Donald Trump, his shadow president Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are waging a highly illegal rampage through the federal budget. Among the first wave of intended victims are thousands of scientists across the country who depend on federal grants and loans to fuel their research. The administration is trying to unilaterally slash billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). To defend this, Musk claims it’s a “ripoff” when grant funding goes to pay for salaries, lab space and equipment, even though no one can conduct scientific research without these baseline necessities.
“Trump and King Musk framed this as a shot at baddies like Harvard and Yale, but this absolutely destroys public schools and every state has those and they all are doing scientific research,” historian Erik Loomis explained at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Even Republican senators are having trouble concealing their panic, as public universities are economic centers in many red states.
Musk’s ingratitude is breathtaking. It also fits the larger pattern of tech billionaires spitting venom at the middle-class workers who did the real labor in creating the products these capitalists profit so handsomely from.
Noting that neither Trump nor Musk has the legal authority to make these cuts, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, said, “They are causing irreparable damage to ongoing research to develop cures and treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, ALS, Diabetes, Mental Health disorders, opioid abuse, genetic diseases, rare diseases, and other diseases and conditions affecting American families.” And she’s just talking about the NIH money. The larger assault on universities and the NSF will likely undermine research in every field, from biology to astrophysics.
It’s no surprise that Trump hates science. He is, after all, the same man who confidently declared he had a cure for COVID-19 that those silly medical researchers had overlooked: injecting household cleaners directly into your lungs. He’s no doubt still nursing the narcissistic injury when people laughed at him for being so thuddingly stupid. But, despite his own painfully obvious blindspots, Musk should know better than this. After all, if it weren’t for government-funded research, Musk would be an anonymous failson living off his daddy’s money, instead of a billionaire competing with Kanye West for the title of the world’s most cringeworthy celebrity.
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Despite the media hype painting Musk as a genius and inventor, he largely built his financial empire on other people’s research. At every turn, he’s relied heavily on technologies developed because of the very federal largess he now deems a “ripoff.” He’ll never admit it, but Musk owes former Vice President Al Gore a giant thank you. Gore did not claim, as conservatives pretend he did, to “invent” the internet. But Gore was telling the truth when he said, “During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” He spent the better part of two decades promoting the internet, backing legislation to fund its development, and organizing research agencies to make it happen. As early pioneers in the internet’s development, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, explained in 2000, “Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development” and “no other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.”
Musk got rich because of all this work. In the 90s, he built a website called Zip2 that functioned as an online Yellow Pages. He sold it to Compaq in 1999, netting $22 million. He made another huge chunk of money as the CEO of PayPal, which would also not exist but for the decades of government-funded development of the internet. Musk deserves credit for developing coding skills at a time when the internet was still new, of course. But he also just got really lucky in being a young man right when decades of taxpayer-funded research into the internet was finally paying off.
That’s been the story of Musk’s career ever since. Without investment from the Department of Energy into developing batteries and other electric car technology, there would be no Tesla. Car companies were often reluctant to fund that research because it would take decades to pay off. Only the government, which works for the people and not for profits, has a motive to put money into scientific inquiry on that time scale. SpaceX scientists have done impressive work, even if they probably won’t get us to Mars, despite Musk’s ignorant bleatings. Still, as admirable as the people who work for Musk may be, they wouldn’t be able to do any of this without NASA and the federal government’s astronomical 20th-century investment in the space race. It is the same story with Starlink, which exists because of satellite technology initially developed by both the American and Soviet governments. At every turn, Musk makes money only because he grabs onto technologies that were invented at taxpayer expense.
And that’s just the science side of it. In every way, Musk’s fortune has depended on federal largess. He started Tesla with a generous loan from the Department of Energy. Without federal tax credits for electric vehicles, Tesla would likely not have enough customers to survive. Economists also point out that Tesla was kept afloat by regulatory credits made possible by the government. Now, of course, Musk rakes in large amounts of cash as a government contractor, all with businesses he built on a foundation of government-funded research.
Musk’s ingratitude is breathtaking. It also fits the larger pattern of tech billionaires spitting venom at the middle-class workers who did the real labor in creating the products these capitalists profit so handsomely from. The psychology at play is not especially mysterious. Knowing that other people actually did the work and you’re just taking the credit has got to be unsettling. Musk in particular has a long, documented obsession with pretending to be smarter and more accomplished than he actually is, even in areas as inconsequential as video gaming. (He hires people to play online games for him, and passes off their scores as his own.) Musk isn’t a scientist, he just plays one for TV. I have little doubt that he resents real scientists, as poseurs always do when confronted with the real thing. He’s probably taking his insecurities out on people whose only crime is being what he only pretends to be. Unfortunately, his petty psychodrama will have real impacts on the whole human race, which may be denied the often life-saving benefits of what real researchers do.
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