The Problem with U.S. Research

In September 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered his speech at Rice University, now-famously declaring, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Within seven years, humanity’s first steps on lunar soil single-handedly galvanized America’s foothold in the global scientific community. Today, no single goal commands such unified focus among these scientists, students, and engineers; yet the question of who sets our research priorities—and who gets to determine what the world most urgently needs—remains imperative. When research funding flows primarily from government agencies (e.g., NSF, NIH, DoD, NASA) and private investors, each with their own strategic interests, the resulting financial dependencies may create tensions between what researchers want to study, what funders are willing to support, and what the public needs most urgently addressed. Additionally, because university research agendas are primarily enabled by researcher engagement, public sentiment, and government funding priorities, they not only influence society's collective focus toward certain areas of study (e.g., climate, health, and technology) but also shape students' experiences and trajectories by determining which skills and opportunities they are encouraged to invest in.

This analysis primarily examines research dynamics in the context of the United States, with particular attention to how national funding priorities shape institutional agendas at universities like Indiana University, though many of these dynamics apply to research institutions globally.

Meet the Stakeholders

Contemporary research in the U.S. involves three main stakeholders with vested interests: (1) the researcher/research institution, (2) public and political groups, and (3) financial benefactors and investors.

Firstly, researchers create institutional interest and organic momentum toward certain questions, after which they actively conduct the actual research. Educational institutions like Indiana University promote diversity in research areas that meet state, national, and international needs, hosting a wide array of fields from materials science to medieval literature. For instance, the IU Bloomington 2030 strategic plan outlines IU’s goals of expanding research toward improving the health of aging adults, integrating quantum technology into cybersecurity, and preventing human diseases through environmental health initiatives (Indiana University, 2025).

Secondly, activists, legislators, and other pressure groups provide strong enough forces that steer institutions toward what gets studied. Recent issue-priority work in 2025 continues to show inflation and other economic concerns at the very top of the public’s agenda, with large partisan differences over majorly identified issues like immigration and climate change (Shin et al., 2025). Data coming from these pressure groups is essential to identify relevant and unmet needs that institutions might want to address, ultimately guiding research toward a more need-based approach.

Third, and perhaps most decisively, financial investors largely determine what research actually gets done due to their power to enable and limit research feasibility. The National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Energy allocate billions annually based on congressional appropriations, while private donors and industry partners—from biotech firms to tech billionaires like Elon Musk investing in space technology—direct resources toward their strategic interests. These funds are used to support the cost of personnel, equipment, materials, data collection, analysis, and dissemination of results.

These three stakeholder groups all influence the course of institutional research through their different functions and objectives.

Today’s Frontiers

Kennedy’s Rice Stadium speech marshalled U.S. research toward a singular vision. His moon challenge was a carefully designed rhetoric that channeled Cold War panics into scientific achievement—one that demonstrated American technological superiority and inhibited domestic social unrest. Federal R&D spending peaked at 1.86% of GDP in 1964 (National Science Foundation, 2025), STEM education popularized itself dramatically, and universities steered entire departments toward aerospace engineering and related fields (Logsdon, 2022). This was America’s 20th-century frontier.

Today, many of the aforementioned drivers of research work in unison, though without the singular—arguably quasi-military—clarity of Kennedy’s program. Driven by both scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and public demand for adaptive solutions, climate resilience and energy research have become prominent international research priorities (Schipper et al., 2021). Likewise, trillions in market investment in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing have increased research opportunities in these fields (Ropes&Gray, 2025), evidenced by massive trade shows and research conferences like SC25 (Supercomputing 2025), conducted last November 21 at St. Louis, MO. In their applications, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, biotechnology and human health research have also continued expanding, with startup series funding surging to approximately 28.1 billion USD in venture capital in 2024 (Pokladowski, 2025). Such examples represent only a portion of the encyclopedic set of global research priorities and the forces that steer them.

The Problem with Who Gets to Decide

While Kennedy’s vision was a success, the moon landing was just as much a propaganda victory as a scientific one. The paradigmatic institutional shifts that ensued from his program are evidence of governmental power in manipulating public perceptions—as clearly shown by the binary opposition, dissociation, and epideictic progression (Bostdorff, 2014) in Kennedy’s speech that built on the recent Red Scare and McCarthyism—and enabling certain fields of study through funding and resource allocation.

Apart from the generally conflicting interests of stakeholder groups, the reality of who truly holds power over research agendas not only complicates the decision-making process but, more importantly, undermines what is considered the public good of research. The Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to environmental programs and the Environmental Protection Agency are a clear example of this conflict, with the administration able to redirect research priorities regardless of public need or scientific consensus. When the NSF, NIH, or DOE face defunding or deregulation, the message is clear: the government, or at least the institutions with sufficient financial or legal capacity, have the power to ultimately decide which fields research institutions may (or may only) pursue.

Such instances create disastrous misalignments between public needs and actual funded opportunities. Kennedy’s propaganda playbook aligned public sentiment with government objectives through fear-based rhetoric, whereas contemporary administrations now often deploy media narratives to rationalize funding decisions that contradict public priorities. New cycles, social media echo chambers, and partisan information ecosystems allow governments to either manufacture consent or manufacture indifference among researchers and the public (Jiang et al., 2021). Fields enjoying both governmental and private sector support—AI, quantum computing, defense technologies—attract resources, talent, and institutional infrastructure. Meanwhile, critical areas like long-term climate modeling, biodiversity research, or public health infrastructure receive inconsistent support, creating boom-and-bust cycles that undermine sustained progress. Hence, education and research remain inherently dependent on financial and legal frameworks, subject to the interests of those wielding power.

Following the Money

In today’s world of mediated information, students haphazardly internalize this dynamic in making academic and professional decisions. The goal of many is simple: pursue fundable skills or risk obsolescence. Salary differentials between fields create another variation of funding influence that steers students toward lucrative sectors regardless of personal interest or social need. Computer science departments swell while humanities programs diminish. A hidden curriculum that implicitly values certain competencies while devaluing others surfaces—one that educational and research institutions unavoidably propagate due to their fundamental reliance on financial and legal capacity.

As an undergraduate software engineer, this situation has personally influenced my academic choices and part-time employment opportunities. High-performance computing and AI research necessitate specific technical skills, steering my intended career path toward roles in organizations like Indiana University’s UITS department. UITS exists because institutional needs for computing support justify funding allocation. Conversely, when comparing NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) opportunities—just one of many undergraduate research funding sources—I found significantly fewer positions focused on environmental science compared to computer science and healthcare technology. While other funding mechanisms do exist, this disparity in readily accessible opportunities for undergraduates provides a larger perspective on research funding allocations and how they affect student choices.

In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in computer and information technology occupations will grow 13% from 2020 to 2030, much faster than average, with median salaries exceeding $90,000 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Environmental science occupations, on the other hand, face slower growth and lower compensation. Thousands of students make similar decisions toward jobs with better infrastructure and composition, and the aggregate effect is a generation of researchers clustered around well-funded domains, leaving critical but underfunded areas understaffed.

What Humanity Really Needs

Many argue that research priorities must align with market demands to ensure that students develop employable skills and that institutions receive sufficient funding for continued research. However, such market-based framing creates three problems. First, it assumes that current market demands accurately mirror long-term societal needs, when in reality, markets, over the course of their histories, tend to misprice existential risks such as climate change (Schnabel, 2020). Second, exclusive focus on commercially viable research creates knowledge gaps in areas low in profitability but crucial for public welfare—epidemic preparedness before COVID-19 being a prime example (Tortoris et al., 2024). Third, short-term commercial incentives may lead to technological advances that outpace our understanding of their societal implications, as we’re seeing with the surfacing concerns surrounding AI ethics and governance (Taeihagh, 2025). These problems suggest a need to consciously temper our propensity for narrow, hyper-focused research toward technologies that promise near-term commercial returns, thereby allowing long-term societal value to take precedence over immediate profitability. We must pause and reflect on how breakthroughs in AI, computing, or other well-funded technologies might spill over into other fields that directly result in positive, long-term environmental and sociological change, particularly in climate science and public health infrastructure.

Preventative climate action, for instance, serves society both on a moral and practical level, and therefore must be reinstated as one of our first and most major priorities. Currently, much focus has turned toward reactive solutions and climate adaptation over proactive mitigation. Reactive disaster response, for instance, costs vastly more than resilience building (Wellington Management, 2025). Research into renewable energy systems, carbon capture, ecosystem restoration, and climate adaptation strategies deserves sustained, apolitical support, wherein programs are insulated from short-term political cycles and partisan polarization. While politics is an inevitable part of funding decisions, climate science shouldn’t fluctuate dramatically with the change of each administration; it requires institutional mechanisms—such as long-term funding commitments, independent scientific advisory boards, and bipartisan legislative frameworks—that can maintain research continuity despite political transitions.

Public health infrastructure research remains underfunded relative to biomedical research focused on novel therapeutics, especially in remote and vulnerable communities. COVID-19 has exposed catastrophic weaknesses in epidemic surveillance, healthcare delivery systems, and public health communication—all of which hindered people’s access to vital and immediate services. Thus, preventing the next global outbreak requires unglamorous but largely beneficial work in systems design and implementation science. To an extent, ethical and responsible AI development would also require investment whose concerns go beyond inference latency and parameter count. As AI increasingly shapes medical diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and epidemic forecasting, we need robust research into algorithmic bias in clinical decision-making, transparency in medical AI systems, patient data privacy compliance, and the equitable distribution of AI-enhanced healthcare. Without this foundational work, even the most sophisticated medical AI may risk perpetuating healthcare disparities or failing vulnerable populations during the next public health crisis.

In retrospect, perhaps the question of who decides what we study and why would forever remain a complex and indeterministic entanglement between the citizen, the researcher, and the politician, but this does not absolve us from our ethical responsibility of opening our minds to such dynamics. Because university research agendas today are almost dictatively shaped by political expediency and funding, what students learn and what skills they develop are inevitably controlled by these power-bearing institutions. We ought to recognize these forces and, in light of this, more consciously do our part in building research ecosystems that serve public needs rather than short-term interests. The question we must now ask ourselves isn’t whether we can reach for the moon once more, but whether we can build systems that democratically determine which solutions that best serve society are worth reaching for here on earth.

Works Cited

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Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, December). Occupational outlook handbook: Computer and information technology occupations. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/

Hwayong, S. (2025, November 6). Americans’ top concerns reflect both common ground and partisan splits: Economy unites, but policy and politics divide. Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, Washington University in St. Louis. https://wc.wustl.edu/americans-top-concerns-reflect-both-common-ground-and-partisan-splits-economy-unites-policy-and

Indiana University Bloomington. (2025). Transformative research and creativity: IUB 2030 strategic plan – Goal 1: Accelerate translational research and creative activity. https://iub2030.indiana.edu/plan/research/index.html#goal1

Jiang, J., Ren, X., & Ferrara, E. (2021). Social media polarization and echo chambers in the context of COVID-19: Case study. JMIRx Med, 2(3), e29570. https://doi.org/10.2196/29570

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