American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

Why do you believe those aren't good examples of cutting edge science funding? I get the stereotype that government organizations of all types are just stodgy bureaucrats stuck a few decades in the past, but the reality at least in the US in the year 2025 is that truly cutting edge science is not obviously being funded at any significant scale anywhere but government.

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.

To be fair, there are still many well funded private research labs, they just focus on "sexy" easy-to-market science like quantum computing, photonics, deep learning, robotics etc.

That's engineering. Science involves laws and facts about the natural world that are not yet known.

There's a lot of overlap between science and engineering, a lot of the things being affected by the cuts would be engineering by your definition.

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.

> Why do you believe those aren't good examples of cutting edge science funding?

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.

Scientific research groups hire engineers to engineer, and industry teams hire scientists to serve as specialized engineers, but there is next to no scientific research in the industrial sector.

That is so narrow a definition of scientific research it excludes many major contributions to our base of knowledge. The primary difference between engineering and science is the intention - Scientists want to understand how things work by using the scientific method, engineers want to make stuff that works, but this still often includes iterating over designs by using empirical data.

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.