Making America Weak
The biggest own goal in modern history
An “own goal” in football (called soccer in the U.S.) occurs when a team kicks the ball into its own goal, scoring for the opponents. It’s usually very upsetting and embarrassing to the player responsible.
For the past year, the United States has been scoring the biggest own goals in history. Our opponents, particular Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are rejoicing after each one. Our friends, which include most of Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Australia, and dozens of other countries, are bewildered and upset.
What do I mean by this? The examples are numerous, especially in foreign policy, but I’m going to rant about discuss the areas I know best: science and medicine.
It all started when Donald Trump appointed the most unqualified person in history to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This isn’t an exaggeration: Kennedy, as I’ve written before, has no qualifications at all for the job. He’s a lawyer who previously worked on environmental issues. But it’s much worse than that: RFK Jr.’s only claim to fame is his last name, which he has milked for decades to become the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist. When it comes to vaccines, RFK Jr.’s beliefs are so misguided, so damaging, that it would be far better to have someone who knew nothing about health in the job of HHS Secretary. Pick any random elementary school kid, and they’d be better. Pick your pet dog!
Almost immediately after his inauguration, Trump and his followers (especially Russell Vought, a dangerous ideologue who is particularly damaging because he knows how government works, and because he’s stated publicly that he wants government employees to suffer) then proceeded to freeze all scientific and medical funding across the country. This happened nearly overnight at the end of January 2025. Trump then launched additional, targeted attacks on multiple major universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Penn, Cornell, and others, freezing all of their funding (scientific and otherwise) on the false pretense that they weren’t dealing with anti-Semitism adequately.
What was really happening? It’s no secret: Trump and J.D. Vance both consider universities to be too liberal, and thus not loyal to Trump. This wasn’t about anti-Semitism, a fact that was obvious to everyone who was paying attention, but rather about attacking liberals and especially about “woke” ideology.
Freezing all science funding was a colossally stupid thing to do. The immediate effects were that thousands of projects were halted, thousands of scientists lost their jobs, and tens of thousands of students who were planning to start Ph.D. programs were unable to do so. That’s right: across the country, Ph.D. programs in biomedical sciences admitted about 50% fewer students this year because of the funding freeze.
But wait, you might ask, didn’t the funds get un-frozen? Yes they did, mostly, but that happened in August of 2025. Ph.D admissions happen in January through April each year, with the final deadline being April 15 for all programs. The funding freeze meant that most Ph.D. programs in biomedicine and engineering drastically cut the number of students they admitted in 2025. For some programs at my own institution, Johns Hopkins University, the entering class was only half the size of the previous year.
Who is harmed by this? Well, beyond the immediate harms to students, research staff, and scientists themselves, the longer-term harm is that we simply won’t make discoveries, we won’t find cures for diseases, and we won’t invent devices that make our lives better. Progress will slow down, and people will suffer from the lack of cures that they don’t even realize they’ve lost.
That’s a big part of the problem: no one really notices when biomedical research fails to cure something. Imagine we only came up with a vaccine for polio last year: people would be celebrating and lining up to get the vaccine. Fortunately, though, Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine in 1955, saving millions of lives in the 70 years since then. Few of those people even realize that they owe their lives to Salk – after all, how can someone know that they would have gotten polio in a hypothetical world that never existed?
Let’s look at another, more current example (and there are thousands I could choose from): medical imaging. Scientists in my field, biomedical engineering, have invented ways of seeing inside the human body and creating remarkably detailed pictures of our insides. One technology is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which lets us see soft-tissue structures like cartilage as well as cancerous tumors. It’s amazing technology that uses a strong but totally harmless* magnetic field to map out the tissue. (If you’ve ever been inside an MRI machine, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) We are still improving this technology! It’s one of hundreds of areas that scientists work on, and that were halted by Trump’s drastic, across-the-board freezes.
I’ll just mention one more topic: genetic research on cancer. I’ve worked on this topic myself, as have thousands of other scientists. Cancer is a genetic disease: we now know thousands of ways that an accidental mutation in your DNA can turn a cell into a tumor, but there are countless other ways that we haven’t yet mapped out. Funding from the NIH (now controlled by RFK Jr.) is the primary support for research into the causes of cancer. This was all brought to a crashing halt in the spring of 2025.
So did these funding freezes help anyone? Research on MRI imaging technology and cancer genetics isn’t “woke” by any definition of the term. Who benefits when cures are delayed? No one. Who benefits when new treatments and cures are developed? Everyone, regardless of their politics. But Trump, Vance, and their henchman Russell Vought don’t seem aware of this.
Stepping back a bit, the biggest own goal of these actions is surrendering our reputation as the world leader in almost every field of scientific and medical research. Students from all over the world flock to U.S. universities because of this reputation, and many of them stay here and contribute enormously to our technological and scientific prowess. This has long been our not-so-secret weapon in the never-ending competition to develop the best technologies for the future: we attract the brightest minds from around the world because the U.S. is such an exciting place to do science.
Or at least it has been. If the current attacks on science and medicine continue, then other countries will step up and happily take the lead. Many are already trying to do so with newly-announced initiatives to recruit scientists from the U.S.
How can we stop scoring own goals? Well, the first thing we need to do is to replace the incompetent leader of HHS. NIH has already fired most of its institute directors, and those now-open jobs have attracted very few applicants, for the obvious reason that no self-respecting scientist wants to work under RFK Jr. and devote his/her life to undermining public health. We need competent people running NIH as well as NSF and our other science agencies, and many of them were fired or forced into retirement last year. We’re not going to get good replacements while incompetent sycophants are at the very top of many federal agencies.
Then, if somehow we can convince competent people to join the government’s science and medical agencies–perhaps by promising not to fire them–we need to return to the bipartisan support for science that has been the foundation of the American science enterprise since World War II.
I don’t hold out much hope that this will happen, but until it does, we’ll keep scoring own goals.
*MRI magnets are indeed totally harmless, with the rare exception that if you have ferromagnetic metal inside your body, then you cannot get an MRI.