John Mulchaey explains how Carnegie Science combines endowment support, federal funding, and private philanthropy. Reflecting on funding uncertainty at the time of the interview, he describes the endowment as a foundation for the institution's work while emphasizing that ambitious projects still require additional support. He discusses fundraising as a major part of his role as president.
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21:45But it takes a huge amount of engineering. Yeah. >> Yeah, that's That's pretty crazy to think about. Um So the reality of I wanted to sort of transition into the reality of science funding today and how institutions like Carnegie Science get funding in the first place. Because I I imagine as the president of Carnegie Sciences, that's one of your big jobs. Is where does the money come from? So you know in the modern day, there's been substantial cuts to the NSF. NASA is cutting its astrophysics budget by a lot. A lot of other institutions are saying that this is kind of an
22:26existential crisis for fundamental science, for fundamental astrophysics. I wanted to ask you about your opinion. How would you characterize the situation right now? >> Yeah, so it's of course an ever-changing situation. We're looking at this uh literally every day it seems like something new is happening on the federal landscape. I mean, I think at Carnegie, we're a little bit unique. We have We can weather kind of changes on the federal landscape better than a lot of universities. Universities have really come to really rely on federal funds, right? And so the The programs at universities almost all of them are funded almost entirely out of that. Carnegie, what Andrew Carnegie did was
23:06he set up an endowment that that funds a significant fraction of of what we do. So, we keep our lights on and things like that based on this original money that Andrew Carnegie gave that we have invested and we spend a small amount of a year. So, we have kind of a baseline that a lot of universities don't have. Some of the bigger ones have endowments as well, but a typical research university might not. And so, for us federal funding has allowed us to do different additional stuff on top of that, right? So, the challenge I think we're seeing is that even though you know, the White House has obviously tried to make pretty substantial changes on the science front and the funding. Congress has been much more generous and come back and brought that back. I think one thing I always tell people about science is science is very bipartisan in
23:48general. Some areas like climate science clearly are not, but in general things like astronomy and earth science for the most part are are everybody understands the value of them because there's a huge impact economic impact that comes out of science. The basic stuff we do here at Carnegie 20 or 30 years from now may lead to some technology we don't know about, right? GMT will lead to new technologies we probably don't know about yet that could make money in the future for the country. So, for that reason it's very bipartisan. So, Congress has come back and and put most of the money back. Like NSF took like a something like a 6% hit. Look, we wouldn't want to take a hit at all. 6% is a lot better than 60% which is the numbers that were thrown around at one point. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. That
24:28was insane. And so, that's the good news. I think the the thing we don't yet understand is how that money will be appropriated within for instance NSF. So, we don't yet know you know, is all that money going to go into AI research at NSF? It was probably quite likely or quantum computing. It's not that those things aren't interesting, but you know, traditionally a place like National Science Foundation has funded really basic research. So, it funds astronomy, it funds earth science and all these things. And so, the question is will that money flow? That we just don't know. And so from my perspective at Carnegie, my perspective is that we cannot rely on that. We have our endowment, but we do we need to we need additional money to really do our science. So we put a big emphasis here, which is a lot of my job
25:09on philanthropy and going to the private sector to try to bring in money cuz we need that money to do these big projects. But it's not clear it will come from the federal government. That makes sense. To follow up on that, you know, you say we're going to need to find money from private donors and philanthropy, things like that. Like what is what is that process like? Is it like that scene in Wolf of Wall Street where Leonardo DiCaprio is like, I have an amazing opportunity. >> Pretty much it is. >> Yes. What are you doing?