Cutting federal funding for basic research will hurt the US economy

Cutting research funding now could later mean relying on other, possibly hostile nations for vital medical cures and technology.   

Amidst ongoing budget brinkmanship in Washington, House and Senate panels have proposed significant cuts in federal funding for basic scientific research. That would be a grave mistake for our nation's long-term economic success.

President Biden's 2024 budget proposal maintained the current funding level for the National Institutes of Health and proposed a small boost for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Yet under recent congressional proposals, NIH funding would be significantly reduced —  and NSF funding will fall to its lowest level in more than 30 years.

Far from reducing the debt burden, cuts to federal funding contribute to it by diminishing the fund of new knowledge that drives economic growth.

The for-profit private sector has the ability and incentive to take basic research and turn it into useful products — from semiconductors to artificial intelligence to biotech. But in many cases, the point of origin of such products isn't a business. It's a research institution like our major universities, operating with federal funding.

The NIH and NSF are the pillars of federal support for academic research. The bulk of their budgets each year goes to grants for basic research, on which the federal government spent $101 billion in 2018 across all agencies. In 2021, the federal government funded 40 percent of basic research in the United States. 

Such basic research makes up a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Yet numerous economists have shown that spending in this area pays off several times over in sustained economic growth.

Proposed cuts would have far-reaching consequences for the work of more than 300,000 researchers across the country. And as funding dries up, potential breakthroughs will slip out of reach. 

Science typically advances incrementally, with discoveries building upon decades of previous work. This is not a role the private sector can usually play, because the revenue potential is uncertain and often distant. 

Consider the history of the anti-HIV drug AZT. A medical researcher first developed the drug in the 1960s as part of the government's "War on Cancer," but results were disappointing at the time. About 20 years later, scientists at the National Cancer Institute found that AZT could delay the onset of AIDS, then a terrifying emerging epidemic. AZT paved the way for subsequent generations of treatment that have ultimately turned a one-time death sentence into a manageable condition. 

From cell phones to the internet, 3D printing to CRISPR gene-editing, countless major innovations can be traced to basic research supported by the federal government. A grant to Stanford University graduate students, for example, yielded the search engine prototype that became Google. 

Nobody knew where those research projects would lead when they were approved for federal funding. All that was in the future. We can already anticipate future solutions to Alzheimer's disease. Even more significant is what we can't yet imagine.

At my own institution, New York Institute of Technology, our researchers are testing targeted cancer therapies and looking for the causes of brain disorders like autism. Not all of the experiments underway at U.S. institutions will pan out as hoped. But some will lead to breakthroughs in global health crises like antibiotic resistance, and others will solve problems we haven't yet foreseen. Even past apparent failures are getting a second look now as AI algorithms comb through archives in search of patterns scientists may have missed.

We can't afford to lose these potential advances. In fact, "More than 50% of U.S. economic growth since World War II has come from science and technology," according to the NIH. 

The cuts Congress proposed earlier this year in non-defense research and development spending — $17 billion in a House proposal and $10 billion in the Senate — stand in sharp contrast to the approach of economic competitors like Germany, Japan, and South Korea. According to the most recent data, those countries already spend a higher percentage of gross domestic product on scientific research than does the United States. In China, meanwhile, research and development spending from 2010 to 2019 grew at nearly twice the U.S. rate.

Cutting research funding now could later mean relying on other, possibly hostile nations for vital medical cures and technology.   

Funding for basic research is not a luxury item in the federal budget. It's the cornerstone of our future prosperity. 

Jerry Balentine, D.O., is provost and executive vice president at New York Institute of Technology.