New research from two Northwestern professors and two professors from other universities revealed that Republican lawmakers either exceeded or matched Democrats in the amount of federal funding they directed toward science from 1980 to 2020.
Kellogg professors Alexander Furnas and Dashun Wang worked with two researchers from Vanderbilt University and Harvard University to analyze appropriations data over the 40-year period, which showed which government programs the U.S. Congress and president allocated money to. The researchers’ findings were published in a paper in “Science” journal in September.
Furnas said that during the period the researchers looked at, they found Republicans tended to appropriate more money for science and research, particularly when they controlled the House of Representatives, the presidency, or both.
Vanderbilt Prof. Leah Rosenstiel also worked on the research and said that to achieve their findings, the team looked at average spending in the appropriations data within the federal budget under different parties’ control.
Additionally, Rosenstiel said the team had to decide what budget accounts they could count as science or research.
“We define science pretty broadly in the paper, which was just going through and looking at, okay, what is this account? What are they actually spending the money on?” Rosenstiel said.
Based on this line of inquiry, Furnas said that while Republicans funded more science over the period the researchers looked at, there wasn’t a large partisan disparity. He said Republicans were simply more robust in their overall funding.
When he initially saw the data, Furnas said he hypothesized that Republicans appeared to be funding more science than Democrats due to research in the Department of Defense.
Rosenstiel said she shared this theory, but Furnas found it wasn’t true — funding was spread throughout multiple programs and not just concentrated in defense.
“I think one thing we did expect was that when Republicans control Congress or control the presidency, there might be more spending on research and development when it comes to defense, but we weren’t expecting the higher spending for, say, the National Science Foundation,” Rosenstiel said.
She added the relationship between partisanship and science spending is not straightforward, and both parties were funding science at fairly high levels.
According to Rosenstiel, neither the Republican party nor the Democratic party has been historically anti-science.
“It does underscore the degree to which the Trump administration’s posture towards funding science is a break from the historical position of the Republican Party in funding science,” Furnas said.
The Trump administration has proposed large cuts of science funding in the government’s current proposed spending bills.
Political science Prof. Mary McGrath said when she read the published research, she was struck by the fact that there were no large fluctuations in overall funding over time, even when one party was in control of all of Congress.
McGrath said regardless of party funding, scientific research was respected bipartisanly across the time frame the researchers studied.
“This is good, important context, especially at a moment when science and research in general has been very politicized, and research institutions (have been) targeted for political reasons in a way that we haven’t really seen in the United States,” she said.
Though the Trump administration has been proposing budget cuts aimed at scientific organizations, Furnas said both parties have pushed back against the cuts in the government’s current proposed appropriations bills for the federal budget.
Furnas said it’s encouraging that, despite Republicans’ recent shifts away supporting for science, bipartisan support still does exist.
“I’m a scientist and I care about funding for science, but I would like to see a return to that sort of more traditional posture of robust support. And I do think there’s still appetite for that, or at least I hope there is,” Furnas said
Email: annacaputo2029@u.northwestern.edu
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