We’re Not Just Losing Funding—We’re Losing the Future

In labs across the country right now, centrifuges sit idle, mouse colonies are being culled, and experiments—some a decade in the making—are being boxed up and frozen. This isn't the natural ebb and flow of scientific exploration. It’s the direct result of federal cuts to basic research. The Trump administration’s move to slash funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the agencies that serve as the lifeblood of American scientific innovation—isn't just bad policy. It's a quiet, calculated demolition of our future.

Think about what we’re losing. The NSF supported the computer science that led to the internet, before anyone knew what a search engine was, and the search engines themselves by supporting Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Ph.D. research at Stanford. GPS technology that powers smartphone maps, ride-share and delivery apps, and even farming equipment was developed with support from the NSF. NSF supported the development of 3D printing, along with the plastic filaments and CAD software necessary to create 3D printed articles, and NIH researchers used 3D printing to create prosthetics and dental aligners (like Invisalign). 

Tens of millions of lives were saved by COVID-19 vaccines developed by NIH researchers, and the NIH funded the basic research in RNA biology, lipid nanoparticles, and spike proteins that made the COVID-19 vaccine possible long before the pandemic. NIH funded immunotherapies have generated life saving treatments for melanoma, lung, and bladder cancers, and countless lives have been saved from HIV/AIDS by pioneering antiretroviral research performed by NIH funded research. 

Let’s not forget that the NIH funded CRISPR researchers gave American scientists and business people the advantage over their European and Japanese colleagues long before gene editing became a biotech gold rush.  

Basic research is the soil from which radical breakthroughs grow. Cut off the water, and America’s technological advantage will wither and eventually die.

And here's the deeper truth: we’ve been here before.

Science has always advanced in spite of those in power. In every era, there’s been resistance: emperors, kings, presidents, and popes fear that knowledge will erode their control of the populace. Galileo was locked away for claiming the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Giordano Bruno was burned alive for suggesting that stars were suns and the universe was infinite. Darwin was mocked and ridiculed for challenging the religious narrative of creation. His ideas didn’t just challenge biology—they threatened the social order.

What’s happening now may seem less dramatic than being burned alive, but it’s no less destructive. When a government dismantles public science by eliminating its funding, it creates a slower, more insidious collapse. You can’t simply pause cancer research or halt Alzheimer’s trials for a year or two. You lose scientists. You lose expertise. You lose momentum. Promising technologies wither. Curiosity dies. Students who might have invented a new form of artificial intelligence, cured a disease, or created the next synthetic biology platform pursue careers outside science.

But history tells us something else: science persists. It pushes forward, one resistant fact at a time. Scientists are stubborn. They question. They test. They iterate. And when their work is suppressed or undercut, it often becomes stronger in the retelling.

Every future miracle starts with basic research. The blockbuster drug, the Nobel Prize, the billion-dollar startup all trace back to a grant proposal, a curious mind, and the freedom to ask “what if?”

Cut that off, and you’re not just killing jobs. You’re killing tomorrow.