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We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower
The president’s assault on science dangerously undermines America’s superpower status.
By Max Boot
Updated
June 3, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTtoday at 6:00 a.m. EDT
On June 14 — the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army and, not so coincidentally, the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump — a gaudy display of U.S. military power will parade through Washington. No doubt Trump thinks that all of the tanks and soldiers on display will make America, and its president, look tough and strong.
But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science, and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.
Since the 1940s, when the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the University of California played a central role in the Manhattan Project, the engine driving U.S. economic and military competitiveness has been federal support of research universities. That partnership has produced most of the key inventions of the information age, including the internet, GPS, smartphones and artificial intelligence.
Federal support of university research has also made possible the success of the United States’ world-leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Advances enabled by federal support include magnetic resonance imaging, the Human Genome Project, LASIK surgery, weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, and drugs that have saved countless AIDS and covid-19 patients.
Now Trump is sabotaging a research and development pipeline that is the envy of the world. The Trump budget would cut the National Science Foundation budget by 55 percent. Already, the U.S. DOGE Service has terminated more than 1,600 active grants from the foundation, worth $1.5 billion. According to the New York Times, the science foundation’s grants this year are being disbursed at the slowest pace in at least 35 years. The NSF directly supports 357,600 researchers and students; many of them will now be out of luck.
It’s a similar story at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who subscribes to an array of crackpot health theories, has already reduced the HHS workforce by 10,000 people with buyouts or early retirements, and now he intends to lay off an additional 10,000. Adding insult to injury, Kennedy wants to prohibit government scientists from publishing in the leading peer-reviewed journals. “CDC clobbered,” one official told The Post. “The agency will not be able to function. Let’s be honest.”
These budget cuts are hitting hard at America’s — and the world’s — leading research universities: Johns Hopkins is losing $800 million; Columbia, $400 million; the University of Pennsylvania, $175 million. No school has suffered more than Harvard University, which has lost more than $2.6 billion in federal funds.
Indeed, Trump says he wants to eliminate all of Harvard’s federal contracts and give the money to trade schools. This is populism gone crazy. Valuable as trade schools are, they will not be making breakthroughs in fighting Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, strokes, sickle cell anemia or other diseases that are being researched at Harvard.
Then there is the administration’s assault on foreign students. Trump tried to kick all international students out of Harvard — an order halted by a federal judge Thursday. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has vowed to retaliate against U.S. allies that censor free speech, has sought to expel foreign students for expressing views he dislikes about the war in Gaza. The State Department announced last week that it was temporarily halting all interviews for foreign-student visas, and Rubio said the agency would “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students in the United States “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
As The Post noted, about 100 million people belong to the Chinese Communist Party, most for careerist rather than ideological reasons. And of the 277,398 Chinese students currently studying at U.S. universities, more than 110,000 are pursuing degrees in math, science and engineering — all areas of weakness for the U.S. educational system. Expelling a substantial number of foreign students, who typically pay full tuition, would deal another heavy blow to universities already reeling from federal budget cuts.
It isn’t just universities that benefit from the presence of foreign students — so does the entire country. According to the Association of International Educators, the more than 1.1 million international students in the United States create about $44 billion in economic activity and 378,000 jobs. And then there are the benefits they deliver after they graduate, assuming they are allowed to stay in this country. The National Foundation for American Policy reports that one-quarter of all billion-dollar U.S. start-ups have a founder who attended a U.S. university as an international student.
The United States’ competitors are salivating at the prospect of gaining an edge in technological competition at our expense. France, Australia and Canada are throwing out the welcome mat to scientists who can no longer do their work in the United States. But the biggest beneficiary is likely to be China. Even before the Trump cutbacks, China was already catching up to the United States in scientific spending; its research and development budget has been growing by an average of 8.9 percent a year, compared with just 4.7 percent in the United States.
In March, Beijing announced a $138 billion government fund that will invest in cutting-edge fields such as AI, quantum computing and hydrogen energy.
So while China is investing to win the economic (and potentially military) contests of the future, Trump is undercutting long-term U.S. military and economic competitiveness with his anti-intellectual animus. The weapons systems that will be paraded in Washington on June 14 won’t be of much help to the United States in the future if it falls behind in the R&D race with China. I fear we may be seeing, as suggested by China expert Rush Doshi, the suicide of a superpower.
