The government is not a business. It provides services: those things that the public needs but aren’t profitable or shouldn’t be profitable (*cough* healthcare). Public needs are not enterprises. Market research for private industry has scientific elements, but it’s not the same thing as scientific research for the public’s benefit. Hint: the differences are motive and accountability, differences Project 2025 conservatives know very well when they extol the private sector as the great fixer and funder.

When the DOGE movement hit the United States government without congressional approval or oversight, the next fifty years were derailed—and not just the obvious war crimes of shutting off the entirety of USAID cold-turkey. The abrupt loss of research contracts and grants, the shrinking of key government services, and the dismantling of critical regulatory bodies will be felt for a long time. It was poorly conceived and egregiously short-sighted. The sheer gape in strategy proved that billionaires’ wealth compared to the average joe’s isn’t proportionate to intelligence. These projects and programs took decades upon decades to become what they were, and in a single, AI-driven hatchet swing, helmed by junior programmers with no knowledge of the industries or processes, they ceased. They ceased without reasonable stepdown plans, oftentimes in the middle or near-end of their work. They ceased without alternatives in place to the otherwise vacuum in industry reporting, watchdog oversight, or research need they served. They ceased without rhyme or reason beyond politically troublesome keywords or a perception of liberal bias (science has a knack for doing that….)

In response to research contract and grants’ catastrophic budget changes, universities across the U.S. scaled back their professional programs, meaning not only a loss to the medicines, agriculture, and technologies of our future, but also the next generation of professionals who would have helmed them. COVID-19 already disrupted learning, putting our Next Gen in peril. Nerf’ing their student loan support, as higher ed price tags do nothing but rise, while also reducing available MS and PhD programs chart a depressive path for the next fifty years as the U.S. loses an entire generation of content experts. It will take another generation to recover, by which time other more strategic global powers will have long surpassed us. By then, the U.S. of Next Gen might resemble North Korea more than the industry leaders of its past.