Physicists have struggled with a basic secret of the world for decades.
They wanted to know why certain debris — like the electrons in atoms — have large, while particles of lighting do not. Whatever the reason was, it was important to comprehending the planets, galaxies, and life itself’s causes.
The leading hypothesis stated that particles got their size from interacting with an unknown field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove it existed.
One of the most optimistic international collaborations in medical history would be required to do so. Starting years ago, thousands of scientists from lots of places worked side by side, even though some of their governments considered one another enemies. A third of the labor and hundreds of millions of dollars from the government were contributed by the United States.
The investment paid off in 2012, when the team detected the so-called” God object” or Higgs boson, confirming the half-century-old Higgs niche idea. The breakthrough was so important that two of the theoretical physicists were awarded the Nobel Prize.
Under a new law proposed by the Trump administration, British scientists may be forced to view similar discoveries from the sidelines. The plan would entail limiting global collaboration and allowing political appointees to choose which research to fund and have the authority to halt it at any time, for any reason.
As soon as he learned about the proposal, one of the U. S. experts who took part in the landmark initiative rushed to record his criticism with the federal government.
In a public opinion, University of Chicago science professor David W. Miller wrote,” These investigations take decades to build and require sustained, joint international investment.” ” The research will remain, without American leadership. The United States did not simply fall behind. It may move aside”.
The relevance of the rule extend much beyond physics. Proposed by the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known but effective part of the White House that guides federal spending, it would give the government’s political appointees across dozens of governmental agencies considerable discretion over how grants are awarded and terminated. The appointees are required to have no prior knowledge of science or the grants ‘ topics.
Russell Vought, who runs the office and has made expanding presidential control over federal spending one of his signature goals, has put the philosophy into practice over the past two years, helping to dismantle the U. S. Agency for International Development and, in another controversial move, blocking funds already allocated by Congress. After an agency lawyer recently admitted in court records that the terminations were “only based on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” or blue states, Vandought’s decision last year to cancel 284 Department of Energy grants drew new criticism.
The rule would cover at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants, touching everything from food stamp benefits and housing assistance to small business loans and funding for the arts. In their annual budgets, many cities, states, and nonprofits rely on federal funds. Representatives of domestic violence organizations and museums and the attorneys general of 22 states are among those who have objected to the rule.
The final version of the rule, according to Vought’s office, should go into effect on October 1. Before that happens, the OMB must consider the nearly 500, 000 public comments that have flooded in since the rule was announced in late May and address or respond to substantive critiques.
An OMB spokesperson told ProPublica that the “proposed rule will ensure spending is aligned with current law, Executive Orders, and agency priorities”. It is “fundamentally about accountability to the American people and making sure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.” It will not disrupt major scientific research or supplant the peer review process — any claims to the contrary are based on spurious assumptions”.
However, scientists have received thousands of public comments, warning that the proposed rule, in its current form, would severely reduce their efforts to treat pediatric cancers, advance maternal health, and advance fundamental research.
The United States ‘ world-renowned system of funding science entrusts decisions to subject-matter experts who choose grantees based on a rigorous, merit-based peer-review process, with minimum political interference. Other physicists, oncologists, and those of other oncologists are evaluated by physicists. Larger projects get steady funding through multiple years, so that researchers can hire staff, design and purchase equipment, and make commitments to other involved institutions or people, such as patients undergoing treatments.
Few things more fully illustrate the benefits that system provided than the Higgs boson, one of the most significant scientific triumphs of the twenty-first century.
Miller took ProPublica inside the endeavor, highlighting ways the new rule could imperil similar projects in the future.
In his public statement, he said,” The United States built the greatest scientific enterprise in human history on a simple idea: fund the best ideas, chosen by the best experts, and get out of the way.” ” This proposed rule dismantles that principle entirely, and it does so in ways that will cause immediate, concrete, and in many cases irreversible harm to American science”.
Miller, 43, claims that the government has invested heavily in research and education throughout his entire career.
He grew up in Chicago and went to public schools. Neither of his parents attended college. His mother was the first female paramedic hired by the Chicago Fire Department. On his days off, his father, a firefighter, did construction work. Miller liked building stuff in his dad’s workroom. In high school, he etched his own circuit board and made shelves for his bunk bed.
At the University of Chicago, where Miller enrolled after winning a full-ride scholarship for students whose parents worked as police officers or firefighters, he chose to study physics and soon became interested in questions such as: Why do things with mass behave differently from light? Why does the universe contain more matter than anti-matter? Miller said his dad used to sit in his firehouse, clipping newspaper stories on dark matter and black holes to send to his son.
Miller began his undergraduate studies at CERN, an international physics laboratory close to Geneva, which was established after World War II to facilitate ambitious experiments and build bridges between nations that had recently been in conflict. He took a job there after graduation as a research technician.
He crawled through tunnels, connecting power cables, and joining pieces of steel together in a cavern 300 feet underground. He was helping build the machinery needed to test a theory scientists had been chasing since the 1960s.
A hidden field of energy, according to physicists, leaves photons without mass while giving protons and other particles mass. To test the theory, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, would smash hundreds of billions of protons together at nearly the speed of light. One of the enormous, intricate cameras that Miller had been designing was being built to detect the Higgs boson produced by colliding protons. Later, he worked to disentangle the messy data.
Miller was one of nearly 2, 000 scientists from the U. S. who worked on the initiative. Before being shipped to CERN, three U.S. national laboratories built the collider’s components in-house. Federal agencies invested$ 531 million into construction and other services. Additional funding was awarded to individual scientists. Miller’s technician role and support for his research when he earned a doctorate in physics from Stanford University were both funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the main government agencies that supports basic scientific research.
Federal grants can’t be canceled without notice, and according to Miller, the dependability of that funding was important. But the new OMB rule would allow termination with minimal explanation or opportunities for appeal.
In his opposition to the rule, Miller wrote that the threat “is a tool for political coercion.” ” It tells every scientist in America: your funding is safe only as long as your work, your institution, or your public statements remain acceptable to the current administration”.
The prohibition of using federal funds to” support certain foreign collaborations involving covered foreign countries or covered foreign entities” poses an additional threat. The rule accounts for limited exceptions, including collaborations allowed by federal statute and those in which an agency head “determines that the activity does not pose a risk to national security”. A spokesperson for the OMB did not provide a list of the countries that were covered or respond to ProPublica’s inquiries about how the rule would be enforced.
More than 60 nations contributed to the Higgs boson discovery. Superconducting magnets used in the collider were tested by Indian engineers. Russian scientists collected spent artillery shells from World War II to source the huge amounts of brass needed for one of the particle detectors. Various nations are making contributions to the collider’s ongoing improvements, including cast-iron shielding from Pakistan, crystals from Italy, and special magnets from China.
Some of the scientists working at CERN come from countries like China that the Trump administration has already restricted researchers from collaborating with. And it’s unclear how frequently others are listed as adversaries. Since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has picked public fights with a long list of leaders from U. S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and Canada.
According to Chris Llewellyn Smith, a former CERN director and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford, strict restrictions on international partnerships flies in the face of how science has evolved over the years. The Royal Society of London, a scientific academy founded in the 1600s, appointed a foreign secretary to correspond with scientists from other countries nearly 60 years before the British government appointed a foreign secretary to oversee international relations, he noted.
According to Llewellyn Smith, global conflict has already harmed the collaborative spirit at CERN. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, CERN’s governing body voted to ban scientists affiliated with Russian labs — a move that has harmed the careers of Russian scientists and deprived CERN of the hardware and labor Russia could contribute to future experiments.
Llewellyn Smith warned that if the United States also retreats due to restrictions on working with foreign scientists, it” could jeopardize the entire future of high-energy physics.”
That may feel abstract to many Americans. However, the advancements in technology that require particle physics result in unexpected discoveries.
A CERN engineer pioneered a touch screen in the 1970s while building research instrumentation. A scientist at CERN was the inventor of the World World Web in an effort to share information among various institutions. Smaller particle accelerators are used for manufacturing and cancer therapies.
It may take generations before the real applications become apparent. Take the GPS technology that powers the maps on our phones, Miller said. It depends on Albert Einstein’s century-old equations. ” I guarantee you that Einstein wasn’t thinking about your ability to find Starbucks this morning when he wrote down the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity”.
The rule, according to the OMB, must be implemented in order to stop waste, fraud, and ideological bias.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose work the OMB cites, praised the proposed changes in a recent column. The columnist wrote that empowering political appointees creates the “kind of adult supervision” that ensures” the taxpayer is funding the activity that he votes for at election time.”
But critics say the changes aim to solve problems that either don’t exist or don’t require such a blunt-force tool.
The rule repeatedly cites “woke” funding decisions as a justification for reform under President Joe Biden’s leadership. ” Federal grants were politicized by the last administration to promote a far-left DEI agenda”, an agency spokesperson told ProPublica in an email, referring to initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
The rule references a 2024 report from Senate Republicans that found that$ 2 billion in National Science Foundation grants, which they claimed were supporting “radical political perspectives,” were based on a keyword search of terms like “women,” “diversify,”, “segregation,” and” Hispanic culture.” ProPublica’s reporting found that many of the projects simply referenced existing social inequities or involved unrelated terms flagged by the committee’s crude methodology. One involved a study of how mint plants evolved.
Fraud in federal science funding does exist, but it’s relatively rare. According to a spokesperson from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General, fraud cases involving universities, nonprofits, and small businesses have resulted in about$ 54 million in recoveries over the past ten years. That’s an average of$ 5.4 million a year — a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars the NSF gives out in grants every year.
Legal experts question whether the OMB has the authority to impose this change, despite the administration’s assertion that those issues warrant reform. The final rule will almost certainly be subject to litigation, they say.
Lawsuits will challenge the OMB’s authority to set forth the terms of individual grants ‘ content, according to Kali Murray, a Marquette University law professor with a focus on the intersection of administrative and intellectual property law. ” This is a hall of famer move by Russ Vought” to expand the power of that office, as the proposal allows the OMB to override existing congressional statutes that govern agency spending, she said.
For instance, the proposed rule’s prohibition of DEI conflicts with a statute that directs the National Science Foundation to expand “participation of underrepresented populations,” particularly women and Black and Hispanic researchers, in science, technology, engineering, and math, Murray said. Federal physics funding has been less of a political target than grants related to health disparities, racial inequities and LGBTQ+ communities — areas the administration derides as “woke” or “illegal DEI”. However, at least a number of grants were terminated to support early-career physicists from underrepresented backgrounds.
Any change through litigation could take time, lawsuits can’t be filed until the final text of the rule is published.
Through a formal rulemaking process, the incoming presidential administration may reverse it. That process, too, could take years.
The only way to forbid the OMB from making significant changes before the final rule is released this fall is under the pressure of congressional leaders, particularly Republicans. Democrats in Congress have registered their opposition. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, wrote to Vought to request the OMB to remove portions of the rule that “would unnecessarily burden scientific and biomedical research and small communities.”
Collins took particular issue with the provision that would allow political appointees to review grant proposals, noting that it would undermine the goal of awarding funds “based on scientific merit and value, rather than political ideology”.
The first article on ProPublica explains how Trump’s” America First” administration might force American scientists to leave the next Nobel-winning discovery.
