The general issue is that each year, the number of PI's grow mostly due to PHD graduation and yet funding in many scientific areas remains flat and facilites DO NOT YET scale within increasing number's of PIs.

Two major results

• An increasing number of recent PHDs find themselves on tenuous soft money - this is borderline unethical behavior for various disciplines
  
  
• Access to the facilities necessary to enhance one's career are becoming increasingly hard to get

The extrapolation below paints a particularly dismal qualitative future. The redline is not particularly important or based on very good data, but what matters is the behavior of the green and blue lines. This behavior directly shows that we are not scaling our investment in science, and therefore we are not allowing for The flow of new scientiric knowledge must be both continuous and substantial

Note the bump below is the 2009 ARAA



As said before, your extinguished professor has been part of a study of all of this - here's an excerpt from one report:



In 2017, the overall funding rate in the physical sciences for the NSF was about 1 in 4. DMR/DMS is related to Materials Research and and Mathematical Sciences - note the very large number of proposals in DMS.



Even the NIH exhibits flat behavior now.



And all of this is happenening as the number of science and engineering graduate students continues to increase. Much of the recent increase is due to more international students arriving to US graduate schools. Nonetheless, this is the population that will build out new scientific foundation for the future and that future is clearly based on foreign graduate students coming to our institutions as the domestic population peaked in about 2010 and has been slowly decreasing. But, due to Trump administration policies as well as the global pandemic, there are currently many fewer international graduation students at US univerisities



And the graph below comes from this 2020 report:




Some excerpts from the 2018 NSF Budget request to congress:

A Reminder About Flat Budgets



Way too Big of Vision



Too much Agency Redundancy



Facilites vs Graduate Student Training; why we need separate funding buckets





If one extends the trends over the last 15 years, the outlook is not good. Lower probabilities of getting grants to start up your research group as a new professor and lower access to facilities.

What this ultimately means is that Research Universities with money that can be more independent than those dependent on federal funding will likely survive and possibly even flourish as the other ones whither away and die ...

And the Winners are