Why Science Funding Should Work Like Military Readiness

A nation doesn't build its military the moment a war starts. It maintains standing readiness — trained personnel, working equipment, functioning supply chains — continuously, in peacetime, precisely because waiting until the crisis begins is already too late. This reading makes the case, using real economic research and my own experience working inside federal and state science-funding systems, that basic scientific research deserves the same treatment: not a discretionary budget line that gets cut whenever a given year's politics are tight, but a continuously maintained national capacity. This argument rests on economics and history, not partisanship — the research behind it comes from economists across the ideological spectrum, and the case for American scientific leadership is, in my view, a matter of national pride rather than one political party's platform.

Where this idea comes from

In 1945, at the end of World War II, President Roosevelt asked engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush, who had led the U.S. wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, to recommend how the federal government could keep supporting American science once the war ended. Bush's answer, published as the report Science, the Endless Frontier, argued that the country's future prosperity and security depended on a sustained federal commitment to basic research — and it directly proposed the agency that, after years of congressional debate, became the National Science Foundation in 1950. The report's influence is hard to overstate: federal science funding grew by more than a factor of ten between the 1940s and 1960s, and it built the modern American research university system largely as we still recognize it today.

What the economic research actually shows

Recent economic analyses, including Federal Reserve research, have tried to directly measure the payoff from federal science spending. Estimated returns on government-funded non-defense R&D run roughly 140% to 210%, notably higher than estimated returns on private-sector R&D of around 55%. Some economists attribute roughly a fifth to a quarter of all U.S. productivity growth since World War II to non-defense government R&D spending, with conservative estimates suggesting every dollar spent yields something like five additional dollars of GDP per person over time. And yet federally supported basic research fell to about 0.20% of GDP by 2019 — its lowest share since 1980. One 2025 policy analysis estimated that a 20% cut to federal R&D could cost the U.S. economy on the order of $1.5 trillion relative to competitor nations' growth trajectories. None of these figures are settled to the decimal point — they depend on real modeling choices — but the direction of the evidence across multiple independent analyses points the same way: this is one of the more reliably high-return investments a government can make.

Why private industry can't carry this alone

A natural question follows: if research pays off this well, why doesn't private industry just fund more of it? Economists have a long-standing answer rooted in the idea of a public good: basic research produces knowledge that diffuses far beyond whoever paid for it, and fundamental discoveries are frequently difficult or impossible to patent. A company that discovers a foundational insight can't fully capture its value the way it could with a specific, marketable product, so the private market has a built-in tendency to underinvest in the earliest, riskiest stage of research even when the total payoff to society is large. Bell Labs is the textbook case study: for decades it produced Nobel Prize-winning fundamental research (the transistor, information theory) precisely because it operated inside a regulated telephone monopoly insulated from quarterly market pressure. Once antitrust action broke up that monopoly and Wall Street's demand for short-term returns took hold, corporate research budgets across the industry shifted hard from open-ended "R" toward market-ready "D" — a pattern that has repeated at other corporate labs since. Private industry is genuinely essential to turning discoveries into products, but the historical record suggests it can't be relied on to fund the earliest, least certain research on its own.

Why states are building their own funding mechanisms

I saw this shift firsthand from 2018 to 2019, when I worked as a project manager managing scientific review panels for the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Research Competitiveness Program. States including Maine and Nebraska have built their own competitive research-funding initiatives (the Maine Small Campus Initiative and Nebraska's NE-EPSCoR First Awards, both of which I helped manage peer review for), and university systems like NC State have developed their own internal pre-proposal review processes to strengthen applications before they ever reach a federal panel. I'm a high school teacher and community college professor now, but that firsthand look at how states build their own research capacity is what grounds this section. At the federal level, NSF's own EPSCoR program (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) was built to help states with historically lower shares of federal research funding build competitive capacity, and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act directed NSF to grow EPSCoR's share of its overall budget from about 13% toward 20% by 2029. Taken together, this looks like a system in which states, universities, and the federal government are all recognizing the same thing from different angles: research capacity has to be deliberately built and maintained, not assumed to appear on its own.

A caution: money isn't the whole story

Funding alone doesn't guarantee good science, and this is a fair challenge to raise about universities specifically, which receive the largest share of federal basic-research dollars. Student journalist Theo Baker's investigative reporting for the Stanford Daily — work that won a George Polk Award — uncovered data manipulation across multiple labs run by then-Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, leading to an independent investigation and Tessier-Lavigne's resignation in 2023. Baker's later book examines Stanford's tangled relationship with Silicon Valley money and prestige more broadly. The lesson isn't that universities are uniquely corrupt — it's that institutions entrusted with public research dollars have to maintain real scientific accountability alongside that funding, or the whole argument for sustained investment weakens. Readiness isn't just about the size of a budget; it's also about whether the institutions spending it are structured to actually produce trustworthy science.

The stakes, and a look back at collapse

Biologist and historian Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed studies why past civilizations, from the Greenland Norse to the Maya, declined. Diamond identifies five recurring factors — environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, the loss of trading partners, and a society's own response to its problems — and argues that while the first four vary case by case, the fifth is always significant, because how a society chooses to respond to a known problem is the one factor entirely within its own control. Federal science funding runs through the same kind of choice point every budget cycle, regardless of who is in office: research dollars can either be protected as long-horizon national infrastructure, or treated as a discretionary line item that rises and falls with each year's short-term pressures. Diamond's framework is a useful lens for that underlying structural question, independent of any single year's politics: sustained scientific readiness is a choice a nation keeps making, or stops making, one budget cycle at a time.

My own cardiologist, who has notable experience with medicine and culture outside the United States, has told me directly that American science remains the world's best — that an outsized share of the world's drug discovery and scientific innovation still happens here. I don't think that's a partisan talking point. I think it's a fact worth being genuinely proud of, and one worth protecting the way we protect any other form of national readiness — deliberately, continuously, and before the moment we actually need it.

Basic (fundamental) research

Research aimed at understanding how something works, without a specific commercial product in mind, as opposed to applied research aimed at a defined use.

Public good

A good or piece of knowledge whose benefits are difficult to restrict to whoever paid for it, which causes markets to naturally underproduce it.

Appropriability problem

The economic term for a company's inability to fully capture the value it creates, which weakens the incentive to invest in hard-to-patent basic research.

EPSCoR

NSF's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, designed to help states with historically lower shares of federal research funding build competitive capacity.

Research readiness

The idea, argued in this reading, that scientific capacity (trained people, working labs, funded pipelines) should be maintained continuously rather than rebuilt only when a crisis makes it urgent.

Think about it

Sources: Bush, Vannevar. Science, the Endless Frontier, 1945 (National Academies Press archival edition); National Science Foundation, "75 Years on the Endless Frontier" (nsf.gov); Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper, "The Returns to Government R&D"; Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), "How Reducing Federal R&D Reduces GDP Growth," September 2025; Association of American Universities, summary of recent federal R&D return research; reporting on the rise and fall of Bell Labs (Works in Progress magazine and related industry histories); National Science Foundation, EPSCoR program documentation and CHIPS and Science Act implementation guidance (nsf.gov); reporting from ABC7 San Francisco, PBS NewsHour, and TechCrunch on Theo Baker's Stanford Daily investigation and subsequent book; Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005. Personal professional experience: J. Reid Schwebach, Project Manager, AAAS Research Competitiveness Program (2018–2019), on managed review panels including the Maine Small Campus Initiative, Nebraska NE-EPSCoR First Awards, and NC State's NSF MRSEC internal review process; now a high school teacher and community college professor. DRAFT — verify current Virginia Science SOL alignment (if any) with the current Curriculum Framework before publishing.