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Wherever budget cuts are proposed, you can rely upon detractors to present the issue in apocalyptic terms. If we believed all of these claims, then it would be

Wherever budget cuts are proposed, you can rely upon detractors to present the issue in apocalyptic terms. If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending. Furthermore, if we accepted the premise promoted by some commenters here, then research, which is presented as incredibly valuable - would be unable to be funded or valued in the private market. For these reasons I regard this topic to be filled with political hyperbole. Yes, there will be occasions where valuable research is funded by the state. It doesn't follow that this is the only way to fund research. Arguments can be made for either case. Depending on your ideological background you may find some of them amenable. Pragmatism may also play a role. However, presentations like this are completely divorced from reason.

whatshisface 1y ago
You think you could fundraise billions of dollars for science from private sources? You're talking about a $100B (spread out over the next decade) bill on the sidewalk. I don't think there's anything less realistic than the idea that there would be that amount of money available for the asking but unclaimed...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dsign 1y ago
  I don't agree with the GP either, but I'm pretty sure there are more than 100 B of private capital which are, on the big scheme of things, being spent on quite frivolous things.. if at all. Which reinforces your point: some things good for society as a whole need to be funded by taxes.
  - biophysboy 1y ago
    The key is that they are investing in frivolous things rather than fundamental medical research because the latter is higher risk and lower reward in money terms. As you say, its precisely the opposite when the metric is future human health.
- h3lp 1y ago
  Well, historically, we used to have a robust industrial R&D that even did basic research: Bell Labs (astrophysics, semiconductor physics), IBM, Xerox, RCA, Kodak and many other; even Ford had an R&D lab with physicists. Their record was quite impressive, as we all know. The weird trick that made that work was a tax policy that supported that. IIRC, R&D was expense as opposed to amortization, together with a laxer trust regime that allowed large profits that could pay for all that.
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    Those are postwar examples, which occurred in unison with the academic funding boom, the space race, etc. The way it worked was you'd have public funding for basic facts ("aluminum is 2.7 times denser than water"), and then scientists would be hired by companies to apply those facts. The revenue model doesn't work out for monetizing basic facts, so to have an advanced industry you need both systems of funding.
  - vmchale 1y ago
    Xerox was when the US was on the up-trend, not committing economic suicide at the whim of a mad king.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Well all those companies are dead now... so... clearly spending all that money on research didn't really pan out for them.
khalic 1y ago
What’s divorced from reality is your ignorance about these projects and how tight their budget already is. You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient. You're being generous. The current administration has no ideology. The cuts are due to partisanship, and they have selected all of science as their political enemies.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
The sticking point for me is that it’s such a risky bet to assume that something else will fill the gap. Much of the research impacted by cuts is not the type that private industry has typically conducted because it can’t be performed with a specific profitable result in mind. It’s the kind of research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections. So there’s a decent chance that this kind of research largely just won’t happen any more, which is a net negative for everybody. Numerous advancements will either never happen or instead occur at the hand of other developed countries’ research apparatuses.
- selfselfgo 1y ago
  [dead]
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  This is a common response here and elsewhere. Generally every state allocation of funds is presented as incredibly vital. This is exactly the attitude I was speaking to in my comment above. It would be rare to find a spending program which the proponents didn't claim was incredibly valuable. Here on HN we have an interest in technology. It fits that we value some of the discoveries of NASA. Down thread, you'll find others suggesting that defense spending should be cut. It isn't hard to imagine nor would you need to look far to find a hawkish interventionist. These communities will assure us that defense spending is vital, absolutely vital not only to our own well-being, but to support the globalized trading system as well. Choose a topic. Pick a niche. Under every rock from K Street to Capitol Hill, you will find a bureaucrat, politician or lobbyist to justify more spending. Some may like to spend more here and less there. Others might like to spend more everywhere. Almost all of them will have particular issues for which spending cuts are beyond consideration. >...research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections. This is a good point. What is missing here, are the missed opportunities in the private sector, which would have also been, unexpected. We don't know the things which were not built. We do not know what all of those scientists and engineers may have discovered or built, had they not been allocated into government funded research. For me, this is a problem with the post-hoc rationalizations.
supplied_demand 1y ago
== If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending== What is the goal of cutting government spending? Most would say it is to balance the Federal budget. The controlling party is planning to do the opposite, so the argument kind of falls apart.
- Ajedi32 1y ago
  The goal of cutting government spending is ultimately to reduce the amount of resources drained out of the economy through taxes/inflation. Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).
  - neaden 1y ago
    Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. You're fractionally engaging in the broken windows fallacy. Every time we pay for something that wouldn't have got done otherwise it comes at our expense. That's not to say that some of these things aren't worth doing. But there are a whole great many things the feds spend money on that aren't worth doing. If two dollars go to invading some stupid sandbox and one dollar goes to Nasa and the NASA dollar pays back a buck fiddy we're half a dollar poorer at the end of the day.
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      > Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions! As the sibling commenter pointed out, you're engaging in a classic economic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.
scottLobster 1y ago
The fact that you think scientific research, and NASA specifically, are driving our budgetary shortfalls shows your own bias. You don't cut government budgets because it's intrinsically righteous, you do it to save money that you can then spend on other things. You could cut the NASA budget to zero and it wouldn't get us out of our current fiscal hole. And it is incontrovertible from any reading of the history that government support is the reason we have modern air travel, the internet, and GPS, among many other facets of modern life. There is no compelling argument I've heard that the private sector can or would develop such things on their own, unless you're arguing that we should be completely reliant on the occasional eccentric billionaire having an interest in something scientific and setting up a foundation.
julienchastang 1y ago
The problem is the throw out the baby with the bathwater approach to the current administration. Moreover, government funded science often already operates on lean, shoestring budgets. In order to make America great you need to be at the forefront of science and technology, not retreat from it.
BlackSwanMan 1y ago
[dead]
biophysboy 1y ago
In my field (biotech/pharma), the private market already invests significantly in R&D. This funding largely investigates how to translate basic research (done by gov, edu) into new drugs. You are proposing that the private market covers the whole pipeline. This will not work because fundamental research is high risk, and even if it is successful it takes decades to turn into profit. No lender or investor is going to finance that kind of pipeline given the opportunity cost; the returns are just not high enough.
tstactplsignore 1y ago
This is a tiny portion of government spending though. You could completely eliminate the NASA budget entirely and it'd make absolutely no difference on the federal government's bottom line. The NASA budget, the NIH budget, the NSF budget, the USAID budget, the EPA budget, the NOAA budget - all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies combined do not amount to more than the margin of error in the US government's annual yearly deficit. So even completely eliminating these agencies wouldn't put a dent in the US government's deficit. But doing so would be sighted, because these agencies and programs also have a long-term return on investment. They are economic wealth generators, not money-spenders, and they are being cut. So there are two reasons that this debate has clearly nothing to do with cutting spending. This is simply factual. Why do you and others keep claiming it does? Especially when the Trump administration is proposing a new budget that cuts all of these things and also greatly increases the US debt? The federal budget is not hard to balance, and there are basically three paths: (a) raise taxes, especially on the rich, (b) cut defense spending, (c) cut Medicare and Social Security spending. I just wish we could have the actual argument. If you do not like new medicines, clean water, space travel, saving millions of lives in Africa from HIV, then say so, and let's have that debate! But can we stop pretending it is about fiscal conservation?
- Whoppertime 1y ago
  "all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies" Unbelievably useful to whom? A lot of people seemed to have problems with what institutions like USAID were doing. I can think of the CIA during Iran Contra as a very useful comparison. Funding the Contras and getting around Congressional obstruction was very useful to Ronald Reagan. The CIA facilitating Cocaine trafficking into the United States by groups supporting the Contras made the CIA offer a high ROI. Those black ops planes carrying cocaine into the United States had some valuable cargo. And yet, after all this came to light I would have had no problem with Bill Clinton reducing the size and scope of the CIA, even if it was offering a high ROI and "was useful"
  - tstactplsignore 1y ago
    Useful to whom? Well first and foremost to these people: https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-funding-cuts-end-lifeline-for-displaced-communities-fleeing-violence https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-... https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipated-deaths-from-usaid-funding-cuts/ https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat... https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-usaid-cuts-are-already-having-deadly-consequences https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z
llm_nerd 1y ago
>then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending Despite becoming insular and retreating to being a hermit nation, already outrageous military spending is increasing by $100B+. Add a few trillion in tax cuts for the mega rich. In the context of those things, dismissing the harm to NASA, with its relatively tiny budget, seems absolutely perverse.
- dboreham 1y ago
  NASA are smart well intentioned people, therefore must be tortured to satisfy the mob.
vmchale 1y ago
Given the changes to R&D taxation and cuckoo tariffs I don't think private research will want to start a lab in the US like Bell did.
dakr 1y ago
If it were cutting back, I can see your point. This, however, is a gutting. The proposal is a nearly 25% cut in one year to a funding level not seen since 1961. Talent will leave, institutional knowledge will leave, and rapidly. Knowledge transfer will not happen and projects beyond those explicitly cut may falter (people work on multiple projects). Keep in mind, NASA accounts for ~0.4% of the national budget. We're not saving a ton of money here, just killing expertise and ceding space excellence to other countries

whatshisface 1y ago

You think you could fundraise billions of dollars for science from private sources? You're talking about a $100B (spread out over the next decade) bill on the sidewalk. I don't think there's anything less realistic than the idea that there would be that amount of money available for the asking but unclaimed...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dsign 1y ago
I don't agree with the GP either, but I'm pretty sure there are more than 100 B of private capital which are, on the big scheme of things, being spent on quite frivolous things.. if at all. Which reinforces your point: some things good for society as a whole need to be funded by taxes.
- biophysboy 1y ago
  The key is that they are investing in frivolous things rather than fundamental medical research because the latter is higher risk and lower reward in money terms. As you say, its precisely the opposite when the metric is future human health.
h3lp 1y ago
Well, historically, we used to have a robust industrial R&D that even did basic research: Bell Labs (astrophysics, semiconductor physics), IBM, Xerox, RCA, Kodak and many other; even Ford had an R&D lab with physicists. Their record was quite impressive, as we all know. The weird trick that made that work was a tax policy that supported that. IIRC, R&D was expense as opposed to amortization, together with a laxer trust regime that allowed large profits that could pay for all that.
- whatshisface 1y ago
  Those are postwar examples, which occurred in unison with the academic funding boom, the space race, etc. The way it worked was you'd have public funding for basic facts ("aluminum is 2.7 times denser than water"), and then scientists would be hired by companies to apply those facts. The revenue model doesn't work out for monetizing basic facts, so to have an advanced industry you need both systems of funding.
- vmchale 1y ago
  Xerox was when the US was on the up-trend, not committing economic suicide at the whim of a mad king.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Well all those companies are dead now... so... clearly spending all that money on research didn't really pan out for them.

khalic 1y ago

What’s divorced from reality is your ignorance about these projects and how tight their budget already is. You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient. You're being generous. The current administration has no ideology. The cuts are due to partisanship, and they have selected all of science as their political enemies.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

The sticking point for me is that it’s such a risky bet to assume that something else will fill the gap. Much of the research impacted by cuts is not the type that private industry has typically conducted because it can’t be performed with a specific profitable result in mind. It’s the kind of research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections. So there’s a decent chance that this kind of research largely just won’t happen any more, which is a net negative for everybody. Numerous advancements will either never happen or instead occur at the hand of other developed countries’ research apparatuses.

selfselfgo 1y ago
[dead]
palmfacehn 1y ago
This is a common response here and elsewhere. Generally every state allocation of funds is presented as incredibly vital. This is exactly the attitude I was speaking to in my comment above. It would be rare to find a spending program which the proponents didn't claim was incredibly valuable. Here on HN we have an interest in technology. It fits that we value some of the discoveries of NASA. Down thread, you'll find others suggesting that defense spending should be cut. It isn't hard to imagine nor would you need to look far to find a hawkish interventionist. These communities will assure us that defense spending is vital, absolutely vital not only to our own well-being, but to support the globalized trading system as well. Choose a topic. Pick a niche. Under every rock from K Street to Capitol Hill, you will find a bureaucrat, politician or lobbyist to justify more spending. Some may like to spend more here and less there. Others might like to spend more everywhere. Almost all of them will have particular issues for which spending cuts are beyond consideration. >...research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections. This is a good point. What is missing here, are the missed opportunities in the private sector, which would have also been, unexpected. We don't know the things which were not built. We do not know what all of those scientists and engineers may have discovered or built, had they not been allocated into government funded research. For me, this is a problem with the post-hoc rationalizations.

supplied_demand 1y ago

== If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending== What is the goal of cutting government spending? Most would say it is to balance the Federal budget. The controlling party is planning to do the opposite, so the argument kind of falls apart.

Ajedi32 1y ago
The goal of cutting government spending is ultimately to reduce the amount of resources drained out of the economy through taxes/inflation. Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).
- neaden 1y ago
  Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. You're fractionally engaging in the broken windows fallacy. Every time we pay for something that wouldn't have got done otherwise it comes at our expense. That's not to say that some of these things aren't worth doing. But there are a whole great many things the feds spend money on that aren't worth doing. If two dollars go to invading some stupid sandbox and one dollar goes to Nasa and the NASA dollar pays back a buck fiddy we're half a dollar poorer at the end of the day.
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    > Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions! As the sibling commenter pointed out, you're engaging in a classic economic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.

scottLobster 1y ago

The fact that you think scientific research, and NASA specifically, are driving our budgetary shortfalls shows your own bias. You don't cut government budgets because it's intrinsically righteous, you do it to save money that you can then spend on other things. You could cut the NASA budget to zero and it wouldn't get us out of our current fiscal hole. And it is incontrovertible from any reading of the history that government support is the reason we have modern air travel, the internet, and GPS, among many other facets of modern life. There is no compelling argument I've heard that the private sector can or would develop such things on their own, unless you're arguing that we should be completely reliant on the occasional eccentric billionaire having an interest in something scientific and setting up a foundation.

julienchastang 1y ago

The problem is the throw out the baby with the bathwater approach to the current administration. Moreover, government funded science often already operates on lean, shoestring budgets. In order to make America great you need to be at the forefront of science and technology, not retreat from it.

BlackSwanMan 1y ago

[dead]

biophysboy 1y ago

In my field (biotech/pharma), the private market already invests significantly in R&D. This funding largely investigates how to translate basic research (done by gov, edu) into new drugs. You are proposing that the private market covers the whole pipeline. This will not work because fundamental research is high risk, and even if it is successful it takes decades to turn into profit. No lender or investor is going to finance that kind of pipeline given the opportunity cost; the returns are just not high enough.

tstactplsignore 1y ago

This is a tiny portion of government spending though. You could completely eliminate the NASA budget entirely and it'd make absolutely no difference on the federal government's bottom line. The NASA budget, the NIH budget, the NSF budget, the USAID budget, the EPA budget, the NOAA budget - all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies combined do not amount to more than the margin of error in the US government's annual yearly deficit. So even completely eliminating these agencies wouldn't put a dent in the US government's deficit. But doing so would be sighted, because these agencies and programs also have a long-term return on investment. They are economic wealth generators, not money-spenders, and they are being cut. So there are two reasons that this debate has clearly nothing to do with cutting spending. This is simply factual. Why do you and others keep claiming it does? Especially when the Trump administration is proposing a new budget that cuts all of these things and also greatly increases the US debt? The federal budget is not hard to balance, and there are basically three paths: (a) raise taxes, especially on the rich, (b) cut defense spending, (c) cut Medicare and Social Security spending. I just wish we could have the actual argument. If you do not like new medicines, clean water, space travel, saving millions of lives in Africa from HIV, then say so, and let's have that debate! But can we stop pretending it is about fiscal conservation?

Whoppertime 1y ago
"all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies" Unbelievably useful to whom? A lot of people seemed to have problems with what institutions like USAID were doing. I can think of the CIA during Iran Contra as a very useful comparison. Funding the Contras and getting around Congressional obstruction was very useful to Ronald Reagan. The CIA facilitating Cocaine trafficking into the United States by groups supporting the Contras made the CIA offer a high ROI. Those black ops planes carrying cocaine into the United States had some valuable cargo. And yet, after all this came to light I would have had no problem with Bill Clinton reducing the size and scope of the CIA, even if it was offering a high ROI and "was useful"
- tstactplsignore 1y ago
  Useful to whom? Well first and foremost to these people: https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-funding-cuts-end-lifeline-for-displaced-communities-fleeing-violence https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-... https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipated-deaths-from-usaid-funding-cuts/ https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat... https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-usaid-cuts-are-already-having-deadly-consequences https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z

llm_nerd 1y ago

>then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending Despite becoming insular and retreating to being a hermit nation, already outrageous military spending is increasing by $100B+. Add a few trillion in tax cuts for the mega rich. In the context of those things, dismissing the harm to NASA, with its relatively tiny budget, seems absolutely perverse.

dboreham 1y ago
NASA are smart well intentioned people, therefore must be tortured to satisfy the mob.

vmchale 1y ago

Given the changes to R&D taxation and cuckoo tariffs I don't think private research will want to start a lab in the US like Bell did.

dakr 1y ago

If it were cutting back, I can see your point. This, however, is a gutting. The proposal is a nearly 25% cut in one year to a funding level not seen since 1961. Talent will leave, institutional knowledge will leave, and rapidly. Knowledge transfer will not happen and projects beyond those explicitly cut may falter (people work on multiple projects). Keep in mind, NASA accounts for ~0.4% of the national budget. We're not saving a ton of money here, just killing expertise and ceding space excellence to other countries