“A Generational Loss of Talent” - Scientist Warns Funding Cuts in Science, Tech, and Health Undermine U.S. Leadership

Students left in limbo with PhD programs paused. Essential scientific research slashed. Key disease response meetings cancelled. The threat of China’s dominance growing.

The Trump administration’s campaign to restrict funding for U.S. institutions critical to science, technology, and health has sparked growing anxiety. Will budget cuts derail America’s leadership, altering its global standing for years to come? What will it cost us—and the rest of the world?

Phillip Alvelda, a scientist and entrepreneur with experience at NASA and DARPA, warns that damage to science, technology, and health initiatives could severely impact America’s ability to innovate and maintain its global position. As the government scales back support for crucial research and education, the long-term consequences could be catastrophic—not only for the economy but for public health and technological progress.

Alvelda spoke with the Institute for New Economic Thinking about how cuts threaten both the immediate workforce and the pipeline of talent necessary to sustain America’s competitive edge in a rapidly changing global landscape. He also shares his thoughts on how we can preserve the things that have truly made America great.

Lynn Parramore: Let me start with a big question. The news is full of reports about Trump administration funding cuts for science, technology, and health policy: Stories of mass firings, grants put on hold, and PhD students who are in suspended animation. Do you feel like we’re witnessing a turning point in the history of science and tech in the United States?

Phillip Alvelda: You know, I don’t think that overall a blip like this is going to radically shift the long-term position of the United States. We’re still an innovative country. We’re still peopled with brilliant, hardworking, curious undergraduates and graduate students who all want to do interesting things.

But I think that there’s a complete misunderstanding on the part of the current leadership of how that whole system works and how it underpins things that the US is and will become. And in that sense, we see a very callous disregard for things that are fundamental to the United States as a country.

LP: Can you give an example?

PA: We just got through the pandemic—although “got through” is a bit of a strong statement because it’s still ongoing, even though fewer people are dying from it these days. That’s the good news. The only reason we saved as many lives as we did and are in a position to start seriously addressing the Long COVID epidemic—now a result of the COVID pandemic—is that we have a history of leadership in biotechnology. And before that, biology. And before that, general science.

Of course, all around that are the instruments of industry that made it possible. All of the engineering, the manufacturing, the information sciences and data analysis, the AI tools—every single one of those advances and our ability to operate the companies, distribute the cures, train the medical students, and have them in the field helping people—every single element of that is dependent on the graduate students funded through those agencies.

So it’s not just a matter of the science that’s momentarily interrupted. It’s also a matter of the pipeline of people who can do the science, the engineering, the operations, and the clinical care. All of it is fundamentally dependent on those graduate students and their studies being funded, their education being funded, and what they’re doing as part of the research infrastructure to make those things happen. What we’re seeing is a huge disruption, not just to the industry itself and a momentary pause in its activities, but to our ability to sustain a workforce that can do these things.

LP: Can some of these displaced individuals pursue their education, training, and research in the private sector? Could that be a solution?

PA: I think what many people in the private sector and many people in the government don’t appreciate is that there is a huge barrier or gap in fundamental science, discovery, and technology development that is not profitable.

Really basic research is too speculative, too risky, and in many cases the benefits are too diffuse to be fully captured by investors in one enterprise. There’s also a huge layer of infrastructure, learning, and knowledge that must be developed years before industry is in a position to take up these new ideas, with the frameworks, knowledge, background, and technologies needed to build profitable systems. So, companies do not invest in those things.

The only agency in the world that has a success rate in creating these technologies is the United States, through its science and technology funding agencies. By that, I mean the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where I worked. People don’t realize this.

The only reason you and I can talk like this via video chat on these systems is because DARPA invested hundreds of millions of dollars in material understanding, followed by more hundreds of millions developing transistors, then hundreds of millions more funding for microchips, and even more to make the internet possible.

All of these advancements took decades of investment, much of which went to PhD labs and universities to create those initial ideas—ideas that came even before the science and the technology. Each stage relied on the government funding mechanism, which is the envy of the world. No one else has this.

LP: It has been pointed out that Elon Musk’s companies have developed exciting products leveraging expensive, government-funded research. For example, SpaceX wouldn’t exist without NASA’s research in areas like jet propulsion and orbital mechanics, and Tesla’s advancements wouldn’t be possible without government-funded research into batteries, among other innovations.

PA: Absolutely. All of the companies he runs are highly technically dependent, and they’re staffed and led by technologists who benefited from these very research programs. The technologies they’re building rely on the fact that we’ve been investing in these areas for the last 50 years.

It’s not an accident that he developed these things in the United States, right? He came here from South Africa. Why? Because there had been decades of investment from these agencies into the technology infrastructure, the base components he then used. He hired PhDs principally from the US, although also from other countries, to staff the companies in this country. So the idea that he would be instrumental in the downsizing of this is incredibly hypocritical. I just don’t understand how he can be supporting these efforts.

LP: In many areas of science, like medicine, timing is crucial. Delays can lead to significant problems. For example, the FDA recently canceled a meeting of its vaccine advisory committee to select a strain for this year’s flu vaccine, raising concerns that vaccines may not be ready in time for the 2025-2026 flu season. What are you most worried about right now?

PA: It’s hard to pick just one because the damage is so vast, but let me highlight a couple. Number one, I would say, is the damage to protection against pandemic threats—it’s probably the most immediate concern. We have an H5N1 bird flu pandemic that’s on the uprise. We have a COVID pandemic that’s on the downswing but a Long COVID pandemic that still persists. We have this new bizarre mystery disease in Congo. The rate of emergence of these threats is increasing, and they’re getting worse because we live in a more densely interconnected and agriculturally connected global society.

Halting efforts that hamper our ability to address existing pandemics, let alone detect or manage incoming ones, is mind-bogglingly short-sighted. To me, actions like stopping the development of the oral COVID vaccine—and the potential shutdown of the nasal vaccine—are particularly concerning. These represent massive investments already in trials, poised to become global technologies that benefit not just the US but companies and humanity as a whole. For leaders at Health and Human Services to put these programs at risk, whether through funding freezes or trial terminations, is not just poor policy—it’s irresponsible. I’d even classify it as evil and putting society at deep risk. And that’s not hyperbole; that’s very real.

My second example of critical damage is generational, affecting science and technology education. When you consider people’s career decisions and opportunities, it’s already a challenge for the United States—even before the current administration’s efforts—to recruit and train enough scientists, technologists, and engineers to meet the demands of our increasingly technological society. And to realize the opportunities of those technologies and improve people’s lives and our economy to boot. So we come into this situation over the last decade already starved for talent.

Historically, we’ve been filling that gap with immigrants. We invite the smartest, the most brilliant people from all over the world to come to our very best institutions and learn from our best scientists and technologists how to create the future. And we hope that with that enticement, they decide to stay in the United States and grow those technologies and advancements here. But now we’ve got a crack-down on immigration, so that pipeline is shutting down. Now we’ve got a crack-down on the funding that allows the universities to employ these students in the first place and train them and educate them and take them through the mentorships and apprenticeships that teach them how to build these new technologies.

So you now have a generation coming into school in the next two, four years at least, who will not have that option.

LP: I’d like to ask you a personal question about your background—can you say a bit about how you got into science, the choices you made as a young person, and what helped you realize your vision for your life?

PA: Well, it’s the very programs that we’re discussing. I’ve been very fortunate to have had fantastic educational opportunities. My undergraduate degree was at Cornell, and my graduate school was at MIT. I had stints at NASA and DARPA, as you know. In each case, big parts of that funding, and, in fact, all of the tuition and fees for my graduate studies came from the US science and technology funding agencies. Had I not had that subsidy, I would not have been able to go because the cost even back in the 90s was unaffordable to a young student on his own.

I think this is a generationally damaging problem because it’s not just about what’s happening to folks entering school today. You’re changing the entire risk calculation of someone who wants to go into this field. What is the likelihood of a stable career? Are they’re going to pay for my first quarter? My first year? My first four years so I can get my undergraduate degree? Is grad school paid for? Four years of $50,000 to $100,000 a year of expenses - that’s a lot. It’s expensive to train a technologist. And no one has done it better than the United States — anywhere.

LP: You mentioned how science and technology have been America’s pride and joy for decades going back. What are your thoughts on how we got to this place of this distrust and even hostility toward science that has been erupting?

PA: I would make a distinction between what the general public wants and what a minority of Trump-supporting zealots are pushing for. There seems to be an effort to deconstruct what I would call the knowledge-based industries because they threaten ideology that doesn’t make sense or does not match with reality. I see that in the FBI, the CIA — really all knowledge workers, people with advanced higher education. Anything that gives people global perspectives to fight bigotry or anything that helps them learn about things like the environment that is collapsing around us with anthropogenic climate change, the fossil fuel impacts there. These are inconvenient policy points, and the more people are educated about them, the fewer people support them.

So I think there’s a broad effort to deconstruct the engines that undermine the support for that ideology.

LP: On the flip side, these are the engines of our economic success. It’s interesting because key people in this administration are part of the world shaped by the economic dynamism driven by science and tech. Can you speak to the economic prospects we might be jeopardizing right now?

PA: It’s a particularly poorly timed effort because, especially with the rise of the new artificial intelligence technologies, we’re seeing an ever-increasing global competitive marketplace that is taking up some of the slack that the US is stepping aside from. You look at, for example, the sovereign wealth investments of China to subsidize their industry. They’re dwarfing the US investments. You may have seen some stats that there are now more patents and AI coming out of China than the United States.

We already have a history of inventing a few things and then handing over the industrial capacity and manufacturing to Asia to our detriment. So how did we get here? I think that we put the wrong people in charge, honestly – people who don’t have an appreciation for these things and don’t know the history, don’t know the technology, and they’re making uninformed decisions that have serious economic and long-term global stability impact.

LP: DeepSeek grabbed everyone’s attention with its leaner, more efficient AI models, challenging industry giants. Some argue that cutting bloat in science and tech agencies, streamlining grants, and forcing efficiency could drive innovation. What’s wrong with that argument?

PA: Well, I think the argument is an excellent one. I’ll be the last person to say there’s no bloat in government agencies or university funding or even innovative research. There are always nooks and crannies that pennies fall into. You often will find people conducting fraud.

LP: What about just inefficiencies, like conducting redundant studies?

PA: What one person calls a redundant study could be multiple different approaches to try and figure out the same thing. Science actually depends on redundant studies to explore different ways to solve similar problems. So to call that waste is not really accurate. I think that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the point that there’s no certainty in research.

You’re trying to discover things you don’t understand yet. So the notion that you can be efficient and say, I’m going to build this thing and I’m just going to invest in the one thing that’s going to be successful — the world doesn’t work that way. You have to try dozens of things, hundreds of things, things that work, things that don’t work. Remember Edison, the famous quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” But eventually, he discovered the right combination — the tungsten filament that worked in the light bulb.

That’s how we advance science. It’s not a certain thing. It requires broad exploration, not just narrow convergence. It’s the idea of divergent thinking and of funding divergent thinking, knowing that many of the things you explore are not going to succeed. But if you don’t do that exploration, you can’t find the ones that will succeed. So that is just a fundamentally different way of thinking about research that the directed corporate profit-driven motives just do not support in the same way.

But speaking about the waste and how that manifests and what you can do about it, you can absolutely do audits and find waste, and in fact, there have been a number of government programs to do that. Could you find ways to run the government agencies more efficiently? Absolutely. Especially with AI technologies, you could probably implement new systems and procedures and reduce the number of people. But if that’s your goal, turning everything off and wrecking everything and just firing people is not the way you do it.

LP: Going back to conversations we had had about the pandemic—you and others were critical of the CDC’s handling of key aspects of the response, such as dragging its heels on admitting that the virus was airborne despite urgent warnings from scientists. What would be the right way to handle those types of failures at government agencies?

PA: The proper response would be to install leadership that actually wants to modernize them and not just destroy them. I think that the mechanisms that you’re seeing here are not just about efficiency. They’re about disruption.

We see reports, for example, that even while the courts have ordered the flow of money to NIH grantees to continue, the senior HHS leadership from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on down has continued to pressure the agency to not resume the funding. Most of the money has not flowed, despite the court order, in direct violation of the court order. What is the purpose of that? Is all of it about fraud? No, of course not. Is any of it critical to our nation’s future success? Absolutely. They have stopped the engine of innovation. They’ve stopped the engine of advancing clinical technologies. They’ve stopped the engine of educating our students to be able to do this next year and the following years.

Right now, they’re more interested in the disruption and the stoppage than in the reinvention. Not to draw too fine a parallel, but the history of dictators has always been, I’m going to tear down the system now and build a better one. And history shows us that pretty much every time they’re great at the tearing down, they fail on the rebuild.

LP: You feel optimistic that this moment doesn’t necessarily ruin our position in the world on science and innovation. But how do we sustain ourselves? How do scientists respond to the challenges so that we don’t lose our momentum?

PA: Number one, I think that we need to make sure that the GOP-led states that are influencing the congressional appropriations, that have the power of the purse, are encouraged by the people who want the cancer cures, who want their parents taken care of, who want their children educated, who will support resuming the normal operations of a university ecosystem and a biotechnology investment system. Unfortunately, not too many people are directly engaged with either of those aspects of society, even as critical as they are. So I’m skeptical that that alone is going to drive a change in policy.

The other thing that I think is important is to look to states where a lot of this research is being carried out, like Massachusetts, California, and New York. These are blue states with very healthy economies. My hope is that if the government stops funding these things on the federal level, state governments will step in. But then that creates the worry that you’re unraveling the ties that bind us as a nation. If the federal government is not funding these things and the states are largely independent of the federal government, why are they part of a union? It seems a little bit short-sighted on that front to me as well.

LP: And as we saw during the pandemic, coordination across the country is often critical.

PA: That’s right.

LP: Let’s talk about the politicization of science. Why is that such an area of concern for you?

PA: This ties very much into my earlier comments and INET interviews about the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO), both of which proved unable to convey important public messages that they were completely aware of technically within the organizations.

The key factor was what I would call the political equivalent of economic capture — regulatory capture. Once the political system has enough control of a regulatory regime, and those people who should be regulated actually control the regulating mechanism, its ability to effectively legislate, control, and govern goes away. In this case, the CDC and WHO both succumbed to political pressure and put their missions in abeyance and people at risk.

If there was going to be a good outcome of firing most of the people of the CDC, it’s that the best people who have been fired would go to a state agency that’s created and designed to be independent politically and not obligated to send a message that’s politically convenient for one ideology.

LP: What would be an example of such a state entity?

PA: The California Department of Public Health would be a good example. Or the New York Department of Public Health. The idea would be to grow the CDC functions within those agencies and see them take up the responsibilities that have been forfeited by the CDC. These agencies could lead coordinated efforts to combat issues like the bird flu pandemic, Long COVID, and vaccine development—areas the CDC is neglecting. California, with its economy larger than many countries, can sustain an advanced public health initiative independent of federal oversight, especially when that oversight is hindering progress. We just need to reach out and get Governor Newsom and Governor Hochul on board.

LP: It’s more difficult all the time to find reliable information with disruptions and pressure on news outlets. I’ve noticed that some federal employees and others that have been displaced are turning to social media to share information that’s no longer available, for example, on agency websites. It seems that new channels of information are emerging.

PA: Yes. The mainstream media sources are owned by people who have conflicting interests from the American public. If you’re not there, just know that the technical and clinical communities have moved over lock, stock, and barrel to the Blue Sky platform, which is an open platform that does not suppress pandemic information or elevate specific, rightward ideologies like now X has been proven to do since last August.