The death of US Science
No, it's not RFK, he is bad but also a distraction. While a lot of people are understandably focused on the most visible political risks to US institutions right now, or the crazy political chaos, there’s a quieter, structural shift happening in science funding that deserves just as much attention from this group. For decades, US scientific leadership has come from a deliberately messy system with lots of independent investigators, spread across institutions of all sizes and types, pursuing a wide range of ideas. Many of these had no obvious short-term payoff. That diversity wasn’t wasteful, rather it was the engine that drives the breakthroughs we didn’t know to ask for.
The Genesis mission (starting with EO 14363 in Nov) moves in the opposite direction, basically towards centralized priorities with short-term deliverables, and tight coupling with the tech industry. To the average person, this sound efficient, but it fundamentally changes what kind of science gets done and who gets to do it. The Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” model is not well matched to a system that depends on long-term, distributed investment in people and ideas. So this is breaking it.
That brings us to this week. The DOE has announced where the money for Genesis is going to come from. It is going to come from us, with a 20% cut on research funding to redirect the funds to Genesis. If one looks at the DOE Office of Science, the budget is about $7B (see p.3: [https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/doe-fy-2026-bib-v6.pdf](https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/doe-fy-2026-bib-v6.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com)), but only a fraction of that actually supports university-based research. DOE doesn’t publish a clean “extramural” line, but if you look across programs, roughly \~30% is in research lines, and a smaller fraction of that goes to universities once you account for lab-based research and other commitments. After accounting for commitments like facilities, the money comes out of the much smaller pool of research funding. Depending on the fixed cost within an area, this could de-facto zero a field.
Now, one can say, why not just try to jump on the Genesis project to bring the money in? Especially in physics, we actually do use a lot of ML/AI. The issue is the mechanism itself is essentially unworkable for most academic groups. The current model expects proposals on \~1 month timescale (released Tuesday, due April 28th with unclear and to-be-fixed language), with \~9 month deliverables. It requires a multi-institution partnership (2 out of the 3 of industry, university, national lab), and awards on the order of $500–750k without any indirect cost. Anyone who has dealt with university contracting knows that just negotiating subawards, IP terms, and compliance requirements with external partners can take months. If one has a grant, the graduate students/postdocs working on it are already spoken for. Hiring people and having them do something meaningful in 9 months is not possible. I am required to have an advertisement open for 1 month, for example.
In practice, this means that only a handful of well-resourced institutions with pre-existing partnerships and administrative support will have any chance of competing. Though, even a place like MIT might not be able to, so this would exclusively go to lab-industry groups. Smaller institutions, and even many R1 groups, simply won’t be to do this. With planned additional phases of Genesis, if this goes on for the rest of the administration, that is pretty much it for DOE based science.
Any thoughts/critiques, etc, of this post would be helpful as I try to figure out whether we have a path forward that salvages something in the physical sciences.