“Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips.”—Proverbs 27:2 (NIV)
Science in America has fallen on hard times. In 2025, the administration proposed punishing FY2026 federal budget cuts, especially in the geosciences—(only partially) restored by last-minute Congressional action. This year the scenario seems to be repeating itself, with the proposed FY2027 funding cuts anchored by other administration actions, such as the apparent wholesale firing of the National Science Board. The animus is real and the stakes are high.
In response, scientists are mobilizing as they did last year. They are speaking out. AMS, AGU, and other science societies are urging their members to lift their voices in support of science—writing their elected representatives to plead the case.
Time is short. The self-advocacy is necessary and urgently needed. Last year’s experience provides reason for hope.
At the same time, this history reveals two causes for concern. First, if it is repeated annually, it’s unsustainable. At best, the long-term outlook would be a slow but continuing erosion of funding for the Earth sciences. Some may hope that a change in the political winds in 2028 (perhaps beginning as early as the 2026 midterms) might restore science’s standing and fortunes. But the rapid rise in national debt, exacerbated by high interest rates, makes such restoration problematic, regardless of who wins the elections.
Second, these days national enthusiasm for STEM seems to be narrowly centered on artificial intelligence and closely related fields, which are enjoying a Sputnik moment. But much of the societal benefit of the sciences comes from cross-fertilization across disciplines. The starvation of broad sectors of science and technology portends a future where the U.S. will lag the rest of the world in general (and China in particular) in the application of AI across all sectors of society.
But this second feature also shows the limits to the power of self-advocacy and the path to broadening public support for science and making that support more robust. The adult population of the United States is about 270 million, while the population of geoscientists is only about 0.1% of that figure. That means every politician who hears from us knows his/her chances of reelection don’t depend on our support in any significant way.
One question we might ask ourselves as a community is how often our politicians tend to hear from us and for what purpose. If we reach out to them only at times when we also need money, that’s not a particularly good look. Suppose that instead the words they heard from us were primarily words of praise or affirmation for the good job they’re doing given the present day’s difficult circumstances. Suppose they frequently heard from us—whether individually or in an organized, structured way—seeking to understand, say: the top several challenges they were facing at a given moment, and how they saw the intersection between those challenges and practical help we might be able to provide. Suppose our—very occasional—requests for help stemmed from relationship with them versus requests that were from names and sources unfamiliar to them and therefore difficult to differentiate from spam.
Take this a step further. Suppose the requests for help for geoscientists came from our “customers”—that far larger demographic of institutions and people using and benefiting from our work—rather than from us. That’s the wisdom captured in Proverbs 27:2. It’s not rocket science—people have understood the truth and social power of this for a while. You can bet that’s the reason politicians are opening the pocketbooks for AI; it’s not the self-advocacy from the big AI firms themselves. It’s the clamor—approaching an uproar—from all their clients.
It’s impossible to microwave such relationships—generate them overnight. It’s too late to do much in this vein in the FY2027 budget cycle. But if we face the same problem next year, we have mostly ourselves to blame.
Readers are mostly too young to remember this, but the present-day predicament of scientists was captured in a classic TV commercial for United Airlines as part of a campaign promoting business travel dating back to 1989. It’ll only take a minute of your time.
You want to watch it!The picture is grainy and the audio a bit rough; you might want to augment the sound with closed-captioning to improve your experience.
