How International Cooperation in Research Advances Both Science and Diplomacy

The partial budget blueprint released by the White House recently will put U.S. leadership in science and technology at serious risk if Congress goes along. In addition to the obvious damage that would result from the proposed $5.8 billion cut at NIH, the $2 billion cut in applied energy R&D, the $900 million cut in DOE’s Office of Science, the abolition of ARPA-E, and the research cuts at NOAA and EPA, a less immediately obvious potential casualty would be U.S. scientific cooperation with a wide variety of other countries on a wide variety of topics.

These international collaborative activities are actually likely to be first on the chopping block for three reasons: the tendency of departments and agencies under budget stress to prioritize protection of purely domestic programs; the presumption among many members of Congress that international cooperation is a one-way street operating to the disadvantage of the United States; and the Trump Administration’s "America First" stance (which is, perhaps not surprisingly, the top line in the title of the March budget document)....