In the 1950s, members of Congress nearly laughed a group of entomologists out of their hearing room. The scientists’ research proposal? To study the mating habits of screwworm flies—parasites that burrow into the flesh of cattle. Though elected officials and members of the news media mocked the idea at the time, the unglamorous research effort eventually led to a sterilization program that saved the livestock industry billions of dollars. If the same project were proposed today, it might never get funded.
Over the past year, federal agencies in the US have cut research funding at a pace unmatched since the 1930s, justified by claims that scientific research has become bloated, inefficient, and wasteful. While the depth of the cuts are unprecedented, the attitude driving the change is older than the current administration, reaching back decades to a period when the US began to doubt that curiosity alone was worth supporting.
For physician-scientists like Jennifer Sherr, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the Yale School of Medicine, this shift undermines the foundation of preventive medicine—work that is, by definition, slow, cumulative, and complex. Sherr studies ways to delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes (T1D), a slow-developing autoimmune disease whose trajectory is best changed by intervention long before symptoms appear. But intervening that early means first finding the people at highest risk, a task that requires decades of screening, monitoring, and follow-up. Effective T1D screening programs must identify individuals with multiple autoantibodies, immune system proteins that serve as the earliest reliable markers that the disease process has begun, often years before clinical signs emerge. “The goal is to identify risk years before symptoms appear, even if that means sifting through huge numbers of healthy children […] sometimes a hundred are screened to find two,” Sherr said.
Foundations of Federal Funding
Before 1940, the federal government played almost no role in supporting open-ended scientific inquiry; most research was funded by industry labs or by philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation, which favored projects with immediate, definable commercial benefits.
However, the technological pressures of the Second World War pushed the federal government to mobilize and coordinate research at an unprecedented scale. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and appointed Vannevar Bush (LAW ’42) as its director. Under Bush, the OSRD coordinated networks of university scientists, military engineers, and industrial manufacturers by shifting its emphasis from practical applications to basic research and “directed autonomy” for scientists to work independently under overarching national objectives In his 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush argued that “scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” He believed that meaningful advances often emerge from work that has no immediate, practical use.
While Congress continued debating for five years whether scientific autonomy should outweigh federal oversight, these projects—combined with the principal doctrine first outlined in Bush’s report—represented a revolutionary new logic: a government that funds science not because its uses are known, but because they are unknowable.
Sherr’s own field offers a living example of the legacy of that worldview. Her work today is shaped by long-running NIH-funded studies that have followed participants over multiple decades of life. “Prevention takes decades, not grant cycles. You can’t rush prevention,” she said. Sherr, diagnosed with T1D in 1987, said she personally believes she has avoided many complications because earlier researchers were given the time to study diabetes carefully, slowly, and thoroughly.
The Golden Age
Following World War II, the United States’ belief in curiosity-driven science built the clinical research infrastructure that Sherr and others still depend on today: longitudinal trials, national screening programs, and multi-site networks capable of tracking disease progression over decades. The decades following the war were marked by a tenfold increase in the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a trifold increase in the number of PhDs in science and engineering, and a growing body of discoveries that reshaped everyday life. As universities reorganized themselves around the new model, research faculty became dependent on grants and laboratories grew into semi-autonomous bureaucracies.
Beyond the cultural assumption that the public good justified long-term investment in long-shot research, the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 transformed science funding into an instrument of national security. Congress responded by pouring money into science education and establishing NASA. Through the Cold War, curiosity became strategized: basic science was treated not as a luxury but as the foundation of national power, and even identity.
Michael Crair, Yale’s Vice Provost for Research, points out that the intellectual and policy frameworks built in the 1940s became the scaffolding for the research culture that followed. The philosophy behind federal investment did not just shape what kinds of questions were considered worthy of support; it also established the idea that basic science is a public responsibility. “Every form of inquiry—abstract, fundamental, or extremely applied—contributes to essential advancements,” Crair said. “The private sector typically does not fund at high levels the basic, fundamental research that forms the backbone of discovery, given the long-term investment it requires. Federal funding, therefore, has an irreplaceable role in sustaining this work.”
For Sherr, this era made her field possible. “Those big federal investments built the scaffolding my field stands on,” Sherr said. “You can only understand a disease like Type 1 diabetes if you watch it unfold over years, sometimes across childhood and adolescence. None of that is possible without a system that believes it’s worth funding work long before the payoff is visible.”
But beginning in the 1970s—and accelerating ever since—the commitment began to unravel. The postwar social contract between science and the state has been replaced by a new cultural logic, one that demands immediate usefulness above all else: the cult of practicality.
The Accountability Trap
As trust in major bodies of the federal government took a hit in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, agencies were asked not simply to fund research, but to justify it through precise timelines and measurable outcomes.
Senator William Proxmire (YC ’38) helped crystallize this shift in the logic of funding. Beginning in 1975, his monthly “Golden Fleece Awards” singled out federally funded research that, to his eye, appeared trivial or absurd: studies of aggression in primates, investigations into how people fall in love, research on insect mating behavior. While the awards weren’t about budget savings—Proxmire admitted they accomplished little financially—they shaped public perception of scientific research. Investigations without immediate, obvious, material benefit were cast as wasteful.
As federal culture shifted toward scrutiny and short-term justification, prevention research became especially vulnerable. Programs that once relied on long-term stability were now expected to deliver quick results, even when the science refused to cooperate.
Crair emphasized that such scrutiny has value—up to a point. “It’s important that research conducted on behalf of the American public is conducted ethically, transparently, and to the highest academic standards,” he said. “At the same time, researchers’ intellectual freedom must be preserved.” In other words, accountability alone is not the problem; rather, it’s what gets lost when oversight goes overboard.
That same tension between freedom and oversight manifests at the institutional level, reshaping how research priorities are defined and evaluated. As review panels became more cautious and universities built compliance infrastructures to document funding use, a cult of practicality emerged within institutions with a new evaluative norm: research must be justified as immediately useful before it can even begin.
Cults of Practicality
Today, the Trump administration frames funding cuts to science as the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse. This is a ruse—the administration has, by and large, targeted scientists on political grounds, shutting down inconvenient research into vaccines, climate change, and health outcomes for transgender youth. But the language of “wasteful” science that emerged in the 1970s still dominates public perception and serves as a cudgel for politicians with ulterior motives.
The Trump cuts have come down the hardest on slow, longitudinal research. The trouble with this is that disease does not obey political timelines. Studies of diseases that manifest over decades cannot be paused and seamlessly resumed.
Further, in clinical care, the populations who would benefit most from long-term prevention initiatives are the ones most easily lost when funding ebbs. “If you aren’t there early, you miss your window to prevent complications—or prevent the disease entirely,” Sherr said. “Prevention only succeeds when you’re allowed to think in years, not in quarters. The irony is that the slowest diseases demand the fastest action, because once symptoms appear, you’ve already lost precious time. If we stop investing early, we guarantee we’ll be too late.”
The tension Sherr describes in medicine echoes a broader tension in science itself: research must be conducted ethically, transparently, and to the highest standards, but those guardrails work only when they don’t smother the very curiosity they are meant to protect. Healthy checks and balances—peer review, safety systems, and clear goals—are essential. But so is preserving researchers’ intellectual freedom, allowing experts to follow evidence rather than rigid parameters or political constraints. “It’s healthy to have checks and balances that ensure accountability, but it’s also important that the research process is transparent with reasonable timelines. At the same time, researchers’ intellectual freedom must be preserved,” Crair said. “That practice has allowed the US to remain a global leader in innovation, discovery, and progress.”