It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at the University of Queensland to advise the uni admin if we had any projects involving US funding.
It turns out that Australian participants in such projects had received demands from the US to respond, at short notice, to a questionnaire asking if anything they were doing violated any of the long list of Trump taboos: contacts with China, transgender issues, persecution of Christians and so on.
This is front-page news in Australia but I couldn’t find anything else about it except for a brief story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Presumably, though, this is happening everywhere.
Taken in the broader context of the Trump dictatorship, this means the end of international research collaboration involving the US. That will be a huge blow to global research of all kinds. Faced with this prospect, I would have expected our response to start with denial, before working through the other stages of grief.
And that’s exactly what we got from our Education Minister Jason Clare, who put out a waffly statement ending with “We look forward to working with US counterparts to demonstrate the benefits of collaborative research to both US and Australia’s interests.”
But, amazingly, the Group of 8, representing the management of the leading research universities seems to have moved on to acceptance, calling for a turn to Europe saying “Australia must double down on getting a seat at the table to access the world’s largest research fund, Horizon Europe,”
Research funding is only the first stage in the story. As Trump closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become intellectually indefensible, if not physically impossible. In my own field of economics, the central role in the job market played by American meetings will need to end. The central role of US journals will last a bit longer, but can’t be tolerated indefinitely.
In the longer term. Trump is setting out to destroy US universities as centres of intellectual inquiry. That will take a while, and the US will continue to be central in many fields of research for some time to come. But the eagerness of university managers to collaborate with the regime means that time may be short.
The axe is already falling on biomedical research and climate science among other fields. Work in these topics will have to move elsewhere, as will researchers who value their independence. Is such a shift financially and technically feasible, given the resources of what’s left of the free world? On an initial analysis, it’s a task comparable in cost and difficulty to taking responsibility for our own defence.
Looking at cost first, the US government currently provides around $200 billion a year in research funding, and total US R&D expenditure (including commercial R&D) is around $900 billion a year. Combined GDP for OECD countries other than the US is around $40 trillion, so we are looking at somewhere between 0.5 and 2.25 per cent of GDP.
Fortunately, there’s no need to replace all of that, certainly not at once. The areas under most immediate attack are biomedical research, where the US currently funds about $100 billion a year and climate science, about $15 billion a year. Finding this kind of money, along with a defence buildup, will be politically painful, but it is certainly feasible economically. And the long-term payoff to achieving a dominant position in biomedical research will be huge.
And compared to defense, where complex US-centred command structures have been built up over decades, the logistics will be relatively straightforward. Academics are a mobile bunch, and there will lots of them looking to get out of the US, even with lower salaries and, initially, constraints on infrastructure. In any case, they may have little choice.
The rest of the natural science/STEMM sector will presumably carry on relatively unaffected for a while. I’d be interested in comments from people closer to the action on this.
This process won’t lead to a complete break with the US. There was, after all, a significant amount of co-operation between the US and USSR during the Cold War. And, once we accept that the US and China are going to be more alike than different in the future, we can be a bit more relaxed about research interaction with China.
Then, there’s AI. Without taking a position on whether it’s a fad, a technological revolution, or, potentially, The End Of The World As We Know It, it’s vital that these issues should not be decided by dictatorial regimes. As with Starlink, an independent capacity is essential. US firms have spent a fortune, with limited returns so far, and China has shown with DeepSeek that much of their work can be replicated/independently reproduced at low cost. It should not be too hard for the free world to do the same.
Finally, there’s the humanities and social sciences, including economics. These fields have never flourished under dictatorship, as can be seen by comparing China’s near-invisibility in these fields with its leading position in many fields of technological research. They will, inevitably, wither on the vine if Trump’s dictatorship is sustained long enough. But there is a lot of ruin in an academic discipline. We can hope that Trump’s winter will be short relative to the lengthy time-scales of the academic world, and that when it passes, there will be a new spring/
{ 45 comments }
KT2 03.19.25 at 6:16 am
One states trash is anothers treasure.
“SAFE PLACE FOR SCIENCE: AIX MARSEILLE UNIVERSITY READY TO WELCOME AMERICAN SCIENTISTS
UPDATED BY MARIE RENAUDEAU ON THU, 03/13/2025
“At a time when academic freedom is sometimes called into question, Aix-Marseille Université is launching the Safe Place For Science program, offering a safe and stimulating environment for scientists wishing to pursue their research in complete freedom.”
…
https://www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/actualites/safe-place-science-aix-marseille-universite-ready-welcome-american-scientists
“Harvard says tuition will be free for families making $200K or less
The changes go into effect for the 2025-2026 academic year.”
By Taylor Dunn and Bill Hutchinson
March 17, 2025
khttps://abcnews.go.com/Business/harvard-tuition-families-making-200k/story?id=119874241
Academic & research whiplash.
Nathan Lillie 03.19.25 at 6:53 am
The US has told Helsinki University to remove certain words from US funded stipend advertisements, and cancelled some already granted stipends. The offensive words in question were “climate change”, “social equality”, “inclusive society”, and “women in society”. (This from the Ilta Sanomat, which got it from the Hufvudstadsbladet, but my Swedish skills are weak)
Obviously, you can’t work with people who think it is reasonable to tell people just don’t to talk about “women in society”. No one can do real academic work in such conditions. Also, they probably won’t stop at just defunding certain things here and there to be reversed in four years. Unlike Hungary, the US does not have membership in the European Union holding it back from darker solutions. If I lived in the US, I’d leave. The job market for US academics in the rest of the world, probably lots of other professions too, is likely to be glutted pretty soon, but don’t let that stop you. Happy times for recruitment in certain fields.
MisterMr 03.19.25 at 7:39 am
There is no title on this post
John Q 03.19.25 at 9:36 am
D’oh ! Fixed now
MFB 03.19.25 at 10:20 am
This all presumably relates to USAID, which a cursory Googling suggests is the main conduit for US funding of universities elsewhere in the world.
MFB, I’ve asked you before not to commment on my threads. This sort of nonsense is one of the reasons why. Please. nothing more – JQ
Stephen 03.19.25 at 10:50 am
I may be an incurable optimist, but I do try to look for rational grounds for Trump’s actions (which is not at all the same as approving of them). Sometimes, I think I can find them. But as for defunding biomedical science, I’m in difficulty. Two possibilities occur, but I have no great confidence in either. One, biomedical science leads to support for vaccination, which has been opposed by fruitcakes in various countries for centuries. Two, biology leads to support for evolution, which in the US if not elsewhere in the West is widely thought to be a false and godless idea.
Any other explanations?
Robert Weston 03.19.25 at 2:19 pm
Any other explanations?
Necropolitics?
wkw 03.19.25 at 3:21 pm
Stephen @6, “defunding university research” =/= “defunding biomedical science”.
Those grants will just go directly to corporations now, rather than indirectly to them. Then the corporations will privatize the work produced with this public subsidy, using aggressive IP protection.
At “public” US universities, including the one where I used to work, this process has been underway for a long time already, with university presidents openly boasting of efforts to create a “startup culture” among university research faculty. University research itself is increasingly pay-to-play, meaning researchers have had to self-fund their positions (with external grants) with university admin taking an enormous cut off the top for “administration” (i.e., they are rentiers). Links to the private sector are not only encouraged, in some units they are essentially mandatory. “The public interest” is interpreted as “helping business” — which means biomedical and digital tech, in some places Big Ag — and nothing other that that.
So you shouldn’t want to be in business with the status quo US academy anyway. This is how you end up in a dependency relationship with American industry (e.g., Silicon Valley) in the first place.
Neville Morley 03.19.25 at 3:32 pm
I thought the blank title was a powerful rhetorical move…
somebody who remembers 03.19.25 at 4:37 pm
Harvard cutting its tuition for poor kids means nothing. nobody goes to harvard. it doesn’t exist.
the reason for obliterating the public university, all scientific research of any kind is because 40 percent of america has convinced itself that it’s all fraud, waste and abuse because one time they went to a college campus and saw a black person NOT in an athletic jersey. there really is nothing more to it than that
oldster 03.19.25 at 6:45 pm
“… Two possibilities occur…Any other explanations?”
Rufo and Musk have made it clear that they particularly want to stamp out the kind of concerns for social progress that they characterize as the “woke mind virus,” which they believe (falsely) are spread by propaganda and ideology in American universities. They believe that the real enemy on this front is the humanistic disciplines but they also believe — and correctly, as I understand it — that the humanistic disciplines are supported, indirectly, by the sciences. The “indirect costs” that are tacked onto a science grant in the Chemistry department also go to paying the lighting and heating bills for the English department.
So, attacking the funding for the sciences is also a way to attacking the humanities. And indeed, the humanities may be the higher priority target for the current crop of autocrats.
SamChevre 03.19.25 at 6:50 pm
Any other explanations?
I haven’t seen anything in the US press, so this is sheer guesswork based on what US constituencies seem to be influencing US policy.
The first is the US restrictions on experiments on humans, especially fetuses, which are stricter than in much of the rest of the world.
The second is the fact which became public during COVID that gain-of-function research is restricted in the US, but US institutions were funding research in other countries that was considered too dangerous in the US.
Stephen 03.19.25 at 7:52 pm
wkw@8, oldster@11: OK, but JQ originally stated that “The areas under most immediate attack are biomedical research, where the US currently funds about $100 billion a year and climate science, about $15 billion a year … The rest of the natural science/STEMM sector will presumably carry on relatively unaffected for a while”.
Now, I can understand why anyone with an interest in fossil fuel production might not want to fund climate change research, but why is biomedical research a prime target, not other sciences? You don’t really answer that question.
SamChevre@12: I can’t follow your logic here. US restrictions on experiments on humans are very strict THEREFORE trump wants to shut them down altogether. Should that be, Trump wants to shut them down altogether ALTHOUGH restrictions are already very strict? If so, why? And if it’s a matter of all research on fetuses being abhorrent, why go for the entire non-fetal research program?
As I said, I’m an incurable optimist by nature, but Trump is a hard subject for that.
Alex SL 03.19.25 at 8:43 pm
It is fascinating to see the spectrum of how people react to and try to adjust to the new regime in the USA. From many US citizens to governments in Europe or elsewhere, there is an enormous amount of complacency. If it was me in a position of power, I would have for weeks now been convening emergency working groups to figure out (1) what military assets we have bought from the USA that may lack spare parts or have their computers bricked if we ever annoy Trump, (2) what the dismantling of US research means for my nation’s research, (3) what secrets we share with the USA and stop doing that YESTERDAY, thanks, (4) if any of our nation’s government or research data are stored with US companies wait what do you mean “all of them” what is going on are we crazy how did that happen have you never heard about vendor lock-in did nobody ever do a risk analysis on this (primal scream)
On the other end of the spectrum, I was in an online meeting where the possibility of bringing people together in a workshop in the USA was discussed, and a South American colleague immediately raised their hand to say that if it was in the USA, they would not come. Because, well, obviously; a South American early career scientist can afford no comforting illusions about what is going on. I wonder how long it will take ministers and high-level managers outside of the USA to progress from Denial to Acceptance that the USA now cannot be relied on to honour signed agreements and contracts even with supposed close allies.
Unfortunately, I do not think that other countries will pick up the research investment lost in the USA, nor that they will create lots of jobs to pick up US talent. Electorally, most of the ‘western’ world has the choice every 3-5 years between technocratic centrist neoliberals who think that we need to save money because that is the serious thing to do and right-wing neoliberals who think that we need to save more money so that the rich can pay fewer taxes. No help is coming from there. China may grasp the opportunity to pull ahead in some fields its government considers to be of strategic importance, and it has the political will to invest where needed, but that seems unlikely to be of use to many US researchers who want to escape authoritarianism.
Stephen,
My interpretation is that the Trump administration is doing a lot of things that Trump himself, in isolation, would not care about at all. Something like destroying biomedical research is likely coming from those around him. somebody who remembers at 10 has it right, I think. Apart from a general hatred of education, these people really do believe that there is no public good, market failure and collective action problems don’t exist, and everything that isn’t a for-profit company must be a waste. They have about the same level of understanding of how the economy, governance, and science work as a pigeon does.
wkw,
I am highly skeptical that the private sector will pick up public good research that involves a major ongoing investment and a high risk of not ending up with IP that can be aggressively protected. At the very least research on rarer diseases will not be attractive to for-profit companies. Problems like that are why publicly funded research institutions came to exist in the first place.
LFC 03.19.25 at 8:53 pm
somebody who remembers @10 wrote:
“Harvard cutting its tuition for poor kids means nothing. nobody goes to harvard. it doesn’t exist.”
This attempt at humor is actually bullshit. The announced Harvard expansion of
financial aid — which will affect middle-income students (not just poor students, who already went tuition-free, although the number of them in any given Harvard class is pretty small) — is a welcome development, but afaict it has nothing to do with the OP. So
I don’t really know why KT2 @1 mentioned it.
Mike on the Internet 03.19.25 at 9:05 pm
“Any other explanations?”
The neo-Nazi mafia running the US gov’t sees all money as rightfully theirs, and is stopping that money from flowing into anyone else’s pockets. The first phase of the heist is targetting pockets that the Republican support base will not object to being picked (education, science, health, aid, environment, etc).
I think your optimism will be cured by the end of the year.
marcel proust 03.19.25 at 9:08 pm
Do you mean that that America is no longer “the indispensable nation”?
Something, something, “there’s a lot of dispensability in a nation,” something, something.
Hmm, doesn’t sound quite as good as the original
Mashing JQ and Sec Bessent together, it seems like the correct conclusion is that the ROW* needs a detox period from its dependency on the US. This may end up being best for the ROW but for the US I imagine its effect will be similar to that of Brexit for the UK. Let’s hope that the second time is farce and not also tragedy.
*For those not versed in economics jargon, ROW = rest of the world
KT2 03.20.25 at 12:10 am
LFC @15. “but afaict it has nothing to do with the OP. So I don’t really know why KT2 @1 mentioned it.”
I mentioned Harvard as they have a whopping outsized endowment. And have madenmoves to get brains.
Harvard Endowment
$50.7 billion (2023)
“Harvard posts investment gain in fiscal 2023, endowment stands at $50.7 billion”
October 20, 2023
https://web.archive.org/web/20231020010333/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harvard-posts-investment-gain-fiscal-2023-endowment-stands-507-billion-2023-10-20/
JQ; “Fortunately, there’s no need to replace all of that, certainly not at once. The areas under most immediate attack are biomedical research, where the US currently funds about $100 billion a year and climate science, about $15 billion a year.”
Harvard and others are able to ride out;
– any funding cuts, and
– replace any brain drain.
“Top 100 US schools, colleges, universities and institutes ranked by size of endowment”
1. Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Endowment $50.7 billion (2023)
2. Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520
Endowment $31,201,686,000
3. Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Endowment $28,948,111,000
4. Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-0070
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6. Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6303
7. Texas A & M University-College Station
College Station, TX 77843-1248
…
99. Juilliard School
Endowment $1,063,433,596
100. University of Miami
Endowment $1,050,754,203
…
https://collegedb.app/lists/endowment/top
Harvard. Will they soon be buying universities? Juliard for the Rockefeller Centre Band…. sarc
andrew_m 03.20.25 at 12:39 am
It seems to me that that in his rush to provide a title for this post, our host has mischaracterised his argument. The need is not to dispense with US universities, but with the US system of research funding (and more broadly, research direction).
This is a distinction with a difference. My US colleagues in the climate change impacts space are just as much victim/survivors of this vandalism as the rest of global society. And funding Colllaborations that sustain key capacity in US universities is likely to be a good policy choice for other OECD governments.
Stephen 03.20.25 at 11:36 am
Alex SL @14: you may well be right about Trump’s entourage having a general hatred of education, but that doesn’t answer my original question: why hate biomedical science specifically?
Mike on the Internet @ 16: ditto for their overwhelming greed. As for my optimism, it’s certainly tarnished. I contemplated writing a post as Advocatus Buccinae, looking for his better aspects (Hitler was a dedicated non-smoker) but gave up in disgust. Pity, I used to admire the USA. In some ways, I still do, incurable optimist that I am.
wkw 03.20.25 at 3:11 pm
Stephen@11 and Alex@14,
I apparently was unclear. This is not an attack on the biomed sector*, it is an attack on universities. I am not saying the private sector will “pick up the slack”, I am saying that the private sector will be given taxpayer funds for R&D directly rather than those funds being routed through universities first (as under the status quo system of “neoliberal” higher education). Call it “industrial policy”.
Musk/DOGE is going after the payments system — in the parlance of the blog they are “weaponizing” the ACH system — in addition to subjecting NIH/NSF/etc to direct Project 2025 control so that they not only control who receives funds, they can retroactively withdraw funds from any account if the holder of that account does anything that displeases them (which, obv, is a shifting target by design). See this recent article by Nathan Tankus, whose Substack is very useful for understanding what DOGE is doing on a technical level: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-musk-doge-treasury-take-money-bank-account-1235295232/
So the public funds will still be spent, they will just not be spent to build up university research in the sense that has traditionally meant. Two groups will receive the funds: religious organizations (via “charter schools” and faux charities, in addition to doctrinal “schools” like Hillsdale) and private businesses linked to (or favored by) Elon Musk and Donald Trump. There’s a reason why every CEO went to the inauguration and goes to Mar-a-Lago: if they don’t they’ll be shut out, if they do they’ll get subsidy and protection. Similarly, if “universities” (meaning: the presidents, who are chosen by the wealthiest alumni and most reactionary state-level politicians) choose to “reform” themselves into one/both of those groups then they may continue to receive public subsidy, as in Florida and Texas; if they do not then they will not.
Want to access public funds for biomedical research? Must integrate Grok into your workflow, give xAI access to your data, and build power generators for AI compute on site. Must hire workers from the “loves MAGA” list of universities, and those workers will be required to sign a “NDA” that functions as a loyalty oath. Must create “free trade zones” in which normal environmental/labor laws do not apply. Etc.
xAI now has a bigger market valuation than Twitter. One of these companies has near-monopolistic global market share and the other is a very minor player, new on the scene, competing against entrenched incumbents, with an absent CEO whose other companies are going up in flames, and no profitability model. So why should this be?
Rents.
With the caveat that there is an ongoing rift in MAGAland between the Christian nationalists, who are anti-vax and anti-science/education generally, and techbro grifters. The Christianists *do hate biomed, and stem cell research, and IVF, and H1B immigrants, etc. The techbros hate the Christianists. The best way to resolve this internal tension while keeping the coalition together is to make the money harder to track: universities are big, visible, transparent, so give them over to the Christianists. Private corporations are allowed to have trade secrets, so don’t tell the Christians that they are using taxpayer funds to do stem cell research and you might get away with it.
John Q 03.20.25 at 7:15 pm
@wkw US Big Pharma is eager for war on another front, attacking the PBS Australia’s single-purchaser scheme for medicines, which has a popular status similar to that of the NHS in the UK. If anything will shift Australians to seeing the US as an enemy, that will be it.
Alex SL 03.20.25 at 7:57 pm
Stephen,
I am not even sure they are targeting biomedical research specifically. They are also very much targeting the NSF. Perhaps they are targeting all of science, and it just so happens that the USA have, in the NIH, a very well-funded agency specifically for biomedical research, so it gets targeted as a science agency like any science agency is?
wkw,
Not sure I understand, but you seem to be saying that the science funding will still be spent, only it will be spent on nonsense. Okay, no disagreement there, but that isn’t what I meant. You could just as well say that if somebody steals my wallet and spends the money I would have used to buy groceries to buy themselves a new phone instead, “my money is still being spend, only without being routed through me first”. But that is not generally considered a meaningful statement. In this case, simply handing the money to a pharma company or to Musk will not make research into rare genetic disorders happen, just like I won’t get my groceries.
Thomas P 03.20.25 at 9:00 pm
Who did the big owners of biotech support in the election? It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that they supported Harris and this is Trump´s petty revenge. (I don’t have any statistics for if this hypothesis is correct).
wkw 03.21.25 at 2:52 pm
Alex, you wrote: “you seem to be saying that the science funding will still be spent, only it will be spent on nonsense”
No. I am saying that instead of spending money on Indiana University (my former employer), which has close ties to the Lilly Pharma (a company headquartered in Indianapolis) and produces research and trains workers for that company and thus public funds benefit them indirectly, that money will now go directly to the Lilly Pharma directly.
No further pretense of there being a public interest in R&D or basic research necessary. In this way, they can cut out the share of uni budgets that go to non-loyalists and starve the institutions of all but their (debt-funded) business schools and semi-professional sports programs. “Liberal arts” colleges will become in-house think tanks for the reactionary right, this has already happened in the University of Florida system, led by Christopher Rufo (if you don’t know the name yet, you soon will).
From 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/30/florida-universities-colleges-faculty-leaving-desantis
From 2024: https://www.chronicle.com/article/oath-of-fealty
From now: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/florida-puts-university-spending-under-the-00214210
The postwar system of US higher ed is over. It’s not a serious system of higher education anymore, it is once again an institutional apparatus of white supremacy (in a truly Orwellian turn, civil rights laws and affirmative action programs are now being utilized against minorities groups and in favor of white men… the real victims don’t you know).
Some institutions are fighting to remain somewhat as they were, but if they are in a state controlled by Republicans then that battle has already been lost, and soon the losses will be nationwide.
somebody who remembers creationists never gave up 03.21.25 at 5:46 pm
Much of this discussion is like a dog chasing a ball. The ball is already rolling. You need to be looking ahead of the ball. That is, what will the NEXT thing be that’s done to America’s public universities? The answer is to close most of them and fire nearly everyone. If Americans want to take out a loan to pay to their local church to say they have a degree in biology (Answers In Genesis approved!) they will still be permitted to do that for a while, but again, even that is chasing the ball. The next place it will bounce will be to the resegregation and then elimination of all public education. You won’t have a choice but to dispense with US universities because there won’t be any left to speak of that are more than a football team and a business school.
Alex SL 03.21.25 at 9:41 pm
wkw,
Either we are using slightly different words to describe the same thing, or you are much more cynical about universities and much more optimistic about pharma companies than I am. To be clear, I am not in pharma research, so maybe I don’t grasp how hollowed out that sector is in the USA. But in most sectors, and that would include most biomedical research, universities and research agencies do research that for-profit companies would never do, either because it is too basic (an insight about protein interaction that may be relevant to a patent fifty years from now but only after taking five additional steps building on it and on nine other insights that currently seem disconnected and are produced in different labs), or because it is too risky (too many failures have to be worked through before achieving a marketable success), or because even if success is easy, there isn’t enough shareholder profit in it (rare diseases that have no mass-production market, like one-in-300,000-people genetic disorders).
This means that if you pipe the money directly to pharma instead of through a university, certain kinds of research will never be conducted. Thus my analogy of my groceries not being bought if somebody steals my grocery money. It matters who has the money, because the guy who stole my money has different needs and interests than I do. Which is not even a criticism of pharma corporations as such – it is merely an acknowledgements of the purpose for which corporations are explicitly created.
dk 03.22.25 at 7:29 am
God forbid the Australian government should actually fund research properly.
wkw 03.22.25 at 2:02 pm
Alex, ” you are much more cynical about universities”
Yes I am, clearly. Which is the subject of the conversation, no? As somebody@26 correctly notes, the US academy, the way it has been, is already dead.
“This means that if you pipe the money directly to pharma instead of through a university, certain kinds of research will never be conducted. ”
Of course. But other kinds will be. The choice will be made not by what is in the public interest, but what can be privatized.
John Q 03.22.25 at 7:56 pm
“God forbid the Australian government should actually fund research properly.”
International research funding isn’t US aid, it’s a two-way street. The Australian Research Council (equivalent of NSF) funds lots of research projects involving American researchers, just as NSF does with Australians. I’ve done a fair bit of ARC-funded research with American co-authors. Of course, more funding would be nice, but we aren’t freeloading on the US as this implies.
I expect Trump will try to impose conditions on American participation in these project as well.
hh 03.23.25 at 1:13 am
When Covid happened, experts were consulted. As climate change continues, experts provide guidance there as well. (That guidance is noticeably imperfect in both cases, virology and epidemiology are not simple, nor is climate prediction.) The essential game play for the fascists is to attack and delegitimize all other sources of authority. Research $ are not, I believe, the main driver. There isn’t that much money involved.
dk 03.23.25 at 2:45 am
@30 JQ
All of my ARC grants (a couple $M total) involved foreign collaborators, but the condition was always that no money could flow outside Australia – at most, I could use the money for travel to my partners’ sites. All of my US grants (again, a couple $M total) directly funded my research within Australia. That’s a huge difference. “Freeloading” is a strong word, but it’s absolutely not a two-way street.
I would never have been able to fund an internationally competitive lab with just ARC grants, and my colleagues around the country generally agreed that they wouldn’t either. Lack of ARC support was one of the biggest reasons why I left academia, and I was considered well-funded among my peers.
I don’t approve of what Trump’s doing at all, but it’s long past time for us to stand on our own feet in regard to research as well as defence.
John Q 03.23.25 at 10:28 am
DK, I’m surprised by this. I was able to use ARC money to bring US collaborators to Australia, as well as to travel to the US myself.
J-D 03.23.25 at 10:28 am
‘Why should I pay taxes to support schools? The old folks taught me to read, write and cipher and I can do the same for my own young ‘uns.’
wkw 03.23.25 at 3:45 pm
Front page of NYT right now is about DOGE’s actual purpose: to redistribute taxpayer dollars from expert civil servants to Elon Musk’s personal bank account. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/us/politics/spacex-contracts-musk-doge-trump.html
Generalize this to understand what is happening with uni funding: funds earmarked for LGBTQ health will be spent on “conversion therapy” religious programs; funds earmarked for vaccines will be spent on homeopathy. Again: generalize, there is no limit until Trump has bankrupted every entity on earth.
It’s Christmas for grifters, all day every day. No other country should want to be “partners” in this.
Alex SL 03.23.25 at 8:21 pm
John Q,
That still reads as if the money is being spent only in Australia. I think what dk says is that at least some US funding allows paying for salary at an Australian institution or buying consumables for an Australian lab, while Australian funding agencies do not allow paying for salary at a US university etc.? Again, that is my reading of dk, I haven’t looked into ARC guidelines in detail, and I assume that there is also some developmental aid-themed Australian research (capability building) funding that is spent overseas, although presumably not in a country as rich as the USA.
John Q 03.23.25 at 11:48 pm
I paid for a US-based postdoc out of one my ARC grants, so I’m not sure what the story was.
Regardless of the details of the pre-Trump situation, I agree with dk that we will have to be independent of the US in both research and research funding from now on.
dk 03.24.25 at 12:18 am
@36 Alex SL
Correct, thank you. As of the mid 2010s, there were no restrictions whatsoever on use of US funding in an Australian setting. The US paid for several postdocs and plenty of equipment in my lab. The ARC expressly forbade any use of their money overseas except for travel.
@37 JQ
My mistake, I think I could probably pay for travel both ways as you suggest. In any case, travel cost is a miniscule fraction of the cost of running an experimental research lab.
Interesting, must have been a massive rule change in the last 10 years then. Not that the ARC enforces their own rules anyway – some of my Go8 colleagues routinely violated the express conditions of their grants in a very public way with no consequences.
Glad we can agree that we need to be independent of the US in terms of research. There will have to be a shift in priorities as we massively underspend compared to our OECD counterparts: 1.68% of GDP vs an average 2.7%. Makes you wonder if “freeloading” is such an extreme word to use after all.
wkw 03.25.25 at 3:44 pm
“Makes you wonder if “freeloading” is such an extreme word to use after all.”
I’d put it differently and say that the presence of economies of scale are not necessarily indicative of free-riding: it’s not like the US wanted more competition, and in fact the US acted coercively to prevent more competition in many instances. Which isn’t necessarily bad either, if you think of “R&D” as analogous to utilities, then it’s not clear that cutthroat competition is the best means of provision: we don’t want a dozen companies laying plumbing under the street and another dozen stringing up power lines everywhere. Monopolistically-competitive R&D provision might be optimal if it can be regulated. And for 75 years you could argue that it was regulated, well enough.
Not anymore.
As always there is an Acemoglu and Robinson paper: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/varieties_of_capitalism_april_9_2013.pdf
If we adopt that frame as useful for motivating discussion about various reforms, then one Q moving forward is: does the “Old West” have to adopt US-style “cutthroat capitalism” to keep up, or does US-style “cutthroat capitalism” require passive buyers to thrive? If the latter, then can the Old West replicate some of those functions through cooperation rather than competition? If so, then perhaps an Old West shared R&D structure should be created, analogous to NATO but for non-military purposes and technologies, which could coordinate R&D in a similar way that the NSF/NIH coordinates R&D across the US federal state system.
LFC 03.25.25 at 10:08 pm
wkw @39
Out of curiosity, I looked at the abstract of the Acemoglu & Robinson paper. It opens with this:
“Because of their more limited inequality and more comprehensive social welfare systems, many perceive average welfare to be higher in Scandinavian societies than in the United States. Why then does the United States not adopt Scandinavian-style institutions?”
Maybe political culture and history have something to do w/ it? What do, e.g., Lipset & Marks say in It Didn’t Happen Here? Frankly I’m not entirely sure, not having read it, but I wonder whether A & R have. (Didn’t look at their bibliography.)
Skipping down a few sentences in the abstract, there is this:
“A greater gap of incomes between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs
(thus greater inequality) increases entrepreneurial effort and hence a country’s contribution to the world technology frontier.”
This assumes that entrepreneurs are motivated solely or mainly by large material rewards. I would think that, IRL, that would vary depending on particular individuals and perhaps (?) the sociopolitical culture in which they’ve been raised. Maybe not, but I wonder if they’ve considered this. Of course I understand they’re constructing a model and have to make assumptions.
The abstract suggests that if every country adopted a “cuddly” version of capitalism, there would be less total innovation in the world. Even if that’s true, maybe that would be a better state of affairs from the standpoint of average welfare.
wkw 03.26.25 at 6:44 pm
A&R won a Nobel prize for their work on the inputs into, and outputs, from political institutions of various types. They are not historical institutionalists, but they are not allergic to case analysis and process-tracing. I am certain that they are familiar with Lipset and Marks, and would essentially agree with their emphasis on local cleavages a drivers of political change. (I studied in Marks’s department, which is where I first read A&R).
I’m not a big fan but do find their work useful for motivating/framing discussion sometimes. E.g., now: is this an example of free-riding, as many say (and JD Vance clearly believes, from these leaked Signal texts), or is it a fairly rational division of labor? The US “bails out” Europe w/r/t security in exchange for Europe not militarizing the Suez Canal, because that was the original deal in 1956. The US benefits from fewer wars in MENA and the free flow of goods through a global economy it dominates.
“This assumes that entrepreneurs are motivated solely or mainly by large material rewards.”
Is that so unreasonable? Look around. How much is “enough” for Musk and Thiel and Zuck? Clearly not the amount they already have, and their political ideology is transparently materialist: make it easier for them to get rich and they support you, try to aggressively regulate them and they oppose you. They couldn’t get as wealthy as they are in any other country besides the US, which is why they are here and not someplace else. But their products are used everywhere in the world. That is A&R’s point in this paper: that there is a global “division of labor” across national political economies, and the cutthroat capitalists do more market-moving innovation as a result, because they can service the whole market.
It’s not a normative claim, they note that this may well be suboptimal for the citizens of the cutthroat country. But as a basic description it is consistent with many other things, e.g. the Piketty/Saez inequality studies and the recent Draghi report on EU competitiveness.
KT2 03.27.25 at 1:29 am
JQ, you have company.
“Musk Email Reaches Italian Workers. It Did Not Go Well.” New York Times
“Musk Email Reaches Italian Workers. It Did Not Go Well.
“Employees at the Aviano Air Base who serve American forces got a familiar demand to list their achievements. Unions say Italy “is not the Wild West like the U.S.”
https://archive.md/8zOmu
LFC 03.27.25 at 3:15 pm
@ wkw
Thanks for the reply and clarification of what they’re doing in the paper.
clew 03.27.25 at 9:37 pm
DOGE attacked NIST, which is the most insensical self-damaging low-payoff thing I can f’n imagine US — or any! — technologists doing.
My guess is “Jackpot” politics, which I think of as “lots of people should die because I will survive and get their stuff”. (Necropolitis, aiui, is content at “Lots of people should die.” )
roger gathmann 04.01.25 at 5:52 pm
I think the key to Trump’s policies is High Plains Drifter. Like the sheriff in HPD, Trump thinks the town – America – didn’t support him when he was whipped in 2020. They voted against him! So, revenge must be had. Just as in HPD, the thing to do is to set up a crew of losers to govern the town, Then lets the villains take care of it. Difference, of course, is that the Clint Eastwood character is sympathetic, while the Trump character is a senile, syphilitic felon. However, from the pov of a senile, syphilitic felon, embarking on the punishment of the country for wronging him makes perfecct sense.
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