GoKawiilHow Silicon Valley Is Turning Scientists Into Exploited Gig Workers Tech elites are enriching themselves by plundering STEM institutions—and offering researchers scraps.
Peter Thiel and his ilk are starving public science. (Eva Marie Uzcategui / Getty)
Silicon Valley would not exist without government-funded research. Foundational technologies, including the semiconductor and the Internet, emerged from Cold War–era military research programs. As graduate students at Stanford, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin relied on funding from the National Science Foundation to develop the search algorithms that would eventually become Google. The touchscreens and lithium-ion batteries that we now carry around all day were likewise developed in university labs funded by government grants. Even generative AI—incessantly touted as the crowning achievement of the free market, upon which the fate of the American economy depends—emerged out of decades of research underwritten by the Department of Defense (DOD). Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner known as the Godfather of AI, left his academic position in the United States precisely because he wanted to avoid Pentagon contracts. Hinton nevertheless turned to the Canadian government to help fund his lab at the University of Toronto, which eventually produced leading AI researchers for OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Given how much Silicon Valley has profited from government-funded research over the years, you might expect a certain amount of reverence for the system. At the very least, even the staunchest techno-libertarian rationalists should recognize the value in not killing their golden goose. Yet Silicon Valley elites are at the very heart of the Trump administration’s devastating assault on public science funding—and, not coincidentally, have positioned themselves to profit off the wreckage. In particular, conservative venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.”
Thiel has long set his sights on shifting federal research dollars from universities to private industry. In numerous interviews, Thiel has pointed out that we have 100 times as many science PhDs as we had a century ago, yet the rate of progress is about the same. The claim itself is dubious. He offers no clear benchmark by which to measure scientific progress, nor does he consider the possibility that science has become more complicated after a century of advancement. Could it be that more bureaucracy, however flawed, is needed to operate a Large Hadron Collider as compared to a microscope and Bunsen burner? For Thiel, the answer is a definitive no: “The average PhD is 99% less productive than people were 100 years ago,” he concludes with unwavering confidence. But even he cannot ignore the successes of Cold War research programs. However much it might pain his libertarian soul, Thiel acknowledges that DARPA—the research and development arm of the DOD—functioned well early on, but he has conveniently decided that it was a one-time acceleration that “came at the price of completely corrupting the institutions.”
In any case, the justifications now matter less than the actual results. Trump entered his second term with a plan to cut federal science funding and extort prominent universities with threats of targeted budget cuts. The attacks were orchestrated by Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who previously served as the chief of staff to Thiel at his venture capital fund. The proposed budget included funding reductions of 40 percent for the National Institute of Health, 57 percent for the National Science Foundation, and 24 percent for NASA.
Although Congress has since attempted to roll back some of the cuts, the administration has already inflicted enormous damage. Over 10,000 federal workers with STEM PhDs left the federal workforce last year. University labs have been forced to fire researchers, cancel studies, or just shut down operations altogether. Some academics sought refuge in Europe; others retired early. An unmistakable chill has taken hold of the scientific establishment—one that will linger long after the Trump presidency.
Why would tech billionaires attack a system that made them enormously wealthy at virtually no personal cost? The most obvious explanation is that much of that newly freed-up funding can be redirected to the tech industry. Thiel and Andreessen position start-ups as the remedy to the supposedly bloated, inefficient scientific bureaucracy. They cast themselves as the true champions of science, locked in an existential battle against pencil-pushing charlatans. If Newton were around today, the thinking goes, he would be applying to Y Combinator and ordering swag for his B2B SaaS start-up. This grandiosity is coupled with a strong sense of paranoia. In a 2025 interview, Andreessen described the Biden administration as being preoccupied with “the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation, and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation,” concluding: “Absolutely tried to kill us.”
When Trump took power, it was their turn to strike back. As science budgets got axed, portfolio companies backed by either Thiel or Andreessen—and sometimes both—received billions of dollars in federal contracts. The administration quickly deregulated crypto and threatened to punish states that enacted “onerous and excessive laws” relating to AI. This agenda was spearheaded by Trump’s policy advisers, including the billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks, who led PayPal alongside Thiel, and Sriram Krishnan, who was previously a partner at Andreessen’s investment firm.
The attacks on science also created a new talent pool for Silicon Valley to exploit: newly displaced STEM researchers. Within the AI industry, executives frequently cite the goal of creating models that are “PhD-level experts” across various academic disciplines. But training those models requires actual PhD-level experts to write relevant prompts, generate training data, and verify the output. How do you get someone with a doctoral degree in physics or math to sit down and solve hundreds of challenging problems? One way is to hire them, pay a competitive salary, and offer health insurance. Another, perhaps less obvious, approach is to kill off as many of the previous job opportunities as possible, such that highly credentialed researchers might be enticed to perform mind-numbing gig work for $30 an hour.