Trump’s Science Policies Pose Long-Term Risk, Economists Warn

Rates of President Trump could increase prices. His efforts to reduce the federal workforce could increase unemployment. But ask the economists of which administration policies are more worried and many indicate to cut federal support for scientific research.

The Trump administration has canceled or frozen in recent weeks billions of dollars in federal subsidies made to researchers through the National Institutes of Health and moved to Strongly reduce funding For academic medical centers and other institutions. He also has, through the initiative called the Department of Efficiency of the Government, he tried to shoot hundreds of workers at the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency. And has Revocation of visas hundreds of students of foreign origin.

For economists, policies threaten to undermine US competitiveness in emerging areas such as artificial intelligence and to leave Americans as a poorest, less healthy and less productive in the decades to come.

“Universities are enormously important engines of innovation,” said Sabrina Howell, professor of New York University who has studied the role of the federal government in supporting innovation. “This is really killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Scientists they warned that the risks of the United States losing its status As a leader in the avant -garde research and in its magnet reputation for the best scientific minds from all over the world.

Yes, the workshops of the whole country have started to fire workers and cancel the projects – in some cases Stop clinical studies who were already in progress – and the best universities including Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have Announcement of assumption of freezing. France and other countries have started Recruitment of American scientistspromising a more welcoming environment.

Economists in a broad ideological spectrum argue that investments in scientific research-in particular the type of fundamental and initial research that is too risky to attract private investors to the most efficient uses of the dollars of taxpayers. The research discovered that every dollar invested in research and development make about $ 5 in economic earnings, a figure that probably underestimates the real performance because it does not take into account the benefits that are not captured in the measures of the gross domestic product, as a longer life and an increase in free time times.

“It’s like a car: you put a dollar in the car and get $ 5 back,” said Benjamin F. Jones, an economist of Northwestern University. “From a social point of view, it is an incredibly high performance activity that we already do too little.”

Unexpected discoveries

Hudson Freeze was a university student at Indiana University in the 1960s, when he began to help his professor, Thomas Brock, study the microbes who live in Hot Springs at the Yellowstone National Park – the work that was supported by a subsidy of the National Science Foundation. He remembers the excitement of excitement the first time he looked through a microscope and saw one of those microbes, Thermus aquaticus, Grow at a temperature previously designed impossible.

“I had goosebumps,” he said. “I was the first person in the world to see him under the microscope.”

Two decades later, that body proved to be fundamental for the development of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a DNA replica process that is the basis of practically all genetic science. And Dr. Freeze went to his research career – also strongly supported by federal subsidies – studying a biological process that plays a role in dozens of rare genetic disorders.

The work of Dr. Freeze, both as university and as a professional scientist, illustrates the unique role for the government in scientific research. Few private investors would be interested in the ailments that affect only a handful of patients, let alone in a project that studies the yellow melma that grows in a national park. Yet that research has produced enormous dividends.

“Some of these things really pay, others are not – this is science,” said dr. Freeze. “The federal government has the ability to risk.

The US research and development system retraces its roots to the Second World War, when the government paid money to university and private companies while climbing to make progress in flight, communications and atomic weapons. These relations are deepened in the following decades while the Federal Government financed projects related to the Cold War and the race to space, as well as research in sciences and basic medicines.

That research has opened the way to many technologies that are fundamental for the modern economy. The Internet began as a network of university computers, financed by the Defense Department. Google started as a research project for Stanford graduate students, Financed by a subsidy of the National Science Foundation. Practically all modern medicine is based, to a certain extent, on the research supported by federal dollars. So it is most of commercial agriculture.

These discoveries, collectively, have helped to push the rapid economic growth of the United States and the increase in the standard of living in the 20th century. A Recent article Published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, he discovered that government investments in research and development represented at least one fifth of the growth of US productivity from the Second World War.

“He had a huge impact on people’s living standards,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, Texas A&M University economist who was one of the authors of the study. “It fueled economic growth to a considerable extent.”

Fears for American leadership

Federal investments in science have fallen, as a share of the economy, since the end of the Cold War, and the work of Dr. Fieldhouse suggests that it is part of the reason why the growth of productivity has also slowed down.

The researchers warn that Trump administration policies could allow science to stay behind. The National Institutes of Health, for example, have proposed to limit the rate to which the Government will reimburse universities and other research institutes for “indirect costs”, such as structures and staff members not linked to a specific research project. In a Working document published on Monday From the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of economists discovered that politics would lead to substantial financing cuts and would influence the institutions with the most successful research programs in an disproportionate way.

“We have had a good race in the last 60-80 years,” said Daniel P. Gross, an economist of Duke University who was one of the authors of the study. “Sometimes you don’t realize the value of something until the end.”

The concerns about the loss of soil in science are particularly acute in artificial intelligence, the technology that experts believe is more likely to guide productivity gains in the next decades. American companies dominated the early stages of the AI ​​revolution, in part because most of the basic work was carried out in US universities.

But the release this year of Deepseek, an advanced artificial intelligence model developed by a Chinese company, has been seen by Some American technological leaders Like a new “Sputnik moment”, a sign that the United States must double its efforts to avoid being behind.

The officials of the White House reject the idea that the administration’s policies are undermining US leadership in science and technology. Vice president JD Vance, in A Speech in Paris In February, he asked to loosen himself for the development of artificial intelligence, among other phases, to ensure that the United States remain in front of China and other rivals.

An official of the White House, speaking in the background, said that the administration’s moves to freeze the subsidies and cut the reimbursement rates reflect an effort to make federal investments more efficient in research, not to reduce support for sciences in general.

Space for improvement

Experts say that there is ample space to reform the federal concession system. The candidacy times for federal funding are progressively longer over the years and researchers dedicate a growing share of their time to the waste intended to ensure that government funds are not wasted.

“When I heard the initial idea of ​​Doge, I thought, maybe there is finally a little impulse or momentum behind doing something here,” said Stuart Buck, director of the Good Science Project, a non -profit organization and newsletter that has been critical of the federal research and development system.

So far, however, Dr. Buck has been disappointed. By focusing on alleged waste, he said, and canceling the projects seen as in the step with the political priorities of the administration-like the research relating to race and gender or climate-dying change and other administrative efforts of Trump could make researchers even more adverse to risk.

“It is only disconcerting for me that so many of these efforts seem to be oriented to be paranoid for any fraud or potential expensive activity,” said dr. Buck. “There are so many examples in which a study that seemed frivolous in a moment ended up bringing to a turning point later.”

Scientists have similar concerns for some of the recent moves of the administration on immigration, including the revocation of the visas of the students involved in political protests.

Immigrants have long played a disproportionate role in scientific and technological progress in the United States. A 2022 Studio They discovered that immigrants represented 36 percent of total innovation in the country since 1990, measured through patents, despite constituting less than 20 percent of the population. Companies are also more likely to start and worked on start-ups compared to native Americans.

“Immigrants are really critical, punches above their weight,” said Britta Glennon, an economist of the University of Pennsylvania who studied the role of immigrants in innovation.

Even without formal changes in immigration policy, he added, the United States could become less attractive for global talents if foreign students and scientists no longer see the country as welcoming. A recent working document From Dr. Glennon and three co -authors they discovered that Chinese students were less likely to study in the United States during the first Trump administration, even before establishing formal restrictions.

“We know that international students respond to how they perceive the labor market in the United States and how much it will be receptive for immigrants,” he said. “It is quite clear that it is not super receptive right now, so it will have effects.”