Bring Back Government Funded Science
- Jeanna Winchester PhD
- May 17
- 17 min read
This is a real story of real people who shape the future.
May 17, 2026
Academic and government science is one of the most vital pillars of American society, though few realize just how deeply it shapes our daily lives. From the Wi-Fi you are using right now to the synthetic fibers in your clothes, or from your air conditioner’s filter to the butter in your fridge, nearly everything around you has been touched by this research.
The real kick in the pants? The scientists behind these everyday innovations probably make less than you do. We certainly don’t do it to get rich. We actually have salary caps and work 3x as much as the average worker for the same pay. In fact, a “team coach” at your local Walmart often earns more than the average academic scientist/professor. A government scientist makes barely more than that, dealing with the additional burden of political shifts and a new boss every 4-8 years.
We aren’t driven by money, but by the pursuit of knowledge. We do it to make a difference, to unravel the mysteries of existence, and to chase that unforgettable thrill of discovery.
Despite being treated horribly and, in many cases, cast aside by society, we wouldn’t trade it for anything. We essentially donate our lives to this work. For us, science is a calling built into our very bones. We could no more stop discovering than we can stop breathing.
To understand this dedication, look at the staggering timeline it takes just to do this job. Imagine feeling a passion so intense that you willingly complete 12 years of primary school, 4 years of college, and then another 5 to 10 grueling years of advanced study to earn a PhD in a hard science. But you aren’t done yet. After graduating, you must spend another 2 to 6 years in a Postdoctoral fellowship (Postdoc), grinding out a dissertation amount of work, 2 to 3 times a year, at a ridiculous pace, entirely on your own without a safety net.
When you add it all up, that is easily 26 years of intense preparation just to land a job that pays poorly and comes with endless public scrutiny.
Yet, it calls to us, and we answer the call every time, because the mysteries of the universe are too incredible to ignore. That is who we are. We are much like artists, school teachers, or engineers in that way. Most of us never get that big break. We spend much of our lives living a lower-middle-class or average-middle-class lifestyle, while putting in an upper-class level of dedication and work. But we can’t stop.
Just like an artist needs to create to breathe, or a teacher lives to shape the next generation, scientists are driven by a deep need to explain our existence. It is probably why we often end up marrying artists, teachers, or engineers. We all share that same core fire.
The goal of this editorial is to pull back the curtain on how government and academic science actually work, and how it shows up in your life. Consider this a brief magic carpet ride through the field of discovery.
People often look at the scientific world as an elite, isolated ivory tower, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, it functions like a giant, interconnected machine that quietly drives the entire American economy forward. A wild “what if” idea becomes a real-world, everyday product because of what I call “The Big 3”: academic institutions, state governments, and the federal system. Each of these sectors feeds into and feeds off of corporate America to bring innovations to life.
The Academic Sector Is The Engine of Discovery
The academic scientific sector is where the most creative, big-picture research begins. Here, applied sciences attack the most important issues in human existence, changing the lives of everyday people. The rest of science, then, focuses on pushing forward theoretical disciplines and filling in the gaps of knowledge that the applied sciences need. You can’t have one without the other. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. It has to be complementary, requiring both applied and pure research, or we don’t know what we’re doing.
And getting it wrong can kill people. We need all of science to save lives and shape the future. The next great discovery can come from even the most unlikely of places.
The engine driving this whole operation is the students. While undergraduates learn the basics, Master’s degree and PhD students do the heavy lifting in the labs. Most also have teaching assistantships. They aren’t just studying. They are professional researchers and Professors-in-training who routinely log over 60 hours a week running experiments, grading papers, and living well below the poverty line.
This happened to me. I made less as a grad student than my friends working at The Hard Rock in Orlando, and I was working on therapies in Alzheimer’s disease.
So in my final year of grad school, I worked 60 hours a week on my fMRI/PET clinical study in Alzheimer’s patients and 20 hours a week at Victoria’s Secret in the mall down the street. I needed cash to get started as a Postdoc in SoCal, so I pulled myself up from my bootstraps, made discoveries, and helped ladies buy the bra they needed to feel confident about their bodies.
Working extra jobs as a scientist is way more common than you might think.
Above the students in the academic hierarchy are the Postdocs and faculty members. Postdocs are doing science, mostly independently, but still under the supervision of a Principal Investigator. All while managing the grad and undergrad students’ trajectories so they can graduate. They may or may not also be Adjunct faculty, teaching undergraduate-level courses somewhere.
Oh yeah… also get grants. We’ll talk about grants later.
Most Principal Investigators are also Professors, but some have part-time administrative duties too. Professors do much more than teach; a Principal Investigator acts like the CEO of a small startup. They have to recruit and hire students, write detailed grant applications, and constantly publish research papers to keep their operation alive. My Postdoc Principal Investigator, Carl Cotman PhD, published more than 1,000 studies during his career in Alzheimer’s disease research.
All of this happens inside the research lab, a sacred space that feels like a mix between a high-tech facility and an artist’s studio. Every lab develops its own unique culture, ranging from completely silent and intense to loud and collaborative.
Shocker shocker. I always seem to make it loud and collaborative 🤣.
Keeping everything running in the background is the Administration. Campus leaders like Deans and Provosts handle the heavy red tape. They ensure the lights stay on, review projects to guarantee the research is ethical, and manage the massive streams of grant money flowing through the university.
State & Federal Government Science Are The Backbone of the American Economy
The federal government sector acts as a mission-driven giant in the scientific world.
If academia is an intricate studio of discovery, federal agencies like NASA, NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc., operate like a monumental Fortune 500 company. Their research is strictly mission-oriented. Meaning, they aren’t just trying to figure out how the world works. They have a specific, concrete job to get done, whether that is curing a disease or putting humans on Mars.
A lot of agency work is divided into intramural and extramural science. Intramural science happens when the government’s own scientists do research right inside federal laboratories. Extramural science happens when the government acts like a patron, funding research at various universities, colleges, and genius-level think tanks. Behind the scenes, the administration is made up of policy experts who decide which scientific problems are the nation’s biggest priorities and where that funding should actually go.
Down in the state sector, scientists act as local problem-solvers. This level of science is usually the most practical, even if it gets the least amount of attention. While federal agencies are busy looking at the stars, state scientific agencies are focused on the soil, the water, and local health.
State science relies heavily on public labs and academic partnerships to get things done.
Public labs focus on everyday safety, such as testing drinking water quality, tracking local disease outbreaks, or managing state forests. At the same time, state governments partner with local land-grant universities and colleges to solve immediate, regional problems. This sector operates at a much faster, more reactive pace than the federal government, focusing its energy on immediate public health, safety, regulations, and practical solutions.
And the states and federal government do make money from these investments. Even though the federal government doesn’t take a cut of the commercial profits, it still keeps a powerful foothold through a lifetime, backstage pass. Officially, this is a non-exclusive, non-transferable, paid-up license, which simply means the government can use the invention anywhere in the world for its own purposes, completely for free.
And trust me, it does. All the time. For free. Forever.
Down at the state level, things operate in a very similar way, but they are governed by state laws. Because public colleges and universities are state entities, the institution owns any discoveries made by Professors or staff using campus resources. Much like the feds, the states don’t get a direct cut of the cash when a product hits the market.
Instead, the state wins indirectly.
The financial payoff shows up as regional economic growth, new local jobs, corporate tax revenues from successful spin-off startups, and royalty money that gets funneled right back into the system to fund the next big breakthrough. This is why the federal and state governments are so essential in the engine driving discovery in America.
American Science Has Been The World’s Engine of Discovery Since The Founding Fathers
The American scientific ecosystem has roots that stretch back to the very founding of the nation.
In fact, science and innovation were baked directly into the United States Constitution in 1787, which explicitly gave Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts through patents. Federal funding for innovation didn’t start with massive agencies like NASA or the NIH; it began with practical, mission-driven needs like charting the nation’s geography, securing its borders, and protecting public health.
For example, President Thomas Jefferson secured a secret congressional appropriation of $2,500, a huge sum at the time, to fund his geographic and scientific mapping project. Shortly after, in 1807, Jefferson established the Survey of the Coast, which lives on today as NOAA, making it the first civilian scientific agency tasked with mapping the American coastline to secure maritime trade.
Long before the nation was officially formed, Benjamin Franklin served as the blueprint for American scientific diplomacy.
He used his international renown as a physicist, famous for his groundbreaking work on electricity, to secure crucial French support during the American Revolution. Later, as the first Postmaster General, he used a federal apparatus to map the Gulf Stream to speed up mail delivery across the Atlantic.
Then, in the early 19th century, individual states began funding state geological surveys. North Carolina in 1823, Massachusetts in 1830, and New York in 1836 were among the first to hire state scientists to systematically map out coal, iron, soil quality, and water systems. This marked the birth of state-funded public labs aimed entirely at practical, regional economic growth.
Unfortunately, for the first century of American history, science was treated as a hobby for wealthy elites rather than an academic discipline. That changed entirely during the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862.
The federal government gave blocks of public land to states, which the states then sold to fund the creation of new universities. For the first time, academic research was formally funded to solve real-world industry problems.
Born into slavery and emerging from the dark times of the Civil War, George Washington Carver became a world-renowned agricultural scientist and a prominent faculty member at the Tuskegee Institute. Tuskegee is a historically Black university that received land-grant funding under the second Morrill Act of 1890.
Carver’s academic research revolutionized Southern agriculture, inventing hundreds of uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans to heal soil depleted by cotton farming and to keep poor farmers from starving.
While these early examples laid the groundwork for the collaborative science network we see today, it didn’t fully solidify until World War II.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who directed the government’s wartime research and development, wrote a famous report for the President titled Science, The Endless Frontier. Bush argued that the government should permanently fund general academic research without actually taking over the institutions themselves. This single report led directly to the creation of NSF and established the exact modern pipeline of federal cash flowing into academic labs to fuel American innovation.
Some of our greatest discoveries have come from the pursuit of space travel and our fascination with the stars. Before computers were gadgets on our desks, “computer” was an actual job title for a person.
During the tense years of the space race, human computers were elite mathematicians who solved complex equations completely by hand. This vital but long-hidden chapter of American history began during the labor shortages of World War II, when the government’s aviation agency, the predecessor to NASA, started hiring women with math and physics degrees.
They were stationed at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, but because of Jim Crow laws, these brilliant minds were divided into two segregated rooms. White female mathematicians worked in the East Area, while incredibly talented African American women were placed in the West Area.
Despite facing harsh, everyday discrimination like separate bathrooms and dining halls, the West Area team quietly became some of the most influential minds behind early American spaceflight. Hundreds of women did this work, but three African American trailblazers directly changed the course of history.
Dorothy Vaughan became NASA’s first Black supervisor by teaching herself and her team how to code in FORTRAN when the first giant IBM computers arrived, saving their jobs and creating the agency’s very first digital programming unit.
Katherine Johnson was a math prodigy who calculated the flight paths for America’s first space missions. In fact, astronaut John Glenn trusted her math so much more than the new electronic IBMs that he refused to launch on his historic 1962 orbit until Katherine personally double-checked the machine’s numbers by hand.
We couldn’t have gotten to the Moon without being Human Verified.
Mary Jackson became NASA’s first Black female engineer after winning a legal battle to attend night classes at a segregated, all-white high school. She worked in several NASA divisions and authored 12 technical publications. She later dedicated her career to helping other women rise in science and math.
Without the precise calculations of these women, America likely would have lost the Cold War space race to the Soviet Union. They mapped out the launch windows and emergency routes that kept our astronauts alive, and as electronic machines took over, they transitioned into America’s first generation of software engineers. This ambitious effort to reach the stars, backed by federal funding, ultimately birthed modern computer engineering and satellites.
The history of American Science is storied and has been a driver of the US economy for its entire existence. Today, however, government scientific funding is in crisis. This is a tragedy because most people simply don’t understand how it works or how much it impacts our daily lives.
This editorial is aimed at changing that, but it begins right here with you. You are the one who makes the change.
Science is not a niche academic hobby; it is essential, practical, and a fundamental part of the American identity. Our scientific enterprise is the best in the world, and it has been ever since the Founding Fathers first envisioned a nation built on the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
Right. Grants. Let’s Talk About Grants.
Running a scientific lab is a lot like operating a small startup where the actual product is new knowledge. A lab’s survival relies entirely on a high-stakes cycle of pitching ideas to secure the next dollar just to keep the lights on. This survival is driven by a highly competitive grant system.
A lead scientist writes a hefty proposal explaining a major problem and offering a scientific solution, only to have that document face a brutal review process where rival researchers hunt for flaws. Because competition is so fierce, only about 5% to 7% of these proposals actually win funding.
Then the scientist’s university immediately takes 40% to 60% of that grant money off the top to cover its own building utilities and overhead, leaving the remainder to pay for actual lab equipment and staff salaries. To help new labs get off the ground before they can win these big grants, universities provide upfront startup packages that act exactly like venture capital.
Lasting about 3 to 5 years, this temporary seed money buys the initial equipment and hires the first round of staff. The clock is ticking from day one. A scientist is expected to use that time to gather enough raw data to win a permanent federal grant before the school’s cash dries up. If they need to pivot into a new, trendy research area later on, universities might hand out smaller internal booster grants.
Beyond government funding, modern labs also tap into private philanthropy for specific medical causes, or they sign contracts with private companies that fund targeted research in exchange for getting first dibs on the final results. When a major breakthrough finally happens, the university’s specialized legal office patents and licenses the discovery, ultimately splitting any future financial royalties between the inventor and the school.
Government labs operate under a completely different financial model. Unlike university researchers who must constantly beg for money, federal labs enjoy stable, multi-year funding tied directly to the national budget.
Instead of open-ended grants, they receive targeted mission funding to tackle specific national priorities like upgrading the power grid.
Remember, the government gets to use that technology for free whenever it wants, forever, anywhere in the world. This is mind-boggling because the government system churns out hundreds of technologies a year, and has for more than 100 years.
That’s a lot of free tech it gets to use, forever, in any way it wants.
Think of all the biotech, software, security, and communications technology that includes! We haven’t even talked about military scientific agencies, because that’s a whole other beast!
A Hypothetical Budget For A Federally Funded Lab At Any American College Or University
I’ve incepted, written, and carried out budgets using federally funded, state-funded, congressionally funded, and private association-supported research. In this section, I’ve put together a hypothetical budget for a federally funded project to give you an idea of where all that money goes. Then we’ll end by bringing it back to society’s ROI and the benefits to you in your daily life.
To give you a clear picture of how research is funded, let’s look at a modular budget. I’m going to use the NIH version, because my research is clinical research. This is the most common format for the NIH. Let’s imagine a scenario where they provided $250,000 per year, for 3 to 5 years, based on achieving benchmarks that are used for direct research costs that I’ll tell you about in a second.
If you were to crack open a lab’s spreadsheet for just a single year of a study, you would see exactly how that $250,000 vanishes into everyday expenses. Unsurprisingly, the biggest chunk of the money, about $150,000 to $165,000, goes toward personnel, because the most expensive and valuable resources in science are human brains and hands.
This is the Human Verified truth of science. No AI can replace the capacity for human discovery. It is what we have evolved to do.
The essential component of this project is the Principal Investigator I mentioned above. In this theoretical example, we’ll say that the person takes around $30,000 for their salary because they don’t usually pull their entire salary from a single grant.
Instead, they might charge about 20% to 30% of their total time to one specific project. Let’s assume it’s on the higher end of a well-established Investigator, like Carl Cotman PhD, and cap it at 20% for easy math.
They do this because the institution they work for expects them to have 3 to 4 projects going at one time. They also have to have 3 to 10 Postdocs to manage, 5 to 20 students to foster, and sometimes 10 to 20 hours of teaching to do. You see how it becomes a 60 to 80-hour work week, shaping minds and innovating the future? It’s not for the feeble.
Next is the full-time Postdoc making at $45,000 to $65,000, responsible for actually running the day-to-day experiments. Remember, there are salary caps. Federal grants are standardized, and they don’t come with health insurance. Only a couple of states provide supplementary access to health insurance. I made $45,000 in SoCal, which is half of what is considered the poverty line, and is lower than HUD very low income status.
Then you have a grad student working on their PhD degree, costing $45,000 to pay for their presence in the lab: the hidden costs of employment, like social security, and other contributions for the team. Grad students might get $15,000 to $25,000 in salary, depending on their scientific discipline. As a grad student, I got a small salary of $25,000, but no health insurance. A server at the Hard Rock, Orlando, makes 2 to 3x more than that, depending on tips.
The next $75,000 or so of the budget is swallowed up by operations, which cover the physical materials needed for the experiment. Using an example of a general neuroscience experiment in animals, reagents and chemical kits easily cost over $40,000.
Modern biology tools, like PCR kits used for DNA testing, are incredibly expensive, with a single tiny tube of specialized enzymes costing $500 or more. Standard lab supplies like pipette tips, plastic tubes, gloves, and glass beakers eat up another $15,000, as labs burn through thousands of these items every single month.
In fundamental animal research or cell cultures, another $15,000 goes toward daily fees for housing, food, and care for animals or specialized human cell lines. The remaining $5,000 is set aside for the hefty fees required to publish a paper in a top journal and covers the cost of sending a student to a conference to present their data.
Then the budget has the teeny tiny $10,000 or so allowance allocated for ridiculously expensive equipment maintenance. High-tech equipment like an advanced microscope or an ultra-cold freezer that chills down to minus 80 degrees requires strict annual service contracts to ensure they don’t break down.
This is crusty because this equipment is specialized, rare, and difficult to fix. Scientists treat their equipment like they’re their own children, doing everything possible to make sure they stay operational. Timing is crucial in science. Things have to be done at certain times for the experiment to go forward, and the tiniest hiccup in equipment function can make or break the results.
For Direct Costs: Of the $250,000, let’s say $165,000 goes towards 1 Principal Investigator, 1 Postdoc, and 2 grad students. Then we take another $75,000 for operations, and another teeny tiny $10,000 for equipment that we hope never breaks or needs upkeep.
High key, we burned through that $250K real quick.
Then there are the Indirect Costs, which make up the facilities’ administrative charges needed to keep the lights on. This is on top of the direct costs and is calculated at roughly 55%, amounting to $137,500 in this example. That puts the total cost of that one general neuroscience experiment at $387,500 per year for 3 to 5 years.
That’s not even for a study that includes human clinical trials. In Alzheimer’s disease, that would be the cost of studying one protein that might affect either tau or amyloid plaque formation, so we can add it to the literature of data explaining how the plaques and tangles develop. That is considered general “basic” NIH-funded science. Not what you thought basic science was, huh?
The ultimate reality check for us is that this budget leaves absolutely no margin for error.
If a critical piece of equipment suddenly breaks, like a $50,000 centrifuge, there is no emergency cushion built into the grant. The professor has to scrounge for that money elsewhere, which usually means choosing not to take on a grad student that year, or begging the department head for an emergency repair fund. Scientists work under these difficult conditions, donating much of their time to the cause, in a society that doesn’t understand what they do, so the government can use that intellectual property for free, forever, in any way it wants.
Let’s Finish Up By Talking About ROI & Benefits To The Community
Since the beginning, scientific funding has served as the primary engine driving the nation’s economic growth. What started as a scattered, disjointed effort before World War II eventually evolved into an interconnected behemoth that delivers a staggering ROI to the American taxpayer.
This financial payoff triggers a wave of secondary economic activity known as the research ripple effect. Because these dollars don’t just stay locked away in a lab, every single dollar invested in federal, non-defense research and development actually generates a long-term return of between 140% and 210%.
To put that into perspective, the NIH supported nearly 407,782 jobs and drove $94.58 billion in new economic activity across all 50 states in 2024.
In fact, since World War II, this government-funded research has been responsible for about one-fifth of all business-sector productivity growth across the country. It practically invented entirely new industries from scratch, securing America’s global leadership and unlocking trillions of dollars in modern market value.
Early financial backing from the Department of War and the NSF laid the groundwork for the internet, GPS, and the entire semiconductor industry. Without this early public risk-taking, the modern tech sector and Silicon Valley simply wouldn’t exist.
At the local level, the relationship between academic institutions and state governments creates highly successful innovation hubs, like Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Universities act as natural business incubators, where federal research dollars allow students and faculty to develop early prototypes that eventually spin off into independent companies.
This continuous cycle of sparking growth creates high-paying local jobs and expands the regional tax base. To keep this momentum going, state and local governments frequently step in with matching funds to build specialized research facilities, which naturally attract top-tier talent and private corporations to the region, further strengthening and diversifying the local economy.
Ultimately, perhaps the greatest economic benefit of this entire system is the creation of a highly skilled workforce, often referred to as human capital. Academic funding essentially trains the trainers by supporting the grad students and researchers who eventually leave the institution to work in the private sector.
The Human Verified reality is that these bright minds bring cutting-edge expertise directly to American companies, keeping them highly competitive against global rivals like China or India. By constantly discovering and innovating, this lifelong pipeline of federal, academic, and state funding effectively increases the true wealth, health, and security of every American citizen.
Thank You For Spending This Time With Me Today.
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Copyright 2026
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