Last night I noted news which has spread like wildfire through the American scientific and medical research communities. The NIH released a seemingly down-in-the-weeds new directive which has the effect of drastically reducing the federal funds that go to institutions doing basic medical research. Put as briefly as possible, NIH medical research grants are divided into funds for this specific study (“direct”) and funds that go to the institution which houses the lab conducting the study and the infrastructure that makes it possible (“indirect”). That latter category is a major funding source for research universities and academic medical centers. Last night’s directive reduces that stream of funding somewhere between 50% and 75%. The precise breakdown ranges from institution to institution. But that’s a good measure of the level of funding cuts we’re talking about.
From what I can tell, if this stands, it would mean big drawdowns at institutions across the country doing basic medical research, especially in academic medical centers. I hear some people talk about whole institutions closing down or particular universities just closing down their research work in the affected areas altogether. I can’t judge the precise impact. But it’s very big and probably sets in train a course of events — especially if the same model is followed at the National Science Foundation — which cripples the U.S. primacy in the sciences which has been a global reality for the last 70+ years.
I want to address two issues — why, and how likely is this to succeed.
On the why, I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural belief that universities and colleges are institutional loci of opposition to MAGA and Trumpism. So you can knock them out of commission in a broader political and culture war by simply defunding them.
On a secondary level, once you’ve established that these grants are at the political pleasure of the chief executive, they’re a powerful tool for disciplining these institutions. Criticize President Trump and watch half your budget disappear. This latter model is very much the one pursued by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary: discipline the universities and bring them under political and patronage control. Putting it all together, it’s very much a move in a broader culture war, seeing universities as the breeding ground of cosmopolitan, liberal, empirical values in the society. So you either destroy them or put them on a tight leash.
Having reviewed various particulars I think there are at least some reasons to think that the drasticness of the action may make it hard to pull off. There are academic medical centers outside of Boston, New York and LA. They exist across the South and in red states as well. Indeed, these and the universities they’re associated with are often bigger drivers of job support and growth, in percentage terms, than they are in blue states. They’re also where people get treated for diseases. They’re where a lot of people’s kids go to school. So I think you will have major, major stakeholders from Republican parts of the country who will be pushing back on this. Often in this era it’s not publicly. But it still happens. I’m pretty certain that when the administration nixed its across-the-board grant freeze it was because they were starting to hear from key Republicans that they wouldn’t be able to support it because of the impact in their states and districts.
So the point is this. We all get that in our age the Democrats are essentially the party of the universities and higher education. Not simply because of the people who work in that sector but because of people who have college educations and advanced degrees and are acculturated to its values. So on its face, from a degenerate, authoritarian point of view it seems like a no-brainer — knock out the universities. But it doesn’t break down that clearly when you see where these places are located and the role they play in communities around the country.
Then there’s the pharmaceutical industry. Liberals and left-wingers have complained for ages that a big part of Big Pharma’s business model is scooping up the research funded by American taxpayers and then selling it back to the same taxpayers at exorbitant costs. That’s true. But that reality has a nice benefit in this situation, which is that Big Pharma is hugely dependent on that funding too. Big Pharma now does a decent amount of its own funding in this space. But blowing a hole in these institutions’ budgets and possibly crippling them hits them very hard too.
We will be talking more about this. And there are important ways Democrats need to loop this into their broader messaging, a heavy component of which is that through various means, Trump’s biggest push since getting into office is to shut down as much research into finding cures for cancer as he can find. That’s a strong and very accurate message. But I think the White House may have a hard time sustaining this because there are too many corporate and/or Republican constituencies that are hard-hit by it.
