A National Prefrontal Lobotomy: The Costs of Cutting the Social Sciences

Issue 158: The long-term impacts of funding cuts threaten "social science for a safer world"

Last Thursday, Jay was sitting in his office with a team of leading scholars frantically working on a research proposal to study the spread of extremism and misinformation around the world. How does extremist content go viral online? What factors cause this content to spill over into real-world violence and anti-democratic behavior? And can we create scalable interventions to target and prevent intergroup conflict before it grows out of control?

Jay’s project had already been selected by officials at the MINERVA Research Initiative at the United States Department of Defense for a full proposal that would potentially fund his lab—and three of his collaborators at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona— for the next five years. This funding competition, billed by the Pentagon as “Social science for a safer world,” was established in 2008, partially in response to lessons learned following the terror attacks on 9/11/2001 .

In the middle of the meeting, as his team was drawing their theoretical model on the whiteboard, Jay received an unexpected email from the U.S. Department of Defense noting that the landmark program was coming to a halt. There was no longer any grant competition. The last four months they had spent writing the grant had been completely wasted. Critical research questions would remain unanswered. Four labs would go without key funding, which included money for a new graduate student, postdoc, and three new Assistant Professors.

We were far from alone. As Science Magazine announced, the “Pentagon guts national security program that harnessed social science: Dozens of U.S. academics lose grants from Minerva program for studies related to terrorism, drug trafficking, and other threats”. The MINERVA initiative has helped to build up a generation of social science researchers engaged with national security, noted Jacob Shapiro, a political scientist at Princeton University. “It’s been a great program for building the cognitive and analytical foundations for making smart defense policy.” And now it was being shredded.

As President Donald Trump took the oath of office that began his second term in the Oval Office, you could almost, if you listened carefully, hear the revving of chainsaws. Through a series of executive orders, agency memos, and Dear Colleague Letters issued following his inauguration, the Trump administration has initiated a slew of funding freezes, grant terminations, and staff layoffs that have already dramatically altered the nation’s scientific ecosystem.

The Current State of Science Funding

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has all but been eliminated. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) stopped reimbursing research expenditures and announced a crippling 15% cap on indirect cost recovery (funding that supports the spaces, people, and infrastructure that allow research to happen in the first place). These decisions have temporarily been restrained by courts, but very few NIH study sections have been announced since January 20, which means that little-to-no new grants will be awarded any time soon. This has already “stalled about 16,000 grant applications vying for around $1.5 billion in NIH funding”, according to NPR. And apparently the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, wielders of those chainsaws) paid a visit to the National Science Foundation (NSF) late last week.

Figure from Nature.

The impacts of these Federal actions have been widely reported, with particular attention to how disruption to scientific funding will adversely affect biomedical research in the United States. Yet, while biomedical research has rightly garnered many of the headlines, these funding disruptions also threaten our ability to confront a broader set of urgent challenges. These are issues that resonate with Americans across the political spectrum and that demand robust scientific inquiry well beyond the biomedical realm, including the scientific issues that animate our research—and this newsletter.

Social Science: It’s Everywhere

We believe that there is a common set of problems that people across the political spectrum and around the world care about. Regardless of who they vote for, most people would like to see crime rates go down, learn about more effective ways of tackling the opioid crisis, maintain effective cybersecurity, design better solutions for rampant housing shortages, reduce rates of chronic diseases, and pray for more peace in the world.

Each of these problems is massively complex. If they weren’t, societies would have solved them by now. Tackling the opioid crisis, for example, has biological components (e.g., discovering new pharmacological treatments). It has geopolitical components (e.g., reducing the flow of drugs across borders). It has educational and economic components (e.g., changing patients’ understanding and doctors’ incentives when prescribing medications). And it has social and psychological components (e.g., addressing the needs and motives that contribute to substance abuse and finding effective messaging about solutions).

It’s not that these problems are complex simply because they involve multiple components. They are complex because many of their components directly involve human beings. Humans are what make things really tricky. No shade to the amazing advances we are living through in everything from gene-editing technology to artificial intelligence, but the really hard problems are still “people” problems.

The social sciences, at their core, grapple with questions of human motivation, social norms, cultural influences, institutional structures, and collective behavior. What we learn about these can help reduce crime by improving police-community relations or address the opioid crisis by understanding the social triggers that drive substance abuse. The same can be said of tackling chronic diseases, cybersecurity threats, or housing shortages—issues that hinge on understanding how people make decisions, how communities organize, and how social systems either support or undermine well-being.

Historically, the federal government in the United States has played an indispensable role in funding such research. Agencies like the NIH and NSF have not only supported medical advances but also backed projects investigating how to change health-related behaviors, how to optimize educational outcomes, and how to strengthen community resilience in the face of disasters. When these funding lines dry up or are lopped off in the name of efficiency, we risk losing essential knowledge that leads to better public policy and, by extension, better lives.

When critics dismiss the social sciences as “soft”, they overlook the fact that the “hard” problems ultimately hinge on human behavior.

We can invent astonishing tools—CRISPR to edit genes, AI to detect credit card fraud, vaccines to prevent disease, or advanced architecture to engineer safer buildings—but unless we understand how people adopt, regulate, or respond to these tools, progress stalls. Take cybersecurity: no quantum-proof encryption algorithm will succeed if individuals are continuously falling prey to social-engineering hacks. Take gene editing: what good is medical precision if public distrust or cultural taboos keep new treatments from being administered? And if no one will take vaccines, it hardly matters how effective they are! Effective solutions are two-sided—technical brilliance supported by social, ethical, and behavioral savvy.

Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw, a gift from Javier Milei, also pictured.

Indeed, we would say that far from creating efficiencies, taking a chainsaw to the social sciences will prove to be deeply inefficient. If the United States loses its capacity to study the human dimension, then the billions invested in biomedical research or high-tech weapons systems risk being wasted, because the solutions that do emerge will not align with real-world behavior or on-the-ground realities. Ultimately, investing in social science isn’t about sustaining academic disciplines; it’s about guarding against a future in which a lack of understanding leads to failed policies and wasted resources.

To solve people problems, we must protect social science research. In this time of shifting political priorities, we need advocates—in and out of government—who recognize the multi-layered nature of our national challenges. We need to insist that genuine problem-solving requires a broad portfolio of research support that spans biology, the physical sciences, engineering, and the social sciences, which help connect specialized breakthroughs to real human lives.

If the government wants to reform science funding, they should take a scalpel, not a chainsaw, to the problem. Doing it well requires the intelligence, skill, and nuance of a brain surgeon, rather than the mindless mayhem we are currently seeing. Defunding the world’s leading scientific community is akin to performing a prefrontal lobotomy on the nation—you are effectively severing the connections between the most innovative ideas and its citizens. Everyone deserves to benefit from science and society is stronger for it.

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Catch Up on the Last One

Last week we addressed research debunking the idea that their are necessarily special places—blue zones—that cause people to live longer, and highlighted a new article in Nature Medicine which found that social connections are a surprisingly powerful predictor of longevity.