Science Who Needs Your Stinking, Job-Creating Science?!

 

Science? Who Needs Your Stinking, Job-Creating Science?!

When we can slash the budget and coast on free conspiracy theories that are easier to sell.

“Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female… This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.” 

Disclaimer now on multiple government webpages, such as those dealing with HIV, civil rights and healthcare for transgender people.

You do not create significant new manufacturing, or even service, jobs without innovation… which can be a two-edged sword: the innovation may be labor-saving robotics. And except for rarified custom manufacturing (like a celebrity-outfitted motor home or a superyacht), the US is almost never competitive with hands-on labor in other countries. As any competent economist will tell you, the United States is primarily a service economy, heavy into financial structuring, tech design and implementation. But historically, whenever the federal government directly supports sophisticated innovation, the resulting jobs created often redefine the entire nation. Our space program has generated everything from a powdered orange drink (Tang) to the global interconnectivity of our satellites and the navigation/military surveillance or internet-connected commercial systems that drive modern life.

But we live in an era of retribution and resentment by a large cadre of Americans who feel “left behind” by uncaring globalists and financial manipulators. While there is truth in their perception, this MAGA “I’ve never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t like” force is replacing hard medical and other relevant scientific knowledge… and denigrating the people and the research universities that work hard to create that job-creating innovation. In earlier years, we had an expression for that attitude: throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And while “liberal America” owes those, left behind in a tsunami of globalism and technology, a perceivable path to affordable happiness, “illiberal America” should keep in mind that any hope of their prosperity lingers in innovation, wherever it may be born. We still have to deal with the bathwater. As I will explore in future blogs, America has lost its sense of balance and the aggregation of bona fide truly local “communities.”

NASA is ours. After the US 1957 educational and infrastructural explosion, America’s reaction to the first successful orbital launch of a satellite by the Soviet Union, seriously amplified our nation’s resulting obsession with being the best and most technologically advanced nation on Earth. Nuclear weapons secrets were already stolen by the Soviets, and our post-WWII rocket program was built around German rocketeers (yes, Nazis, like Werner Von Braun) in cloisters set in a part of America where a foreigner would stick out like a sore thumb. Huntsville, Alabama, today a small city with an exceptionally high concentration of PhDs.

We’ve come a long way from those early days. NASA conducted or funded innovation – now unfortunately outsourced to billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (Space X) – spread new technologies that powered everything from GPS systems in our smartphones and care, simulation technology that has been absorbed into videogames and highly focused missile and smart bomb targeting systems to the highspeed supercomputers governing everything we do. AI anybody?

But in a political system that is predicated on wealthy private ownership of what used to be government systems, as conspiracy theorists now occupy major leadership positions in government replacing highly experienced scientists, engineers, medical doctors and researchers, government has paved a clear road for concentrated power to selected oligarchs, now taking over what those government agencies used to do. Ideas, once born in government and university laboratories, think tanks and research centers… which spread the resulting knowledge freely across the land… are now patent and copyright captives to this coterie of billionaires. Yet the funding for their billionaire efforts came from and continues to come from the government, now as vendors (with a profit mark-up) to that same government. Or dumped totally.

After decimation by DOGE and Trump’s misnamed Big Beautiful Bill, Trump is slowly shutting down most university and intra-governmental scientific and medical research as “wasteful,” just as he bolsters the power and importance of his favored oligarchs. Writing for the June 9th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote: “[The] President insists ‘America will always be the first in space.’ But his budget plan would slash agency’s program funding by half… Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public.

“Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work.

“But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA’s science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%... Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on ‘practical, quantitative,’ even commercial applications, [Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society] told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation… The budget cuts will undermine the administration’s professed goals. That’s because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals.”

Political realities, beyond the red-blue divide, now define our future progress. What will the Musk-Trump break-up mean for our space program? But fear not, humanity will not see an end to such research. It is painfully obvious that China has stepped into this technological void, just as they stepped into the void left to starving millions in Africa and parts of Asia once served by USAID. China could not have planted a more destructive device detonated against America or a more global influence diminishing Manchurian Candidate than Donald John Trump.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am harshly reminded that we are only 1/8 into Trump 2.0, and the passage of his Big Beautiful Bill will guarantee his unilateral power well beyond the mid-terms (which Trump is also actively trying to control by having the DOJ sue blue state election officials with legally questionable claims).