Bonus | Cuts to Science Funding and Why They Matter

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special bonus solo episode of the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We don't do special bonus solo episodes here that often. In fact, we never actually have. We did one special bonus episode that was not solo with Tara Smith, the immunologist back at the beginning of the pandemic, just to do a quick refresher or course on viruses, Covid, things like that. Haven't done any since. But this right now is a time when we're in a similar kind of important historical thing going on that I can actually add a little bit of expert knowledge to. So I thought I would chime in. And that little thing going on is the attempt to cut the budgets of not just various government programs. That's certainly what is going on, but in particular, science funding here in the United States. So this is now February 2025. For future listeners. Donald Trump got elected president, and he's been president for, I don't know, a couple weeks now. Elon Musk, his buddy, has been put in charge of something called DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. And the Department of Government Efficiency is in a weird legal status as not really a government department, not really approved by Congress or anything like that, but has been looking at different government organizations, different actual offices and directorates and so forth agencies, and slashing their budgets.

0:01:34.2 SC: And ordinarily this would be done by a law, but they're trying to do it much faster than that. So they're doing it by executive order handed down by the president. Now, there's many things to be said about this, and I think that it's perfectly okay to be either, well, very emotional about it, let's put it that way, either cheering it on or wailing in sorrow that this is going on right now. People have different reactions to what is actually happening. And I'm all in favor of emotional responses. I think that politics matters. I think that it is important to be invested in it in a deep way. So that's perfectly okay. But it's also important to make the case, or just talk in a very explanatory way to people on either side of the issues. So I have my own views here, and they will come through completely clearly in what is to come. But mostly what I'm trying to do is explain, explain why the system works as it does, explain why I and many other people think that some of the changes that are going on are very, very bad. Not necessarily trying to persuade anyone.

0:02:44.9 SC: Persuading people is a whole nother thing. But the intended audience of this podcast is. I have heard that things are going on at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. I'm not really sure what the details are. Could you please explain to me and help me understand why scientists in particular are kind of more than a little bit alarmed about all of this? It may or may not work. You know, sometimes one's own opinions come through, and that's absolutely something that will happen here. But I hope that if there are any people out there who are cheering on what is going on in the government right now and wondering why anybody would be against it, and they're not really very familiar with things like indirect costs and other such technical terms, hopefully this will be helpful to them. And even if you're already on the same side as I am about this, maybe knowing some of the details will be helpful to you. I will try to keep it short. I will probably fail. I usually do. But I think it's important what is happening right now, to say the very, very least.

0:03:52.9 SC: This is very, very important. So the more light we can shed on what's happening, the better. So let's go. One of the difficulties in having a conversation like this is that the actual situation in what is happening in the government and the cuts to science and elsewhere is changing very, very rapidly. Not only are more executive orders and proposals being floated, but the ones that are out there already are being challenged in the courts. So who knows what will actually survive from moment to moment? Which that's one of the reasons why, rather than talking about this or that specific cut, I'm more interested in giving background knowledge about the whole situation, just to say very, very quickly there's been one very specific thing that has happened, which is that the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary agency that funds biomedical and health and biology more broadly, research here in the United States has been told that they need to cut what. What are called indirect costs. And so I'm going to talk a lot about what indirect costs are. But just so you know, right now, a typical indirect cost on a grant charged by a university to the federal government.

0:05:25.9 SC: So when the government gives a grant, then they also give indirect costs, and that's a certain amount of the grant in total, maybe between 60 and 70%, 50%, something like that. And I will explain what that means. And this number, something like 60% has been chopped down to 15%, which is much, much lower. So overall, a huge cut to spending on grants from the National Institute of Health. That's an actual thing that happened. There's also a rumored thing at the National Science foundation which is that two things. One is that employees of the National Science foundation have been told to expect that about half of the workforce is going to be let go at the National Science Foundation. And the rumor, which hasn't come true yet, as far as I know, is that the overall NSF budget is going to be cut by 60%. That is 60%. So one way or the other, the very short version is lots of funding cuts to scientific research in the United States.

0:06:30.1 SC: And again, long story short, I'm going to try to make the case that this is completely devastating to to science in the United States for all sorts of reasons. Not only is less research going to be done, but there's going to be a huge change in how the United States is thought of by our partners and competitors, for that matter, in other countries. When this news came down, I was actually traveling in England and I was talking to some physics professors, presser friends, and uniformly without being prompted, when this topic came up. They said, yes, they have students who are thinking of either going to graduate school in the United States or taking up a postdoctoral position in the United States, and they are now going to strongly recommend that that not happen, that they don't go to the US I personally have an NSF proposal that is under review. It was always the science was good, but the area that I fit into is not a comfortable fit for anyone particular NSF subdivision. So I was hopeful that it was going to go through, but I wasn't absolutely sure. And now I'm pessimistic that that will go through. I will confess that when Donald Trump got first elected in 2016, a lot of people said, ah this is the end of the United States, the end of democracy.

0:07:52.7 SC: I should leave the country. And some people actually did leave the country. I never felt that way at all. I thought that even if democracy was under assault, it was my job to stay here and fight that kind of thing. This particular set of changes to science funding is the first time that the thought of leaving the country flickered seriously across my mind. I'm not going to do it. At least I should say the chances that I would leave the country to move somewhere else to do science are very, very small. But this is the kind of thing that would make that seem like a reasonable thing to contemplate. You can't do science without the money, or at least you can't do science nearly as well as it's being done other places, I'm sure many other people are to be much more straightforward about it and just leave. If this is the kind of thing that goes on. My proposal would have paid for one postdoc and one grad student. So it's not exactly a huge amount of money, but that is one postdoctoral researcher and one grad student fewer that will get training and education here in the United States.

0:09:00.7 SC: So that's the kind of situation we're in. Multiply that by much bigger projects, much more down to Earth research than what I do. You know, I think about the foundations of quantum mechanics and the origin of space time, other people out there trying to cure cancer and Alzheimer's disease and things like that. So all of these are under serious threat. Just to put in context, let me give a very broad overview of how this works here in the US like many other governments, like many other countries, the way that we fund scientific research is not something that some people, some wise men or women sat down in a room 200 years ago and planned out. It grows up over time, somewhat organically. So we have various agencies here in the US Various departments that fund science. The National Institutes of Health, which is a big one, maybe the biggest one, I'm not sure is one that will be... That is one of the targets of what is going on right now. The Department of Energy actually puts a lot of money into funding physics research. It's an outgrowth. The DOE is an outgrowth of the Atomic Energy Commission from the Manhattan Project and then the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, et cetera.

0:10:16.2 SC: So what used to be funding for building nuclear weapons is now the funding for doing particle physics. Okay. So I have been mostly supported by grants from the Department of Energy my whole life, although I've had some NSF funding, also the National Science Foundation. Then there's NASA for astronomy, National Oceanographic and Aeronautics, no. Atmospheric Administration. Right. NOAA for oceans and climate, and things like that. And basically the National Science foundation is not an umbrella organization that includes all of these. Rather, it's a separate agency that catches everything else. So the National Science foundation is basically the catch all, if you don't fit into any of those more specific categories. And the vast majority of active research scientists in the United States are funded in this way. Some get money through foundations, but overall that's much less foundations in the sense of private philanthropic foundations like the Simons foundation, the Sloan foundation, the Keck foundation, what have you. So the typical thing you do is there's some deadline, there's some Research grant proposal announcement on call for proposals, as it is called. That goes up on a website at the government agency. Agency. And then all the scientists who fit into that category scrambled to write grant proposals.

0:11:38.1 SC: And the grant proposal is supposed to say what you're going to do, how you're going to spend the money, what you already have done, your cv, all the various things that might go into judging whether or not you should be funded. And if it goes through, then you're funded for typically something like three years. Every year you have to turn in a report saying what you've done. At the end of three years you can ask to be renewed. You may or may not be. Some agencies are better at consistently renewing you than others. Sometimes it's an adventure, okay? And the things that these grants pay for are, like I said, postdocs and students, that's a very, very common thing. They will pay for your travel sometimes. So if you go to international conferences, again, not any travel you want to do, like you can't go on vacation and charge it to your NASA grant. These are all controlled by the university. And then the university is overseen by the agencies. So every dollar that you spend is very carefully tracked through the system. You can buy equipment. You know, if you're a theorist like me, your equipment might be buying a new laptop every five or ten years or something like that.

0:12:45.1 SC: We're kind of cheap, we theorists, obviously medical researchers or any laboratory research is much more heavy on the equipment spending. There's also summer salary. This is a system that I don't know if a lot of people know about, but if you are a successful grant researcher, you can ask for some of your salary to be paid by the grant. So summer salary, it's just like one or two months of your salary will be paid through the grant that you apply for. The basic philosophy of this, like, why do they do it this way? Like, aren't the universities already giving them salary? So the way it works is the university promises you only nine months of salary. And if you're not good at doing research, then that's all you're going to get. You're going to get your nine month salary and you can have it spread out.

0:13:29.6 SC: One, sorry, 1/12 of your nine month salary every month. That's if you want to do it that way. But it's technically only your nine month salary and you're off for the summer. And most academics work over the summer anyway. If you're in a well funded area and you want to, and you can and do get your science done, then you can get summer salary as well.

0:13:52.4 SC: So it's basically a little incentive system for tenured faculty member to continue to be good at doing research. The tenured system is wonderful in many ways. It has its flaws in other ways. What you want is for professors at research universities to continue to be active doing research and their jobs are guaranteed. They have tenure. Right. Of course you can raise or lower their salaries. Lowering is rare, to be honest, unless you're really in times of austerity. But you can give people extra salary bumps if they're doing very well. You can give them promotions and titles or fancy endowed chairs and things like that. But for the typical run of the mill researcher at a university, getting summer salary is one of the big motivations for just putting a lot of effort into doing research. And therefore it increases the amount of research getting done. Now, indirect costs are the other big part of your grant proposal. So indirect costs or overhead costs as they are often called. The idea is that you have a budget. Typically these are very complicated. The individual agencies have very, very specific ideas about what your budget should say. And so any halfway decent research university has people whose job it is to help the scientists with the budget.

0:15:13.8 SC: Because scientists are not very good at writing budgets and things like that. And honestly, they shouldn't be. I don't want to worry about the amount of taxes that need to be covered or et cetera, et cetera. This is not what I'm trying to spend my time doing. So there's a person who helps you write the budget and then once you do the budget, so once you know you're doing like I want to hire one postdoc and one grad student and I want to buy a computer and I want to go to one foreign trip or something like that, that's a budget. They tally up what the amount of money would be, and then the university takes that amount and asks for that amount from the agency plus an extra amount called the indirect cost or the overhead cost. So if I asked for $1,000 from the NSF and the university had a 60% overhead rate, that would mean that the University asks the NSF for $1,600. So they ask for the thousand that I need for my budget and then they ask for 60% over and above that. And this is so just one common mistake.

0:16:17.9 SC: Elon Musk made this common mistake in a tweet which indicates that he doesn't really understand the system. It is not that I apply for $1,000 and the university takes 60% of that. That is not how the math works. If I apply for $1,000, I get $1,000, but the university in total gets an extra 60%. So $1,600. So that is not. That is. That is not 60% of the total. The $600 they get is not 60% of $1,600. That's how the math works. Okay, why is this happening? Why does the university get this indirect cost? Of course, universities like money. They always like money. They're going to try to get money however they can. It's a negotiated amount of money. It's not that there is some fixed amount that is given to every researcher who applies for a grant. It depends on the details. The point of the indirect cost is that if you actually want to do the research, you need more than just what you are budgeting for. You need, of course. So if I want to hire a postdoc, good, I hire a postdoc. And the money I get from the grant proposal will basically pay their salary and their benefits, such as those are maybe a bit of travel and research money for them as well.

0:17:34.6 SC: But then they need an office, right? Both they and I need offices, and we need offices in a building, and the building needs to have lights and heating, and there needs to be that person who knows how to do the budget, who is an administrative person, who the university hires. All of these costs, just to sort of the phrase that is typically used, are keeping the lights on, okay? That is supposed to cover a lot of things up to and including building the building where the research is done. That's what the indirect costs are for. As a matter of fact, as a matter of empirical fact, it is not enough. Typically, the indirect costs do not cover all of the actual costs that the universities pay for. I mean, there's this idea that by having huge grants come in and having all these indirect costs or overhead come into the university, the university gets rich. And indeed, if you get huge amounts of money because you're like curing cancer or something like that, if you're James Allison, who has a center named after him at the University of Texas, and you've brought in a lot of grant money, then you can build a gleaming new building full of fancy equipment and things like that.

0:18:45.0 SC: But typically, if you dig into the details, the indirect costs you get from the grant aren't quite enough to cover the costs of those fancy buildings and fancy equipment and anything like that. And the reason why is because universities want that stuff, they're willing to lose money on the grants that they bring in overall because of course they get a nice building, a higher research profile, more prestige and all of those things. And also we like to think that the people running the universities are motivated to do good research, to drive science forward and to learn new things. So it's not just lining the pockets of administrators or anything like that. The indirect costs are used for very down to earth things. And finally about, I should amplify on the negotiated part, different universities and different projects within universities will have different indirect costs associated with them because we know what the indirect costs are for. They're for, let's say that you want to build a building.

0:19:44.0 SC: Obviously my puny little grant is not anywhere close to doing that. But if you add up my puny little grant among many puny little grants, then maybe university can think about, oh, okay, we need to, it's time to build a new building to get some research done. Building a building in the middle of the Midwest is cheaper than building it in downtown Manhattan. So if you're negotiating with NYU or Columbia and they need a lot of money just to keep the lights on, as it were, they can make a good case for getting additional indirect cost funding. Whereas if you're at the University of Nebraska, where the research is good but the land is cheap, your indirect cost rate is going to be low. And in particular if you, furthermore, I should say if you're doing a lot of your research elsewhere, like you're doing your research at CERN, okay, so you're an American particle physicist, but a lot of your research is going on in Switzerland, then you're going to get a lower indirect cost rate because a lot of your facilities are somewhere else. Okay, so that's what indirect costs are for. Now if you're someplace like Johns Hopkins, which is one of the top places doing medical research in the United States, in fact, I think it's true that Johns Hopkins has the largest amount of grant money coming in for medical research in the US and their indirect cost rate on NIH grants, National Institutes of Health, which is where most of that money comes from, is the high 60%.

0:21:11.4 SC: So let's just call it 70%. Okay, between 60 and 70%. And the proposal is not the proposal. The executive order is to say let's cut that to 15%. So for every thousand dollars that you get, Instead of getting $600 for indirect costs, you're now getting $150. So very roughly speaking, the total amount that you're going to bring in is 30% less, roughly speaking, than you had before. That's going to be absolutely devastating for bio-medical scientific, broad, more broadly research here in the United States. If you lose 30% of your income, you don't lose 30% of your lifestyle because there are things called fixed costs, right? Again, think literally about your income. Unless you're blessed enough to be quite wealthy and just drawing from your trust fund for the rest of us, you have a monthly income, right? And if you were told tomorrow that your monthly income got cut by 30%, you still need to pay rent or mortgage. Perhaps you need to pay utilities, gas, food, maybe if you're young, you have student loans. If you're old, you have health care costs. None of these are going to go away. You can't cut those by 30% unless you literally move and then you have new moving expenses to take into account so you don't end up getting 30% fewer cupcakes.

0:22:44.6 SC: If you get a 30% cut in your monthly income, you get much, much worse than that. And universities are the same way. Just suddenly losing 30% of the money that they were planning for in this planning process grinds everything to a halt. The buildings don't go away, the lights don't get turned off. In Pennsylvania. There was just a response to this. So just put this in context. This particular rule, this particular ruling executive order that says we to change the NIH's indirect costs from 60 whatever percent down to 15%. This was put out there on a Friday afternoon, on last Friday afternoon, with the proviso that it goes into effect Monday. And it doesn't go into effect on future grants, it goes into effect on all grants. So you may have thought that you have a grant with a certain amount of money coming in and no you don't. If this executive order is taken seriously, the state of Pennsylvania, or sorry, Penn State, I should say Pennsylvania State University told all of its medical researchers who are on NIH grants to stop spending all of their money. They're not allowed to spend any money anymore because every money that's coming in from the grants is needed to pay fixed costs.

0:24:05.8 SC: And likewise, this is going to be true for people who are proposing new grant proposals or contemplating what research they can do, et cetera. Okay? So it is an absolutely devastating blow to the way that science gets done in the United States. Likewise, if the rumor is true and the National Science foundation gets cut by 60% overall, so the NIH is in effect Getting cut by 30%, NSF, the rumor is 60% cut, it's lights out. There's no more research being Done. Funded by the NSF, roughly speaking. So what are the legitimate concerns that might lead you to want to do something like that? We should take them seriously. It's not that they're just randomly chosen. There might be perfectly good reasons why you want to cut money from the budgets of NIH, NSF, et cetera. The most obvious one is you are convinced that there are inefficiencies, that there are bloats, that there is waste, maybe even corruption or fraud, I don't know, in the budgets of these grant proposals. Sure. This is absolutely something to take very seriously. It is endemic in bureaucracies that there is waste. Okay, corruption, not so much. I don't know what.

0:25:21.5 SC: Or even fraud, not so much. There's occasionally scientific fraud, that's absolutely true. But there is not really a lot of room for fraud in the sense that there is money allocated for no good reason. Like if someone is doing fraud by saying, I would like to build a new superconductor and then they fake the data. That's one thing that happens and we try to catch it. But no one says I would like to get a grant to buy a yacht or something like that. These are just not things that happen. In fact, the money that is spent in scientific research through this grant proposal system is some of the most carefully scrutinized spending on Earth. I've been on both ends. I've been on the proposed for a grant end and I've also been on the grant review end because at a place like the National Science foundation, for example, you have a whole bunch of people involved in this process. So there are employees of the NSF. Okay.

0:26:22.4 SC: But there are also a lot of people who are scientists, full time university professors who give some of their time to the NSF to help organize a particular subfield of science or something like that. And then when the grants come in, it's not just the boss of the NSF who reads the grant proposals and says, let's fund this one, let's not on that one. There are review panels. It's much like getting a paper published in the peer reviewed literature. Your grant proposals are peer reviewed. And I've been on a number of peer review panels for NASA and for NSF. And I forget whether I did the DOE or not. I think DOE like I reviewed proposals, but it wasn't an actual panel. So you can review proposals because they send them to you, much like a paper. You read the proposal and then you write up a report on how good you think it is, and you send it back to the DOE. That's one way to do it. NSF actually gets people in a room. Here's five scientists in, let's say, theoretical physics, and they have a whole bunch of grant proposals and theoretical physics, and they each read all the grant proposals and they come into the room and they discuss who should we give money to. Here is your budget, here's how much you get, here's how much you get to give away.

0:27:36.8 SC: There's always more requests for money than there is money, Unsurprisingly, the one I was on most recently. I remember it quite vividly just because for all the cynicism you might want to bring down to processes like this, I was just so very impressed with the seriousness with which my colleagues and hopefully I took our job. In other words, there's all sorts of ways that you might think this system is prone to biases one way or the other. I want to give money to my friends, or I want to give money to famous people, or I want to give money to the research areas I think are most interesting. Right? All these things. Things. You can't just give money to your collaborators because there's a list of who your collaborators are and you're not allowed to evaluate their grant proposals. But I think that this particular time, the amount of money we got to allocate was about half of what was being asked for overall. Right. So roughly speaking, 50% of the people that we were looking at were going to get funding. And I have no idea. I think this, this number, this 50% varies a lot.

0:28:42.2 SC: I think that there are some areas within science where it's much lower than that. Maybe there are some where it's much. But what I was impressed with is there were some super famous, successful scientists who applied to grant, put in grant proposals that we looked over and we did not give them money in favor of some younger person who was frankly doing more interesting work and also, frankly, put more work into the grant proposal. You know, you want to see, not... It's weird, especially in theoretical physics, writing a grant proposal, because if you're an experimenter, when you write a grant proposal, you say, I'm going to build this experiment and here's why I'm going to build it, and here's what I hope to see, and here's how we'll analyze the data. It's all quite straightforward. A theoretical physicist like myself, I don't know what I'm going to be working on six months from now, most likely. So the traditional thing to do is to sort of say you're going to do the research you just did or the research that is almost done and you haven't quite published yet. And then you know, say, oh, and I will keep going, okay? And everyone understands this.

0:29:44.7 SC: It's kind of playing a game because it's what you should do. Because what better way do we have of judging how good research someone will do in the next three years than to look at how good the research was that they did do for the last three years? You make some compensation for the people who are very, very young. And indeed many of these programs, DOE and NSF being the ones that I'm most familiar with, but there's special carved out funding opportunities for brand new professors. Okay, so you're not competing against people that have a track record, but I was looking at ones against people had a track record. And yeah, a lot of the famous people were just phoning it in, frankly, not all of them. Some of them put in the work. And if you phoned it in, we didn't give you money. So. And I thought that was the right thing to do. I thought it was very, very admirable that we didn't just say, okay, let's see whose names we recognized and then give them money. It was a sincere effort to give money to what seemed to be the most worthy grant proposals that we saw.

0:30:50.7 SC: Now there is bloat. There is excess spending on things like administration and things like that. Now why is there excess spending on things like administration? No one intrinsically likes spending money on administration. It's usually because the government bureaucracy has invented all sorts of hoops that you have to jump through in order to not have waste and fraud. Right. To make sure that you are complying with government regulations. That's what leads to the administrative bloat. Now you can say, I don't like administrative bloats. We should cut those administrators. I personally would be very persuadable about that. Many of these hoops you have to jump through are super duper annoying, frankly. But then you are opening yourself up to actual waste and fraud because you don't have as much oversight from the administrators, right? So that's a conundrum that you're in. And this is sort of the eternal bureaucratic conundrum about that. Now you might also think that beyond simple inefficiency and bloat, that's one thing that you might be concerned about. A second thing you might be concerned about is specifically spending on aspects I'm trying To just phrase this in a value neutral way, aspects of the administration that you are not particularly fond of.

0:32:18.5 SC: Maybe for example, just to choose an example of random, you don't want a lot of money being spent on WOKE initiatives, DEI or what have you, okay? There are in various regulations and things like that, exhortations on the part of the agencies to get the scientists to think about things like diversity and equity and inclusion. Indeed, in NSF proposals in particular, which is the one that I'm most familiar with, having just done one, you need a whole section not only in the research you're doing, but on the broader impacts. Now typically the broader impacts have nothing to do with DEI or anything like that. There's some scientists saying, well, I'm going to give a bunch of public lectures or I'm going to turn my lecture notes into book, or I'm going to make a series of YouTube videos on science. Okay, they're broader impacts in the sense of outreach and things like that, but they could in principle be broader impacts in the sense of lifting up minority students or women students or what have you into science. That is one of the ways that you could try to get broader impacts in there. But you know, what can I say? It's a necessary thing to have as a section of your grant proposal that you're going to do this.

0:33:38.2 SC: It's never the thing that either the proposing scientists care about the most or the review panel cares about the most. This might be 5% of what they care about, but 95% of it is caring about your science. They might care about your budget. Like, are you asking for too much money? Like, how many postdocs do you really need? Things like that. But mostly it's about how good the science is going to be. And furthermore, it's not like you're proposing to hire a DEI person or something like that. The university might have such a person. And in principle, I suppose they might be ultimately paid for by indirect costs, as that is one of the things that indirect costs call for. But again, in the real world, the fraction of the administration that goes to things like that is tiny. It's real. And you can have a debate over whether or not it's worth it or not, but you're not going to cut the budget deficit significantly by getting rid of all that stuff. So certainly cutting the NIH indirect costs from 60 some percent to 15%, in other words, cutting the overall NIH grant giving budget by 30% is much, much bigger than any amount that is being spent on anything one could conceivably categorize as being devoted to social justice kinds of goals.

0:35:01.2 SC: So again, is that really what you want to do or is that the excuse you're using to do something else? Okay, another way, another reason. I'm trying to list the legitimate concerns that might lead you to want to cut the money to NIH, NSF and elsewhere. Another one is that you think in a perfectly good faith way that universities are not the place to do science. That's absolutely a legitimate idea. You could have. You know, it's far from obvious that universities, which you might think of as a place that is devoted, that are places that are devoted to educating young people, are not supposed to be the places which focus on research. You know, I once wrote a blog post years ago called the Purpose of Harvard is not to educate People. And part of it was about people were complaining that like Harvard didn't accept many students and it had this huge endowment and things like that I was just trying to point out that Harvard's self image is not as an educational institution. And this is not a criticism. The top research universities in the United States are driven by research that is most of their reason for existence.

0:36:19.4 SC: They also do educate students. Caltech is an especially lopsided example of this. The number of undergraduates that go through Caltech is ridiculously small compared to the overall amount of money that goes through Caltech. Caltech is a research institution. There are also universities and colleges in the United States that are devoted to educating undergraduates and even graduate students. But research institutions, the most famous universities that you can think of think of themselves as place to do places to do research. And maybe you don't think that should be the case, right? Maybe you think that you should separate out those two things and universities should be devoted to educating and somewhere else should do the research. Again, this isn't something that happened through planning necessarily. It's sort of I think one could argue the current system is mostly a post World War II creation. Especially on the science side of things, where you have research being done with budgets. Right? Like universities always did research in some sense. Isaac Newton was at Cambridge University, right? But there wasn't a lot of budget going into Isaac Newton. He basically got the salary from, I don't know what Cambridge asked Newton to do.

0:37:33.0 SC: Maybe he was just able to sit around and think great thoughts. But the typical bargain is a university hires a professor, they pay them a salary, they ask them to teach some courses and they encourage them to do research. That is the typical job of a University professor at a research university. And the alternatives would be either you have directly federal funded research institutes, which you do have, some of you have national labs like Fermilab and Los Alamos and things like that, or you have private research institutions, either complete research devoted institutions like the Perimeter Institute or the Santa Fe Institute for that matter, or you have research being done by corporations, right? Like Bell Labs in the old days was the classic example. Google funds a lot of research, Microsoft does as well, etc. But none of these are overall competing really with the vast scope of university based research here in the United States. Why is it that universities are chosen as the place to do all this science? Well, like many things like this, I think you could make a very good argument that to simplify something very complicated, it's cheaper and more effective to do it that way.

0:38:49.4 SC: If you are starting a research institute, you pay for everything, right? I mean, you pay for the buildings, you pay for the salaries, you pay for the equipment, you just pay for everything. And what, what do you get for that? Where does the money come in for doing something like that? Obviously it could just be federal grants, that's true, but then your indirect costs, as it were, would be super duper high. That is not a way to make them lower. That is absolutely a way to make them higher because the only income that such institute has is from those grants. Whereas a university sort of has a more diverse portfolio of both activities and incomes and expenditures. You have students coming in, some of them pay tuition, some of them get loans, but one way or the other, some money goes to the university. You have alumni who sometimes donate a building or some money to pay students or things like that. And best of all, not only is it cheap and efficient, but it has a side benefit that the world's best scientists are in constant interaction and close contact with young students who are interested in learning things.

0:39:54.7 SC: When scientific research is being done at universities, we take it for granted now that a student at a good university can be taught by or do research with the best scientists in the world. And this benefits both the students and the scientists. There is no doubt scientists are kept lively and innovative by ideas being brought to them from students. Students get mentorship and advice and research projects and experience, not to mention knowledge about science and all of those things. So I think that you can critique the idea that most scientific research should be done at universities, but it would be a hard critique to make because that aspect of the system you can absolutely critique different, possible, different particular, specific things within the system. But the basic idea that scientific research is largely done at universities by researchers who are professors, who teach courses and also get government grants has been super duper effective. It's a big reason why the United States has been, for three quarters of a century at least, the leader of scientific research in the world, by a lot. So I don't think that that's a good criticism, even though it's a criticism you can imagine making.

0:41:16.3 SC: Finally, of course, you might just think that scientific research or the particular scientific research that's being done is not that important. I'm going to have a tough time being level headed and objective about this one. But yes, you might think that this or that thing is just a waste of money. I mean, maybe you think that what I do about, think about quantum mechanics or the origin of space time is a waste of money. Maybe not. Mindscape listeners mostly, but you never know who's going to wander in here. There is a tradition, especially in the United States, of making fun of silly sounding scientific research. It goes back, I mean, when I was growing up, it was William Proxmire, who was a senator, who used to hand out the Golden Fleece Awards. And it's a very simple, not very profound game to play. You take all of the scientific funding, all the grant proposals that have been funded by the government, and you comb through them for titles that sound kind of goofy, goofy, that sound like a waste of time, right? And then you take them out of context and you hold them up to public scrutiny and you laugh at them.

0:42:23.5 SC: This is what Proxmire did. This is what is going on. Ted Cruz and others are doing it right now. It's again, not a very highbrow game. It's kind of cheap and usually it involves a great amount of lying and disinformation. So there was an example going around very recently where someone said said, and I don't know who said it. I'm not going to try to remember who said it because I might get it wrong. There was this grant to like a million dollars was being spent on buying a trampoline for shrimp. That was an example of wasted money by the National Institutes of Health or the NSF. I forget who it was. Now you dig in closer, you actually read what is going on. And of course that is entirely nonsense, right? There was a grant that involved trampoline for shrimp. It was done by a researcher who was trying to understand shrimp locomotion. You know, how different animals move and walk. This entirely sensible scientific question. He built A little gizmo for the shrimp to bounce on, to watch them walk. And the first time he did it, he did it out of his own pocket because no one was going to give him money to do it.

0:43:36.5 SC: He got some good results. So he applied for a grant and he got $1,000 to build a very high tech shrimp, shrimp walking perambulation machine or whatever it was. It was never a million dollars that was just made up or that was sort of grouping all of the grants that university got or something like that. But people got a good chuckle out of it. And more importantly or devastatingly, people had reinforced the idea that a huge amount of the spending is just on bs, right? That it's not spending on really good scientific research. It's just the weird fantasies or peccadillos of this or that research researcher. I just, that's not a case that anyone can possibly make very compellingly if they know what is actually going on. Again, the research that is done is being funded because of very strict procedures of peer review in a very competitive environment. If you just propose things that are completely silly, you're not going to get any funding. The NIH, in particular the National Institutes of Health, which is the target of the giant reduction in indirect cost spending, they're trying to improve our health. They're literally doing research that tries to cure cancer and fight Alzheimer's and fight leukemia and develop new drugs that will prevent us from getting these diseases in the first place and live longer and be healthier.

0:45:08.3 SC: It is slightly surprising to me that that institute, the NIH, would be a target or the first target for the these kinds of cuts. I think science matters. I'm not going to kind of bore you with me telling you why science matters. If you're listening to me for this thing, this podcast, you probably think that science is important. So maybe you think that, maybe, maybe you do think that it's not important. If you think that science overall is important, then these cuts are going, are absolutely devastating, are truly going to.

0:45:44.0 SC: Ruin science here in the United States in a very deep way. So that would be my case for why you might on the one hand think that there are legitimate concerns that would lead you to cut the funding. And nevertheless, I think that there are not. Maybe that at least helps you understand where I'm coming from. But there is a bigger thing going on here that it goes far beyond just the particular cuts to NIH or NSF or whatever. It's the process, it's the procedure that is being used to decide what is being cut. And here it's harder to be completely objective and apolitical because people live in different spheres of information.

0:46:28.5 SC: And what is going on, what is very clearly going on from some person's point of view simply isn't happening from some other person's point of view. And it's difficult to have a level headed conversation. But again, what I think is pretty obviously going on is that a lot of these actions are being taken unilaterally by the executive branch, by Donald Trump and his administration, in particular by the Department of Governmental Efficiency, the Doge panel, which is not a department. Departments are supposed to be made by Congress and this was not. And so it is headed by Elon Musk and he hired some young people and they're being put into different government agencies and being given access to all the information in those agencies and making cuts which are then being promulgated through executive orders. So I have some reasons why this is not, the right way to do it. Even if, even if you were completely unpersuaded by anything I just said, even if you think that there is huge amount of waste in the way that we fund science and it shouldn't be done at universities and the science is mostly nonsense anyway, even if you think all of that, the way it is actually happening is hugely problematic.

0:47:52.0 SC: So for a few reasons, number one, it's super illegal. There's simply no question that this way of doing. Things is not, not legally kosher. The idea of doing it through executive order is kind of nonsensical. So for those of you who are not super familiar with what an executive order is or with how the United States system works, we have three branches of government. We have the executive, the President and all the agencies below him. We have the Legislative Congress and we have the Judicial Supreme Court and all the other appellate courts below them. So these branches of government have responsibilities. The responsibility of the legislative branch is to pass laws which are ultimately signed by the President. But the drafting of the laws and the passing of them is done by Congress. And part of that is what we cheerfully call the power of the purse. The ability to allocate money to be spent is a power that is entirely vested in Congress. In the legislative branch, it is. You don't have to read very far into the US constitution to see that happening. It's in Article 1. It's the first thing that the Constitution says, spending money is Congress's job.

0:49:14.7 SC: Now, footnote here. There's a little thing that if you're really into this kind of thing you can read up on the Internet called impoundments. Impoundments are supposed to be examples where the President says, I know Congress said we should spend some money, but I don't think it's the right thing to do, so I'm not going to do it. This has been a thing, this has been a power that existed in the United States for a long time. It was typically used rarely and very judiciously in cases where the President, for some good reason, thought that Congress was abusing their power or just made a mistake. Now there's. If that's true, there's an obvious opening for corruption and misuse. And guess who started being corrupt and misusing it? Richard Nixon. So he was the founder of a lot of these methods of corruption and misuse in executive power in the history of the United States. And so, yeah, he started using impoundments for personal political gain. And Congress noticed this. So Congress cut down. Congress makes the laws. And Congress passed a law which was signed by later presidents saying, no, there's no more ability to do that.

0:50:21.7 SC: And this was upheld by the Supreme Court. And in the particular case of very specifically the idea of indirect costs on government grants, there are very, very specific laws passed by Congress saying that the executive branch is not legally allowed to not pay them, to not give these allocated monies to the people who they were allocated to. So, so 100% clear that the executive branch passing an executive order to say, we're not going to pay these monies is in violation of the law. Now, of course, if you've been following politics at all, and US Politics in particular, and in recent years in particular, you know that what is illegal is sometimes a somewhat subjective matter. If the courts don't go along and Congress doesn't raise a fuss, then you can do whatever you want. Then nothing is illegal unless someone comes along and says something about it. As I speak on the Wednesday after this executive order was put down, there have already been two major lawsuits about the NIH indirect cost order, one by a bunch of attorneys general of various states, I think 22 states of the 50 states, basically the states that have Democrats as their attorneys general have sued the federal government to prevent this chopping off of funding.

0:51:52.5 SC: And the judge quickly moved to say, okay the cut in funding cannot go through right now. Let's think about it. But you can't put it through right now. I'm going to temporarily stay this. Now, this leaves 28 states where it's still going on, including Pennsylvania, which I mentioned, mentioned has that issue now. So doing on a state by state basis is a little problematic for various reasons. The other lawsuit is coming from universities, Johns Hopkins is one of them, and that would be nationwide. If it goes through, I don't know what the status of that lawsuit is. So, on the one hand, the government is. The executive branch is doing a bunch of illegal things and you might say, well, the courts will stop them. But all this takes time and resources, and there aren't that many courts. And not all the courts are good, et cetera. So this is certainly not a guarantee that it's going to work. I started saying something about executive orders. I got sidetracked. If Congress passes laws, what is the need for executive orders at all? Right. Because if you look at the executive orders being passed down and signed by Donald Trump, it looks like he's inventing laws and just passing laws all by himself.

0:53:09.7 SC: If you were told that the United States is supposed to be a democracy, not a monarchy, how does he get to do that? How does the president, not just Donald Trump, how does any president, have the ability to just make up laws and pass them? The answer is that executive orders do not have the force of law. The idea of an executive order, which is a thing again, that it is a part of the process of making and enforcing laws here in the United States, is that Congress passes laws and the executive branch enforces the laws. And in order to do so, they need to interpret what the laws mean. One of the fun things about the law is that you pass a law and there are words in it, but then different people will disagree on exactly what it means. So the whole purpose of an executive order is to explain or to put out there in easy to read form what the executive thinks Congress meant by the laws they passed past. It's not to make up new laws. That is just not what you're allowed to do as the president. And you're not the king, you're the president.

0:54:16.7 SC: So once again, if you have an executive order and people don't agree with it, they can go to court. But that costs money and time and waste and all those things we're supposed to not be in favor of. So this particular procedure, and we haven't even gotten into the idea that the DOGE Agency is not official, not vetted by Congress, not established, or anything like that. I'm just not going to get into those details. I'm talking about the specific example of the cuts in research funding at the NIH and elsewhere. Clearly 100% illegal. And I Think it's bad to do illegal things if you're the government. Others might disagree. The second procedural problem is that it's being very badly implemented. As I said, this particular cut to NIH funding was announced late Friday and it started Monday. This is not the way you should do it, but it's part of the charm for people who are in favor of it, and I get that. Part of the reason why people are in favor of it. There's not been some countrywide rebellion against Donald Trump's actions. In many opinion polls, people are roughly saying, yeah, look, he's decisive, he's doing things, he's shaking things up.

0:55:34.4 SC: That sounds good to me. Okay. I get the lure of being decisive and shaking things up and getting things done, because bureaucracies are bad, man. Bureaucracies get in the way. I don't like bureaucracies. I can tell you all sorts of stories about bureaucracies making very, very silly decisions. There's a sort of bureaucratic mindset that loves rules written on paper and forgets what the purposes of those rules were and what the actual human goal behind writing the rules in the first place was. And it can be enormously frustrating dealing with bureaucrats who forget why they're there, other than to just fill in the proper forms and do the right things. But that doesn't mean that anything goes. It doesn't mean you can just change things without thinking about them. I mean, I guess this was a separate point. I want to blend it into this point. The fact that these particular ways of making these cuts are just not carefully thought out. Out. As I said, Elon Musk, who's in charge of the whole thing, didn't even understand how to do the percentage calculation of what an indirect cost was. He clearly had never heard of indirect cost before, and now he and his friends are just cutting it by a huge amount.

0:56:48.0 SC: I think that's bad. I think that the power to have all this influence over a huge amount of scientific research should be taken more seriously, should be given thought, should be, if it's going to be implemented, implemented carefully and in a way that doesn't disrupt things. There are horror stories out there, and I'm not going to repeat them here. But look, this is medical research. If suddenly the funding gets cut off to your medical research, there are a bunch of trials for drugs and devices and therapeutic procedures that have to be stopped in the medical middle. This can not only be devastating for the research being done, but literally for the people who are being part of the trial. Right. It's the cliche is that the Silicon Valley motto is to move fast and break things. The things being broken are people's lives in a very real way. If you were serious, if you really wanted to say, okay, we're going to cut spending because we thought there was too much waste and fraud and excess fat that we want to trim, fine. But you, if you are serious about it, then you should be patient enough to do it correctly, to actually look carefully at what is being cut and not just make up some number and say, in two days it's going to happen, okay? It's a sign of a lack of seriousness that they're not taking the time to do it.

0:58:19.7 SC: I would claim that the process actually matters. And this is, in this day and age, a controversial claim. Think about it this way. There can be two different views one might have on virtue and politics. One view is that there are two sides, my side and the other side. And I have the belief that my side is virtuous and the other side is not virtuous, okay? And it could be right or left. Either side could very well have this belief. And there are plenty of people who believe that everyone on their side is more or less virtuous. Everyone on the other side is more or less not. But there's another view which says we can have political disagreements, but we should recognize that people on both sides, some of them have respectable reasons for believing what they believe, and other people on that other side are susceptible to real corruption. Corruption. Okay. If you think, as I do, that both sides are susceptible to making mistakes, not just outright corruption, but even just making mistakes, then running around unchecked and breaking things is not going to lead to less of that. If you think that human beings are imperfect vessels and they need to be balanced between being allowed to lift themselves to their greatest heights, but also brought back from their worst impulses, then you have to do things carefully.

0:59:57.4 SC: When you're talking about trillions of dollars of research money being spent on really important scientific discoveries, you can't just say, well, I'm going to put the power in the hands of these people and let them go without any transparency, without any accountability, without knowing what's going on, without them being experts, any of these ordinary, typical procedural guardrails. Does setting up bureaucracy lead to bloat? Sure, absolutely. But the alternative can be worse, and this might be an example where it is worse. I think fundamentally there's an issue about thinking that your group knows how to run things and no one else does. And this is not a Group in the sense of Republicans or Democrats. Maybe you think that only Silicon Valley billionaires know how to run things and nobody else does. Fine. Once again, fine. Everyone roughly thinks that. I think that many people think that their kind of people would be the best at running things and other kinds of people would not be good. But that's not how we're supposed to be doing things in the United States of America. It's not the spirit of democracy. Democracy in a world where there are different groups and every individual group has the opinion that only their group knows how to run thing and no one else does.

1:01:18.5 SC: The only way that can work for everyone is if people in all the different groups share power. People in different groups have to be able to say, I think that my group knows the best, but I have to get along with other people in the world. And therefore, occasionally, even though I think it should be done one way, if everyone else wants it to be done the other way, we should do it that. That way we have to be able to cooperate, we have to be able to compromise, we have to be able to share power. It's all very cliched and boring. It's not nearly as edgy and fun as breaking things, etc. But these are issues that matter. These are issues for which you have to be grown up. You have to really sit down and say, okay, if we're going to do this, if we're going to get rid of the waste and the fraud, we have to do it responsibly. And I would think that if you go deeply into what is being reported on what is happening, you can see that it's not just that the people who are making these decisions are not well informed or expert level knowledge about the parts of the government they're making decisions about.

1:02:26.8 SC: But the fact that so much unaccountable power is in a small number of particular hands, which you might worry is an obvious opening for corruption, is actually an opening for corruption, is actually happening. There are inspectors general and oversight organizations, or I should say oversight. What is the right word? Agencies, I'm not quite sure now we're out of my expertise zone. But Elon Musk's companies are overseen by various parts of the federal government and the people doing those oversight are being fired. There's a set of rules here in the United States that we're not allowed to, that companies are not allowed to bribe foreign officials. Okay? Those rules have now been removed and very openly because it said, well, we have to level the playing field. If other countries allow their companies to bribe foreign officials, then we should allow ours to. And not just corruption, but kind of silliness in the rush to get things done so quickly, things are just being done badly. The nsa, the National Security Agency, like one of the most hardcore parts of the federal government, super secret things going on, et cetera. They were given instructions to delete web pages.

1:03:53.7 SC: And here's the important point. Okay, the NSA deleting web pages, that's fine, but which web pages are going to delete? If the web pages contain any example of a certain list of forbidden words, they had to be deleted. This is not carefully thought out, right? This is just smashing and burning. This is going to cause real damage. Not to mention that it's just kind of silly and immature. So the point I'm trying to make here is that if you, in a principled, good faith, good natured way, think that we should be cutting government waste, then this isn't the way to do it. There are ways to do it that are much more effective. If. Look, if you feel the world is bad and you just want to get a thrill from watching it burn, then I don't know what to tell you. Then you might very well get a thrill from seeing what is going on right now. But if you want to improve the world, then you should be absolutely appalled by what is happening right now. I'm a believer that science, the attempt to understand the workings of the natural world through the proposing of theories and the testing them experimentally, is a huge driver of progress and progress in a very broad sense, economic progress, social progress, cultural progress.

1:05:13.4 SC: And that scientific progress is enabled by a system of support. It doesn't happen all by itself. We're in a world where the low hanging fruit has been picked scientifically. You can't just sit in your backyard and invent new wonderful scientific breakthroughs without data and experiments, not to mention collaboration and cooperation with other scientists, we have, over the course of decades, built up an extraordinarily successful system for pushing scientific progress forward on a vast variety of different fronts. And that system is being dismantled in front of our eyes. One thing I haven't even mentioned yet, I should have mentioned it, but very quickly. You know, science takes time and time means trust and reliability. If you're building a scientific experiment, the United States already has a slightly sketchy reputation when it comes to keeping our promises. Famously, the Superconducting Super Collider was a large particle physics experiment that was international in scope. Other countries put money into it and we built it halfway. And then we Canceled it. This makes people a little nervous. We can still pull it off. You know, we built LIGO, the Gravitational Wave Observatory. NASA has done an amazing job at building satellite observatories.

1:06:33.3 SC: We're pretty good partners in the CERN and elsewhere. But as I started out by saying, if you're a scientist in another country and you're looking at the United States, and whether or not this week's brouhaha causes damage or not, you have to be thinking to yourself, I can't trust these people anymore. Who knows whether there will be funding. Could you imagine being a. I mean, try to literally imagine being a postdoc. So this means you just got your PhD from some university. Imagine, like, and you're in Italy and you got a PhD, and you got a PhD in physics, and you got an offer to get a postdoc at Princeton. And you've never left Europe. You know, you've traveled around Europe a little bit, but you've never been in the United States. You pick up your life. You're in your mid-20s, you pick up your life for a not especially highly paid job in the middle of New Jersey doing physics research. You probably speak English because most physics students speak English, but it's not your first language. It's not the easiest thing in the world. You have no idea about a lot of the specific ways of doing things, either at Princeton or the United States more broadly.

1:07:50.2 SC: You can't bring a lot of stuff, right? You're flying across, so you're like packing a couple suitcases, and that's your life. You're uprooting your life. You're bringing it to somewhere that you've never been before. And now you're very worried that at any moment your entire salary and benefits are going to simply be cut off. Will that happen? I don't know. But is it a plausible scenario given everything we've seen? It's absolutely plausible. Why in the world would any talented young postdoc that has the opportunities to do things elsewhere, why would they come here? Why would students come here when we're making it more and more difficult for foreign students to get visas and so forth? The United States has been the leader of the world in science. And that's not important because I think that the United States should be the leader. It's important because we've been doing great. It's not that we're the leader. It's that we're showing the world a way to be great at this. And now we're giving up on that. We are putting aside the effort, the what it takes, the responsibility involved in leading the world in scientific discovery. To me this is one of those world historical moments that we're going to remember for a long time no matter how it might go.

1:09:14.3 SC: Things are changing very rapidly. I don't know how it will go but decisions are being made the consequences of which will reach very, very deeply into the world right now and for many, many years into the future. I hope things can quickly be fixed. It's not just a matter of cutting someone's grant and getting rid of some WOKE DEI administrators. We're putting devastating blows to scientific research in all sorts of ways as I hope I've persuaded you of. I don't know if I can say that I'm optimistic. I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing but I still hold out hope that we will set things straight, that these issues can quickly be fixed and that we turn out okay.