The United States of America, in its infinite, bovine generosity, has spent the better part of a century functioning as the world’s unpaid intern for the hard sciences. According to recent reports that should surprise no one with a functioning frontal lobe, America’s scientific prowess is essentially a massive global subsidy. We foot the bill, we do the grueling, unglamorous basic research, and the rest of the planet—from the opportunistic sharks in Beijing to the regulatory vampires in Brussels—simply waits by the fax machine to reap the rewards. It is a system of profound, systemic stupidity that is finally, mercifully, beginning to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

For decades, the American taxpayer has been the collective sugar daddy for every breakthrough from the internet to mRNA vaccines. We pour billions into the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, institutions that are currently little more than high-end daycare centers for people who are too socially maladapted for Wall Street but too high-functioning for the Department of Motor Vehicles. This 'subsidy' is the engine of modern civilization, and the American public gets nothing for it except a front-row seat to their own obsolescence and a healthcare bill that would make a medieval king weep. We invent the technology, and then we pay three times the global average to use it, assuming we aren't busy arguing that the technology itself is a plot by the lizard people to turn the frogs gay.

The 'threat' to this prowess, as the pearl-clutching class calls it, comes from both sides of the aisle, each vying to see who can lobotomize the nation faster. On the Right, we have the anti-intellectual vanguard, a group of people who view 'science' as a four-letter word and would prefer to replace every laboratory with a fracking well or a sanctuary for the preservation of 1950s gender roles. To them, funding basic research is a waste of money that could be better spent on more missiles or tax breaks for billionaires who are already building rocket ships to escape the very planet they are currently strip-mining. They see the 'global subsidy' and their instinct isn't to make it more efficient; it's to burn the building down because they don't like the color of the curtains.

On the Left, the situation is equally pathetic. The performative progressives have turned the scientific establishment into a theater of the absurd, where the 'impact' of a study is measured not by its replicability or its utility, but by how well it adheres to the ever-shifting linguistic demands of the terminally online. They are more concerned with the diversity of the petri dish than the results of the experiment. We have replaced the pursuit of objective truth with the pursuit of institutional approval, creating a bureaucratic quagmire where a breakthrough takes twenty years of paperwork and three dozen sensitivity trainings to see the light of day. They aren't worried about losing the scientific edge; they’re worried about who gets to hold the handle of the knife.

Meanwhile, the private sector—the supposed bastion of innovation—is nothing more than a parasite. Silicon Valley doesn't innovate; it harvests. Every 'disruptive' startup is just a thin layer of marketing wrapped around fifty years of government-funded research. They wait for the taxpayer to take the catastrophic risks of basic physics and biology, then they swoop in, slap a subscription model on it, and call themselves geniuses. It’s a 'subsidy' for the world’s least charismatic sociopaths, who then use that wealth to lobby the government to stop funding the very research that made them rich in the first place.

The geopolitical reality is even more hilarious. We produce the knowledge, publish it in 'open access' journals because our academic system values vanity metrics over national interest, and then act shocked when China builds a better version of the technology in half the time. It’s not espionage; it’s a public service. We are effectively the world's R&D department, and we’re working for exposure while the rest of the world collects the dividends. The 'threat' isn't that we will stop being smart; it's that we have finally run out of the money and the collective will to keep being the world's most useful idiot.

As this 'scientific prowess' fades, the usual suspects are mourning the loss of American leadership. But what leadership are we talking about? The leadership that resulted in a crumbling infrastructure, a declining life expectancy, and a population that can’t find their own country on a map? If this is the fruit of our scientific labor, then the subsidy was a failure long ago. Let the prowess die. Let the funding dry up. If the world wants progress, let them pay for it themselves. We’ll be here, comfortably retreating into a new dark age, lit only by the glow of the smartphones we invented but can no longer afford to repair.