On research: A present past, and tense future
Research policy bite: 02
Key take away:
Political influence on research has entered a new phase: From Europe’s mission-driven programmes to U.S. security-filtered funding and China’s strategic subsidies, science policy is increasingly shaped by geopolitical agendas, with autonomy and openness giving way to alignment and control.
Sustainable science needs structural reform: To protect long-term, curiosity-driven research amid shifting political tides, democracies must adopt dual-track funding models by balancing stable, insulated support for foundational science with transparent, time-bound investments in strategic missions.
On Monday 5th May 2025, under the gilt ceilings of the Sorbonne’s Grand Amphithéâtre, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unfurled a promise designed to lure talent across the Atlantic: a $566-million “Choose Europe” war-chest of super-grants, relocation bonuses and decade-long contracts for researchers willing to decamp to the EU. The timing was well placed. Only a fortnight earlier, Washington had frozen billions in federal science funds, prompting Ivy League universities to post hiring freezes and shove half-built prototypes into storage. Von der Leyen did not name Donald Trump; she simply called the cuts a “gigantic miscalculation” and invited researchers to pursue stability over uncertainty in their scientific careers. In a single morning in Paris, research moved from collegial to geopolitical.
A tense past
Governments have steered science ever since radar beat planes and U-boats and penicillin beat gangrene. Yet the modern contract between researchers and the state crystallised only in 1945, when engineer Vannevar Bush told President Truman that federally funded, investigator-led basic research would be “the endless frontier” of national strength NSF - National Science Foundation. For a generation the bargain more or less held: Washington picked the bill, scientists picked the questions, and the Cold-War pay-off from MRI scanners to the internet seemed to vindicate both.
This intellectual separation of “research and state” has become challenged in times of crisis. Sputnik jolted the United States into the space race; the 1970s oil shocks were the genesis of solar-cell laboratories; HIV funding exploded only after activists stormed the NIH. The lesson is enduring: When politicians feel urgency, academic autonomy comes under pressure. And, today’s geopolitics feel very urgent indeed.
The politicised present
If, as was first observed in 1913 in the New York Times, “Money talks”, then in 2025, in the context of research, it speaks fluent geopolitics. When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled “Choose Europe,” a €500-million pot of super-grants and relocation bonuses, she was explicit: The scheme is meant to tempt US-based scientists rattled by the US administration’s sudden funding freeze. Across the Atlantic, a Nature analysis shows that U.S. lawmakers have under-delivered on their own CHIPS & Science Act, leaving the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and other agencies USD 7 billion short of the law’s 2024 targets and poised for a 25-year low in real-terms spending. A different film, this time in 1976, suggested that the smart thing to do is always to “follow the money”. In this case, it is clear that research capital is being encouraged to flow to Europe and to China.
That shift is rewriting funding frameworks. Horizon Europe, once a largely bottom-up programme, has reorganised its €95 billion into five headline “missions” on cancer, soil health, climate adaptation, smart cities and oceans, each expected to deliver photogenic proof points by 2030 (European Commission). Calls that used to invite free-form curiosity now arrive with score-sheets demanding impact logic models and lighthouse demonstrators.
Meanwhile, Beijing’s 14th Five-Year Plan is throwing subsidies at semiconductors, green hydrogen and biotech, nurturing thousands of “little-giant” firms meant to become de-risked engines of strategic independence (China Daily Government Services). Where Europe talks of “open strategic autonomy,” China is practising it at industrial scale.
Anglo-American systems are experimenting with new instruments altogether. Washington’s ARPA-H (modelled on DARPA but aimed at health) has asked Congress for $54 billion across five years, including $1.4 billion for a cancer “moonshot” (Congress.gov | Library of Congress). In London, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) holds £800 million to pursue high-risk bets on everything from longevity to solar geo-engineering, under rules that let programme directors rip up normal peer review (Financial Times). And the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology now publishes rolling Areas of Research Interest (e.g. quantum, AI, internet resilience) so Whitehall can point academic guns where policy needs them (GOV.UK)
Layered on top is a new lattice of security filters. Grant agreements come stapled with export-control clauses; visa checks slow international teams; and U.S. universities, facing freezes and cancellations worth at least US $6 billion, have begun layoffs and hiring moratoria (Nature, Nature). Funding, once the lubricant of open science, has turned into a lever of statecraft shifting the research agenda from the inside out.
Fault-lines and frictions
Mission rhetoric is crowding the curiosity space. In Horizon Europe’s latest work-programme, more than 70% of open calls are now anchored to five flagship missions, each scored on short-term “lighthouse” deliverables rather than open‐ended discovery. In the US, Congress authorised record sums in the CHIPS & Science Act, but then withheld roughly $7 billion of that promise, forcing agencies to funnel the money they do receive into politically photogenic technologies such as quantum and AI.
The combination of the move toward applied research following the 2008 crisis and the current geopolitical fragmentation is a move away from “grand challenges” and a move toward “strategic challenges”. We might define these as being more narrowly drawn and pushing toward national rather than global interests. In practice, this thematic compression means that if your proposal cannot be labelled with a strategic-mission keyword it may struggle to breathe.
Security considerations are hardening into outright balkanisation. Export-control clauses newly added to UK, EU and U.S. grant agreements restrict satellite, advanced-chip and synthetic-biology work; updated control lists run to dozens of pages. Institutions caught unprepared face sudden handbrake turns: Columbia University, for instance, is laying off 180 federally funded staff after Washington pulled $400 million in grants under new scrutiny. Collaborative science now moves at the speed of licence paperwork.
The same mission framing risks widening the North–South infrastructure gap. A Horizon “Soil Health in Africa” call, laudable in intent, assumes access to drones, spectral imagers and continuous sensor networks—tools that many African agronomy labs cannot yet afford. When eligibility hinges on technology platforms, partners without them stand outside the door.
Finally comes budget whiplash. Universities (and their wet bench laboratories in particular) hire when an administration trumpets a moonshot, then scramble for bridge money when the next fiscal cycle bites back. The current freeze-then-courtship dynamic with Washington retracting funds and Brussels waving its chequebooks will, too, create a volatile environment for researchers. Like the financial markets, researchers hate uncertainty. While the money in Europe or China may seem appealing, the challenge that the US is creating for itself is that funding is no longer predictable. And researchers may accept less in favour of consistency. Europe has less to give financially, but can offer certainty. Funding uncertainties are impacting project continuity and career stability. Each cycle of instability erodes morale, wastes sunk capital and teaches early-career scientists that strategic patience is a luxury they may not inherit.
Running through all four fractures is a cultural crack: A generation raised on the ideal of borderless knowledge must now weigh visa risk, supply-chain provenance and export codes before daring to ask a question.
Tense futures
The global competition over research subsidies is only set to intensify and the race to outspend rivals on strategic science will accelerate, not ease. Quantum, AI-in-defence and next-generation energy are too tightly bound to national wealth and security. “Technology alliances” among like-minded democracies could ease duplication, but they could also hard-wire bloc rivalries, fragmenting the literature behind paywalls of secrecy. Climate deadlines add another time-bomb: the planet needs cross-border data and talent flows just as super-power competition is throttling them. Expect the next decade’s big contests to be less about how much money is spent than about who controls the research questions and where the resulting IP can travel.
The next tense or “quo vadis”?
In an idealised world, the kind of policies that could catch the imagination might include a dual-key model for funding: one key unlocking a legally ring-fenced baseline, e.g. 0.7 % of GDP for curiosity-driven science, insulated from election cycles and governed by independent peer review, not ministerial agendas. The second key would open transparent, mission-oriented funds, co-designed with citizens, industry, and civil society, anchored in sunset clauses and audited impacts, rather than slogans. A narrow, evidence-based security test, which is time-limited and publicly accountable, would protect against genuine dual-use risks without gutting open collaboration. Scientists, empowered by such a structure, could spend less time second-guessing political winds and more time advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
But, given current trends, we need to be realistic. In the current world, perhaps all we can hope for would be a principled compromise: stable core funding preserved through multi-year commitments, mission frameworks tied to broad societal priorities rather than election manifestos, and security policies grounded in transparency, not suspicion.
Even that, however, is unlikely to be enough to stem the deeper tide: a creeping normalisation of short-termism, ideological interference, and science as an instrument of statecraft. Crucially, research as it stands is not equipped to navigate this terrain. Most scientists are trained to be methodical and rigorous and not to negotiate funding under strategic ambiguity or operate in environments shaped by diplomacy, national security, and economic leverage. If research is serious about engaging in this new geopolitical context, it will require the development of new skills and new approaches to engage in a geopolitical context.