Trump's war on science

A multi-directional assault on the foundations of American research

Thanks to the involvement of Elon Musk and the support of several other prominent technology industry figures, the second Trump administration has a techno-futurist strand that was completely missing from the nostalgia-soaked first. We’re hearing about robots, advanced rockets, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies of tomorrow.

But underlying this forward-looking rhetorical glow is a multi-pronged attack on American scientific research that could genuinely cripple knowledge production and our long-term future.

In order to grasp the full scale of the assault, it’s important to recognize that these threats are converging from multiple directions at once. The centerpiece, politically at least, is a determination to destroy left-aligned institutions, of which universities are a salient example. But that’s hardly the only front:

• Somewhat independent of the administration’s attack on institutions is the involvement of RFK Jr. and his admirers, who until recently, formed a crank anti-progress wing of the left.

• On immigration, the administration’s paranoia extends well beyond a desire for a secure border, and systematically errs on the side of removing more people and making the United States a less desirable place to live and work.

• DOGE’s core fiscal theory is that it’s possible to make large reductions in federal spending without any noticeable diminution of service levels, and this creates large, systematic incentives to do things with hidden long-term costs.

• It’s not unique to this administration, but the traditional business community’s hostility to research agendas that might make the case for public interest regulation has not diminished.

• And last but not least, there is a harder-to-define nexus of influence in Trump’s DC that includes both malign foreign actors who don’t want America to safeguard its national interests and believers in a short-term singularity who don’t believe there’s a long-term interest that needs to be secured.

I try not to do too many pure “Trump is Bad” takes — if you’re here and reading, you almost certainly already believe that — but I think it’s important to contemplate the scope of the harms here.

DOGE’s short-term mindset

My starting point for thinking about what’s going on is DOGE — not as a specific group of people or even as an initiative, but as a mindset about the federal government.

“Efficiency” can mean all kinds of things, but Elon Musk has cast it as an almost dogmatic belief that large amounts of government spending constitute criminal fraud or waste and can be eliminated with no visible repercussions. This just isn’t true. The government spends lots of money on things that I would characterize as “wasteful” in the sense that there’s no good reason for it, like subsidizing biofuels production. But the people getting the money and the communities they live in would certainly notice if you cut these programs. It’s not like the money is falling off the back of a truck.

Tackling these weak claims normally requires battling with interest groups in Congress. DOGE has, instead, elected to bypass the separation of powers and tackle weak claimants using what it claims to be the discretionary authority possessed by the executive branch.

When you start firing people willy-nilly, visible consequences arise because most of the people working for the government are, in fact, doing something. But then every time a national park has a disruption in user-facing services as a result of something that Trump has done, the right claims “malicious compliance.” They’re so sure that the National Park Service is wasteful that when cuts turn out to have visible consequences, that must mean sabotage.

If you think about how organizations work in practice — how broad mandates trickle down through subordinate layers of management — DOGE is essentially a mandate to neglect long-term issues. If you’re running a large apartment building and orders come down that you need to immediately cut spending but also avoid any immediately visible consequence for tenants, your go-to option is to skimp on upkeep. Delay, avoid, or reduce the frequency of routine inspections. If something is slightly off, don’t get it fixed.

Musk is a big fan of stress testing institutions by turning things off to see what breaks. I know a lot of people thought it was embarrassing when the Trump administration fired the people responsible for securing nuclear weapons and then hired them back. But I think the DOGE-pilled view that as good management. If you never fire someone you realize you shouldn’t have fired, that means you’re not firing enough people. Right now, basic customer service functions at the Social Security Administration are breaking down. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those cuts are also rolled back to minimize political backlash, just as Trump keeps touching the tariff stove and then withdrawing his hand when the stock market screams.

What gets lost in this process are things like the lives of poor kids in Africa. Or basic science.

Crushing the NIH

When I first heard that the Trump administration was going to cap “indirect costs” for NIH grants, I thought, in the spirit of generosity, that this was maybe a plausibly good idea.

I have never worked in scientific research or dealt with federal grants, but I have worked at nonprofits that get grants from private foundations and other donors. Taxing grants to cover general operational needs is, on the one hand, a totally legitimate process. If you hire a bunch of people to do a particular project, you’re not going to have a “toilet paper” line item on the budget for the project, but you will, in fact, need more toilet paper. At the same time, your incentive as an institutional leader is obviously to bump up the indirect costs as high as you can for reasons that don’t always align with the intentions of the grant-makers.

Traditionally, even pretty hard-core rightwingers have supported scientific research funding. But most of the people who get scientific research funding are liberals. So indirect costs are potentially a way of getting Republicans to fund things they wouldn’t actually want to fund. And trying to squeeze down on that sounded like a plausible way to assert control.

But the number they picked — 15 percent — is by all accounts dramatically too low. Stuart Buck of the Good Science Project, whose whole mission in life is pushing for reform of federal grant programs, says he thinks a 50 percent cap might be appropriate. At 15 percent, they’re just crippling scientific research. And I would note that Trump proposed huge cuts to the NIH back in 2017. His disdain for scientific research predates this whole Trump 2.0 obsession with using the federal government as a tool to crush the “woke” elements in society.

And while there’s clearly a sense that these two threads — anti-science and anti-woke — are re-enforcing each other, there’s also a clear tension. If you were trying to reform universities in a more politically moderate direction, the science departments would be your natural allies. But Trump has authentic and deeply held anti-science sentiments, separate from any of the culture war material.

Just look at Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School who, after stepping down, became well-known as an opponent of diversity statements and in February of 2024 wrote a piece for Free Press about how wokeness was undermining medical education.

But by the time of the Trump transition, Flier was writing about how RFK Jr. is bad and tweeting about how, separate from any funding issues, the Trump administration is moving against the entire technology of mRNA vaccines.

The crank realignment bites

Kennedy is a guy who used to be an embarrassing coalition member for liberals like me. When we would complain that George W. Bush was blowing off science, it was embarrassing to admit that our side also included folks like RFK Jr. who were against the genetically modified crops that have done tremendous good for the world.

He was also a major player in the misguided effort to shut down Indian Point in New York, and more broadly, a longstanding member of the deeply counterproductive anti-nuclear movement. His disdain for mRNA vaccines is downstream of his longstanding generalized suspicion of vaccines, which itself is part and parcel of a broadly anti-science, anti-technology, anti-progress worldview.

Trump clearly has significant sympathy for that worldview — he was touting the alleged vaccine/autism link back in his first presidential campaign. And over and above the cuts to indirect rates, the Trump administration has been specifically zeroing-out funding for research endeavors that they deem excessively woke. That includes projects related to transgender health, but also all research into vaccine hesitancy and seemingly a huge swathe of research related to HIV/AIDS. Is the latter because the White House still sees that as a “gay” health problem and therefore culturally objectionable? Is it because the HHS Secretary is an HIV denialist?

I have no idea. There’s simply a baffling array of intersecting motives at work, and this administration has almost no ability to explain what it’s doing in a clear way or speak consistently on any topic.

But I do think you can only explain the influence wielded by cranks and the extreme short-termism of this administration’s approach to the budget with regard to the fact that the technophile wing of the Trump administration believes the singularity is imminent.

In that framework, the only thing that really matters is short-term political power. If you believe what Musk claims to believe here, then you don’t care about the long-term future of medical research any more than you care about the long-term value of Tesla as a luxury car brand. You’re trying to make sure that you are in control of the levers of power when everything goes vertical, and that’s all that matters.

Winning the future

One take I’ve seen is that this is all comeuppance for scientists’ tendency in recent years to wield their prestige as experts for political ends.

Certainly, there have been abuses. In particular, I would flag that while Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, can be a very effective public communicator on scientific topics of political interest, he has also tended, for years now, to be a pretty clumsy advocate of politicized science. He’s just one guy, but given the public-facing nature of his role, I wish he spent his time thinking about how scientists can bend over backwards to show sensitivity to the cultural concerns of a mass public that is more religious, less educated, and much less left-wing than the average scientist. Things like Scientific American endorsing Kamala Harris, similarly, reflect a complete failure of Weberian spirit. It’s just obvious that this kind of behavior does more to make conservatives think less of scientific institutions than it does to make voters think less of Donald Trump.

It’s also the case that, more broadly, a somewhat annoying habit has developed where scientists will weigh-in on questions related to Covid NPIs or climate policy that involve complicated multi-dimensional tradeoffs as if “the science” settles rather than informs these debates. This is bad.

That being said, I do sometimes feel like political discourse is now dominated by people who have no recollection of events that occurred outside the past ten years.

If you go back to the 1990s or the 2000s, the discourse around science was much less politicized, in part, because there was much less education polarization. Nonetheless, the situation was that in the course of life, scientists would occasionally discover various health hazards that were inconvenient to the interests of private industry. It turns out, for example, that nicotine is addictive and that inhaling smoke causes cancer and lung disease. It turns out that while fossil fuels are incredibly useful, they cause greenhouse gas emissions, and that coal in particular generates incredible amounts of particulate pollution that seems to have wide-ranging negative consequences for human health. It used to be the case that industrial activity was releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, causing acid to rain down on major American cities. In a well-functioning market economy, we study these kind of externalities and try to come up with cost-effective ways to address them.

But Newt Gingrich (who deliberately dismantled Congress’ scientific expertise) and George W. Bush made it clear that any finding of fact that could justify regulatory intervention was per se unwelcome.

Republicans could have responded to neutral presentation of scientific facts by saying something like, “It’s true that stricter tobacco regulation would save lives, but I’m opposed to it on philosophical grounds of freedom.” Instead, we had Mike Pence running around telling people that smoking doesn’t kill. That’s the climate that got people thinking that if your scientific work might be relevant to political debates, you had to “do politics” and not just science. I’m not a “two wrongs make a right” guy and I think the politicized response to ideologically motivated attacks on scientific work has not been helpful or effective. But it’s worth understanding the context in which it emerged.

At any rate, here we are today. Money for science is being cut willy-nilly, and scientists are being denied entry into the country because they posted anti-Trump political opinions. There is no way for private money to fill the funding gap. And while the singularity very well might be right around the corner, I’m not comfortable betting the fate of our nation on that.