If there’s one thing that’s set in American politics it’s the reputation of the two major parties. Vote Republican and you’ll likely get lower taxes, higher defense spending, increased oil and gas drilling, and cuts to entitlement programs. Vote Democrat and you’re probably in for more climate regulation, increased health care spending, expanded child care and paid leave, and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
And then there’s science. In the binary world of Washington, the Democrats have historically been defined as the pro-science party while the GOP, deservedly or not, is seen as anti-science. The second term of President Donald Trump has certainly reinforced that divide. While Democrats howled, the White House in the spring proposed massive cuts to federal science spending, including $350 million from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), $100 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) climate research programs, $4.9 billion from the National Science Foundation (NSF), $6 billion from NASA, and $235 million from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development.
But Trump, it turns out, might be an outlier. According to a new study in Science, over the past four-plus decades, funding for the sciences has actually been higher when there is a Republican majority in the House of Representatives or a Republican occupying the White House than when Democrats control those levers of power. The study covered the period from 1980 to 2000, a stretch that saw three Democrats and four Republicans in the Oval Office, and during which the House was under Democratic Control three times and Republican control twice. Poring over the spending ledger from that era revealed a lot.
Not only did Republican administrations support science funding, the benefits were widespread, across 171 funding recipients represented by 27 agencies, including the CDC, NASA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NSF, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Energy, and the research and development arm of the Department of Defense. Democrats funded no fewer agencies—but they did so at a slightly less generous level.
“We’re taking a data-driven approach,” says Dashun Wang, co-author of the Science paper and director of the Center of Science Innovation at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “The team has pieced together these data sets to look into what I would call the dark matter of science funding.”
“No one’s looked at this level of granular data that captures this range of spending,” adds Alexander Furnas, co-author of the paper and research assistant professor at Kellogg.
Whatever the level of funding the science sector receives, it amounts to little more than pan scrapings from the government’s overall annual spending. The total federal budget for fiscal year 2024 was $6.75 trillion. Of this, discretionary spending—which includes transportation, education, housing, social services programs, science outlays, and much more—represented just 26% of the total. In the period the study covered, science funding in particular ranged from $120 billion to $225 billion—or a maximum of 3.3% of the final federal budget.
Still, that small expenditure has big backers. Space states like Florida and California, for example—home to NASA’s two biggest centers—jealously guard their share of the federal pie. Georgia, home to the CDC, similarly looks out for the 13,000 local jobs the headquarters supports.
The lawmakers’ fight for such funding is a multi-step process, beginning with the president proposing a federal budget for the upcoming fiscal year. The House and Senate then take up the proposal, with each chamber drawing up its own budget resolution, referring those drafts to a joint conference committee, marking up the proposals again, meeting in conference once more, and at last handing one Congressional appropriations bill back up to the president, who typically signs it.
“The president doesn’t have a ton of power here,” says Furnas, “because rejecting an appropriations bill risks shutting down the government.”
It is in the congressional phase of this sausage-making that the partisan fights for science funding play out—sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes out in the open. As the authors of the paper point out, the GOP did not do its reputation as a friend to science any favors from 2009 to 2012 when it sought three different times to slash or eliminate NSF funding for political science research. “Republicans are more likely to express concerns about accountability in NSF funding than Democrats in the midst of long political battles over public funding for social sciences,” the authors wrote.
Similarly, the so-called Dickey Amendment, a Republican-led measure first passed by Congress in 1996, prohibits the federal government from allocating any funds to study firearms injuries and deaths as a public health issue. The Dickey-Wicker amendment, passed that same year, forbids the use of tax dollars in embryonic stem cell research.
But behind closed doors, the GOP is a lot more science-friendly. The authors found that, on average, science- and research-related recipients were allocated $150 million more when Republicans control the House and $100 million more when there is a Republican president. Those benefits were widely felt, with the Department of Defense, the CDC, the NIH, the NSF, and more all coming out of the budget process with more cash in their pockets. One exception to this rule was the Department of Energy—typically no friend of the fossil fuel sector—which receives about one third less when Republicans control the House than when Democrats do.
There is more hostility to science in the Senate, with the CDC, the NIH, and the NSF all seeing modest proposed reductions when the GOP holds the majority. Those cuts typically do not survive negotiations with a Republican controlled House.
Just what accounts for the GOP funding edge is not clear, but the authors of the paper have at least one idea—and it does not suggest that any one party is friendlier to science than the other.
“It’s possible that Democrats tend to be the party of having the government do more,” says Furnas, “more social spending, more safety net spending. So they may just have more competing priorities and they have to make trade-offs.”
“The primary purpose of the paper is to present the facts,” cautions Wang, “rather than speculate on mechanisms.”
How science will fare in the three-plus years that remain of the Trump presidency is uncertain. Furnas sees hope in the Senate’s July move to clap back at the president’s proposal to cut the NIH budget by 40%, instead proposing an increase in funding to the institutes by $400 million. “At least so far this looks to me like a place where Republicans in Congress are pushing back,” Furnas said in a follow-up email to TIME.
“While the administration’s proposed cuts are dramatic,” adds Wang, “Congress—especially the House and Senate Appropriations Committees—has often played an independent and stabilizing role. Bipartisan traditions in appropriations could provide a buffer. Still, it’s important to emphasize that our findings are historical, and future dynamics could evolve differently.”
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