The government shutdown is only hurting Ohio scientists more after onslaught of federal cuts
The NASA Glenn Research Center hangar in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo from NASA Glenn Research Center website.)
As a physics professor at Ohio State University, I’ve written a few op-eds this year to explain how decision making in Washington has thrown a serious wrench into the career plans of a generation of young scientists both nationally and in Ohio.
I’ve worked with reporters to highlight the cancellation threat to nearly complete projects like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which professors and students in Ohio State’s Department of Astronomy have been working on for over a decade.
Now I am speaking out because the federal government has been shut down since a funding lapse began on October 1.
As a scientist it is not my mission to explain why we’ve reached this point or what it will take to climb out of it.
But I can explain that when the government shuts down, many federal employees have to stay home, and this includes scientists at government labs and staff members at science funding agencies who help keep America’s science and technology machine going.
Ohio is a scientific powerhouse.
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We have an Air Force R&D presence larger than any other state that is housed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Further north we have the NASA Glenn research center, which is where every new NASA satellite is sent for testing.
In Columbus, Ohio State University received nearly $800 million in federal research grants last year, and the Battelle Institute is no less connected to federal funding sources and research.
The shutdown has had an immediate impact on regularly scheduled meetings between government scientists and university researchers.
In my research group, meetings with research scientists at Wright Patterson AFB to discuss experiments funded by the Air Force Office of Science Research haven’t happened since September.
Another OSU physics professor’s collaboration with the Air Force to develop secure quantum communications has been interrupted.
In many cases, the projects being impacted and the government workers being furloughed don’t depend on the current budget negotiations in congress.
My colleagues in the biological sciences are perhaps even more profoundly affected.
In Ohio alone, the National Institute of Health (NIH) funds over a billion dollars of medical and biological research projects each year.
With NIH staffers furloughed, this creates problems for researchers trying to run existing projects.
And the funding of new NIH projects is delayed because long-planned “scientific merit reviews” are indefinitely postponed.
It is hard to find the right metaphor for this disruption, but imagine if OSU announced that its annual Pelotonia fund raiser might be cancelled next year.
This would jeopardize something like $26 million dollars of continued funding to advance projects towards improving cancer care.
Now imagine if, instead of $26 million dollars, like the Pelotonia raised last year, it typically brought in 25 times as much, and imagine this uncertainty affecting every major medical research center in the country.
This begins to communicate the mess that the impasse in Congress is producing.
Scientists are not interested in debating who’s suffering the most from the shutdown.
If the Trump administration uses the shutdown to justify further “reductions in force” at scientific agencies, or if funding interruptions prompt universities to close research labs, and scale back Ph.D. programs, what is there to gain by comparing this chaos to anything?
Careers to advance the scientific expertise of our country are being ruined.
I wish I could say that the threat to the enterprise of American science was theoretical in some way, but these times give me no such luxury.
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