We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.

Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.

This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.

It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.

And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.

Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever.

Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.

This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc

Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).

> If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will....I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.

As someone who spent far too much of my life pursuing that goal, I have an unpopular opinion: US science needs some cuts.

The first project (the space telescope) makes me sad, simply because it's pure science that probably wouldn't get done any other way. And it probably costs nothing, in the grand scheme of things. See also: climate data gathering, oceanology, etc. I don't support cutting things based on politics in any direction.

But as you go down the article, you quickly run into projects that are, frankly, a gigantic waste of money -- like "determinants of health inequality" work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing:

> Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD)...wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”

It's laughably absurd to claim that "we can start asking these questions", because I'm here to tell you that ineffectual 'scientists' were doing the same research when I was a graduate student, which wasn't yesterday. This kind of stuff has always had ample funding, while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel. It sucked. It's not "censorship" to eliminate it, and the bureaucratic imperative -- along with being accused of "racism" if you cut it, as in this article -- essentially guarantees that it lumbers on for decades.

Even in "harder" science, it's really a case-by-case basis. You see so much questionable science getting huge funding, simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas. Frankly, there were many days where I felt/feel that the US scientific funding process should just randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold.

So while I'm saddened that a lot good projects are having a hard time, if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor -- even if "Scientific American" doesn't approve.

They're not own goals, they're achieving what they set out to do.

But that man is a foreign actor.

Science, or more specific to what we're talking about, public research which happens mostly in universities, has turned political long before this administration.

That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.

Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.

Unfortunately there is another possibility: a return to great power competition.

Science is partisan because “reality has a well-known liberal bias”, to quote Stephen Colbert.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but he hasn't been part of this administration for a while. And also i'm not quite sure you have his views on NASA funding (one of his main customers) right, you're just making them up.

He is a genius though, great results on the market.

First of all, NASA is the main client of SpaceX. They pay SpaceX money. Sabotaging NASA is sabotaging SpaceX. If NASA can (or want to) compete against SpaceX directly it probably wouldn't have fund half the R&D cost of Falcon 9.

The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.