Winning the Budget Fight and Losing the War

Deborah Stone opens her book Policy Paradox with a provocation: policymaking is not a technical problem waiting for a rational solution. It is a contest over values, conducted through the language of facts. Efficiency, waste, return on investment - these are not neutral descriptions. They are arguments. And right now, the American research enterprise is losing an argument it hasn't fully recognized it's in.

The evidence is hiding in plain sight. The most dramatic proposed cuts to federal science funding didn't survive Congress. NIH received a modest increase rather than the proposed 40% reduction. NSF took a small cut rather than the proposed 57% reduction. By the conventional measure of budget advocacy, the research community did its job. And yet agency capacity at NIH, NOAA, and NSF has been gutted. Awards have been administratively slow-walked. Merit review has been politicized. Compliance certifications tied to executive orders have been inserted into grant infrastructure that touches hundreds of thousands of federal award recipients. The appropriations held. The enterprise is still being dismantled.

Stone argues that efficiency is never a goal in itself. It is a means to an end, and the moment you start defining what "most," "least costly," or "waste" actually means, you are already in a values argument. She frames it around three questions that lurk beneath every efficiency debate: Who gets the benefits and who bears the burdens? How do we measure what something is worth? And what way of organizing human activity actually produces the best results?

These questions don't have technical answers. They have political ones. And that matters enormously for understanding what has happened to federal science funding over the past year and change.

When the administration characterized university indirect cost rates as wasteful, it was not making an accounting argument. It was making a claim about what research universities deserve; who should benefit from federal investment, and who should bear the cost of scientific infrastructure. But the argument landed, at least in part, because it found a willing audience. Faculty who have long questioned where indirect cost recovery actually goes, and the public who had no reason to think the answer was satisfying, were not obviously wrong to be skeptical. A 65% indirect cost rate does sound like a lot when you don't understand what costs it's intended to underwrite and how the rate is negotiated. Universities have rarely made a compelling public case for what indirect costs fund or why the rates are what they are. That silence created an opening, and the administration walked through it.

When merit review gets politicized, it is not an efficiency reform. It is a reassignment of the question "what research is worth doing" from scientists to political appointees. When agency capacity gets hollowed out, it is not streamlining. It is the deliberate degradation of the infrastructure through which science moves from idea to funded project. The language of efficiency provided cover. The underlying move was about legitimacy.

Slow-walked awards waste researcher time and institutional resources. Hollowed-out agency capacity, say with the Office of Inspector General, reduces the oversight that prevents actual fraud and abuse. Vague compliance certifications create conditions for selective enforcement. The policies and executive orders justified by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse are generating all three.

When research universities come under attack, they reach for data. Economic impact reports. Return on investment calculations. Job creation numbers. Patent filings. The implicit argument is: judge us by your metrics. It is both a reasonable instinct and a losing strategy.

The attack was never primarily about the data. The argument being made against higher education: that it is wasteful, ideologically captured, unaccountable to the public that funds it is fundamentally a values argument. A claim about legitimacy. About who deserves resources, and what obligations a democratic society has to institutions that have largely stopped explaining themselves in democratic terms.

Research universities have spent decades talking to each other and to federal agencies. They have become fluent in the language of grant mechanisms, indirect cost negotiations, and peer review standards. What many have lost, or perhaps never fully developed, is the capacity to make an impassioned, plain-language case for why any of it matters to someone who didn't go to graduate school. That divide is not just a communications problem. It is a vulnerability the current political environment has exposed and is actively exploiting.

Fighting a legitimacy argument requires something most research institutions are not structured to do. It requires taking a public position on what science is for, who it serves, and why a democratic society has a stake in protecting the conditions that make it possible. Not a position buried in a mission statement or an accreditation document. A position made plainly, repeatedly, and in language that doesn't require a graduate degree to understand.

Stone's three questions are worth sitting with here. Who gets the benefits of federally funded research? The honest answer is broad and demonstrable: patients, farmers, engineers, communities that depend on weather forecasting and disease surveillance and clean water. Who bears the burdens when the infrastructure erodes? Largely the same people, on a delay. And what way of organizing this work actually produces results? Peer review, investigator-led inquiry, and the kind of basic research that doesn't have an obvious commercial application but has historically produced the most transformative outcomes. These are not technical answers. They are values claims. And they are ones the research community has largely left unmade.

Stone's line that "paradoxes are nothing but trouble" captures something real about this moment. The research enterprise faces a genuine paradox: the stronger its technical case, the more it may be signaling that it doesn't understand what kind of fight it's in. There is no clean resolution to that. But there is a choice about whether to keep fighting on the wrong terrain or to start making the argument that actually needs to be made.

Further Reading

Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (4th ed., W.W. Norton). The foundational text behind the arguments in this post. Stone's analysis of how efficiency, equity, and security operate as contested values rather than neutral goals is essential reading for anyone trying to understand why policy fights so rarely resolve on the merits. 

Jay P. Greene and John Schoof, Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3681 (January 2022). The opposition's case, stated plainly. The argument that indirect cost rates subsidize ideological agendas rather than research infrastructure is worth understanding on its own terms, not because the methodology is airtight, but because it gave political actors a ready-made narrative that universities largely failed to counter. That failure is part of the story this post is telling.