As a The Washington Post subscriber and admirer of many in their news team, it was shocking (but not surprising) to read Scott Atlas’ July 2nd OpEd: “Abolish the NIH“.
Atlas, a former special adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020 and member of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, contends that the NIH has failed and should be replaced with nothing. His supporting evidence includes a misreading of how basic and translational research work. The supposed flaws include the fact that (i) NIH provides critical research infrastructure as part of grants; and (ii) the Trump administration cancelled grants last year (which were then reversed – but apparently such reversals are a waste of taxpayer dollars).
The argument goes on to misrepresent the difference between public and private research and identifies the act of responding to grant terminations as a rationale for shutting the whole thing down. But ignoring Atlas won’t make him (or his arguments) go away. Instead, it is worth thinking about Atlas’s OpEd as a decoy – a misguided option intended to make any alternative look better.
This week the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released the alternative: a self-declared ‘Landmark Report and Recommendations for Renewing American Scientific Discovery’. On its own, the report has little to offer other than a misreading of what drives innovation in science. But, I would not recommend trying to read the OSTP document as a detailed policy proposal – such dark arts are left to OMB and Russell Vought. Neither is the report a serious historical analysis, despite the references to Vannevar Bush’s “The Endless Frontier”.
The OSTP report sets a frame. It signals how an ambitious functionary working within federal R&D agencies might get noticed by the White House. Beyond the 120+ pages, the report is animated by a central goal: the transfer of federally funded science to corporate interests willing to overtly align with administration priorities and advance the centrality of AI.
But we cannot and should not take either path.
We should reject nihilism and the corporate takeover of science.
We should advocate for reinvesting, reimagining, and rebuilding an innovative ecosystem for publicly funded science & medical research. This won’t be easy. Science has opponents. The release of this week’s ‘Landmark Report’ by the White House OSTP provides the talking points to accelerate a tech transfer and redistribute Congressionally allocated funds to corporate allies.
Most people won’t know who Scott Atlas is – or was. Scott Atlas has a Covid grievance and found a willing partner in a tech ascendancy OpEd page that intentionally misrepresents how science works as a means to propose the dismantling of the innovation engine funded by and for the public. As I source in Asymptomatic: ‘Dr. Atlas estimated that the coronavirus “would cause about 10,000 deaths”—a number he claimed “would be unnoticed” in a normal flu season.’ This is not the kind of track record that should open the door to serious editorial consideration.
Like the Director of NIH Jay Bhattacharya, Atlas decided to fit Coronavirus data to his preferred narrative and ignore public health data whenever (and especially) when it was inconvenient. When it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was nothing like the flu, Atlas doubled down, continuing to promise an early end to the pandemic and insist that government responses were over-reactions.
Atlas resigned from the Trump administration in Fall 2020. But, according to Atlas, up is down and down is up, as he argues: “Abolishing the NIH is not a case against science. It is a case for science itself.”
Atlas goes further, arguing that rather than destroying our capabilities, support for science and medical research should be handed to others. I will let David Spergel, President of the Simons Foundation (one of the leading and most innovative funders of science and mathematics in the United States) make the case:
“[Philanthropy] cannot be a replacement for federal funds. Roughly speaking, philanthropy is about 10% of the overall funding for science. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is by far the biggest funding agency, and most of the philanthropic funding is in biomedical. But regardless of whether you’re looking at biomedical or physical sciences, there just isn’t the capacity in philanthropy.”
If not philanthropy, then where? What Atlas and allies really want to do is take taxpayer dollars and redirect it to tech companies.
It turns out: the White House wants to do exactly the same thing.
U.S. science is under attack by White House endorsed policy making, including the Office of Management and Budget proposal to politicize the entire pipeline of decision-making and undermine American leadership in science.
Such an attack comes with risks to health, the economic, and national defense. The attack also comes with political risks.
Science is popular. The White House may eventually learn that ignoring the public comes with consequences. Despite what some say about degrading trust, the vast majority of tens of thousands of analyzed comments oppose proposed OMB regulation that would politicize federal grant making. This public pushback is one indication that the public trusts scientists to do their jobs without interference.
But just doing our jobs is becoming harder.
Since early 2020, the Trump administration has slashed research infrastructure, cancelled grants based on keywords, disrupted pathways for training, undermined and interfered with science, scientists, and institutions, and proposed massive budget reductions that would lead the US ever further behind in a globally competitive landscape for R&D.
The “Gold Standard” on the title page of the OSTP report remains an empty slogan championed by a White House intent on increasing administrative burden, reducing the capacity of the American science workforce, and transferring federal funds away from universities, research hospitals, and independent institutes to a narrow set of corporate partners willing to play the game.
The game is afoot.
It is in our interest to understand the rules.
Although some will win awards, far more will lose. The losses stem from a decision by the White House to make a singular bet: slashing budgets within federal science agencies and shifting an increasingly larger share of the funds that remain to AI.
It is time for elected representatives to step in before even more harm accumulates in communities and districts throughout the U.S and for scientists to step out into the arena and forge a new path beyond the emptiness of nihilism and the narrowness of a corporate takeover of science.
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