How to Save Science

From the longtime chief of the National Institutes of Health’s $38 billion a year funding stream, a call to rebuild and reimagine the systems that made America the world’s leading scientific innovator.

In 2025, the second Trump administration launched an all-out attack on science. Operatives terminated thousands of government grants and left the scientific community reeling. The sudden assault was successful, but not because Trump’s anti-science ideas were popular or well-founded. As physician-scientist and former NIH grants chief Michael S. Lauer explains, America’s once-vaunted system for funding biomedical science had grown weak and politically vulnerable long before Trump entered office. 
 
In the wake of World War II, government-funded science enjoyed unprecedented public support. Visionary policymakers sought to capitalize on the popularity of government-supported scientific innovations like the wartime mass production of penicillin to create a system that would allow scientists to make similar discoveries untroubled by needless paperwork, financial worries, or interference. This new government-university partnership produced significant medical discoveries, from statins to GLP-1s. But increased federal funding also brought political meddling, paralyzing bureaucracy, and the emergence of a hypercompetitive enterprise that hampered innovation as it grew more bloated.  
 
Simply restoring the old system will not address these weaknesses. Nor can the private sector take charge of an enterprise of this scale. How to Save Science exhorts us to reinvent government-funded science and catalyze future medical breakthroughs.