Introduction
Many individuals who have relied on legacy media (CNN, ABC News, Washington Post, NYTimes, etc.) could not digest Donald Trump’s victory in the recent US elections of 2024. While it was a given that celebrities and Hollywood would not endorse him, it came as a surprise when scientific magazines and journals also endorsed Kamala Harris, participating in propaganda against Trump.
Notably, Scientific American, a renown science magazine with its legacy of 179 years, stated that this is the 2nd time it is having to endorse a leftist candidate for president. So, when was the first time? Their first time was 4 years ago, when the magazine endorsed Joe Biden. On both occasions, the magazine justified itself by trying to prove that Trump is unscientific and does not function as per scientific evidence provided by so called experts to support science, health, and environmentalism.
Also, Nature, a highly reputable scientific journal first published in 1869, openly endorsed Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Their justifications were a replica of those by Scientific American.
It appeared that a highly reputed science magazine and a scientific journal were expected to sway voters opinions on who the better candidate for US president was. But was this their job? Why are they not busy publishing real science instead?
Nature Medicine, part of the Nature journal portfolio, also published the controversial article on the natural origin of COVID-19, misinforming millions of people. It took over two years for FBI intelligence reports claiming it was a lab leak to surface or gain prominence. However, scientific publications that claimed it was a lab accident were shunned systematically.
Even Mark Zuckerberg admits to being pressured by the US government to censor content on COVID-19.
Why did the scientific journal or magazine not publish articles/editorials against the sitting government of the United States for its failure to be transparent about critical information on COVID-19 in 2021 or 2022?
Are scientists and experts in the life sciences blind in their support towards the Democrats (left wing)?
Learning the System
Here, we try to address these questions by grounding our understanding of the system.
First, it is important to know that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) of the United States is a government agency encompassing 27 institutes and centers. This means the federal/central government of the United States allocates a budget for the NIH. The budget allocated to the NIH also becomes a source of grants for professors, students, and other academic researchers from universities.
Second is a more ignored aspect of budgets and when they are proposed. If Obama was president between 2009 and 2017 and Trump won an election in 2016, the budget for 2017 and its framework were already proposed by the Obama administration in 2016, i.e., the first year of every new president runs on a budget proposed by the previous president with none to minor tweaks.
With these two points in mind, let’s look at the NIH funding patterns.
NIH Funding Patterns
NIH data plotted above shows how funding has increased in quite a linear manner since 1995.
In 1998, the Human Genome Project, an elaborate project to sequence all of the human genome, received tremendous attention. The funding for this project under the then Bill Clinton administration resulted in a doubling of funding for the NIH. This increased funding was to be delivered over a proposed span of 15 years. However, due to accelerated support, the Human Genome Project was completed by 2003, with budget allocations to the NIH reaching double the amount received in 1998. Despite being a Republican, President George W. Bush approved increased funding for the Human Genome Project in 2001 and helped double the budget of the NIH by 2003. This likely happened because of the promise of the project and its rate of progress.
The NIH budget did not decrease after the Human Genome Project because its success highlighted the potential of biomedical research, leading to increased investment in areas like genomics, precision medicine, cancer research, and neuroscience. Additionally, new initiatives and technologies required sustained funding to translate discoveries into treatments and address public health challenges.
However, another key reason to approve greater allocations for NIH were the following incidents that occurred during Bush’s presidency.
- Following 9/11, government officials in the United States received mail containing anthrax spores.
- In 2002, a coronavirus spilled over from animals to humans in China, leading to the SARS epidemic. The virus later escaped the laboratories in China, Taiwan, and Singapore at least three times between 2003 and 2004.
- Between 2003 and 2004, there were approximately 40 cases of bird flu (H5N1) predominantly in Southeast Asia. Although the avian virus typically infects poultry, it is known to cause severe disease in humans. WHO concluded that the fatality of the virus in humans is about 51%.
These incidents forced the Bush administration to invest in identifying pandemic potential viruses and in bioterrorism. Overall, the NIH benefitted from improved funding during Bush’s term as well.
We see from NIH funding data under the Bush administration that its budget grew quite steadily, even if it did not double like during the Human Genome Project. As determined above, the first year of a new president elect runs predominantly on the budgets proposed by the previous administration. Therefore, budget implemented in 2009 was proposed by the Bush administration.
After Obama succeeded Bush to take office in 2009, a H1N1 outbreak led to a pandemic situation. The H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak began in Mexico and eventually infected about 1.4 billion individuals around the world, causing approximately 500,000 deaths up to its decline in August 2010. The variant of H1N1 was nothing like the regular seasonal flu because it appeared to have elements from pigs, humans, and birds and infected people of all age groups. Going by its classification system, the WHO declared a pandemic for the first time.
In his first term, Obama prioritized economic recovery, healthcare reform, and affordable care, increasing NIH funding after the 2008 recession. But to address national debt, the 2011 Budget Control Act mandated reductions in government spending, with automatic sequestration being triggered if cuts were not met. This led to a 1.5 billion cut to NIH funding in 2013. However, NIH funding began recovering in 2014, with Ebola outbreaks in Africa creating a need for scientific investigation and development of vaccines. Between 2014 and 2016, candidates for Ebola vaccines were in clinical trials. Example: Merck’s ERVEBO. By 2016, the NIH budget reached 31.8 billion dollars.
In his last two years, the Obama administration was able to up the budget for NIH.
Between 2013 and 2014, the scientific community realized that it had trained too many PhDs and became an extremely competitive space for new scientists and aspirants to procure funding. It was also during this period that the Nobel Prize winning former director of the NIH, Dr. Harold Varmus, authored an article to reform US biomedical research. His recommendations included planning for predictable and stable funding of science.
While universities and scientists hoped for more stabilized government funding, they did the bare minimum in implementing other recommendations in the article. This includes “to gradually reduce the number of entrants into PhD training in biomedical science—producing a better alignment between the number of entrants and their future opportunities—and to alter the ratio of trainees to staff scientists in research groups. At the same time, we should do more to help transition outstanding young people with scientific training into a broad range of careers that can benefit from their abilities and education. Together, those changes will lead to an enterprise that is both more flexible and sustainable.”
After winning the election in 2016, president elect Donald Trump took charge in January 2017. In his first budget proposal, Donald Trump gave a major shock to the life sciences and medical communities. According to his budget, funding for NIH saw a cut of about 18% from 31.8 billion dollars to 26 billion dollars.
Trump’s proposed budget cut for the NIH triggered/threatened many in the scientific community. Consequently, in April 2017, students, scientists, and other academics took to the streets in a series of rallies and marches named “March for Science.” Platforms like Facebook also developed a display picture frame with a March for Science logo. However, bipartisan support for biomedical research and its contribution to the US economy forced an increase in funding by 2 billion dollars. The rallies and marches put Trump on his toes, resulting in a consistent increase in budget for the NIH throughout his term.
We can see from above, that the Trump administration saw the greatest growth rate of NIH Funding since the Human Genome Project. Regardless of his yearly hikes in the NIH budget, Trump was labelled anti-science.
By the end of his term as president, COVID-19 forced greater investments into healthcare, medicine, and research. The pandemic gave reasons for individuals in academia to vote for the party that sponsors science without any introspection. Quarantining and isolation, imposed by the Trump administration, further aggravated people. It was an opportunity for other dependent businesses, such as scientific journals and magazines, to chip in with their stories on how unscientific Trump’s administration was.
The scientific/medical community voted for Biden’s victory in 2020 predominantly fearing funding instability under Trump. Ultimately, they ensured a consistent yearly 2 billion dollar hike to NIH funding. In 2024, the budget for NIH is 47 billion dollars, 42% up from its 2017 budget of 33 billion dollars during Trump’s first year as president.
Science vs Economics
From an economist’s perspective, Trump’s proposed cuts to the NIH budget was a classic move from the playbook of free market economics, where reducing the NIH budget meant cutting unnecessary government spending and potentially shrinking the size of the government agency (NIH). Although it would create more competition for funding, it would also help in generating new credible private enterprises invested in science as opposed to government bureaucracy.
If the plan to cut NIH funding had succeeded, scientific output from academia would have decreased, leading to fewer publications. Fewer scientists would have received funding due to increased competition. However, academic science’s efficiency might have improved as a smaller budget could yield similar publication numbers. Similarly, reducing the NIH’s size could have streamlined its functioning by cutting bureaucracy. Those displaced from academia or government roles might have joined established firms or started their ventures, generating employment and boosting the economy. A stronger economy could, in turn, provide more funding for science and create jobs. This perspective is often overlooked by academic scientists and government employees.
Reduced scientific output due to reduced funding would also reduce the amount of irreproducible/unreliable science published in journals, thereby improving the overall credibility of science. This would have also helped improve our understanding of COVID-19 while reducing unwanted confusion.
It’s imperative to note how experts, scientists and academics with a science/engineering background do not understand the economics of useless government expenditure or wastage of taxpayer dollars. Likewise, an economist is incapable of appreciating scientific progress unless tangible outcomes or applications become available. Neither is to blame. The setbacks of COVID-19 and its vaccines, along with unnecessary demands of the NIH for increased funding, are proof to show how the number of scientists in academia is growing without improving their ability to generate employment outside of academia or government agencies. Some of them even published manipulated truths of COVID-19 having a natural origin.
Experts and scientists from U.S. government institutions and academia rely on maintaining this trend to secure their salaries. This dependency also explains why other sectors, like scientific publishing and magazines, promote leftist propaganda without addressing the growing issues of corruption and opacity in academic research.
An outcome of this trend is the increasing unemployment in the life sciences/biosciences industry despite an increase in budget for the NIH under Biden. Pharma and biotech companies have prioritized layoffs as pandemic-related demands have diminished. Meanwhile, startups struggle to raise funds, with the government channeling higher budgets to the NIH but not allocating resources where they matter most. While funding the NIH or academia is not inherently wrong, their outputs are often intangible and rarely contribute directly to the economy. In fact, directing funds into academic science and government research has allowed big pharma and biotech companies to dominate the market without the threat of new entrants or substitutes.
It is crucial for students and scientists to understand the origins of their funding and take accountability for delivering meaningful contributions. Educational programs should encourage PhD students and faculty to move beyond merely producing publications and realize that not all government funding leads to scientific or economic progress. In my view, 80% of impactful contributions come from just 20% of the funding, underscoring the need for focus and efficient resource use.
The dysfunction of Bidenomics has brought the economy back into the spotlight. With Trump’s victory in the 2024 US elections, it is clear that somewhere between 2017 and 2024, the United States went from marching for science to marching for a better economy.
