Science’s value, unlike NASA, cannot be destroyed by politics

It should be every scientist’s greatest fear: that 2025, in the United States, will mirror very closely what happened in Nazi Germany in 1933. In the 1920s and 1930s, physics and mathematics in Germany was second-to-none. Einstein achieved his great successes in Germany, and was lauded as a national hero for his work on relativity, quantum physics, the equivalence of mass and energy, and more. Lise Meitner, the first woman to become full professor (außerordentlicher) of physics in Germany, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and a codiscoverer of nuclear fission, was called “the German Marie Curie” by Einstein himself. Hans Krebs, Fritz Haber, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Max Born, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, and Viktor Weisskopf, among others, were incredibly prominent and successful German scientists during this time.

And then, on April 7, 1933, Germany passed a law making it illegal for those considered to be Jewish to hold any civil service jobs, including as physics or mathematics professors. By time the year ended, 18 mathematicians at the University of Göttingen, alone, had been forced out, with a total of at least 129 scientists across the country losing their jobs and the ability to be part of the civil service due to Nazi policy. (Even Erwin Schrödinger was forced to leave, as his spouse was Jewish.)

Similar attacks on science, scientists, and civil servants in the United States today, in 2025, are threatening the very future of science in the United States. Although the value of science remains unchanged, the loss of our scientific leadership will harm our entire society — and cost us more, in the end — in more ways than most of us can fathom.

This political cartoon, published in 1933, shows Einstein shedding his pacifist wings to roll up his sleeves and take up a sword labeled “preparedness.” Einstein would at this point call upon the friends of civilization all across the world to unite against Nazi militarism.

I want to start by telling you a bit of an unusual story: that of the James Webb Space Telescope. Back in 2011, the telescope was more than 85% complete, and although it had originally been budgeted for a cost of $5.1 billion, there were cost overruns due to a variety of problems. The novel, five-layer sunshield that would passively cool the telescope was proving more difficult to develop than anticipated. Budget mismanagement and an insufficient margin (i.e., what you build into your project so that when you encounter unexpected problems, you can address them) meant that the allocated funds were insufficient. And, perhaps very importantly, the estimated cost of the telescope jumped twice: first to $6.5 billion, and then to $8.7 billion.

Perhaps the first jump was expected: if you have budget mismanagement and you didn’t prepare for the actual funding you’d need to build the telescope, of course it was going to cost more. Also, if it was going to take a longer amount of time to complete the telescope, you have to pay for personnel support (i.e., the cost of human salaries and labor) and for operations costs. You have to pay for further integration and testing to ensure the telescope and its components work properly together.

But you also have to provide the funds, as needed, in a timely fashion, or things get even more expensive, and very quickly. While mismanagement and insufficient margins — which one could rightfully blame NASA and its contractors for — led to the cost jump from $5.1 billion to $6.5 billion, the cost jump from $6.5 billion to $8.7 billion was entirely the fault of the United States Government.

Both Hubble (top) and JWST (bottom) are reflecting telescopes. Light from distant objects enters the telescope, reflecting off of the large primary mirror sending it to the smaller secondary mirror. The secondary mirror reflects that light back through a hole in the primary mirror where it comes to a focus and enters each of the telescope’s many instruments located behind the primary mirror. Telescope diagrams are not to scale, but JWST’s position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, as opposed to Hubble’s ~500-600 km distance from Earth, represent a huge difference in the temperatures the observatories can operate at.

Why is that? How did the United States Government wind up increasing the cost of a space telescope by $2.2 billion dollars?

It’s because, in 2010, the project for building the telescope underwent its Critical Design Review, and it became apparent that the 2014 launch date was not credible, given the progress that had and hadn’t been made on the telescope. In the Summer of 2010, an independent review was conducted, with the Independent Comprehensive Review Panel finding that the projects was improperly managed by not keeping enough near-term reserves (i.e., cash on hand) to deal with unexpected issues when they came up.

The remedy recommended by that same Independent Comprehensive Review Panel was that the James Webb Space Telescope could still be launched in 2015 for a total cost of $6.5 billion, provided that an additional $250 million was provided in each of 2011 and 2012. This would be the earliest and cheapest way to launch JWST, and that any delay would result in a more expensive mission.

And then, after making those findings, the US government chose not to provide exactly those needed funds. Without those funds when they were needed, NASA needed to both:

• lay off skilled workers due to a lack of funds,
• and pause work on many components also due to a lack of funds.

Training and hiring replacement workers later on, and imparting them with the necessary expertise to do their jobs appropriately, was much, much more costly than simply providing the necessary funds up front to solve the underlying problem back when it was first identified. As we all know, we now have a fully functional JWST, and it’s magnificent, but it cost more and came several years later than it needed to.

The secondary mirror’s deployment sequence is shown in this time lapse image. It must be precisely located just under 24 feet, or a little over 7 meters, from the primary mirror. This was one of a few hundred steps that needed to occur as planned, without failure, to bring a fully functional JWST online during deployment and commissioning.

There has been a lot of discussion about “government efficiency” in recent months, but the most efficient way to run a government is:

• to direct the minimum amount of funds necessary
• to achieve the maximum amount of public good.

That’s what “efficient” actually means. When you hear the saying, “the government that governs least governs best,” that’s what the saying was referring to: not the notion that government should be eliminated wherever possible (i.e., literally governing the least amount possible), but that where society needs the government to intervene, that government should intervene early, swiftly, and in the least costly, resource-intensive way to accomplish the goals that we need.

It’s similar to how, when you’re driving a car, you have options for obstacles that you’re going to encounter on the road ahead. If you see a sea of cars with brake lights on up ahead, you can either:

• continue driving as you are right now until you get close to those cars, and then slam on the brakes, or swerve, or make other risky maneuvers right at the end,
• or you can make small adjustments way ahead of time, so that by the time you arrive at the actual obstacle, you’ve already done the vast majority of preparation work, and very little additional action is required at the end.

That’s how you successfully govern best by governing least: not by slashing government programs to cut costs, but to make the most low-cost, successful interventions that still lead to the desired outcomes.

In this picture taken on April 29, 2020, an engineer shows an experimental vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus that was tested at the Quality Control Laboratory at the Sinovac Biotech facilities in Beijing. Many of the techniques used to develop vaccines, including vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and its various strains, would be illegal under a proposed new bill in US congress in 2025: the Dangerous Viral Gain of Function Research Moratorium Act.

If you want an educated public, providing a robust system of public schools, including heavily (racially, geographically, and socioeconomically) desegregated magnet schools, is the most efficient solution, not to promote voucher schools, charter schools, or to eliminate the Department of Education.

If you want a healthy public, and especially healthy children, you invest in public healthcare, including prenatal care, pediatric checkups, vaccinations, hearing and vision screening, and water fluoridation.

And if you want a scientifically literate society that reaps the benefits of science, you’ll value the scientific consensus on issues ranging from clear air and drinking water to climate change to space weather monitoring to fundamental research to virology and pandemic prevention and much more. We may have many prominent anti-science myths that are prevalent in our world today, but there are also concrete steps we can take to transform any nation back into a scientific one.

Unfortunately, as with most things, it’s a lot easier to destroy than it is to create, and there is no faster way to destroy all of these institutions than by censoring the results of government-funded science, by failing to build the needed science facilities to remain competitive with the current scientific frontiers, and by simply pulling the rug (and funding) out from under currently-existing and working scientists.

This image of the Very Large Array in the southwestern United States highlights the importance of arrays of radio dishes in measuring many different properties of our Universe, including searching for potential extraterrestrial signals that were created by an intelligent species. A next-generation facility, the ngVLA, is required to keep United States radio astronomy on the cutting edge, otherwise other international endeavors — China’s FAST telescopes, Europe’s ALMA, and the multinational Square Kilometer Array — will soon render our current capabilities obsolete.

Most recently, on April 11, 2025, the Trump White House’s budget proposal for NASA — the crown jewel of US science — was exposed, seeking to make tremendously deep cuts to some of the basic, fundamental science that drives our society forward. NASA funding was already at an all-time low at the end of 2024, with NASA’s total budget representing just 0.36% of the federal budget: the lowest figure since the agency’s founding in 1958. The new proposed NASA budget, in line with previous Trump proposals to gut NASA science, would cut the overall NASA budget by a further ~20%. However, the deepest cuts are reserved for NASA science, including:

• NASA astrophysics, reducing the budget from $1.4 billion down to $0.48 billion,
• NASA heliophysics, reducing the budget from $0.9 billion down to $0.45 billion,
• NASA Earth science, reducing its budget from $2.1 billion down to $1.0 billion,
• and NASA planetary science, reduced from $2.8 billion down to $1.9 billion.

Overall, it reflects approximately a 50% cut to NASA’s overall science funding. I would argue that the most egregious offense is the proposed cancellation of the next NASA astrophysics flagship mission: the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, which is already completely built and fully assembled, is under budget and ahead of schedule, and is simply awaiting launch in 2027.

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, shown in blue, is the largest, deepest, long-exposure campaign undertaken by humanity thus far, even in the JWST era. For the same amount of observing time, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will be able to image the orange area to the exact same depth, revealing over 100 times as many objects as are present in the comparable Hubble image.

Most of us are familiar with the Hubble Space Telescope: the flagship NASA observatory launched way back in 1990. It not only showed us what the Universe looked like, but continuously improved over its lifetime, as a total of four servicing missions:

• led to the installation of upgraded, more modern instruments,
• corrected any initial flaws in Hubble’s optical systems,
• progressively became more efficient, maximizing the scientific value that could be extracted from every photon collected,
• and replaced any failed components of the steering mechanisms that enable Hubble to stably point at a desired position in the sky.

That’s why, 35 years after its launch, and 16 years after its final servicing mission, Hubble remains arguably the most valuable optical telescope in humanity’s entire ground-and-space-based arsenal.

But the Nancy Roman Space Telescope will outstrip all of Hubble’s capabilities. It basically can do everything that Hubble could have done if it were built with today’s technology, including superior coronagraphy, having greater numbers and types of wavelength filters available, and better ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared sensitivity, while having around 100 times the field-of-view of Hubble. In other words, for large areas of the sky, Roman can acquire in about 7 hours what it would take Hubble a full month of observing to capture. Very importantly, Roman is exactly the tool we need, from a scientific perspective, to map large collections of galaxies across the sky and to determine when, if, and how dark energy is evolving in our Universe.

This illustration compares the relative sizes of the areas of sky covered by two surveys: the upcoming Nancy Roman Telescope’s High Latitude Wide Area Survey, outlined in blue, and the largest mosaic led by Hubble, the Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS), shown in red. In current plans, the Roman survey will be more than 1,000 times broader than Hubble’s, revealing how galaxies cluster across time and space as never before, enabling the tightest constraints on evolving dark energy, and revealing more microlensing events, including possibly extremely close black holes, than ever before. Euclid is wider-field than Roman, but with inferior depth, resolution, and wavelength coverage.

Killing an already-built space telescope a telescope whose remaining cost is largely driven by paying for the salaries of those who will launch, calibrate and commission, operate, and maintain the telescope doesn’t represent any sort of meaningful savings; it represents pure destruction of something that was costly, but worth it, to build. And we can be certain that it is indeed worth it; a recent study from late 2024 showed that NASA’s $25.4 billion budget, as of FY2023, yielded a total of $75.6 billion in economic output. A 3-to-1 ratio of return-on-investment, by anyone’s accounting, is a tremendously successful and “worth it” government expenditure.

Scientists and science enthusiasts have noticed. The American Astronomical Society, the largest professional organization of astronomers and astrophysicists in the United States, recently put out a statement condemning these proposed cuts, with AAS president Dara Norman writing:

“The impacts of these proposed funding cuts would not only be devastating to the astronomical sciences community, but they would also have far-reaching consequences for the nation… Without robust and sustained federal funding for the sciences, the United States will lose at least a generation of talent to other countries that are increasing their investments in facilities and workforce development. This will derail not only cutting-edge scientific advances, but also the training of the nation’s future STEM workforce. These cuts will certainly result in the loss of American leadership in science.”

It isn’t just the American Astronomical Society; practically every working professional in the field shares the same sentiments.

This animation features satellite images of the far side of the Moon, illuminated by the Sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth — one million miles (1.6 million km) away. EPIC’s scientific instrument suite allows it to measure ozone, aerosols, cloud reflectivity, cloud height, vegetation properties, and UV radiation estimates at Earth’s surface, with DSCOVR’s location at the L1 Lagrange point enabling it to continuously image the sun-lit face of Earth.

Of course, it isn’t just NASA astrophysics that’s being cut or that’s expected to face even deeper cuts in the future; it’s all of publicly funded science in the United States. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is facing new cuts of a further 27% over its existing budget. The agency’s main research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, would be hit especially hard, defunding any lab or cooperating institution that works on climate, weather, or oceanic research. NASA’s Earth Science endeavors are tremendously important for climate modeling and weather forecasting, including aerosols, clouds, sea level rise, droughts, and floods. And that’s to say nothing of cuts to wildfire management, FEMA, public health, and education, which have been nothing short of disastrous.

It’s no secret that the playbook for the current administration in the United States, Project 2025, is very closely modeled on the policies enacted by Nazi Germany in 1933. And yet, there’s something that’s vital to remember in all of this: science was just as valuable to the world in 1934 as it was in 1932, but Germany reaped less and less of that value as time went on. Later in 1933, in fact, the then-minister of education in Germany, Bernard Rust, asked the legendary mathematician David Hilbert how mathematics at Göttingen was, now that it was free from the Jewish influence.

Hilbert solemnly responded, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.”

David Hilbert (far right, front row) was one of the most prestigious mathematicians of the 20th century, and led the faculty at Göttingen for many years. After the 1933 exodus of Jewish mathematicians, he declared that there was no longer mathematics at Göttingen. Based on publication rates, advances, and breakthroughs made prior to 1933 versus afterwards, he was proven quite correct.

But elsewhere in the world, including throughout Europe and in the United States, physics and mathematics and chemistry departments flourished. The exodus of scientists from Nazi Germany especially benefitted institutes like Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, and Stanford, which rose to prominence swiftly during the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile, German universities took decades, and even generations, to recover. Nuclear power (and, more destructively, nuclear weapons) became well-developed in subsequent years, but not in Germany and not due to German scientists; these advances were only possible in countries that still had robust investments in science itself.

Science has always been touted as the great equalizer: the scientific truths underlying our Universe know no borders and do not discriminate based on race, gender, or religion. It’s still possible that citizens will rise up, that congressional and judicial leaders will exercise their constitutionally-appointed powers, and that these science-destroying and society-destroying maneuvers will be thwarted by the elected and appointed officials whose sworn duty is to serve the people of the United States. But even if we do destroy the institution of science and the lives and careers of those who practice it in the United States, that intellectual capital will never disappear. Science will continue to thrive here on planet Earth, and will continue to benefit citizens of all societies who heed its lessons and invest in furthering it. Politics may yet destroy science in the United States, but the story of human civilization is the story of our continual advancement, as driven by science. Only when our line is extinct will that cease to be the case.