We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower
The
president’s assault on science dangerously undermines America’s superpower
status.
MAX BOOT
June 3, 2025
On June 14 — the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army and, not
so coincidentally, the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump — a gaudy
display of U.S. military power will parade through
Washington. No doubt Trump thinks that all of the tanks and soldiers on display
will make America, and its president, look tough and strong.
But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the
president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly
irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its
long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science,
and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.
Since the 1940s, when the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the
University of California played a central role in the Manhattan
Project, the engine driving U.S. economic and military competitiveness has been
federal support of research universities. That partnership has produced most of
the key inventions of the information age,
including the internet, GPS, smartphones and artificial intelligence.
Federal support of university research has also made
possible the success of the United States’ world-leading biotechnology and
pharmaceutical industries. Advances enabled by federal support include
magnetic resonance imaging, the Human Genome Project, LASIK surgery,
weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, and drugs that have saved countless AIDS and
covid-19 patients.
Now Trump is sabotaging a research and development pipeline
that is the envy of the world. The Trump budget would cut the National
Science Foundation budget by 55 percent. Already, the U.S. DOGE Service has
terminated more than 1,600 active grants from the foundation, worth $1.5
billion. According to the New York Times, the science foundation’s
grants this year are being disbursed at the slowest pace in at least 35 years.
The NSF directly supports 357,600 researchers and students; many of them
will now be out of luck.
It’s a similar story at the National
Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
Food and Drug Administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., who subscribes to an array of crackpot health theories, has already reduced
the HHS workforce by 10,000 people with buyouts or early retirements, and now
he intends to lay off an additional 10,000. Adding insult to injury,
Kennedy wants to prohibit government scientists
from publishing in the leading peer-reviewed journals. “CDC clobbered,” one official told The Post. “The agency
will not be able to function. Let’s be honest.”
These budget cuts are hitting hard at America’s — and the
world’s — leading research universities: Johns Hopkins is losing $800 million; Columbia, $400 million; the University of
Pennsylvania, $175 million. No school has suffered more than
Harvard University, which has lost more than $2.6 billion in federal funds.
Indeed, Trump says he wants to eliminate all of
Harvard’s federal contracts and give the money
to trade schools. This is populism gone crazy.
Valuable as trade schools are, they will not be making breakthroughs in
fighting Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, strokes, sickle cell anemia or other
diseases that are being researched at Harvard.
Then there is the administration’s assault on foreign
students. Trump tried to kick all international students out of Harvard — an
order halted by a federal judge Thursday.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has vowed to retaliate against U.S. allies
that censor free speech, has sought to expel foreign students for expressing
views he dislikes about the war in Gaza. The State Department announced last
week that it was temporarily halting all interviews for
foreign-student visas, and Rubio said the agency would “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students
in the United States “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or
studying in critical fields.”
As The Post noted, about 100 million people
belong to the Chinese Communist Party, most for careerist rather than
ideological reasons. And of the 277,398 Chinese students currently studying at
U.S. universities, more than 110,000 are pursuing degrees in math, science and
engineering — all areas of weakness for the U.S. educational system.
Expelling a substantial number of foreign students, who
typically pay full tuition, would deal another heavy blow to universities
already reeling from federal budget cuts.
It isn’t just universities that benefit from the presence
of foreign students — so does the entire country. According to the Association of International Educators, the
more than 1.1 million international students in the United States create about
$44 billion in economic activity and 378,000 jobs. And then there are the
benefits they deliver after they graduate, assuming they are allowed to stay in
this country. The National Foundation for American Policy reports
that one-quarter of all billion-dollar U.S. start-ups have a founder who
attended a U.S. university as an international student.
The United States’ competitors are salivating at the
prospect of gaining an edge in technological competition at our expense.
France, Australia and Canada are throwing out the welcome mat to scientists who can no
longer do their work in the United States. But the biggest beneficiary is
likely to be China. Even before the Trump cutbacks, China was already catching up to the United States in
scientific spending; its research and development budget has been growing by an
average of 8.9 percent a year, compared with just 4.7 percent in the United
States.
In March, Beijing announced a $138 billion government fund that will
invest in cutting-edge fields such as AI, quantum computing and hydrogen
energy.
So while China is investing to win the economic (and
potentially military) contests of the future, Trump is undercutting long-term
U.S. military and economic competitiveness with his anti-intellectual animus.
The weapons systems that will be paraded in Washington on June 14 won’t be of
much help to the United States in the future if it falls behind in the R&D
race with China. I fear we may be seeing, as suggested by China expert Rush Doshi, the suicide of a superpower.
