I’d be one of the first to admit it: higher education in the US is in urgent need of significant reform. Harvard University, for example, discriminated against Asian applicants, especially Asian men, and allowed vicious antisemitism to run rampant on the grounds that it was a necessary part of free speech—all the while rigorously policing speech of which it disapproved and punishing faculty whose research results suggested that racism might not be responsible for all of society’s ills, or who simply stated openly that there are only two sexes. In addition, while discriminating against some talented students and scholars on the grounds of their race and/or sex, the university promoted people on the basis of identity politics whose academic accomplishments were unimpressive and whose plagiaristic work violated academic standards. Our major universities created bloated bureaucracies ideologically coupled to claims of social justice and allowed those overpaid bureaucrats to stifle free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry.

STEM fields were not exempt from the madness. The National Science Foundation, the Department of Education (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and NASA all became so wrapped up in being “anti-racist” that key aspects of their scientific mission were suffering. Indeed, the situation had become so worrisome that I joined 38 distinguished faculty who span a variety of different fields and political allegiances in writing about this in a book: The War on Science, which will be released this month.

But in response to this internal war on scholarship that has been undermining academic excellence, a new external war has erupted that may prove even more damaging to the economic health and security of the US, and to the future of scientific research and innovation at the country’s universities and scientific institutions.

The Trump administration has removed leading scientists from advisory boards and federally supported research institutions, and launched a wholesale attack on universities and departments that don’t mesh with its political agenda, without considering the consequences for the nation. Perhaps most damaging of all, it is proposing to systematically end support for most cutting-edge American research programs.

The new administration’s budget proposes that National Science Foundation funding be cut from US$8.9 billion to US$3.9 billion, with similar cuts at NASA, the DOE, and the NIH. Nobel-Prizewinning experiments like the LIGO gravitational wave laboratory will be effectively ended; the next-generation Roman space telescope, already essentially completed, may never fly; US participation in the LISA space-based gravitational wave observatory, which will open up a new window on the universe, is likely to be cancelled; and the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, where almost all the significant scientific research carried out by NASA is housed, may be closed. And just this last week it ws announced that a high priority radio telescope array designed to probe conditions immediately after the Big Bang has been cancelled.

Harvard has become the epicentre of much of this new reality. Amidst the 1,000 NSF grants indiscriminately cancelled in recent months are those of several leading physicists, who have been supported continuously for decades because they are among the best scientists in the world. This means that they will no longer be able to recruit and train the most talented postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

The best way to fight one form of intellectual intolerance is not to impose your own rival brand of intolerance. If viewpoint diversity is found to be wanting in academia, the solution is not to merely change the viewpoints that are allowed. You can’t achieve anything good for a university by destroying the very best parts of the university in the process.

The attempt to paint all university faculty as woke is misguided. Many leading scientists and scholars have remained largely immune to the mind-virus that has been proliferating across so many university campuses. These individuals continued to push the boundaries of knowledge while either ignoring the internal culture wars or trying to fly below the radar of administrative activists on their campuses. In retrospect, their unwillingness to directly confront the social justice leviathan emerging on campuses may have contributed to the wholesale backlash against universities now taking place. But schadenfreude is not worth risking the country for.

By attacking the work of the best, brightest, and most productive scientists in the country, this new war on science being waged by the administration is, at least in the near term, far more damaging than the woke attacks because it is decimating the nation’s scientific infrastructure by disenfranchising the best scientific researchers and defunding their programs—despite the fact that such people were never part of the problem in the first place.

The punishment, if there is to be one, should fit the crime. Some time ago, I reported on an analysis conducted by a colleague of mine who used ChatGPT to determine how many of the grants awarded by the National Science Foundation in 2023 were related to Critical Social Justice. My colleague and I found that twelve percent of the total NSF budget went to such grants—far too high a proportion. If we want to eliminate the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) infrastructure at the NSF and at universities, it makes sense to end these contracts and either reduce the NSF budget by twelve percent or spend that money on real science. But that is not what is happening here.

Instead, the new administration is prioritising expanding its nuclear weapons program at the expense of science. In the proposed budget, expenditures on the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is in charge of nuclear weapons stewardship, are to be increased by a whopping $11 billion. This is more than the entire current $8.9 billion NSF budget, and more than twice the 59 percent of the NSF budget that the government is proposing to cut. This makes little sense, especially given the fact that, as former Presidential Science Advisor Neal Lane has recently emphasised, good nuclear stewardship is dependent on a vibrant cutting-edge physics research infrastructure.

The economic and military interests of the nation are best served by supporting a vibrant research culture in STEM fields like physics and biology. We need materials science and aerospace engineering research to develop new batteries and hardened materials for use in the military, as well as theoretical work in areas like quantum physics—which is vital not just for quantum computing but also for encoding sensitive messages. We need biological research in areas like immunology and genomics to protect against future pandemics. In short, the best and brightest scientists in the country need to be supported and encouraged to conduct curiosity-driven research—which produced almost half the current GDP of the nation within a single generation.

To do all this, we will also need to recruit the brightest minds from all over the world. Instead, the current administration seems bent on disallowing talented foreign scholars and students from studying and working in this country. In the past, many of these students—including Elon Musk—chose to stay in the United States after their studies ended and have created innovative technologies that have bolstered the US economy in myriad ways.

The culture wars in higher education have hurt both teaching and research, but the current policy of dismantling the government–science partnership that has helped drive US leadership in science and technology is worse. Leadership in these fields may soon pass to Europe—or, worse, to China. A great deal of damage has already been done, and it may soon be too late to fix it, as laboratories close down and first-rate researchers either leave their fields or move abroad.

Curiosity-driven science and research are crucial to the economic success of our nation. They must not be made subservient to political goals. It is worth remembering the words of Robert Wilson, the first director of the Fermi National Laboratory, which houses the nation’s largest particle accelerator. In 1969, when Congress asked him whether the particle accelerator would aid in the defence of the nation, Wilson responded, “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”