Trump thinks too much is spent on research. He's wrong!

Ted Cruz’s October 2024 report on the National Science Foundation included a table that caught my eye. This table, recreated below, seemed to be intended to show that the US spends way more than we should on research and development (R&D). In fact, the report states “According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. government spends more than double on R&D than any other OECD country, and more than the next three OECD countries combined.”

I was teaching data visualization at the time so my students and I looked through the report. There are many ways in which the report is problematic (besides its political arguments!) but I asked them about this table in particular. They were quick to note that this is a meaningless presentation of the data since the countries included have very different populations. They suggested two alternative approaches: R&D allocation per capita, which accounts for variation in population size, and R&D allocation as a percentage of GPD. Accordingly, I’ve fixed the table based on my students suggestions.

Any way you look at it, the US is certainly not leading in R&D investment. And the Trump budget proposal would impose stiff cuts to what is currently being spent. Early figures are a 57% cut to the National Science foundation, a 24% cut to NASA, and a 39% cut to the National Institutes of Health. The national research output has been a pretty amazing return on investment considering how small the investment actually has been, but it’s ludicrous to think that we’ll see even half as much research output if the planned cuts are enacted and the war on scientific research continues.