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Science continues to suffer under the Trump administration. NPR's Katia Riddle brings us this story about the potential long-term consequences of cutting a field of research on how humans behave.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: It's called the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences or SBE. It's a little corner of the National Science Foundation that makes up a tiny fraction of the federal budget, but researchers say it has yielded big returns.
LORI PEEK: So I'm going to actually give you an example from earthquake early warning.
RIDDLE: Lori Peek studies sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works on disaster mitigation. Her field has benefited from SBE funding. In 2019, she worked on establishing an early warning system for earthquakes in the U.S. The science around predicting the earthquakes, she says, is the easy part. It's getting these predictions to people in a meaningful way that's harder.
PEEK: We need people to sign up for the alerts. We need people to receive the alerts. We need the alerts to say the right thing so people know what to do when they receive the alert.
RIDDLE: This is what SBE does - behavioral science, predicting how people act and think, what motivates them. The money for this kind of research has not technically been rescinded by the federal government, but according to the science advocacy group Grant Witness, only seven SBE grants have been awarded as of May 28. The federal government typically makes hundreds of such awards per year.
JON FREEMAN: There's perhaps a fairly calculated attack.
RIDDLE: Jon Freeman is a psychologist at Columbia University. Much of his work has been made possible by SBE research. He says this field has been singled out as a target by the administration.
FREEMAN: Because the behavioral and social sciences are seen as leftist institutions.
RIDDLE: Last year, Republican Senator Ted Cruz wrote a report that specifically called out many SBE-funded programs as, quote, "neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda." In his 2027 budget, President Trump is also proposing eliminating the directorate and zeroing out funding for this kind of research. Freeman says he's got a guess about why SBE has drawn so much fire.
FREEMAN: There may be something deemed as sort of an enemy or something that is DEI.
RIDDLE: In response to a request for comment, White House spokesman Kush Desai sent an email statement. It read, quote, "The Trump administration is committed to cementing America's dominance in cutting-edge technologies of the future, not in ideologically driven social sciences," unquote. But advocates for this research argue it has a meaningful reach that extends far beyond ideology. For example, artificial intelligence. Aron Culotta is a computer scientist at Tulane University.
ARON CULOTTA: If we think about the failure modes of AI and kind of what can go wrong, they're almost all at that human-AI intersection point.
RIDDLE: Culotta says the technology behind systems like ChatGPT comes from computer science, but making those systems safe depends heavily on psychology and social science research.
CULOTTA: Things around, like, mental health, the way people are kind of growing attached to these systems. You know, deepfakes and can we trust kind of the output of these systems?
RIDDLE: Artificial intelligence is built partly on federally funded behavioral research that took place long before AI was in the zeitgeist. Tom Griffiths studies cognition and artificial intelligence at Princeton and has worked on AI systems.
TOM GRIFFITHS: Our job as cognitive scientists, rather than, say, people who are working in a AI company right now, is thinking about what are the technologies that are going to matter, not right now, but maybe a few decades in the future.
RIDDLE: In the 1950s, researchers began developing something called artificial neural networks - computer systems loosely inspired by the human brain that now power many AI tools. That's the advantage, he says, of the government investing in science. It doesn't have to pay off for decades.
GRIFFITHS: We take our foot off the accelerator now, it might not be something that we notice for a few years, but there's going to be a point in the future where suddenly there's going to be a gap with what's going on in other countries, and we say, what happened?
RIDDLE: The answer, he says, may be something we trace back to this moment when the government stopped investing in behavioral science. Katia Riddle, NPR News.
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