February 17, 2026; New York, NY—American science is suffering a crisis of public trust. Long-standing doubts about the quality of the scientific literature, the COVID-19 debacle, and the overt politicization of climate “science” and transgender “affirming care” as a euphemism for child mutilation have all fed into the current crisis of confidence.
In a new report, Rescuing Science: Recovering Science as Civic Virtue, Dr. J Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs for the National Association of Scholars, argues that the crisis is rooted in the National Science Foundation's founding in 1950. That’s when the federal government imposed itself as the nation’s scientific gatekeeper.
Government funding of academic research was minuscule prior to World War II. Since 1950, federal expenditures for academic science have grown to roughly $100 billion annually. This spending was intended to promote scientific discovery, but instead, it taught scientists to conform to deep-state priorities. It fertilized the growth of a self-aggrandizing class of hangers-on and rent-seekers that constitute an effective Big Science Cartel.
“The growing power of the Big Science Cartel has transformed science,” says Turner. “Where pre-war science and scientific careers were shaped around an ethic of discovery, an ethic of production now prevails.” Turner argues that “intellectual autonomy, originality, and creativity have been replaced by a culture of conformity, crowd-following, and careers built on bogus metrics of success.”
According to Turner, rescuing science will require dismantling the network of perverse incentives that sustain the Big Science Cartel: close the National Science Foundation, and phase out the extramural research programs of more than a dozen federal agencies. In its place, we must restore the Small Science Ecosystem that prevailed prior to World War II, in which basic science was supported largely by philanthropy and university institutional funds. This was better suited to fostering the culture of scientific discovery.
In Rescuing Science, Turner lays out a 10–20-year glide path to restoring the academic sciences to an ethic of discovery. This will include immediate changes in the protocols for funding research grants, as well as longer-term reforms to restore decision-making power to scientists, and to changes in graduate education that will foster creativity and independence in future generations of scientists. The end goal will be to remove the government entirely from supporting academic science.
Rescuing Science: Recovering Science as Civic Virtue will be released to the public on February 17, 2026, at 6 pm ET, via live stream and in-person audiences. Register here.
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If you would like more information about this issue, please contact Chance Layton at layton@nas.org.
Photo by Beck & Stone
