Why does the government fund research at universities?
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Trump administration is cutting or threatening to cut federal funding for research. Federal funding for all kinds of science is at its lowest level in decades.
Today on the show: when did the government start funding research at universities? And will massive cuts mean the end of universities as we know them?
We hear from the man who first pushed the government to fund university research and we talk to the chancellor of a big research school, Washington University in St. Louis. He opens up his books to show us how his school gets funded and what it would mean if that funding went away.
This episode is part of our series Pax Americana, about how the Trump administration and others are challenging a set of post-World War II policies that placed the U.S. at the center of the economic universe. Listen to our episode about the reign of the dollar.
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Transcript
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| 0:18.1 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:23.3 | Mike Mears is a biologist and an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. |
| 0:28.8 | He runs his own lab. Does everybody wear a white lab coat? |
| 0:31.9 | Yeah. If E.H&S is listening, yes, everyone's wearing a lab coat. |
| 0:37.0 | Okay. |
| 0:38.0 | He studies how our DNA influences diseases like cancer. |
| 0:42.7 | And he's been doing pretty great. |
| 0:45.1 | But lately, university life has been... |
| 0:48.9 | We talked about it. |
| 0:51.0 | In a language, I don't usually speak. |
| 0:53.7 | Is there an emoji that best represents how you felt the last few months? |
| 0:57.5 | It's shifted. I think in like early February, it was like the panic emoji. |
| 1:02.9 | Mike is one of thousands of researchers all around the country who are suddenly at risk of losing their jobs because the Trump administration is cutting or threatening to cut funding |
| 1:12.1 | for their research. In some cases, huge pieces of it. The thought of those cuts is panic emoji, |
| 1:19.1 | crying emoji, or I don't know, poop emoji. You could work that one in there too, yeah. |
| 1:24.3 | If you can't tell, neither one of us is super emoji literate. |
| 1:27.4 | It might be like the red angry emoji or it might be the sort of exhausted emoji. Yeah. If you can't tell, neither one of us is super emoji literate. |
| 1:31.6 | It might be like the red angry emoji or it might be the sort of exhausted emoji. |
| 1:36.2 | If there was sort of like a keep calm and carry on emoji. |
... |
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