Via Nature News & Comment: How Trump’s science cuts could hurt states that voted for him. Excerpt:
In the heavily fished waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the red snapper has made a notable comeback. Strict US government regulations have helped to rebuild its stocks after overfishing caused a population crash in the 1980s and 1990s. Now the fish faces a new challenge: President Donald Trump, a Republican who wants to cut roughly US$50 billion from the government’s civilian agencies in 2018.
Trump’s plan would eliminate the Mississippi-based Sea Grant programme that is poised to oversee a $12-million study of red-snapper stocks. Its findings are meant to guide future management decisions, and to protect a fishery that hauls in billions of dollars per year for the Republican-dominated gulf states. Now the study’s fate is uncertain — along with those of many other government science programmes, including some that largely benefit the voters who propelled Trump into office.
In 2014, about $35 billion — or nearly one-third of all federal research dollars — flowed to states that voted Republican in the most recent presidential election, a Nature analysis found (see ‘Red state, blue state’). Economists have documented how this type of government investment shores up local economies, says Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC. “Many smaller communities have a huge amount to lose,” he says.
US politicians have long worked to spread federal research and development (R&D) largesse around the country. In 1862, Congress established the land-grant system of universities to teach agriculture and engineering, with many institutions located in newly established states. After the Second World War, politicians created a network of national labs, including facilities in rural areas that had secretly worked on the atomic bomb during the war.
Today, some federal agencies deliberately distribute funds to parts of the country beyond the elite research powerhouses. The National Science Foundation sets aside $160 million from its $6-billion research budget to award university grants to states that routinely receive less than 0.75% from the agency’s ordinary funding channels. In recent years, the programme has seeded an optics industry in Montana and carbon-cycle research in Alaska.
