Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

SCOTT TURNER: America Spent More Than $1 Trillion On Science For Nothing

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In 1950, the United States government decided that it would henceforth be the primary funder of university research, in the hope this would usher in a new age of scientific discovery. This radical experiment has now run for 75 years. Federal disbursements to university science since 1950 amount to roughly a trillion dollars.

But that great new age of scientific discovery? While universities understandably proclaim the program has succeeded, the truth is that the results have been meagre. Or worse.

Federal support has mostly fed the growth of a rent-seeking cabal of universities, funding agencies, a monolithic academic publishing industry, and of course, politicians. While discovery happens, it’s not at all clear that federal funding has had much to do with it.

For any failing experiment, a question inevitably arises: do we keep it going in the hope that more data will yield a hoped-for result? Or is it time to pull the plug? Asking the question provokes fury within the science ecosystem. Science would be doomed! Promising cures for cancer would be snuffed out! Labs would go dark! Denialists of all sorts would gleefully promote ignorance.

American science, its boosters tell us, is the envy of the world, the key to our prosperity and national security. If anything, the boosters say, we do not spend enough because our major geopolitical rival, China, is beating us. American scientists published about a half-million scientific papers in 2022, while Chinese scientists published about a million. To maintain American scientific leadership, this “publication gap” needs to be closed, which of course can only be done by giving universities more money.

It’s all doom-mongering by the self-interested. None of this would actually happen. For many decades prior to 1950, science flourished without lavish federal subsidy ($100 billion in 2024). It can do so again.

While the United States needs to maintain a vigorous pace of scientific discovery, that pace isn’t set by the Washington bureaucrats who dole out the grants. It is set by creative and ambitious individual scientists whose work draws the attention of foundations and entrepreneurs. The greatest scientific advances of the last few years, for example, have been in artificial intelligence and were achieved with minimal help from the government.

And as for that mountain of scientific papers, a huge proportion of them cannot be replicated and many of the others are scientifically trivial.  They are published simply to keep the grants coming. American scientists do make groundbreaking discoveries, but these have ticked along at a steady pace since 1950, at a rate seemingly immune to the growing gushers of federal funds being lavished on it.

Instead of fostering discovery, federalizing science has created and maintains that cabal of rent-seekers and hangers-on to the point that they, not scientists, now control what scientists study and how they may study it. Science is now effectively under the control of a Big Science Cartel that traffics, not in cocaine or soybeans, but in federal research dollars. Scientists are no longer explorers of science’s endless frontier but foot soldiers of the Big Science Cartel.

Scientists’ careers now rise or fall on dubious metrics of scientific productivity – numbers of papers published, citations gleaned, grant dollars won – that have only a tangential relationship to discovery. The intellectual autonomy, creativity, and freedom of inquiry that discovery needs to thrive are crushed under the relentless chase of those dubious numbers.

To rescue science, universities and academic scientists must be weaned from their current dependence on federal funding. The National Science Foundation must be closed. The extramural research programs of more than a dozen federal agencies should be shuttered. These actions would not be anti-science. They are a recognition that scientists, not federal bureaucracies, are science’s proper custodians. What is needed going forward is a glide path to a soft landing on a safe runway rather than a rocky field.

At the National Association of Scholars, we have laid out just such a glide path, in a report Rescuing Science: Recovering Science as Civic Virtue. We lay out a 10–20-year plan of reforms that will disentangle science from the grip of the Big Science Cartel. Policy reforms will be necessary, but scientists themselves will have to take a hard look at the culture of modern science, which has crushed the ethic of discovery. It is scientists themselves who must restore the lost world of intellectual autonomy and freedom that is the beating heart of science. Will they be up to it? Or will they be content to remain in their current addiction to federal funding?

The jury is out.

J Scott Turner is Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars and an emeritus professor of biology. He is the author of the NAS glide path to science’s soft landing, Rescuing Science. Recovering Science as Civic Virtue.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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