After writing that last section, I took a break, I ate some edamame, and I scanned BlueSky, and I learned the story I now need to write is somehow even more depressing than it was 30 minutes ago.
There are a lot of articles out there on the missions that may be cancelled… on how the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is nearly ready for launch and might just get shelved or worse… but what I’m not seeing are stories on what these cuts will mean to the space science workforce. That’s the story I want to tell.
As the story went, the president’s proposed, but not yet submitted, FY 26 budget for NASA, per reporting in the Washington Post and Ars Technica, would see nearly half of NASA’s science budget being cut. Casey Drier, at the Planetary Society, termed this an extinction level event, and I hate saying it, but I agree. But, just as there have always been a few things that lived through past mass extinctions, I thought the National Science Foundation would be there, as a safe place for science to find a way forward.
Then I saw an article in Nature by Dan Garisto reporting “Trump team freezes new NSF awards — and could soon axe hundreds of grants.”
And I let Ally know I’m going to be recording later than expected.
I may stress eat a second box of frozen edamame later, but before I do that, I want to explain why I and so many other researchers are not okay.
There are only a handful of career paths in research. If you are among the very best, you can get one of the rare named-chair positions at a research university that allows you to earn a 12-month salary by teaching a couple courses a semester while getting a day or two a week to focus on research. There are maybe a few dozen of these positions in the US. There are also normal tenure track positions at research universities where you again, teach a couple courses and get time to do research, but only get paid nine months a year and you need to bring in research grants to cover the other three months, except NASA and NSF actually cap grants at two months salary.
So you get paid 11 months’ salary and spend a month or more a year of unpaid time writing grants to fund those two months, to fund your students, and to pay for things like your computer, conference travel, publication charges, and any lab equipment you may need. A failure to bring in money means no students, no equipment, no…well none of the things needed to demonstrate you are a competent scientist worthy of getting grants. It’s a bit of a Catch 22. A lot of us will use our personal money to bridge us as needed, paying out of pocket for work trips or to get that latest research result published in a good journal. It sucks, but you don’t go into science to get rich. You just try really hard not to get into debt.
There are also vast numbers of teaching faculty who may or may not get the time to also do some research. They too have 9 months – unless they get lucky enough to teach a summer class – not full time salaries. There are also lab staff who support teaching faculty at all kinds of institutes, and there are adjunct professors who are paid below minimum wage once you factor in time to grade.
And then there are all of us grant funded people. Research universities and science institutes have post doctoral fellows, research professors and research scientists who may or may not teach classes and generally only have their jobs for as long as they or a colleague or advisor has grants. I was a research professor for 10 years and now I’m a senior research scientist. While we may be the largest population of researchers, we are also the most vulnerable to budget changes. The years I have shy of 6 months of salary, I only work half time and I don’t have health insurance or retirement contributions and time off is time unpaid. That’s me this year, but I at least have non-research work I can do. When you see scientists who are selling their art, their jewelry, their… whatever they are selling…it is because they love doing what they do but also need to eat.
So when we see that NSF is no longer issuing new grants and NASA’s science funding is slashed 50% or more, we know most of us are going to be gone in a year.
And then we see, NSF to offer no new awards.
The astronomers in your life are not okay. And we all know that if we leave the field to take jobs as computer programmers, tech writers, or whatever else is willing to hire us, we aren’t going back to science. It is almost impossible to stay up to date on research, the technologies we use, and everything else you have to know to stay in the profession. When people leave, they only come back if they have the independent wealth to fund their return.
People will fight to stay in science, and as a profession, we will eat our young to survive.
When funding cuts happen, student positions and post-doctoral fellowships for our most junior researchers are eliminated so faculty and research scientists can keep going. As I look around, I see a large number of boomers who helped build the Voyager missions, who will now retire before we return to the moon, even though they were really hoping to get at least one moon landing in their career. Their retirement will help save some of the rest of us.
I also see an even larger number of baby millennials and Gen Zers who are just getting started and still need colleagues to help fund them and they just aren’t going to make it.
And in the middle are us crunchy Gen X’ers, all 12 of us, and the elder millennials who are going to multitask and side hustle our way through, but again, not all of us will make it.
And universities aren’t accepting new graduate students like normal, so there won’t necessarily be new people coming up to fill in behind us.
Not here, not in the US.
And for those who try and keep going, we’re seeing publicly available data being taken off line and data collection being discontinued, eliminating the ability to do research. We see future missions potentially being defunded. We see massive laboratories being shut down as the Federal Government punishes universities like Harvard.
Grant money pays into our economy as a force multiplier. It innovates our technology, sometimes creating entire new fields out of a few specially aligned atoms. Astronomy has led to improved signal processing, image processing, machine learning innovations, wifi, and so much more as a side effect of chasing the mysteries of black holes, the origins of worlds, and an understanding of the fate of the universe. We have discovered what powers stars, and what quenches quasars. And… we are doing honest work that sometimes includes creating memes about Pluto’s planetary status while we what for our database queries to run on data a little to big for our computers.
These budget cuts will end all of that.
I am afraid for the future of research science in America. We are about to see a brain drain and the loss of a new generation. That will happen no matter what. Congress has the power of the purse, and in theory, could say “No more – we will fund research,” but today we heard Senator Murkowski express her fear of what could happen to her if she doesn’t do as Trump asks.
Imagine … We might live in a nation where members of Congress are afraid of the consequences to their safety if they fund science against the president’s wishes.
The phrase “Shock and Awe” has been used to describe massive, overwhelming attacks on our nation’s enemies that were designed to demoralize as well as destroy.
The current attack on science is one of shock and awe. And we are demoralized as we see so much destroyed.
But here is the thing they forget – we went to grad school, which is designed to demoralize, and we got through on our own. We know how to rage clean, eat our feelings, and then buckle down and somehow keep going.
It’s just… a lot of us are going to keep going in another country or another field, and that is just one more knock against our economy that didn’t need to happen.
Call your congress critters. Tell them what kind of a future you want our nation to have.