SCOTT TURNER: America Spent More Than $1 Trillion On Science For Nothing

In 1950, the United States government decided that it would henceforth be the primary funder of university research, in the hope this would usher in a new age of scientific discovery. This radical experiment has now run for 75 years. Federal disbursements to university science since 1950 amount to roughly a trillion dollars.

But that great new age of scientific discovery? While universities understandably proclaim the program has succeeded, the truth is that the results have been meagre. Or worse.

Federal support has mostly fed the growth of a rent-seeking cabal of universities, funding agencies, a monolithic academic publishing industry, and of course, politicians. While discovery happens, it’s not at all clear that federal funding has had much to do with it.

For any failing experiment, a question inevitably arises: do we keep it going in the hope that more data will yield a hoped-for result? Or is it time to pull the plug? Asking the question provokes fury within the science ecosystem. Science would be doomed! Promising cures for cancer would be snuffed out! Labs would go dark! Denialists of all sorts would gleefully promote ignorance.

American science, its boosters tell us, is the envy of the world, the key to our prosperity and national security. If anything, the boosters say, we do not spend enough because our major geopolitical rival, China, is beating us. American scientists published about a half-million scientific papers in 2022, while Chinese scientists published about a million. To maintain American scientific leadership, this “publication gap” needs to be closed, which of course can only be done by giving universities more money.

It’s all doom-mongering by the self-interested. None of this would actually happen. For many decades prior to 1950, science flourished without lavish federal subsidy ($100 billion in 2024). It can do so again.

While the United States needs to maintain a vigorous pace of scientific discovery, that pace isn’t set by the Washington bureaucrats who dole out the grants. It is set by creative and ambitious individual scientists whose work draws the attention of foundations and entrepreneurs. The greatest scientific advances of the last few years, for example, have been in artificial intelligence and were achieved with minimal help from the government.