The following vision is from a country that’s not New Zealand: “We must cut government waste and balance the budget. Science needs to give more bang for research bucks. Stop the wokeness. Research topics will now better match government priorities. We’re slashing funds for anything else. And we’re cutting taxes.”
That’s the United States government’s stance. This year, it has sawed through funding for scientific endeavours, causing what the Economist calls US science’s “gravest moment ever”. It affects the global common areas – the atmosphere, oceans, Antarctica, outer space – and the ripples will be widespread.
Most cuts target research considered woke: climate change, HIV, vaccines and diversity-related endeavours (some biodiversity research fell as bycatch).
Publicly funded research of any stripe at Ivy League universities, especially Columbia and Harvard, has been eviscerated. Grants worth some US$20 billion have been cancelled or withdrawn. Just over half have been reinstated by courts.
There’s more. The US budget for the 2026 fiscal year proposes to halve the National Science Foundation’s funding, take a third from the National Institutes of Health and a quarter from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, and make deep cuts to Nasa. Congress, however, may not approve all these proposals.
Tim Naish, a paleoclimatologist at Victoria University of Wellington, says those decisions threaten climate science. He chairs the World Climate Research Programme and two of its sponsors are the World Meteorological Organization, which is planning for a 30% budget cut, and Unesco, whose future US funding seems unlikely. Plus, says Naish, “We’re significantly funded by National Science Foundation grants, and we’re planning to lose up to two-thirds of our budget for next year.
“One of the things we do is co-ordinate all the modelling centres to produce the projections of future climate that feed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports,” he says.
“The other thing we’re incredibly worried about is the data centres that are the repositories of all our climate information. A lot are funded by the US. Some are going to lose their funding, and everyone’s scrambling.”
Why make the budget cuts? The US administration stated that existing expenditure was “laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organisations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life”.
That’s classic populism. Sir Peter Gluckman, as chair of the International Science Council, said recently that populists reject the authority of science and its institutions, believing truth lies in everyday people’s views. They also reject “elites”. Precariously employed scientists may not feel elite but Gluckman says science is an elite process.
Science funding fared poorly in New Zealand’s recent Budget, too. Gluckman led the group that advised on our science system restructure, and it argued persuasively for more funding. Yet he’s staying calm.
“There’s no point screaming and shouting,” he told the Listener. What matters, he says, is how we respond. “Science has to rebuild its social contract to be properly supported. We’ve not sold the value of basic science.”
For all research, he says, “Everybody should be able to justify why it’s done in New Zealand. Why the taxpayer should pay for it. Scientists, whether social science or natural scientists, need to get better at making their case, and the case has to be understood by everybody.”
All major threats to global commons, to biodiversity, to society and citizens need science’s help, he says. Voters and politicians who prioritise self-interest and short-termism neglect those threats. Gluckman says scientists must build bridges to all sectors of all societies so decisions take in global interests.
