“Silly” Science with Serious Consequences?

Have you heard the one about taxpayers funding a $3 million shrimp treadmill? It is a brain virus spreading through the MAGA world – to validate the utterly lawless vandalism of our government by Trump and his unconstitutionally appointed hit man Musk.

MAGA people apparently never heard of “Google,” which when prompted yields the real world facts of the Shrimp Treadmill. These shrimp earn millions of dollars a year for the fishermen who harvest them. The Shrimp Treadmill was a creative instrument to help understand their decline. The researcher spent $50 on it.

Republican Senator Proxmire infamously handed out “Golden Fleece” awards for such supposed government waste. Until he gave one to researcher Ronald Hutchinson, who fought back all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sided with Hutchinson that Proxmire could not hide behind immunity when he willfully maligned Hutchinson.

The scientific merit of research is not decided by disinformation on social media or by a senator who probably does not even know how a ballpoint pen works. There is a reason why Congress sets up agencies with professional expertise to decide actual merit.

One such agency is the General Accounting Office (GAO) –  an independent agency that tracks government spending and identifies possible spending mistakes or actual fraud. Every year they offer recommendations to Congress on how to fix these problems.

One problem is fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. Not by actual citizen patients, but by criminals who set up fake “medical offices” which are just postal boxes from which scammers send out fake bills to the government. Medicare is well aware of this practice. It can easily be controlled by hiring more agents to track down this fraud and arrest the criminals. Guess which party has repeatedly cut the number of agents?

Another massive loss of income to the government is from uncollected taxes. Guess which party has repeatedly cut the number of agents who find and collect this money? Yes, the party of Trump and Musk.

Civilized countries like France solve the health care fraud problem through socialized medicine. Health care workers are directly employed by the government. No billing, hence no place for fraud.

Back to the “silly” science issue. What would you make of a short research paper “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”? Would you give it a moment’s thought of being important? That was Einstein’s first paper on relativity theory. The theory that gave us nuclear power and weapons and eventually GPS.

Just as important, it gave us a radically new understanding of the very nature of the universe we live in. The idea of spacetime, the formation of matter and energy, the existence of black holes and our place in the universe. Could you have surmised all that from the title?

The most important science is pure science, not the tech that goes into making the newest iPhone. When COVID struck, most people were unaware of how a vaccine could come out in record time. It is because back in 2013 Obama began investing $150 million in mRNA research. If the current vandals were in charge, that obscure research would have been trashed. When COVID hit, the vaccine was already almost ready for creation and deployment.

Did Obama know anything about mRNA? Of course not. But he appointed the best people to his science panel and heeded their advice.

Subsidies let Bell Labs do pure research. They gave us the transistor. Sputnik was a wake-up call for the U.S. to invest in space research and science education; an investment that yielded modern communications, computer and artificial intelligence industries.

But without the Cold War push, the U.S. got lax. Republicans killed the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC).

Investing is about having a diverse portfolio. Not every research program leads to a practical return. But without investing in a wide range of research, failure is assured.

Trump wants to return to the 19^th century world of coal and conquest. We must move forward with visionary investment in research and the technology of the future: Sustainable transportation and energy. Quantum Computing. Fundamental physics and biology. And the Next Big Thing that no one yet has heard of.