Last year, the Trump administration paused or canceled 7,840 research grants, the journal Nature found — and those were just the scientists funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Each week seems to bring a new proposed cut to the Forest Service or to NASA. These cuts betray not just America’s future but its past — because big public investments have strengthened our nation from the start. Consider the men who received what was arguably the first major federal research grant: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
In 1804, the men set out to find a trade route up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific Ocean. But the president, Thomas Jefferson, had to convince Congress to fund the expedition first. America’s politicians, it turns out, have been arguing about research funding from the start. It took a few tricks for Jefferson to secure the funding. He asked for $2,500, but he knew the expedition would cost more. When Lewis and Clark returned in 1806, the War Department calculated their cost at $38,722.25. If you include all of the documented expenses, including the Native diplomats Lewis and Clark sent to Washington on the government’s dime, the total rises to $100,000 or more. During this period, the federal budget ran to about $10 million per year. That means the expedition consumed the same percentage of annual federal spending that all of NASA does today.
Much of that money went to science. Jefferson directed Lewis to gather a staggering quantity of data while he searched for that trade route. The president wanted specimens and written descriptions that would occupy a whole campus’s worth of modern specialties: botany, zoology, geology, climatology, anthropology, economics and linguistics, among others. Before he left, Lewis met with America’s leading scientific minds, in part because Jefferson didn’t think those minds could handle a punishing expedition. (Scientists, Jefferson wrote, were “used to the temperature and inactivity of their closet.”) It was easier to make a soldier a scientist than the other way around.
Once the expedition began, all of its members pitched in on the research. Clark drew maps and helped record measurements for calculating latitude and longitude. (The expedition’s 278 astronomical observations remain remarkably accurate.) Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman, gathered botanical specimens. York, a Black man enslaved by Clark who was known by a mononym, collected invertebrate specimens. But most of the work came from Lewis, whose temperament — intense, precise, self-aware — made him a formidable observer. He noticed when pregnant antelope began to show. He described a squirrel’s fur as “the color of tanner’s ooze.” He collected mineral samples, including one Clark guessed was cobalt or arsenic. Lewis needed to know for sure. He pounded it into powder and examined it until the toxic fumes made him sick.
