The Missile Gap of Our Own Making
A policy of cutting institutional American science has created not just a multi-billion-dollar repair bill, but a future necessity for reconstruction — and restoring funding cuts will not be enough.
On July 3, in a grand hall in Beijing, Tsinghua University welcomed its newest faculty member with the kind of ceremony usually reserved for a visiting head of state. American Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi — the Berkeley chemist who shared last year’s prize for the invention of metal-organic frameworks, the porous materials now used to harvest water from desert air and capture carbon from smokestacks — was introduced as one of the world’s foremost scientists. He will lead a new institute applying AI to dramatically accelerate the rate at which new materials can be discovered. Yaghi is not alone, nor is he the first Western scientist drawn to take his talents to China. Charles Lieber, who chaired Harvard’s chemistry department until his 2020 prosecution over undisclosed China ties, is now at Tsinghua’s Shenzhen campus. So is Liu Jun, who ran data science and AI research at Harvard. China has taken to calling its foreign-recruitment strategy a “talent black hole,” for its capacity to pull in leading scientists from everywhere else.
The American media barely noticed. There was no reckoning, no congressional hearing, no moment of national attention paid to the fact that a Nobel laureate had concluded his best work now lay eight thousand miles from the university that trained him. Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, this is what the systematic disassembly of American scientific leadership looks like: not a single dramatic rupture, but an absence where alarm should be.
Here is the argument I want to make, and then spend the rest of this piece defending. Every administration fights with its scientific agencies over money and priorities — that much is normal, and even healthy. What has happened since January 2025 is categorically different: the deliberate removal of the machinery that lets expertise reach power, replaced in places by nothing and in others by leadership whose qualification for the job is notable chiefly by its absence. And the damage this has done cannot be undone by Congress simply restoring the funding, because the funding was never really the point. Rebuilding it is going to take something closer to what the country built after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik — a deliberate, sustained reconstruction, not a supplemental appropriations bill. The difference this time is that the last “gap” the country closed was opened by an adversary. This one we opened ourselves, by handing the direction of American science to people whose primary qualification is loyalty rather than competence.
Stay in Place
At the peak of the Cold War, American scientists sometimes had their passports withheld to keep them from meeting counterparts behind the Iron Curtain. When the third UN Ocean Conference opened in Nice in June 2025, scientists from NASA and NOAA who were scheduled to participate were simply denied the opportunity to attend; the United States sent only a small delegation of political appointees. It was the second such exclusion in four months — State Department officials and NASA’s chief climate scientist had already been blocked from an IPCC meeting shaping the next global climate assessment, after NASA’s technical-support contract for the meeting was cancelled outright. A year later, the administration moved to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $386 million network of nine hundred deep-sea sensors that had spent a decade tracking the Atlantic current system scientists believe may be approaching collapse. Congressional and scientific pushback forced a pause in June. But the pattern was set well before the reversal: absence from the rooms where the world’s scientists coordinate, combined with the active removal of the instruments that would let American scientists contribute anything to coordinate about.
Headless Leadership
The National Science Foundation has taken the most sustained battering of any research agency, and its story best illustrates why restored funding does not equal restored capacity.
In April 2025, staff from the newly constituted Department of Government Efficiency arrived at NSF and within days had ordered a halt to pending grant approvals, a purge of any proposal touching diversity or misinformation research, and a demand that the director draw up a plan to fire half the agency’s seventeen-hundred-person staff against a proposed 55 percent budget cut. Sethuraman Panchanathan, the Trump appointee who had led the agency since 2020, resigned within the week, writing only that he had “done all I can.” NSF went on to terminate over 1,750 grants worth $1.4 billion — more than half of that from programs training the next generation of American scientists and engineers.
Then, in a sequence that ought to be studied closely, Congress did the responsible thing: it rejected the 55 percent cut and funded NSF at $8.75 billion for fiscal 2026, nearly its historical level. The agency was hollowed out anyway. Staffing losses left NSF short-handed enough that it cut its minimum peer-review requirement from three outside reviewers to two — eroding, by administrative necessity rather than policy choice, the merit-review process that is NSF’s entire reason for existing. Grants are now being awarded at roughly a fifth of the historical rate. Neal Lane, who ran the agency under the Clinton administration, told The Hill in April that the Trump administration had built something “unrecognizable” out of the old NSF. The money came back. The institution did not — which is exactly the pattern the rest of this piece traces elsewhere.
Cancer, Unbuilt
The administration’s opening budget bid proposed cutting the National Cancer Institute by roughly 40 percent, from $7.2 billion to about $4.1 billion — the kind of number that, if enacted, would have reversed a decade of steady growth in the one federal program most directly responsible for the 34 percent decline in American cancer mortality since 1991. Congress has so far resisted the full cut, much as it resisted NSF’s. But resistance at the appropriations level has not stopped the damage at the grant level. Across NIH as a whole, nearly 5,850 grants were cancelled or suspended over the course of 2025, alongside roughly 2,000 more at NSF — some 7,800 in total, disproportionately concentrated in infectious disease, vaccine research, and work involving underrepresented populations. Courts have ordered a portion reinstated. Roughly 2,600 grants, representing $1.4 billion in unspent funding, remain frozen regardless. At the National Cancer Institute specifically, at least 172 grants aimed at reducing cancer disparities among racial minorities and LGBTQ+ patients were still terminated as of this June. NCI staff have taken to calling the pattern of sudden cancellations “drone attacks” — funding vanishing from above, with no warning and little recourse.
Layered onto this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reconstruction of HHS’s advisory apparatus: the wholesale dismissal of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and its replacement with members who share the secretary’s skepticism of vaccination, and a stated intention to overhaul the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that determines what preventive care insurers must cover. NCI’s own leadership says it wants to fund more transformative research. What actually gets funded when a budget contracts and a review process is stripped down, the institute’s deputy director told KFF Health News, is safe science — not the science that changes anything.
The Board Fired Days Before It Could Say the Quiet Part Out Loud
On April 24, 2026, all twenty-two members of the National Science Board — NSF’s statutorily independent oversight body, in continuous existence since 1950 — received a two-sentence email informing them their positions were terminated effective immediately. No reason was given. The timing was not subtle: the board was days from releasing a report warning that the United States is losing ground to China in science and technology. Thirty-seven Nobel laureates signed an open letter calling the dismissal “an alarming attack on the ability of the US to engage in basic and applied research.”
The same season, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — the body that has, across administrations since Eisenhower, been staffed with the country’s leading academic scientists — was reconstituted under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison. One academic remains on the council.
This is the detail that exposes what the AI investment boom actually is. The administration’s rhetoric treats the AI race with China as the defining technological contest of the era, and by the dollar figures involved, it is investing accordingly — NSF’s 2026 budget request protected AI and quantum computing as the only priority areas spared from cuts, even as advanced manufacturing fell 65 percent and biotechnology fell 30 percent. But protecting an AI budget line while firing the oversight board that would have told Congress how the US actually stacks up, and replacing independent scientific advice with the CEOs of the companies most invested in the outcome, is not a research strategy. It is capital allocation dressed in research’s clothing. Omar Yaghi’s departure for a Chinese-government-backed AI materials institute, two months after the board that might have flagged the risk was dissolved, is not a coincidence so much as a demonstration.
“Harm,” Redefined
On July 10, the Interior Department finalized a rule narrowing what counts as “harm” to a species under the Endangered Species Act. For fifty years, the term covered habitat destruction — the reasoning being that a species can be extinguished as surely by bulldozing its home as by killing it directly. Under the new rule, oil and gas drilling, mining, and logging are permitted in critical habitat so long as no individual animal is directly injured. Environmental groups warn the change could push already-imperiled species toward extinction by removing the last legal obstacle to development in the reserves set aside to protect them. It is the same administration that, in its first term, tried and failed to weaken the Act, only to have Biden reverse the changes. This time the rule reaches further, and there is no guarantee of a reversal on the other side of it.
A Reverse Sputnik
In October 1957, a beeping Soviet satellite the size of a beach ball convinced the United States, rightly or wrongly, that it was falling behind in a contest for survival. The response was not a budget line-item restoration. It was the National Defense Education Act, a near-doubling of NSF’s appropriation within three years, the creation of NASA, and a decade-long expansion of federal science funding that built the research university system this country still runs on. The “missile gap” that followed — the claim, largely overstated, that the Soviets had opened a lead in ballistic missile numbers — became the justification for a buildup so thorough that by the time the gap was revealed to have been illusory, the capacity built to close it was real and permanent.
What is happening now is that gap’s mirror image. Instead of a foreign shock triggering mobilization, a domestic administration is engineering the gap directly: firing the board that would have quantified the China competition, gutting the agency that trains the scientists who would close it, and driving a Nobel laureate to build China’s AI materials capacity with his own hands. Congress restoring NSF and NCI budgets to their prior levels — which it has mostly done, more responsibly than many expected — was necessary and is still not sufficient, because the thing that was destroyed was never primarily the money. It was peer review cut from three reviewers to two. It was a National Science Board that existed to give Congress and the president independent warning, now gone. It was seventeen hundred NSF staff reduced by over a third, so that even fully funded grants sit unprocessed. It was researchers like Marianna Zhang at NYU wondering aloud whether her scientific career has to move outside the country, and Omar Yaghi answering that question with his feet.
Rebuilding a peer-review culture, a demoralized federal science workforce, and the trust of a generation of researchers who watched their funding vanish like a drone attack is not a matter of a supplemental appropriations bill. It requires something closer to what the country did after 1957 — a deliberate, multi-year, bipartisan program to rebuild the institutions themselves, not just refill their accounts. The historical irony is that the missile gap which triggered the last great mobilization turned out to be mostly fictional. This one is not. We built it ourselves, and by the time Washington notices, the government of China will have spent a decade wooing away the people who might have closed it.
© 2026 Farooq Hussain
This is part of a series on the damage being inflicted on American science and medicine under the second Trump administration. A future piece will look more closely at what a reconstruction program on the scale of the post-Sputnik build-out would actually require.