I don’t dismiss the premise of the article and I think it is a shame how these organizations are being impacted, but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch.
They fund a lot of the foundational work that doesn't get a lot of resources from the private sector. 99% of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 relied on NIH funding.
Then you simply aren't familiar with their work. These (plus NIH, DOE, DOD etc.) are the engines of a large portion of the world's science.
The engine is starved and it is going to destroy American industry.
The problem is that not all cutting edge science is "sexy". NOAA and NASA are doing some _really_ cool stuff with weather monitoring / climate predicting. Sexy? Arguably no. Unless the weather app on your phone is sexy.
Important? I'd argue that it's critical that we keep getting better at it.
The world of privately funded research organizations like Bell Labs is long gone, with companies being barely able to look past the next quarter never mind being willing to invest in long term research that may not pay off for a few decades, if it pays off at all. And by definition most cutting edge science has that kind of financial time horizon. If there was an obvious, short term path to directly benefiting those conducting it, it's probably not very cutting edge at all and closer to engineering than actual scientific research. Not that there is anything wrong with that, we need engineering investment too. But it's not a replacement for science research.
I think a lot of people who scoff at the idea of government being on the cutting edge of science research don't understand how that research is being conducted. Sure, some of it is done by actual government employees, but especially for organizations like the NSF, the bulk of the research is being done by organizations and individuals outside of government who are simply given a check to look into things that might not immediately pay off or which have major societal benefit but no real path to commercial payoff.
Most of these agencies do some foundational science but maybe more importantly they collect lots of boring data. Boring data they give out to researchers for free. They also hand out grants which might not be lottery tickets but they pay for boring stuff.
The current administration believes that if you stop measuring any problem it ceases to be a problem. No one can push back on their flood of bullshit about everything if there's no data to point to. Authoritarians despise objective reality and empirical measurement and will always strive to make it easier to push their bullshit narratives.
E.g. designing scientific instruments. The fundamental physics and chemistry can be well understood, and yet you need a strong overlap of scientists and engineers to produce and run something that actually collects useful data, especially at the cutting edge, where new things actively need to be discovered and built to achieve the desired capability. Another growing one is using AI to drive scientific discovery (e.g. sifting through the terabytes of data being generated everyday and identifying things of potential interest), it isn't strictly an engineering problem, as the entire point is that you don't fully know what you are/are not looking for.
There's a reason most of the things I mentioned also hire plenty of physicists.
They are, but the article asserts, without evidence, that the US, like Nazi Germany, has passed a threshold where it is going to lose its preeminence in scientific research.
the article is meant to educate and inform, so inform the reader, who might know that fact, of it and some evidence to characterize the dynamic.
when you preach to the choir, you miss a chance to widen the circle of empathy.
True, most are just bloated bureaucracies serving their own self interests
If a team of engineers find a cool new algorithm to make computer vision easier, we learnt something new about the world in the process. On the flip-side, you actually have plenty of research in fields you would consider science, eg. physics, that do not use the scientific method at all, but instead deduce possibilities based on mathematical modelling.