Let’s say you’re a Middle East expert on the Trump White House national security team, or maybe you’re what they call a “planner” in “Muscles” Hegseth’s Pentagon. It’s sometime in 2025. Israel’s so-called 12 Day War, and the U.S. “Operation Midnight Hammer” strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been over for several months.

Holes have been found in Trump’s claims that the attack had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the effectiveness of the strikes was leaked. The DIA concluded that while entrances to Iran’s underground bunkers were destroyed, it was unlikely that Iran’s enriched uranium and the centrifuges necessary to enrich it were destroyed. In an interview, Vice President Vance admitted that the administration didn’t know where Iran’s enriched uranium was kept. The DIA estimated that all those bombs and bunker busters dropped by B-52’s and B-2 bombers had put Iran’s nuclear program back by “a few months,” not the total destruction claimed by Trump and Hegseth.

Trump got mad. He ordered an investigation into who leaked the DIA report. In August, Hegseth fired the DIA Director, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse.

The upshot was that Iran still had a nuclear program. Trump began raising the alarm again: Iran could have a nuke in a matter of months, not years.

The word went out from the Oval Office or the 12^th hole at Trump’s Doral golf resort, or wherever it is that Trump makes his Big Decisions. It’s time for a war on Iran.

In years past, even during such bumbling administrations as that of George W. Bush, who started a war with Iraq without planning what he would do after he took over the country, the least that the Pentagons of the past would do is have a look at the history of past conflicts involving the target country. Well, in the case of Iraq, the First Gulf War pretty much decimated Saddam’s army in just a few days, which led to the decision by Vice President Cheney and his pet Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that the U.S. did not need to field the gigantic army that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell had contended was necessary for victory. So, Rumsfeld famously, or infamously, went with “the army you have rather than the army you want,” and they sent about 140,000 troops into battle and fired Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who had disagreed at a congressional hearing about the number of troops necessary to attack Iraq, saying, correctly as it turned out, that “several hundred thousand troops” would be necessary.

I’m bringing up all this now-ancient history to make the point that exactly none of this sort of planning happened at the Pentagon or anywhere else before Trump decided to attack Iran on February 28. If they had taken a look at the history of Iran’s military and its political leadership since the revolution of 1979, they would have discovered that Iran was attacked by another country, Iraq, in 1980, and fought a war for eight long years to defend itself.

Casualty figures for that war are disputed, but most historians agree that a total of 500,000 soldiers from both sides lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq’s official tally is about 250,000 “martyrs.” Iran’s “Foundation of Martyrs” admits to having lost 155,000 to 172,000 soldiers. Other estimates are much, much higher, with at least one study holding that Iran lost between 500,000 and 750,000 soldiers in the war. Figures for the wounded are also in dispute, but there appears to be some agreement that 400,000 to 600,000 Iranian soldiers were wounded severely enough to require hospitalization.

Whatever the true figures, the Iran-Iraq war was terrible. Both countries had modern air forces with jet fighters and fighter-bombers. Both had huge armored forces. Both were able to conscript hundreds of thousands, even as many as a million, young men to fight in their armies. Both had massive stockpiles of munitions. Both had economies that used oil money to keep going. Iran was backed by a coalition of countries including North Korea, Libya and China. Iraq received military aid from Russia and targeting information from the U.S., as well as loans from Saudi Arabia and other gulf nations opposed to Iran.

The war itself resembles the war between Ukraine and Russia. Iraq was the aggressor, invading Iran in September of 1980. Iraq was able to seize some Iranian territory. Both countries tried unsuccessfully to destroy each other’s air forces. The war quickly settled into trench warfare, with Iran gradually taking back territory it had lost with forays through the front lines to encircle Iraq’s forces. Both sides, but primarily Iran, used variations of “human wave” attacks against the other, causing huge casualties and loss of life. Two days into the war, there was a battle for the Iranian city of Khorramshahr that lasted over a month and cost each side about 7,000 deaths and an unknown number of wounded. The city was occupied by Iraq for two years, and then a second battle returned it to Iranian control, again at great loss of life.

The war ground on. A ceasefire was proposed in 1982, but rejected by Iran, which went on the offensive, attacking Iraq again and again. Iraq was largely on the defensive after 1982, but Iran suffered huge losses in its offensive against Iraq. From 1983 to 1984, the war was stalemated, with neither side gaining advantage. Both countries spent great percentages of their gross domestic product on their militaries.

Iraq attacked Iran’s Kharg Island in 1984 and bombed Iranian tankers, trying to goad the West into entering the war on Iraq’s side to return oil shipping back to normal. Lloyd’s of London estimated that during the war, about 550 commercial vessels were attacked and more than 400 civilian sailors were killed.

In 1985, Iraq went on the offensive, launching air attacks on Iran’s cities. Iran launched a counteroffensive, crossing the Tigris River and taking a section of the Baghdad-Basra highway. Iraq counterattacked using chemical weapons and flooding Iranian trenches with river water from the Tigris.

In 1986, Iran attacked northern and central Iraq, its forces getting as close as 70 miles from Baghdad. Saddam started conscripting large numbers of Shiites into its army and throwing them wholesale into the battles with Iran. Later, after the U.S. took control of Iraq, Saddam would be accused by the Shiite majority that ended up in control of the country of using the Iran-Iraq war to control the Shiite majority simply by having so many young Shiite men killed in the war.

The war went back and forth for the next two years, with Iran launching human-wave attacks trying to take Basra, and Iraq hitting Iranian oil refineries and firing large numbers of its Scud missiles at Iranian forces. Iran used drones armed with warheads from RPG-7 rockets for the first time during the war.

By 1986 and 1987, Iran had developed its own defense industries, producing its own ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, tactical missiles, artillery pieces and ammunition. All of this is still true of Iran…and more…and it started during the Iran-Iraq war.

Both countries were weary of the war and looking for a way out. Saddam threatened Iran with massive attacks using “weapons of mass destruction,” which meant chemical weapons. Iraq had bombed Iranian Kurdish villages with chemical weapons repeatedly, so it wasn’t an idle threat.

Finally in July of 1988, Iraq bombed more Kurdish villages with poison gas. Iran’s political leadership told its religious leaders that the war might last until 1993, and the continuation of the war would bankrupt the country. Iran accepted a U.N. ceasefire resolution on the 20^th of July, 1988. There were sporadic attacks back and forth on each other’s shipping and more chemical attacks by Iraq on Kurdish villages controlled by Iran, but finally by early September, the anti-Kurdish attacks ended and many Kurds that had been in northern Iraq fled into Iran. As many as 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds had been killed by Iraq.

Prisoner exchanges went on for years. Iran continued a naval blockade of Iraq’s oil port, but Iraq used Kuwait and other Gulf nations and Turkey to ship its oil. The negative economic effects on both countries went on for years.

What lesson should have been learned by Pentagon planners before they shot a single missile or dropped even one bomb on Iran? The punishment Iran was willing to take to defend its land, its people, and its oil business was enormous. Eight years and more than a million total casualties. It is unthinkable, really.

Trump is in the sixth month of his war with Iran. Despite the noises he’s made about ceasefires and Iran wanting to “make a deal,” there is no ceasefire, and there is no deal, and there are no negotiations. Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, having learned from Donald Trump himself that their power as a country is larger than the size of its population, the strength of its military, or even the possibility it may one day have a nuclear weapon.

Iran has been ejecting invaders for four thousand years. Iraq was just the latest invader, before Trump and Hegseth decided that the way to defeat the Islamic Republic of Iran was to blow through practically every missile we have with no backup plan and no ability to restock our supplies of offensive and defensive missiles.

Trump famously doesn’t read. All Hegseth apparently reads are his tattoos and the labels on whatever he’s hiding in his desk these days.

Iranian leaders know their own history by heart. They laughed at Trump’s Fourth of July fisticuffs on the White House lawn and his pathetic “fair” on the National Mall. All his flyovers of U.S. jets did was waste fuel, the price of which has continued to rise as Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz goes into its sixth month, with no end in sight.

One of the things Iran has learned since its revolution is the power of what they did to Jimmy Carter in 1980 by keeping the hostages locked up until he lost his election. Do you think that Iran’s leaders might have the same sort of plan for Donald Trump as the date of the mid-term elections approaches? All they have to do is sit back and say that the Strait is closed until they say it’s open. That’s it. Words alone will do it, and there aren’t enough missiles or bombs in the U.S. arsenal to change that.

This is what Trump’s insane ambition and his refusal to study history does. It costs blood and treasure. Our blood. Our treasure.

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IUX, the institutional-grade trading platform serving over 1M+ active accounts across global markets, has made its pricing data fully visible for side-by-side broker comparison—inviting traders to stack its conditions against competitors without reservation.

In a market where cost claims are common and verification is rare, IUX has taken a different position. The firm’s website presents its core trading metrics—raw spreads starting from 0.0 pips, execution speeds averaging under 30 milliseconds, and zero hidden fees—laid out transparently for anyone evaluating where to place their next trade.

For active traders searching for a low cost CFD trading broker , this level of openness is notable. Most brokers advertise competitive pricing in general terms. IUX publishes the numbers and invites the comparison directly.

What the Comparison Actually Shows

IUX positions itself on three pillars when measured against industry alternatives: spread tightness, execution speed, and pricing transparency.

On spreads, IUX reports an average of 0.11 pips across its raw account offering—a figure derived from interbank-sourced pricing with no markup embedded in the quote. The broker’s revenue structure relies on a fixed, disclosed commission per lot rather than widening the spread itself, which means traders see the actual cost of each position before entering it.

Execution infrastructure is the second differentiator. IUX records average order execution at under 30 milliseconds, supported by direct cross-connectivity through low-latency fiber-optic links to major liquidity providers. The system is built on conflict-free STP execution, routing orders directly to the market without a dealing desk intervening between the trader and the fill.

The point about there being no hidden fees is more difficult to measure, but it is probably the most important one for traders who have narrow margins. By completely separating the spread from the commission, IUX’s pricing model ensures that the total cost of a trade can be calculated before the order is given.

Recognition That Supports the Claim

IUX’s comparison page doesn’t rely solely on self-reported metrics. The broker has collected a series of industry awards that independently validate the pricing position it’s asking traders to evaluate.

In 2025, IUX was awarded ‘Lowest Trading Costs Broker in Asia’ and ‘Fastest Trade Execution in Asia’ by the Global Business Review Magazine Awards. For 2025, the Global Brands Magazine Awards awarded IUX the title of ‘Best Forex Broker for Low Spreads in Asia’. Further recognition from Money Expo Mexico, TrustFinance, and Broker View confirms a record that is based on evaluations from a number of different review organisations rather than just one.

In this situation, these recognitions are significant since they deal with the same claims that IUX makes on its comparison page—namely, cost and speed.

The Infrastructure Behind the Numbers

Tight spreads and fast execution don’t hold up without infrastructure capable of sustaining them under pressure. IUX addresses this through several layers of operational architecture.

The liquidity network used by the broker is supplied by a large number of institutional providers, the purpose of this being to minimise slippage risk when the markets are volatile. During periods of high volume, the platform remains running thanks to DDoS protection  and the use of enterprise-grade traffic filtering, and the level of platform uptime is such that executions can be carried out consistently regardless of the market conditions.

Funds are held in segregated accounts, separated from company operating capital and secured under advanced financial standards. For traders who prioritize both cost and security, this structure addresses both requirements without compromise.

What Traders Can Access

IUX offers access to more than 165 CFD instruments across currencies, commodities, indices, stocks, crypto, and thematic index products. Traders can execute across these markets through three platform options: the proprietary IUX Trade App, the IUX WebTerminal, and MetaTrader 5 — all carrying the same underlying pricing and execution infrastructure.

The broker is active in multiple regions, with 24/7 multilingual support available for account and trade-related inquiries. Deposits process instantly for supported payment methods, and the broker’s withdrawal track record is reflected in consistent user reviews across the App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot, and Investing.com.

The Comparison Matters Now Than Ever

The CFD brokerage space has grown significantly more competitive in recent years, and traders have more access to pricing data than at any previous point. That shift has made the gap between advertised and actual trading costs more visible and more consequential for anyone executing at volume.

IUX’s decision to publish its conditions openly and frame them as a direct competitive comparison reflects strong confidence in what the metrics show. Raw spreads from 0.0 pips, sub-30ms execution, STP order routing, and a fully transparent commission structure form a package that IUX believes holds up under direct scrutiny.

For traders ready to run that comparison themselves, the full pricing breakdown and feature details are available at IUX’s broker comparison page.

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The post IUX Opens Its Pricing to a Direct Low-Cost Broker Comparison appeared first on DCReport.org.

This is a photo of Donald Trump playing golf at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey on Sunday, defended by an Army Avenger anti-missile system in case of an attack by an Iranian drone or missile. Who knows what the barbed wire is supposed to defend against. Zeroed-in Iranian attack rabbits? Remotely commanded assault squirrels?

There were no Avenger anti-missile systems present in Kuwait on the second day of Donald Trump’s war of choice on Iran. Six Army soldiers were killed and 20 more were seriously wounded when an Iranian drone struck a logistics headquarters on an army base in Kuwait. Two days later, on March 3, 29 more soldiers were wounded in what the Pentagon has termed an “enemy attack.” On March 18, 70 more U.S. casualties were recorded in Pentagon records. Two dozen of these were reported as due to an “enemy attack,” but there is no record of how the other soldiers were injured, nor are the locations of where the injuries took place in Pentagon records.

The army’s Central Command, which is in charge of the war, reported in following days that the missile capability of Iran had been “decimated.”

In the weeks that followed, 130 more casualties were recorded by the Pentagon. Records of the injuries to these soldiers and where they occurred are not supplied.

In all, since Trump’s war began, 642 soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines have been seriously wounded, and eighteen have been killed. These figures have had to be dragged out of the Pentagon by a Freedom of Information request filed by The Warhorse, a non-profit news organization dedicated to covering the service of military members and other defense issues. The Pentagon has fiddled the numbers multiple times since February. As the casualty numbers now stand, there were 14 deaths and 417 soldiers wounded during what the Pentagon has called “Operation Epic Fury,” and four deaths and 207 wounded since July 7 when Trump’s phony “ceasefire” with Iran broke down.

Here is something the Pentagon does not supply with its casualty figures. None of the soldiers were killed or wounded in what we think of as combat operations in the forward area of a war. All the casualties occurred in places that in previous wars would have been referred to as rear areas, behind the front lines of a war. In Trump’s war, there are no front lines, because he chose from the beginning to fight Iran exclusively from the air with missiles and bombs.

For years, the U.S. has had thousands of soldiers and sailors and members of the Air Force and Marines in the Middle East. They are stationed on U.S. military bases. Those military bases have now been emptied of members of the U.S. military because of the casualties and deaths that soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines have suffered. The bases are empty, with military members relocated into civilian facilities such as hotels in the area, or they have been removed from the Middle East altogether to Europe and the United States.

This is why: The U.S. bases in the Middle East were essentially undefended from attacks by Iran using missiles and drones, which is the way Iran is fighting the war that Trump has been waging. There were no drone defenses on March 1 at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait. An Iranian drone flew across the Persian Gulf and aimed itself at the roof of the army’s logistics command center and penetrated the roof and exploded. The command center’s roof was not reinforced concrete designed to defend against drones and missiles. It was just an ordinary roof on an ordinary building.

Previously, I have published photos of the damage done by Iranian missile and drone strikes at the U.S. naval base in Bahrain. That base has now been emptied, with sailors reassigned out of the region.

The Pentagon had to move all U.S. troops out of the Middle East because there were no missile and drone defenses in the region, or if such defenses existed, they were inadequate. This is unprecedented in U.S. history. Our country went to war without preparing to defend the troops who were assigned to the region to assist in its fighting with logistical, intelligence, and other support. Trump’s Pentagon just left them out there with no defenses. That is why they had to be relocated to places beyond the reach of Iranian missiles and drones. Because there was no provision for U.S. defense against Iran’s weapons.

I’ll just bet you can’t guess where there are plenty of anti-missile and anti-drone defenses. Anywhere Donald Trump is. There are defenses for the White House, for Camp David, and now we have learned, there are Avenger Army anti-missile systems stationed at Trump’s Bedminster golf course. The Avenger is one of our older anti-missile defense systems, firing Stinger missiles from a mobile platform with a separate radar system that picks up incoming missiles or drones and commands the Stingers to fire. The Avenger system costs about $5 million each, with the Stingers themselves costing about $500,000 per missile.

So, the Trump administration didn’t think it was worth it to spend a few million dollars to defend our troops in Kuwait and Jordan and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where 18 have been killed and hundreds have been wounded, many suffering debilitating head injuries that occurred in blasts from exploding drones and missiles.

Our soldiers and sailors and airmen and women and Marines in the Middle East – those who are still in the region anyway – still aren’t defended against Iranian drones and missiles.

But Donald Trump is safe and secure at Bedminster. That fact is a good part of the reason that Iran is winning the war Trump started. They take war seriously, while Donald Trump goes golfing.

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My tradition on this blog is to take a break (mostly!) from current events sometime in mid- August. Instead, I pre-schedule daily posts based on things I read during the previous year about three of my preoccupations: economics, editing/writing, and academia. With the posts pre-scheduled, I can then relax more deeply when floating on my back in a Minnesota lake, staring up at the sky.

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Economists often use the term “happiness” synonymously with the term “utility,” which in turn is the basis for a basic economic model that people seek as best they can (given the cognitive constraints they face) to maximize their own utility. The connection goes back to the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who in one of the less-famous works of 1776 (overshadowed by the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), described the foundations of this theory of utilitarianism in “A Fragment on Government.” (Those of you who have read Bentham will be unsurprised that his “fragment” runs for several dozen pages.) Bentham begins with a “fundamental axiom” and then explains:

It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong … An act’s tendency to promote happiness is what we call its utility; its divergence from this is what we call harmfulness . So it is with actions that are among the objects of the Law: the only way to make a man see clearly the property of them that every man is in search of—i.e. the only way to give him satisfaction—is to point out to him their utility or harmfulness.

Of course, Bentham was not the first to give “happiness” a central role. John Locke in his 1690 An Essay on Human Understanding had made the term central decades earlier. Both “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence and Bentham’s utilitarian axiom of happiness were drawing heavily on Locke, who wrote:

Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) DO continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing … As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.

But when Locke was writing, the centrality of happiness was a relatively new idea. Phil Withington tracks it down linguistically in “The Invention of `Happiness,'” an essay published in the 2017 book Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations, edited by Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes (a reprint of the chapter in working paper form is available here). Withington starts off with a vivid example. Thomas More’s Utopia was published in Latin in 1516. For a century, translations of the work into English did not include the word “happiness.” But then they did. Withington writes:

The word ‘happiness’ is absent from the first English version of Thomas More’s Utopia, which was translated into English from the Latin in 1551 and again in 1556 by Ralph Robinson. ‘Happiness’ remains absent from the next four editions of Robinson’s translation, which was republished regularly to 1639. But when Gilbert Burnet translated Utopia anew from the Latin, in 1684, he used ‘happiness’ no less than nineteen times. What follows looks to explain and contextualize this striking semantic development.

In short, the modern idea of happiness in the English language seems to have been invented in the mid-16th century, latched on to translators like Burnet and writers like by Locke the later decades of the 17th century, and then passed forward to modern economics by way of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Jefferson, and doubtless an array of others. In modern times, there are self-help books about finding happiness and serious research and policy based on survey data on reported levels of happiness.

But what came before happiness? Translations of Latin works (like More’s Utopia) often used “felicitas (denoting worldly contentment) or beatitude (denoting spiritual fulfillment and redemption).” Other writers uses felicity or blissfulness. But the use of “happiness” was rare. Withington does a deep dive into historical writings from the 15th ot the 17th century and finds:

But taking the story back reveals … that ‘happiness’ has not always been as conceptually stable as contemporary commentators, or indeed historians, assume – that, indeed, it was only in the sixteenth century that the word began to acquire the meanings with which we associate it today. … Happiness’ derived from the Old Norse noun ‘hap’, meaning luck or fortune, was probably in use by the mid-fifteenth century. Before the 1550s the semantics of ‘happiness’ were largely informed by this provenance: the addition of the English suffix ‘ness’ to the adjective ‘happy’ made for a word that indicated the quality and state of hap (i.e. fortune) or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition. … But as well as signifying hap, between the 1470s and the 1550s ‘happiness’ was increasingly used to do new semantic work, accumulating connotations that it had not previously possessed … [T]wo other concepts to migrate to ‘happiness’ by the 1550s offer more concrete evidence that the word became an important conduit of classical and patristic ideas into vernacular and spoken English. These were the Greek notion of eudaimonia and the Latin sense of summum bonum: on the one hand, the realization and fulfillment of perfect and ‘natural’ selfhood; on the other hand, the overarching ideal – or ‘sovereign good’ – upon which the good life, the good person, and the good afterlife is based. … The cord between happiness and hap was broken.

By the 1560s, writers were distinguishing between “‘heavenly life, and true happiness’ (Christian ‘blessedness’) and the ‘civil’ happiness (‘felicity’) that was achievable on earth.” Moreover, “happiness” was in some cases explicitly used to refer to the overall good of a society or countrie, and in other cases to refer to the feelings of individuals. The multipurpose meaning of “happiness” has been an issue ever since it became such a broad catch-all term. For example, Locke carefullly warns in 1690 “that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness.” So who decides what happiness is imaginary or real?

Daniel Kahneman (Nobel ’02) was one of the founders of behavioral economics and also one of the early movers in using happiness survey data in economic research. However, later in life he emphasized the complexities of happiness: for example, one might consider happiness in anticipation of an event, happiness when an event occurs, or happiness in remembering an event. For a given individual, these categories of happiness may be quite different. Kahneman said to one interviewer:

I gradually became convinced that people don’t want to be happy … They want to be satisfied with their life. … People don’t want to be happy the way I’ve defined the term – what I experience here and now. In my view, it’s much more important for them to be satisfied, to experience life satisfaction, from the perspective of ‘What I remember,’ of the story they tell about their lives.

In my own mind, Kahneman’s formulation helps to explain why someone might, say, take classes in something where they are a novice (say, dancing or cooking), or serve a hot meal to a large family every day or enter an intense graduate program or work crazy hours at a start-up or train to run a marathon. In the business and stress of the moment, it might be hard to describe those experiences as always and continually “happy.” But they make complete sense if they are part of a narrative you like to tell yourself about your life.

I would not suggest revising the Declaration of Independence to refer to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfaction,” nor rewriting Bentham to say that “it is the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” But thinking about what people truly want from their lives is at the center of economics and the social sciences. From that perspective, “happiness” can be a useful catch-all term and short-hand as long as one remembers that it is a stand-in for a considerably deeper and historically mutable concept.

The post When Happiness Was Invented first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Does the White House Report Science: A New Golden Age Signal Twilight for Us Global Scientific Leadership?

A new White House report argues that eight decades of science policy that helped make the United States the world’s scientific leader is too bureaucratic, too focused on institutions rather than individual researchers, and too slow to translate discoveries into economic and technological advantages.

Supporters see it as a needed modernization of American science policy. Others argue that it places insufficient emphasis on the universities, laboratories and federal agencies that enable and sustain U.S. scientific leadership.

Research affects health, prosperity, quality of life and national security. The technologies that shape modern life, from GPS navigation and weather forecasting to cancer therapies and cellular communications, all rely on scientific discovery.

The debate raises a broader question: What created American scientific leadership in the first place, and what will be required to sustain it?

Us Didn’t Become a Scientific Leader by Accident

During World War II, Vannevar Bush, who coordinated much of the nation’s wartime research effort, led federal programs that created new technologies such as radar and mass-produced penicillin. In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Bush to develop a blueprint for how science could contribute to national health, economic prosperity and job creation after the war.

Bush’s 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, established a framework in which government, universities and industry played complementary roles. The federal government would invest in research and scientific talent. Universities would perform research while educating future scientists and engineers. Industry would transform discoveries into products and services.

The model worked.

The postwar research system laid the foundation for innovations ranging from microelectronics and biotechnology to the internet. Its success can be measured not only in discoveries but also in outcomes: scientific leadership, a highly skilled workforce, innovation clusters of new firms centered on universities that discover new knowledge via research, jobs and long-term economic growth.

The United States did not become a scientific superpower by chance. It built institutions that repeatedly generated both new knowledge and new talent.

Why Rethink the System Now?

The Trump administration’s July 2026 report, Science: A New Golden Age, argues that American science policy requires significant reform.

Having spent much of my career at the intersection of scientific research, research management and science policy, I believe that the report raises several important issues that deserve attention. Administrative burden on researchers is real. Technology transfer could be improved. Artificial intelligence is transforming research and innovation. China’s rise as a scientific and technological competitor presents a genuine strategic challenge.

At the same time, the report arrives after a series of Trump administration policy actions that have already begun reshaping universities, federal agencies and federal research funding. The debate is therefore not simply about a future vision. It is also about how current policy changes may reshape the American research enterprise for decades to come.

What the New Vision Misses

The report places heavy emphasis on innovation, commercialization and technology deployment. What receives less attention is how the capacity for future innovation is created and sustained.

Long-term innovation emerges not from isolated projects but from ecosystems in which universities, government laboratories, federal agencies and industry play distinct but mutually reinforcing roles. Many of today’s technologies exist because these institutions invested for decades in ideas that initially had no obvious commercial value.

Moreover, universities and federal agencies do far more than conduct research.

Universities educate the next generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. They maintain specialized infrastructure, generate new knowledge and support scientific communities that accelerate discovery. Their unique contribution is that they simultaneously create knowledge and develop the workforce that puts knowledge to use.

Federal mission agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Geological Survey, play different but equally important roles. They conduct and support science that informs decisions affecting public health, environmental protection, energy security, economic development and public safety. Many of these activities generate public benefits that market forces alone are unlikely to adequately provide.

Scientific Capacity Takes Decades To Build

Scientific leadership depends on people, institutions, infrastructure and knowledge. These assets accumulate slowly over decades but can be weakened surprisingly quickly.

The current debate is not merely theoretical. Funding reductions, workforce losses and disruptions affecting universities and federal agencies are already reshaping parts of the American research enterprise.

Advocates of these changes argue that resources should be redirected toward faster innovation and greater efficiency. Critics worry that weakening institutions responsible for discovery, workforce development and mission-oriented science will reduce the nation’s long-term capacity to innovate.

Innovation is essential, but it ultimately depends on a continuing supply of new ideas, talented people and organizations capable of sustaining long-term research. Discovery and innovation are not competing priorities. They depend on each other.

America’s Competitors Understand This Balance

Perhaps the strongest endorsement of the postwar American model is the adoption of its core features by international competitors.

China has invested heavily in research universities, scientific workforce development, research infrastructure and technology clusters that connect universities, government laboratories and industry. In several areas of science and technology, China is now rivaling or surpassing the United States.

Scientific competition increasingly involves competition among research ecosystems rather than competition over individual technologies.

A nation that underinvests in scientific capacity while its competitors expand theirs risks losing advantages that took generations to build.

What a Genuine New Golden Age Would Require

A true golden age of American science would not simply preserve the status quo. Administrative burden could be reduced. Technology transfer can be improved. New institutional models deserve experimentation.

If the goal is to sustain U.S. scientific leadership, though, efforts to modernize the research system should strengthen rather than weaken the institutions that produced that leadership. The White House report does not establish federal policy on its own, but it signals how the administration views the relative importance of innovation, technology deployment, universities, federal agencies and industry within the research ecosystem.

Universities remain essential for discovery, workforce development and scientific infrastructure. Federal agencies continue to generate science that directly benefits society through better public decisions. Industry remains indispensable for transforming discoveries into products and services. The challenge is not choosing among these institutions, but ensuring that they remain mutually reinforcing parts of a larger innovation ecosystem.

A genuine new golden age will require innovation, while also sustaining the institutions that generate innovation in the first place.

This article was originally published by The Conversation on August 7, 2026.

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The post White House Plan for a ‘Golden Age’ of Science Ignores the Structures That Made the US a Scientific Superpower appeared first on DCReport.org.

Smithsonian Exhibit Honors a Woman From the Civil Rights Era. How Long Will It Survive?

The Trump administration has been busy scrubbing from public sites the identities and accomplishments of Black, Brown, Asian, indigenous, and female Americans while whitewashing our history of enslavement.

That makes it surprising that a new exhibit in our nation’s capital honors a woman who was crucial to the 1963 Civil Rights demonstration in Washington, where the reverend Martin Luther King, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his stirring “I have a dream” speech.

The woman being honored is Dorothy Height.

Height sat close to Dr. King during that peaceful protest 63 years ago. However, she did not speak. Indeed, only men spoke that day.

How long will this exhibit honoring a Black woman survive? Will it remain up through the end of the year, as announced on Aug. 10 by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum?

Height’s significance within the male-dominated civil rights movement was so crucial that she became known among supporters as the “godmother” of the movement.

That Height sat silently illuminates a long-running conflict within the Civil Rights movement that was apparent in a 19th Century dispute between two famous Rochesterians, the suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony and the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.

In 1869, Douglass supported the proposed 15^th Amendment, which extended voting rights to Black men. Anthony (and her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton) opposed the amendment as written because it excluded women.

Like the little-known Bayard Rustin, Height was one of the handful of march organizers. There was palpable fear back then that the event would turn into a bloody mess because of threats of violence from segregationists, who operated openly and with the support of some of the most powerful senators and representatives.

But the protest came off pretty much without a hitch because of the diligence of Height, Rustin, and a few others. (Rustin’s central role was kept largely in the closet because he was gay.)

We’ll let you know if the exhibit gets taken down early.  If you are in or visit Washington, it would be smart to see it, especially if you bring children and young adults along.

We hope DCReport readers and those who watch our YouTube videos will alert us if they become aware of efforts to close or change this worthwhile exhibit about an unsung hero of American hopes and dreams.

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