The New York Times reports:

The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.

The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.

The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be screened for their loyalty to his goals. The report, issued by the Pentagon, pointed to “potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense.”

The turmoil inside scientific research has extended beyond the Pentagon. The Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff. The National Science Foundation, for decades a primary backer of long-term, foundational research, has withheld more than $1 billion in funding. And at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of medical research, officials delayed or canceled more than 2,000 grants to biomedical researchers focused on topics such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.

Under Mr. Trump, the federal government is still spending roughly as much on research — about $200 billion this year — as the administrations that came before. Scientists across the country are still receiving grants; universities are still being funded. But beneath the surface, the system of federally funded science that helped make the United States a global superpower is under intense strain from Trump policies, jeopardizing the nation’s advantages in defense, medicine and technology, a New York Times examination has found.

The White House regularly proclaims that it is advancing American interests. Yet its actions are eroding the country’s scientific edge as global rivals challenge U.S. dominance in fields that will help define the 21st century, according to interviews with scientists, university leaders, government officials and analysts and a review of documents and budgets.

The damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.

One is the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still reverberating across the bureaucracy.

A second is the administration’s continued pressure on research universities, in which the White House used funding cuts to push schools into adhering to its demands for ideologically driven policy shifts.

The third is a campaign by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, to impose more political control over how the government spends money appropriated by Congress, further infusing politics into decisions around scientific research. [Continue reading…]