The following is a Dear Colleague letter to OMB Director Russ Vought urging the federal government to stop and reverse any cuts to federal research, due to the severe effects on our economy and national security that such cuts will have.
Dear Director Vought,
We ask that you stop and reverse any cuts to federal research. Making cuts—whether to federal funding for universities or to federal agencies conducting research—will have severe effects on our economy and national security. Since World War II, the United States has been the global leader in research. Our world-class colleges and universities, combined with a prolific private sector and public investment, have developed and attracted the top minds in the world, leading to discoveries that have contributed significant benefits to our country. Failing to make investments in research will cede leadership to other countries that do not have the same values and priorities as the United States.
Universities have a mission to advance knowledge through learning and discovery. With federal funding, undergraduate and graduate students can participate in research, training them to be productive members of the workforce and simultaneously increasing our knowledge of the world. Universities perform 48 percent of basic research in the United States. Basic research underpins scientific advancement because it is “directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications towards processes or products in mind.”1
The benefits of basic research are often not known until much later, but serve as the building blocks of further advanced scientific discovery. The federal government is the largest funding source for basic research.2 If the $5 billion in cuts to the National Science Foundation continue as planned, our research ecosystem will suffer in both quality and output.3 If cuts continue, research will cease to occur at the scale we need to have meaningful discoveries.
The benefits of research outweigh any perceived downside. Every dollar invested in non-defense research and development returned between $1.40 and $2.10 in economic output.4 Research at universities commonly leads to companies spinning out of them, creating good jobs, and bringing new products to the market.5
Our national security is also reliant on scientific research. Take agriculture, biotechnology, and space, for example. Food security is national security. As populations grow and climate change presents new challenges to farmers, agricultural research is increasingly important. Cutting-edge farming technologies and methods like precision farming, automation, robotics, and disease prevention require additional research to improve on. If successful, we will be able to produce more resilient and affordable food systems. The private sector will profit from this. However, it is the government’s responsibility to see that its people have access to food.
The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology released a report earlier this year that said, “for the first time in recent history, the United States finds itself competing with a rival over a new form of engineering that will create tremendous wealth, but, in the wrong hands, could be used to develop powerful weapons.” The report goes on to say we are in a competition with China to be the global leader in biotechnology, and we may lose that race.6 Now is not the time to pull back on biotechnology research, but unfortunately, that is the direction our country is trending.
Despite warnings from experts, in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget, this administration is proposing to cut the National Institutes of Health funding by 40 percent to less than $28 billion, $2.7 billion from the National Cancer Institute, and $4 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , nearly half its budget.7 This signals to China and other nations that this administration is okay with forfeiting our leadership in this field.
This administration is also proposing to cut the NASA budget by nearly 25 percent, or $6 billion. This cut includes one-third of the workforce. Space is used daily by nearly every American. NASA was created in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. The space race culminated with NASA’s Apollo program landing the first humans on the moon, a monumental achievement. The total cost of the Apollo program was $25.8 billion, or $318 billion in 2023 dollars.8 That amount of funding could not have come from anywhere other than the federal government. Today, NASA still performs science missions that are economically unviable for any other entity because they do not have immediate commercial benefits.
NASA continues to provide significant benefits to the taxpayer. There are more popular and well-known space missions exploring the origins of our universe and neighboring galaxies. And there are lesser- known science missions studying medicine, earth science, and making improvements in general aviation.
It was not until the last decade that a true commercial space industry emerged in the United States. That would not have been possible without the research and development done by NASA. In fact, the commercial space industry is still nascent and relies on government funding. This is a worthwhile investment by the United States because space is critical to our everyday lives, most notably GPS, but also through services like weather forecasting, wildfire prevention, crop monitoring, illegal fishing enforcement, and several other applications. These uses have led to substantial economic growth. The global space economy was worth an estimated $596 billion in 2024, and the United States is responsible for a majority of that.9
Space is also a keystone to our national security. It is used by every Service to communicate and coordinate, to collect intelligence, provide command and control of our nuclear forces, and for missile warning and detection, among other things. The Department of Defense is investing billions in space programs. For the most part, these investments are a good thing and strengthen our national security. The space superiority we enjoy was not created in a vacuum. The space systems we use today are a product of trillions of dollars in investment into research and development from the public and private sectors over several decades.
Every budget being slashed means jobs being cut. This is expertise that will not be easily rebuilt. This applies to every discipline and emerging technology, whether it be computer science, chemistry, artificial intelligence, or semiconductors. These cuts are causing a brain drain in our nation’s research ecosystem.
The federal research landscape is robust, and for good reason. Research is expensive and complicated. We did not become the premier research destination in the world by accident or overnight; it has taken decades of intentional investment to build the United States’ research infrastructure. You cannot claim that a strong economy and national security are priorities of this administration when you are undermining both by dismantling systems that support them.
We urge you to cease any further cuts that will inflict further harm to our nation’s research capabilities and to reverse all actions taken that have weakened these systems.
1 https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/basic-research-definition
2 https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/seven-recent-developments/#:~:text=Higher%20education
%20performs%20the%20greatest,funded%20by%20the%20federal%20government.
3 https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2026?utm_
4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johndrake/2025/05/19/trumps-nih-and-nsf-cuts-could-cost-the-us-economy-10-billion- annually/
5 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20241/figure/INV-13
6 https://www.biotech.senate.gov/final-report/chapters/executive-summary/
7 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-2026-health-and-health-care-budget/
8 https://taxfoundation.org/blog/apollo-moon-space-race-industrial-policy-cost/
9 https://spacenews.com/the-space-economy-to-reach-944-billion-by-2033-novaspace-unveils-key-insight/