Boston built America’s innovation engine. Now it’s under attack by Trump
It's a strange time to be marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
Back then, some of the main flashpoints related to Britain's tight grip on commerce in the colonies and taxation without representation. When the King got angry about the boisterous Boston Tea Party, he shut down Boston's port so that merchants couldn't import or export goods. That knee-capped the local economy, leading to business closures, high unemployment, shortages of food and other essentials and soaring prices. And it led the colonists to organize the First Continental Congress to plan their response.
Now, the danger to our economy comes not from abroad, but from a president who gleefully uses phrases like " long live the king " to refer to himself.
His administration is attacking the foundations of what we have been building here since the 1630s, when Boston Latin School and Harvard College got started. That foundation tightly integrates education, smart students and professors from around the world, research and development activities, funding from the federal government and private philanthropists and experienced entrepreneurs and investors who form companies around the research projects that look most promising.
What we have built on top of that foundation has been significant both societally and financially. We have cured deadly diseases in children and adults, developed surgical anesthesia, performed the first human organ transplant, helped sequence the human genome, created the field of proton therapy for cancer treatment, and we also did some of the earliest work on the GLP-1 drugs now widely prescribed for diabetes and weight loss.
We developed radar systems that helped the Allies win World War II, and also the guidance computers that enabled Apollo spacecraft to land humans on the surface of the moon. We built some of the earliest hardware and software that allowed the ARPANET — the Internet's forerunner — to link computers together in the 1960s, sent the first email and ensured that the web has remained an open standard that everyone can benefit from. We created the first videogame, booting up an industry that now spins off revenues of more than $180 billion globally each year. An entrepreneur educated at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and working in Cambridge co-founded a startup called Android, now owned by Google, and is the world's most popular mobile operating system.
Before that, we invented the telephone. (The Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell was a Boston University professor — but not yet a U.S. citizen — when he made the earliest phone calls.)
In 2025, we're trying to do things like edit or silence the malfunctioning genes that cause diseases; help our military develop hypersonic missiles; and build a functional nuclear fusion reactor, with no carbon emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.
You get the idea; this list could go on for a whiiiiiile.
Just one industry that our university labs helped incubate here in the late 1970s, biotechnology, last year created more than $600 billion in economic activity in the U.S., and employed more than 300,000 people . Some of its early pioneers and current leaders — people like the late Henri Termeer of Genzyme and Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Pioneering — were foreigners who came to this country to advance their education.
For its part, the Trump administration asserts that it aims to cut government research funding to help bring the deficit under control — a key mission of the Department of Government Efficiency. And the administration believes that it can get universities to address antisemitism on campuses, or increase ideological diversity on faculties, only with high-pressure tactics like withholding federal funding, rescinding their ability to enroll foreign students or revoking their tax-exempt status.
Supporters of the administration may want to play out this hand of cards and see if those aims can be achieved.
But I'd make the case that what we're seeing right now is a federal government that is jackhammering away at the foundations of what makes Boston work — not to mention similar ecosystems such as Seattle, New York and Silicon Valley. It seems they are rooting for the towers atop that foundation to tumble, without truly understanding the impact that that would have on America's competitiveness. They have demolition equipment, but I'm not convinced they have a blueprint or construction equipment.
(As they wrangle with our great institutions, create anxiety around visas, and deny funding to cutting-edge researchers, you can already watch savvy countries swinging into action to attract those people .)
There is also one possible impact of the Trump administration's war on Ivy League schools that few people understand, and it has to do with the universities' nest eggs — their endowments. If federal funding gets yanked or cut, universities may tap their endowments to fill the gap. There are also proposals in Congress to potentially increase the tax rate on wealthy universities' endowments from 1.4% to as much as 21%.
Why does that matter? Endowment money often gets handed to venture capital firms so that they can fund startup companies — the next Moderna, HubSpot, Wayfair or Vertex. So increasing the pressure on university endowments could reduce the money venture capitalists have to support new company formation — a key ingredient of the U.S.' economic vitality. The "acute issue," says Boston venture capitalist Michael Greeley, "is simply not knowing what endowments will be called on to fund" at universities, which could suck money out of the venture capital system.
"In 1775, the proud New Englanders stood strong, threw down their plowshares and confronted the totalitarian threat, even though they knew the battle would be long," wrote Don Ingber , director of the Wyss Institute, a research lab at Harvard, in a recent blog post. This time, instead of taxation without representation, Ingber says one of the central issues is "cessation [of government funding for university research] without justification."
To help highlight the role that academic research plays in the economy, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce this month rebooted a coalition of nearly fifty other chambers that it originally started during the first Trump administration, Business for Federal Research Funding . Research, says James Rooney, CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber, "creates jobs — blue and white collar jobs — all over the country, in every state."
But aside from elected officials like Gov. Maura Healey and Senate President Karen Spilka , and university leaders like Harvard's Alan Garber and Danielle Holley of Mount Holyoke College, it's hard to find evidence of private sector leaders using their megaphones to speak out, or organizing to defend the education, research and innovation-driven economy we have been building here over nearly 400 years. It's an engine of progress that has, quite literally, won wars, cured terrible diseases and shaped the technology we use and how we communicate.
"Too many leaders in the private sector are worried about retribution that could harm their businesses," observes John Maraganore, a longtime biotech industry executive and co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge.
Understood. But in the two-and-a-half centuries since we helped spark the American Revolution, have we turned into a state populated by meek worriers?
Or are we still willing to act to defend what we hold dear?
