OPINION:
For much of the past century, if you were a talented scientist anywhere in the world, you came to the United States. Our research institutions, stable funding and scientific independence created a gravitational pull for global talent. That pull has been recklessly reversed, and our adversaries are now exploiting that vulnerability.
The Trump administration has spent the past year systematically dismantling the research funding system that built American scientific dominance. Last year, political appointees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated or froze more than 5,800 research grants. Historically, NIH terminated fewer than 20 awards per year and never for ideological reasons.
Researchers suddenly found themselves navigating a “banned words” list, where terms like “adolescent,” “underserved,” or “natural disasters” could put grants at risk. Multi-million dollar projects that took years to design could be canceled overnight, along with any cures they could have fueled.
The stakes strike at the heart of American health care. Nearly every new drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019 relied on NIH-supported research. Billions in NIH investment have saved lives, seeded industries and made biomedical innovation a pillar of American power.
If the United States stops being the most reliable place to pursue discovery, the world’s best minds will simply do their research somewhere else perhaps even for our adversaries.
European governments have begun actively recruiting U.S.-based scientists. Austria, France, and Germany are snatching up researchers from Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley. China has recognized the opportunity as well. While the United States cancels grants over language, Beijing is investing heavily in the life sciences and offering U.S.-trained scientists the stability that American institutions once guaranteed.
We are not just losing talent. We are training our competitors’ workforce.
The administration appears committed to this path, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge. He’s elevated anti-science ideologues into power at our health agencies.
My state of Colorado felt this directly: we were one of four states that had $600 million in public health funding including for HIV prevention terminated overnight as political punishment.
But RFK Jr.’s ideological leadership hasn’t just infected what gets cut; it has also infected what our country invests in. Meritless projects aligned with his ideology are greenlit, like the controversial Hepatitis B trials on newborns that the CDC wants to fund in Guinea-Bissau.
History offers a sobering warning about where this path leads. In the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, political leaders elevated ideologically approved pseudoscience, which led to Soviet agriculture falling disastrously behind the rest of the world. When political loyalty matters more than scientific evidence, nations suffer.
The United States became a scientific superpower by choosing a different model. Scientists, not politicians, decided which questions were worth asking. That principle helped produce the Human Genome Project, the biotechnology revolution and transformative advances in medicine that have saved millions of Americans.
One of my proudest achievements in Congress was passing the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016 a bipartisan effort to accelerate lifesaving treatments and support Grand Challenge efforts like the Cancer Moonshot and the BRAIN Initiative. Its passage reflected a bipartisan consensus that American scientific leadership was bigger than partisan politics.
Whether due to disinterest or fear of crossing President Donald Trump or RFK Jr., the result is the same: bipartisan consensus has collapsed.
Polling shows more than 70% of Americans support public health investments, yet political leaders are ignoring what the people want.
Research funding is now entangled in ideological battles, and the idea that science should be insulated from politics is under attack.
The damage will not be easy to reverse. Even if every canceled grant were restored tomorrow, the global scientific community has already received a powerful message: American research funding can swing dramatically with each election.
That is why structural reform is urgently needed to permanently protect science from political interference. The Follow the Science Act, which I recently introduced, would cap the number of political appointees at the NIH, keep them out of grant review and prevent political cancellations. This is good policy regardless of administration, but up until now, we didn’t need it. The fact that we do now tells you how far we’ve fallen.
Our country’s scientific leadership is not permanent, as the current administration has proven.
As our allies and adversaries quickly attract the scientists who once came here automatically, we are at a crossroads.
We can choose science and recapture our role as the global leader in health research or we can choose politics. We cannot choose both.
• Rep. Diana DeGette is the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. She is one of Congress’s leading experts on cutting-edge scientific research and is a recognized leader on human embryonic stem cell research. She represents Colorado’s First Congressional District, including Denver.