“America First” Means Funding STEM Initiatives

How the Trump Administration is Ensuring Chinese Dominance

Via NASA.

As much as the Trump administration has touted American dominance ideologically, recent budget cuts and administrative barriers have effectively ensured that China will surpass the U.S. in STEM.

America is voluntarily surrendering its lead in the arms race of the 21st century — science and technology.

As a disclaimer, I don’t seek to debate the ethics and future of American nationalism or exceptionalism. Instead, my intention for this article is to highlight how the Trump administration's policy on STEM is hypocritical at best and dangerous to this country’s future at worst.

I think it’s time we have an honest conversation about the lasting effects of our country choosing anti-intellectualism over progress.

Anti-Intellectualism Hurts Everyone

I understand the impulse to dunk on the pretension and exclusionary tendencies of academia as much as the next guy.

I was born in a rural area that reeked of the fetishization of the blue-collar class. Cold beer, dirty hands, a relationship with nature, a thankless 12-hour shift, the smell of cow shit (the things bad country music is made of)… it provided a sense of relatable patriotism, a patriotism that conflated exhaustion and exploitation with virtue, a patriotism that drew a line between “us” and “them”.

It was all too easy for the alien world of hoity-toity city elitism, to which the scientific class belonged, to come off as spoiled and disconnected from what actually makes the country run.

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Now, as a graduate student, it can sometimes feel like this career has loaned itself to being as reclusive and uncharismatic as possible. Many of us end up in science and math because we’re not the most socially adept — we just want to do our work. And often our work is not all that sexy. So, trying to repair our image in the eyes of the rest of the country is no small feat.

That said, the majority of the technological and scientific progress we’ve enjoyed is a result of research that occurs in academia, not private industry.

As much as the ideals of American capitalism would have us believe that supply and demand are sufficient engines of innovation, the invisible hand has never once funded basic research. While the free market is good at turning scientific breakthroughs into products, it is not so good at producing these breakthroughs in the first place. Foundational science has no immediate buyer and is therefore a bad investment — it answers questions whose commercial value won’t be legible for decades. The free market is like a car: we’ll probably get to where we need to go, but someone else has to build the road.

If we hope to compete with other leading powers, the road to innovation is paved with grant funding.

There is no better illustration of what that funding looks like when implemented (what it looks like when a government decides to win the scientific arms race) than what China has been building.

On China

In contrast with that of the United States, China’s approach to technological dominance is clear, state-directed, and very generously funded.

In 2022, Xi Jinping declared that China must treat “science and technology as our primary productive force”. China’s total R&D expenditure exceeded $500 billion in 2024, an 8.3% increase over the prior year, with basic research spending growing even faster at 10.5%. While China’s overall government spending grew just 1% in 2024–2025, science and technology spending grew 5%, with the 2026 budget planning a further 7.1% increase.

This additional funding is going to new national laboratories, escalating research goals, creating new domestic academic journals, and significant grant expansion.

America’s response to this has been to close ourselves off. While China recruits globally and aggressively tries to retain researchers, the Trump administration has made hostility toward foreign researchers the norm. By revoking visas and freezing out international researchers and students, we show the world that the best and brightest are more welcome in China than in the United States.

Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Erodes the Supremacy of American Institutions

A fact that always makes me proud to be an American is that we have more Fields medals than any other country. How is that possible when other countries notoriously outperform mathematics in our K-12 system?

Immigrants.

The United States became a haven for mathematicians and scientists during World War II, when prominent figures fled Europe:

• Albert Einstein: Fled Germany in 1933; joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
• Enrico Fermi: Italian physicist who left after Mussolini’s racial laws threatened his Jewish wife; led the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
• John von Neumann: Hungarian-Jewish mathematical genius who joined Princeton’s IAS, where he made incredible contributions to computing, game theory, and quantum mechanics.
• Kurt Gödel: Austrian logician famous for his incompleteness theorems; escaped via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Princeton.
• Paul Erdős: Hungarian-Jewish mathematician who left Hungary and became the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century.

I previously wrote an entire article on the history of mathematics and fascism, if you’re curious:

[embed]Mathematics and Anti-Fascism How and Why the Boot of Fascism Supresses Mathematical Progressmedium.com

In short, immigration is a key part of our success in science and mathematics.

The prestige of American institutions, such as Princeton’s IAS, is entirely dependent on the work from the best of the best, not just nationally, but globally.

When we make the United States less safe for immigrants, we signal to the greater STEM community that this is not the place to do research, that we value nativism over progress.

Now, a researcher choosing between Shanghai and San Francisco is not just weighing visa policy, obviously; they are weighing resources, culture and language, infrastructure, and the sense that their work will be supported. So, the question of immigration and the question of funding are, ultimately, the same: do we intend to compete in the scientific arms race?

What Federal STEM Funding Actually Does

As mentioned earlier, the breakthroughs that define our modern economy are almost always the downstream result of federal research dollars.

• Early federal investment in neural networks and cognitive science laid the groundwork for modern AI.
• NIH funding produced CRISPR gene editing and mRNA vaccine technology, the latter becoming the basis for the fastest vaccine rollout in human history.
• DARPA funding essentially built the internet.

And the returns we collectively reap from these investments in science are quantifiable and significant: every $10 million in NIH funding generates three additional private-sector biomedical patents, and federally funded research accounts for roughly 25% of all business-sector productivity growth since World War II.

To thrive and grow, a society must have research opportunities primarily concerned with the question of “how does this work,” rather than “how can we make money off of this”.

Much of the most revolutionary research comes with a high degree of uncertainty and a longer timetable, making it unattractive to private investors. The government is essentially our only option (within our current economic system) to fill that gap.

The talent pipeline is also very dependent on federal support. Federal agencies fund approximately 42% of all STEM PhD graduates (including me) through fellowships and research assistantships. Thus, without federal investment, nearly half of the country’s advanced STEM workforce would not exist. Students interested in post-graduate education would either have to pursue something else or, crucially, flee to a country that prioritizes scientific progress.

Researchers as a Scapegoat

Trump has made punishing his political enemies a defining feature of his second term (and of his political platform as a whole). The American scientific community, which leans substantially more left than the general population, has proven a convenient target; research funding has been used as a lever to force universities to comply with the administration’s political agenda.

• Columbia was hit with a $400 million funding freeze after the Trump administration accused the university of failing to control campus protests.
• Harvard had over $2 billion in grants frozen after refusing to comply with a list of demands, such as eliminating DEI programs.
• A federal judge even found that the Trump administration’s move to strip the National Center for Atmospheric Research of its supercomputing infrastructure was not a policy decision at all, but retaliation against the state of Colorado for refusing to pardon a Trump ally.

There’s this pervasive idea in modern American conservatism that scientists are pampered elites leeching off of the rest of us. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The overwhelming majority of federally funded science is unglamorous and not necessarily politically polarizing (and therefore not politically convenient). Subjects like disease biology, materials engineering, agricultural research, and weather modeling are not all that sexy or controversial, but they are crucial for our society to function.

When J.D. Vance called university professors “the enemy” in 2021, and Trump described colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs”, it became very clear that people who are just trying to do honest science are becoming scapegoats.

Researchers have described self-censorship, derailed careers, and a generation of young scientists losing faith that the United States values their work.

A country that treats its scientists as enemies to be punished is putting itself last.

What Current Cuts Will Actually Cost Us

In 2025 alone, the Trump administration froze or terminated more than 7,800 research grants from the NIH and NSF combined. This represents $2.3 billion in NIH funds and $700 million in NSF funds that had already been awarded and were mid-execution.

Now, these cuts were not distributed randomly: the administration disproportionately cancelled projects on topics it dislikes, including misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious disease, and research involving underrepresented groups.

The administration’s ideological reach extended beyond funding levels into the language of science itself. PEN America compiled a list of more than 350 words and phrases flagged or banned from federal research grants and government communications. This list began with predictable targets like “diversity” and “transgender”, but expanded to include “women,” “disability,” “elderly,” “Native American,” and, remarkably, “safe drinking water.” The NSF alone flagged 108 keywords for additional grant scrutiny. Researchers received 24-hour notices to alter the language of already-approved grant titles or risk losing funding, and an analysis of NIH data found that more than 700 multiyear grants changed their titles between 2024 and 2025, removing words like “equity,” “disparities,” and references to specific racial and gender groups.

Enforcing ideology was the primary goal, instead of, say, ensuring scientific merit or societal need.

The Trump administration’s ideology has significantly changed the face of research. More than 25,000 people left federal science agencies in 2025, many at early career stages, through a combination of mass layoffs and resignation incentives.

Meanwhile, research on cancer, Alzheimer’s, vaccines, and HIV is already being affected. This will cost human lives.

Congress has largely pushed back, rejecting the administration’s most aggressive proposed cuts, but I have already seen the effects of this damage firsthand. Grants are drying up by the day. PhD programs have fewer available slots and fewer applicants. There’s a culture of scarcity permeating academia.

Zooming Out

There is a growing rift in the Republican Party between its “America First” wing and the traditional hawkish establishment. The America First faction is identifying one of the most defining issues of our time: American foreign policy is not designed to benefit ordinary Americans, and our political class uses nationalist rhetoric as cover for decisions that serve a much narrower set of interests (their own).

The problem is that “America First” as currently touted doesn’t follow its own logic. A movement actually committed to American strength and self-sufficiency would treat the siege on our scientific institutions as an act of national sabotage, because that’s what it is!

But the battle isn’t lost yet. The labs are still standing, many of the researchers are still here, and the infrastructure that made American science the envy of the world has not yet been dismantled. I like to think that my country can rise to the challenge, that is, when we finally decide to take it seriously.

We need to fund research instead of wars, welcome immigrating scientists instead of terrorizing them, and appreciate the people building the future instead of painting them as the enemy.

American greatness is not a birthright. Our greatness is the result of investment, of curiosity, of diversity. It is time we start pushing these ideals to the forefront of our policy.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to help support me through graduate school, you can buy me a coffee.