Should Science Be Publicly Funded at All?
Photo credit: Adam Nir on Unsplash.
At the American Council for Science and Health, Cameron English puts forward a daring hypothesis: Public funding for science research is a trap and it should cease. Especially daring when so many others are bewailing current U.S. government funding cutbacks.
He acknowledges their concern but responds, “Much of the academic work taxpayers are forced to fund provides no benefit or, even worse, causes serious harm in a variety of ways.”
## Evidence? Indeed
> In September 2024 for example, _Science_reported that a veteran neuropathologist running the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Neuroscience — with an annual budget of $2.6 billion — had probably falsified images in key studies used to justify developing novel drugs for Parkinson’s disease — an effort that carries an additional price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars. “I’m floored,” Mount Sinai neurologist Samuel Gandy told _Science_ during an interview. “Hundreds of images. There had to have been ongoing manipulation for years.”
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> Other high-profile fraud cases underscore the problem: take Anil Potti, a Duke University researcher who faked cancer trial data, misleading patients and squandering millions in grants, or the infamous case of Woo-Suk Hwang, whose fabricated stem cell research misled global science for years. And the problem persists. Harvard’s prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was forced to retract seven studies just last year following the discovery of manipulated images in the research.
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> Academics who rely on federal grant funding will insist that these fraud cases represent a few bad apples, unfortunate outliers that besmirch the reputations of researchers who do good work. This analysis misses the mark, however. “Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals,” the _Wall Street Journal_ reported last May, “leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue.”
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> “Science Subsidy Trap: Why Public Research Funding Needs to End,” April 16, 2025
## Ideological Bias
He also notes that in areas such as climate change and gender medicine, publicly funded science is used to advance causes with no scientific merit. Sometimes, the outcome is worthy of the bungling Inspector Clouseau in the classic comedy:
> For example, many scientists mocked [Robert] Kennedy for claiming during his senate confirmation hearing that fluoride is a neurotoxin; few of them stressed that he cited an NIH-funded study from the _Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)_ , one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed publications in the world.
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> It’s the same story with other popular health scares. The ongoing activist campaign against low-risk pesticides? Built on a foundation of sloppy epidemiology heavily funded by the federal government. In one truly galling example, the EPA went to court a few years ago to challenge an insecticide ban that was proposed after EPA-funded research wrongly linked the chemical to health harms in children.
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> “Needs to End”
English cites many more examples and offers two observations: Historically, massive public funding of science research has not necessarily led to advancement. Privately funded research often has. So we are not talking about the death of science here, but about calibration of funding.
## Alone in the Universe?
His approach makes intuitive sense. A government might spend half a billion dollars trying to find out if we are alone in the universe. A private firm would be more likely to fund promising cancer drugs.
It is quite true that the private firm invests the money in order to make a profit. But in order to _make_ a profit, it must produce drugs that work. That fact probably concentrates the minds of the investors.
By contrast, the government spending our tax money might never find out if we are alone in the universe. But what if it did? The probable existence of life on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years away) would hardly affect most of us much.
Sure, we’d love to _talk about_ newly discovered ET life. But there is no comparison between the effect on our lives of alien photosynthesis vs. cancer drugs that produce remissions.
English’s proposal is perhaps best seen as a call to assess what the taxpaying public is really buying for all that science funding. Are there smarter ways to spend the money?
## But _Why_ Trust Science?
His thought-provoking approach to science funding intersects with the longstanding and growing problem of reduced trust in science. A recent _Nature_ paper we haven’t had a look at yet claims, according to _ZME Science,_ that “Conservative people in the US distrust science way more broadly than previously thought” and that “Even chemistry gets side-eye now. Trust in science is crumbling across America’s ideology.”
One might well ask, given the list of problems English cites, why is it just _conservative_ people who are growing skeptical? Are the others not keeping up? Is there a mystique about science that others don’t want to question?
Well, the evidence base for doubt is growing quickly and blind trust is not going to provide the answers we need.
_Cross-posted at Mind Matters News._
