Last month, I went to D.C. to attend the Golden Goose Awards. The program honors federally funded research that looked obscure at first but later led to major breakthroughs in medicine, technology, biology, and more. One of the first recipients of the prize was Dr. John Eng, whose research on Gila monster venom led to the development of GLP-1s. One of this year’s winners turned a $5 bag of pig organs into an FDA-approved treatment for liver tumors and a $4 billion company. It took her 20 years, and for much of that time, her only backer was the federal government.
The Golden Goose Awards celebrate the kind of science that the federal government is now abandoning. Nearly $200 billion in federal funding has been cut, delayed, or otherwise disrupted across 17 policy sectors and 21 federal agencies since President Trump returned to office. The cuts go well beyond “woke” science or “wasteful” spending. They’ve hit a long-term study of Alzheimer’s risk factors, a randomized trial of opioid addiction treatment, techniques to combat disinformation, and more. Grants are being funneled instead to the administration’s priorities, such as AI and quantum computing, and to pet projects with little scientific heft.
Since meeting this year’s honorees, I’ve kept returning to one question: What isn’t getting funded today that could be changing lives 20 years from now?
The New Gatekeepers
Anyone who cares about curing disease, winning wars, or preserving American hegemony should care about the state of American research. Every new drug the FDA approved from 2010 to 2016 traced back to research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Stealth technology, night vision, GPS, and precision-guided weapons all exist because of government-funded basic research. Nearly a third of all U.S. patents, which underpin American innovation, rely on federally funded research.
The most successful and prestigious research system in the world is now being dismantled, clumsily. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 45% fewer research grants this year than its five-year average — the lowest levels in four decades. The NIH has issued 13% fewer awards than its five-year average, and the Trump administration has terminated more than 400 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grants worth nearly $6 billion.
Why is this happening? The Trump administration claims that it is improving government efficiency by eliminating wasteful spending on what it calls “DEI” initiatives. In reality, it is canceling or delaying grant processes and crucial research to appease the president, and then, in many cases, reinstating the research once it realizes that it is, indeed, crucial.
The administration’s policy changes have created more paperwork and more delays for scientists. For example, every federal grant application must undergo a new round of political review. NIH staff have been told to prescreen grants with a “computational text tool,” which staffers describe as a large language model that’s been trained to flag terms the administration dislikes.
Nature’s Max Kozlov reported on a list of 235 terms that have been flagged. The list includes “racism,” “fossil fuel,” and “sexual minorit” (a fragment meant to catch every variant of “sexual minority”). “It’s a way of saying ‘we have a lot of words and topics that we’re banning’ without actually saying that,” Noam Ross, co-founder of Grant Witness, a public database that tracks federal spending cuts, told me.
Some grants have been canceled simply because they mention minorities. $15 million in funding for Alzheimer’s research at Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh was cut in part because scientists were trying to figure out why Black Americans are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia as white Americans. Overall, the Trump administration has canceled nearly $800 million in NIH grants because the research focused on or mentioned minorities.
Grant renewals now take months instead of weeks, as political appointees comb through research documents for banned language. Staffing levels across America’s science agencies have also been slashed, leading to further delays.
Of the more than 11,000 grants that were disrupted across the NIH, CDC, NSF, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 65% were later restored, either by the courts or by the reviewers themselves.
But grant delays have real-life consequences — some that reinstatement can’t undo.
John Paul Macri’s life depended on federal funding. In March 2025, the 8-year-old was diagnosed with an aggressive, inoperable brain tumor called DIPG. The five-year survival rate for his disease was just 2%, but John Paul’s parents were optimistic because he could enroll in a clinical trial for a new mRNA treatment. However, just five months after John Paul’s diagnosis, Elon Musk’s DOGE cut funding for the NIH’s Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, which was funding the trial. John Paul was unable to enroll because of the cuts. The consortium’s work is now being transitioned into a broader network of hospitals, but John Paul won’t be able to enroll in the next trial. He passed away on October 4.
One particular research category has been left undisrupted: the pet projects of political appointees. These scientific studies, Ross told me, are “often poorly scientifically thought out.”
Last month, for example, the NIH issued a request for proposals on metal toxicity. The topic sounds benign, but Ross noted it’s really a convenient umbrella for studying aluminum in vaccines, a long-running fixation of the anti-vaccine community. The presence of aluminum in vaccines has already been evaluated and deemed low-risk. The window between the announcement date and the deadline for submitting research proposals was also unusually short, which signals that the agency was soliciting proposals from a specific group of people.
A Diversified Portfolio
The United States’ research investment portfolio is starting to look like its stock market: dangerously concentrated in AI.
The government’s job is to fund not just the most exciting, frontier research, but also what financially motivated, private sector investors won’t: research with no guarantee of a near-term return. This kind of science can yield groundbreaking results.
Instead, the Trump administration has reallocated research funding to focus on AI, quantum, biotechnology, and advanced materials for semiconductors and robotics — fields the private sector is already pouring trillions into.
The damage, Ross warned, goes beyond individual grants. “What happens is a break in trust, uncertainty which means that universities aren’t going to invest in certain areas of research, because they’re unsure about whether it’ll get funded in the future. In the big picture, we’re undermining the United States’ broad scientific capacity.”
In 2025, health research lost $1 billion, while machine learning and AI gained $468 million, and networking and information technology $368 million. This year, the White House announced it would redirect $200 billion in science funding toward AI initiatives. Meanwhile, new grant allocations at the NSF have fallen more than 20% year over year.
Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals, testified before Congress last year about the Trump administration’s proposed budget. “This is not just a five-year problem. It’s a 10-year, 20-year, 30-year problem,” he said, referring to the impact that cuts would have on the U.S. and scientific enterprise more broadly.
In September, at the 15th annual Golden Goose Awards ceremony, Parikh said in an address to the crowd: “Part of our nation’s scientific and economic leadership starts with giving researchers the freedom to follow promising ideas, even when no one knows exactly where they’ll lead.”
On November 13, I’ll host a livestream with Dr. Parikh and Dr. Shruti Naik, a professor of immunology and dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. We’ll talk about what that 30-year problem looks like from the lab bench and the halls of Congress, and which breakthroughs we may already be losing. Sign up here.
A $5 Bag of Pig Organs
Before the ceremony, I got the chance to speak to a few of the awardees.
Dr. Zhen Xu left Nanjing, China, in 2001 for graduate school at the University of Michigan. A year later, she was experimenting on pig hearts in search of treatments for congenital heart disease when her labmates complained that the ultrasound was too loud. To quiet it, she pulsed the sound at a frequency above the range most people can hear. Then, something unexpected happened: The bursts blasted holes in the tissue. Xu didn’t know it at the time, but she’d discovered histotripsy, a technology that can destroy tumors without incision, radiation, or toxicity.
For years, no one believed histotripsy could treat human patients. Scientists doubted her, and investors considered the technology too risky. Xu’s only backers were federal funders. Grants from the NIH, and later the Department of Defense, paid for specialized equipment and funded the research studies that showed what else histotripsy might treat.
“Federal funding has been absolutely critical, especially at the early stage when you’re laying the foundation that can lead to applications,” Xu told me.
Two decades later, histotripsy won FDA approval to treat liver tumors. HistoSonics, the company Xu co-founded to commercialize the technology, is now valued at $4 billion, with backers including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Reed Jobs. Time named it one of the 10 most influential health and life science companies of 2026.
Xu’s parents didn’t go to high school; her entire education was supported through fellowships. She worries that students hoping to follow her path will struggle to do so. “In China, if you want to get funding, you need to be a senior investigator,” Xu told me. “In the United States, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from,” she said. “If you are great, if you have great ideas, if you are armed with data, and even if you’re young, the U.S. will give you funding. This would never happen in China.”
“It all began with a $5 bag of pig organs,” Xu said. “Federal funding made the impossible possible.”
Coffee Stains and Sand Jams
Another winner, Dr. Sidney Nagel, has spent his life asking the questions you might expect of an inquisitive child.
Why, for instance, does a coffee stain dry darker at its edge than at its center? His research ultimately revealed how evaporation drives particles toward the edge of a drying droplet, which has helped to improve diagnostic tests in medical settings.
Nagel also studied how materials like glass, sand, and grains layer and move on top of one another — all attempts to understand the order of disorder. His findings have improved industrial processing techniques and pharmaceutical manufacturing. It may sound far-fetched, but Nagel’s curiosity about sand piles has helped drug manufacturers distribute powder in pill capsules.
From Nuclear to Celestial Scale
I asked Nagel how he’d defend his work to a skeptical taxpayer. He offered a practical and poetic response.
First, his biggest expense is personnel, because an important dimension of his job is training the next generation of scientists. Nagel sees his job as teaching young scientists “to look at the world with an open mind, and to see things that are in their face that they might not notice.”
Second, as humans, isn’t it important to know — to really know — the world we inhabit?
Take a splashing water droplet. Nagel studied what determines its shape and motion as it breaks apart. This is a fundamental question in mathematics and computer science, he told me. “But the singularity in that event — when a drop breaks apart — appears in star formation, bacteria colonies splitting apart, all the way down to the fission of the nucleus of an atom.”
The best part? “I did all that by studying something on a tabletop.”
For decades, the United States understood the value of patient capital invested in brilliant, curious minds who wanted to contribute to society. “We’re not doing it for the money,” Xu reminded me.
The task before us is simple: Give great minds the freedom to explore, and we’ll reap the rewards for decades to come.
P.S.
Subscribe to Prof G+ to watch our upcoming livestreams:
The Autonomous Vehicle Wars: Winners and Losers, with Dan Chiolan on October 16 at 12 p.m. EDT
From Idea to Episode: How Prof G Media Makes Podcasts, with Head of Research Mia Silverio and Senior Producer Jennifer Sanchez on October 20 at 1:30 p.m. EDT
Is America Losing Its Scientific Edge? with Kristin O’Donoghue, Sudip Parikh, CEO and Executive Publisher, Science Journals, and Shruti Naik, Director, Colton Center for Autoimmunity and Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai on November 13 at 1 p.m. EST
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The question you have to ask yourself is who are all the people who wrote that Project 2025 doc, and why is it that they do not see the value of any of this? I think the answer to that question is that these are free-market ideologues who believe that "the market can solve all things". The market is not good at funding basic research in the absence of monopolies (like the Bell System and IBM), and even there, that research even those companies were doing was in partnership with the US Govt.