return, noting, “There are, so far as we are aware, no systematic quantitative studies that have found a negative impact of public science.”

What Should the Science Community Do?

To start, there are several things the science community should not do.

It should not duck and hope the storm passes. At a minimum, this political climate will persist for the next four years—and if science funding is cut significantly, budget constraints will make it very difficult to restore those resources later.

The community should avoid relying on tired bromides, like: “If you believe innovation is important to economic development, then throwing a wrench in one of the most productive innovation systems in history is not a good idea.” While of course true, to date, that argument hasn’t gained traction or broken through politically. Repeating it louder is unlikely to change that.

It should resist acting like just another interest group lobbying for federal funds. Protests at NIH or on the National Mall will not sway policymakers. The research community simply lacks the scale for “retail” political power. Besides, such actions risk portraying the science community as just another partisan faction—often aligned, rightly or wrongly, with Trumpian opposition. This includes abstaining from overtly political messaging, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists' press release stating, “Pres. Trump Brings His Anti-Science, Destructive Agenda to White House on Day One,” or high-profile candidate endorsements, as Nature did with Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. What could they possibly have been thinking? Do they not employ competent government relations staff?

As University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. writes:

Scientists can be ‘pure scientists’ (who stay out of politics and policy entirely), science arbiters (who translate scientific findings for policy and political audiences, typically through expert advisory bodies), issue advocates (who advocate for specific issues or policies, but do so transparently and openly), or honest brokers of policy alternatives (who present a range of policy options and their expected outcomes). All roles are important in society, what matters most is that the expert community reflects on its possible roles and responsibilities as a part of furthering democratic practices.

However, when scientists step outside these roles and advocate for specific social or ideological agendas, they inevitably politicize the institution and risk losing broad-based political support. Put plainly: If they want to keep federal funding, scientists should keep their political views separate from their professional roles.

The science community has reached a fork in the road. Without serious reform, we are likely to see a significantly diminished role for federal science funding—and all the negative consequences that would bring with it. To avoid that outcome, reform must start on two key fronts.

At a minimum, scientists and university leaders must walk back from the extremes of the DEI agenda that many in the research community have embraced. This does not mean abandoning efforts to expand access and opportunity for underrepresented groups in science and engineering. But it does mean shifting back to full meritocracy in hiring and recommitting to principles of academic freedom and open inquiry.

If leaders and faculty resist this change, believing the current approach is morally justified, they should at least acknowledge the cost of their stance. Most university work is publicly funded, and public funding is conditional. As long as the public elects candidates like Trump, actions perceived as ideological overreach will come at the cost of reduced federal science funding.

Additionally, the science establishment must move beyond the Vannevar Bush model and realign with national interests. Namely, winning the techno-economic war with China. This requires forging a new grand bargain: Science funding levels remain intact, but in return, the research community commits to using science in service of national strategic goals.

That means prioritizing high-impact fields—such as physics, engineering, life sciences, and computer science—over others with less direct relevance to national competitiveness. It means partnering more closely with industry. And it means actively supporting technology transfer and commercialization rather than treating them as secondary to basic research.

Conclusion

Do I think the academic science establishment can make this shift? I highly doubt it. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is so deeply entrenched in academia that many have lost the ability to think rationally about politics. And the very real consequences of not aligning with the DEI mob (even if universities now cloak it in new terminology) are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Compounding this is the deep, visceral commitment to total autonomy in the scientific enterprise. Few scientists or engineers are willing to give that up. That’s sad—and for the country, tragic. America needs a depoliticized scientific and engineering establishment, focused at least in part on helping the nation compete with China.

The only way out of this conundrum is for a few courageous, high-profile scientists and university presidents to stand up, stand together, and say, “We have to change—and we will lead the way.” But don’t hold your breath.

I wish the outlook for science in the United States were brighter. The nation needs a robust federal science and engineering enterprise now more than ever. But the community’s rigid defense of Bushism and its full-throated embrace of ideological DEI have left it politically exposed.

The ball is in the science community’s court. Serious reform or denial, opposition, and irrelevance? Choose wisely.

This article is based on Dr. Atkinson’s keynote speech at the 2025 Allan Bromley Memorial Event at George Washington University.