The battle over U.S. science funding
Lester and Krishna flag an active political fight over U.S. science funding, covering both the FY2026 budget, where money already written into law is being held from institutions, and the ongoing FY2027 budget proposals. They point listeners to a new page at ffppod.com/funding, which draws on R&D funding datasets going back to the 1960s and includes defense spending, the dominant share of U.S. R&D. They frame the issue as civic as well as scientific, encouraging listeners to contact their congressional representatives.
- The underlying data comes from the AААA (triple-A) research and development datasets, which track U.S. R&D spending from at least the 1960s.
- Because the tracker covers all R&D, defense spending is included and represents the largest single share of the total.
- The hosts note the show avoided political and funding topics in its first year but has decided as an organization to cover them going forward.
Transcript
This chapter, from the episode video's captions · 629 words
1:42:27>> we're losing out to Europe something. >> Yeah, >> it's been a long time. >> It's been a long in science. It's been a very long time [laughter] >> in science. So, I just wanted to give some coverage around this because we did put a new section onto the website ffpod.com/funding. There is an ongoing funding battle here in the US, not only around who has the power and authority to deal with grant making, but also what funding actually goes into the larger scientific apparatus. For those who have not really looked at what funding goes where, it it is quite interesting. It's it's based off of the tripleas um
1:43:07>> research and development funding uh data sets that have existed uh back through I believe it's u the 1970s and it's actually the the 1960s and what's interesting about this is um because it's R&D it includes defense which is the lion share of R&D spending >> there's been some es and flows and so if you check out the funding page you can see this long history of the story of how research and development in the US has worked as it's related to major milestones across that time frame as well as being able to look at the 2026 active fiscal year budget that was
1:43:48implemented and is currently having battles over money already written into law reaching the institutions that should be getting it as well as the ongoing battle for the FY fiscal year 2027 budget and the current proposals Both of these things are active issues in Congress. So if you want to get engaged in politics and you take your civic duty in terms of exercising your right to be a participant in the democratic process, your members of Congress, your senators have a role to play in this process. And uh science is one of those issues. uh particularly when you're looking at the hard sciences
1:44:30especially there's a lot of complexity around some of the social sciences um and if you look at the tracker on what these things actually fund and where they go you may be surprised um at how much we can do with very little as compared to for example defense spending. So this is a uh culture issue, it's a funding issue, it's a competitive landscape issue because in some cases it's just people are giving better opportunity. Um yep >> and this show lives off of the frontier research community. And so, uh, we really want to make sure that you as listeners understand what's happening right now, today, uh, with some of our
1:45:12best and brightest and how we can continue to stay competitive as we move into the future. Yep. And I mean, you know, we're going to cover science no matter where it happens, right? We're going to cover science if it happens here. We've covered several Chinese papers. We're going to cover several European papers. Anywhere that science happens, we are going to cover it. But, you know, um we're also American and we care about um science happening in this country and we don't we don't want to let go of um the rich history and capabilities that we have um as a country. So, we're going to continue covering this kind of stuff and you're going to see like, you know, in the first, if I may say, Lester, you know,
1:45:53in the first year, we kind of we kind of shied away from from doing this kind of stuff. >> Yeah. >> But I think I think we've decided as an organization, as as a FFP uh nation that um you know, this is important and we're going to start caring a lot more.
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