Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, on Trump’s research cuts: “When China starts eating our lunch, I think we’ll wake up”

The United States owes much of its prosperity to the constant pursuit and adaptation of new technologies. These advances have been made available through tireless research by scientists which until not long ago received extensive funding from the federal government.

In just over a year under the Trump 2.0 administration, there have been drastic cuts to the number of scientists employed in the federal workforce. Additionally, science research at universities and laboratories around the country have been hampered as grants are withdrawn.

Neil deGrasse Tyson told Brian Tyler Cohen on his podcast that “the relationship of the executive branch and science has never been as devastating as it has been under the current administration, in the history since science has been valued.”

“When China starts eating our lunch, I think we’ll wake up”

While detractors of President Trump and his followers like to say that conservative politics is anti-science, the celebrity astrophysicist pointed out that actually, Republican administrations up to now invested more money in science than Democratic administrations. Even during Trump’s first term, more money was dedicated to science than during Obama’s he said.

However, Trump’s drive to inject billions into sending Americans back to the Moon he argues had more to do with intelligence gathered in the twenty-teens on China’s efforts to do the same. This he said was much like why NASA and the first Moon program Apollo was created in the first place, the Soviets putting Sputnik, the first satellite, into space.

“We don’t tend to be as good at proactive decisions as we are at reactive decisions,” he posited. He lamented that with all the cuts, his colleagues are being cherrypicked by European institutions, something that the U.S. had been doing for the past 50 years, bringing the best and the brightest from around the world to our shores to drive the “engine of tomorrow’s engineering.”

He explained that “engineering is the foundations of tomorrow’s economies.” However, because we don’t see all the work that originally went into feeding the engineering “it’s easier to believe that that doesn’t matter,” Tyson said.

However, that will become apparent he pointed out “when China starts eating our lunch.” He said that when that happens, in his opinion “we’ll wake up and sit up straight in the chair.” At that point he feels Congress will get together and do something about it, shoring up investment. He warns that there will be a delay though in getting back up to full speed as everyone that has left or been pushed out and poached will have to be enticed back.

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