Almost every day, we awaken to a news story about the administration’s unremitting war on science. Very few of those reports “break through”–understandable in an era where citizens are subjected to a daily firehose of other negative news: Trump’s insane and totally unnecessary war on Iran, the steady rise of inflation, the gulags in which thousands of innocent immigrants are held in horrendous circumstances, the rising toll of once-eradicated diseases…the list goes on.
But the fact that so much else in our social structure is under assault doesn’t make Trump’s war on science any less disastrous. As Don Moynihan recently reported in Can We Still Govern, the White House has recently proposed new policies governing the federal funding of American science. These policies would augment those we’ve already heard about: the funding cuts, the de facto impoundments of funds, the funding freezes to disfavored universities, and the cancelation of any grants that include the extensive list of the Trump administration’s “forbidden words.”
Think things could hardly get worse? Evidently, they can. Moynihan says that scientists are employing “apocalyptic terms, like the end of American science as we know it” to describe a newly proposed policy.
As Josh Marshall has written at Talking Points Memo,
It’s a big deal. The Office of Management and Budget is trying to promulgate a new set of rules which, in essence, put OMB officials in charge of all federal scientific grants and encourage them to overrule peer review panels. They can also cancel grants at any time for essentially any reason.
This is one of those cases that does not involve what you’d call a hot populist issue. And it would take some work to explain to the average person just why this is a problem, or what a peer review panel even is. As one reader in the federal medical research establishment told me, this basically takes what everyone always knew was the goal of the DOGE chainsaw massacre of a year ago and states it all explicitly, making those goals and procedures official policy.
The proposed rule would end the current system for determining federal funding for the sciences and medical research. It essentially turns the entire grantmaking apparatus into what Marshall accurately calls “a kind of political patronage system,” in which any research or research institutions can be denied–or immediately cut off– if that researcher or that researcher’s institution has somehow offended the current occupant of the White House.
As Marshall reminds us, this isn’t how science is supposed to work. The proposal is “basically a dagger aimed at the sciences and medical research, which makes sense because the Trumpers see these fields generally as political enemies to be defunded.”
Lest you think Marshall was engaging in hyperbole, allow me to disabuse you. Between January 20, 2025 and March 6th of this year, the Union of Concerned Scientists tracked and categorized 562 unique attacks on science — “a systematic, strategic assault on federal scientific systems and the notion of shared truth.”
In 2025, the Trump administration eliminated or disrupted $29.86 billion in grants from the NIH, NSF, and EPA combined. Nearly 2,000 NSF grants were cancelled or suspended. In the first three months of 2025 alone, the administration cut $2.7 billion in NIH research funding. Federal funding for cancer research was cut 31% compared to the same period the prior year.
The administration’s proposed 2027 budget simply eliminates three of the NIH’s 27 institutes, zeroing out the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and cutting NSF by 54.5%. The NIH issued 66% fewer grant awards in the first months of 2026 than it had during the same period in 2025.
But it hasn’t just been money.
In 2024, more than 25,000 people exited government science agencies. Many of them were fired in mass layoffs. And the administration has censored and suppressed scientific research it deems uncongenial; according to a Senate subcommittee report, the administration has suppressed a measles forecast, deleted health data from CDC and agency websites (including information on HIV prevention), and held back publication of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for the first time in agency history. A top NIH researcher resigned when the administration suppressed findings from a study on ultra-processed foods. And thanks to the crank who heads Health and Human Services, several top vaccine officials have been forced out for refusing to compromise vaccine safety data.
This administration has conducted the most sweeping rollback of federal scientific infrastructure U.S. history–a rollback that threatens public health, the environment, medical research, and space science. It is, as Moynihan wrote, an assault on the very notion of shared truth. Recovery will take decades.
This is hardly “America First.”
You wrote “In 2024, more than 25,000 people exited government science agencies” Did you mean 2025? The first year of our current mal-administration.
I really think we’ve entered the final stages of the oligarchy. I watched as university donors took over the top collegiate institutions when kids were protesting genocide in Gaza. I was not impressed. I also watched how universities folded their cards on DEI, too. Ball State tripped all over itself to post pictures of university staff spray painting over their DEI language. The President of Ball State couldn’t handle the pressure from an employee who, on her own time, wrote a post about Charlie Kirk not being a saint as sold to the masses. The president fired her, which cost taxpayers $250,000 (a modest amount), according to BSU’s president.
So, why is Trump making them all drop a knee to him?
To me, this is about control over higher education. The Koch Network controlled over 150 university systems. They churn out their own science and studies, all of which align with Libertarian principles. Remember, the Broligarchs that run a big part of the federal government want to dictate where dollars will be spent, and right now, that massive investment goes to AI firms.
I do think the oligarchy already had much control over our “free thinkers.” We socialized their costs, so they could privatize the profits.
It’s been a while now since Thomas Piketty’s book on capital was published. It started at the US university he worked for, but once he saw where the findings were headed, he quit and finished his book in France because he knew the university wouldn’t let him publish the conclusions. The university system is just another group of oligarch-controlled institutions.
These oligarchs paid big money to get Trump and his OMB hatchet man in the Oval Office to rid the country of the bureaucratic state. Trump is clueless about what takes place at a university, but Russell Vought knows. I can almost see him forcing the university systems to focus more on religion and less on science. I also think there will be greater demands placed on presidents of higher education institutions.
I’m glad I’m old. I’m sort of glad I’m sick. Every day when I read things like this, my heart becomes sicker. The realization that my life in science and education was all for nought.
Jeff Swett: Yes! mea culpa!
You are correct! mea culpa!
Money ruins everything it comes in contact with. We let it every time. And I cannot understand how, as a culture, we’ve decided that rich people are ‘extra’, when they demonstrably are not. Who taught us to envy other people’s shiny baubles for no other reason than to sell us a lesser version?
We knew this was coming the minute Orange Jesus got elected. Medical Research is near and dear to my heart. I worked with some of the finest researchers in the United States for over seventeen years. I understand that many of the study titles seem frivolous, but thanks to the rigorous peer review process, I can guarantee that even the most trivial of titles can produce important information.
I would bet good money that there are ranchers in Texas who would have appreciated studies on Blow Worms and, if they mutate to affect humans, a lot more people will be wishing that, too. It can happen. It has happened, not with Blow Worms, but it has happened. That’s why the World Health Organization (WHO) has monitoring programs, which we supported before 2025.
C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General, said, “Insufficient medical research may be hazardous to your health!” It’s taken less than forty years to go from that level of respect to the Neanderthal level of disrespect for life that we have now. It may take twice that long to recover.
VOTE!!! PLEASE VOTE!!!!
It was Hitler, who infamously commented that the Nazi state could do “…without science” for few years. Wait until Trump, or one of his bootlickers says “We can do without Jewish science for a while.”
When one is supremely narcissistic, and too stupid to know how stupid he/she is, nothing impossible.
I wonder where all the money the trump regime is withholding from research and science fields is going. Impounding monies appropriated to projects and research is illegal or so I thought. Are these pools of money vulnerable to the corrupt personal profit schemes of trump and family? There was a reason most inspector generals were fired.
Vernon, I don’t think your teaching science was in vain. A lot of kids, people retain facts and store them away. When confronted with opposing theories that don’t make sense, they have a base to stand on and question.
Melinda – “Who taught us to envy other people’s shiny baubles…” I tend to believe that this may be hard-wired – human condition and all – WE do have a choice, which is necessary in a ‘beleaguered’ culture, as ours has been for a very long time.
The Federalist Papers are confirmation of the struggle regarding citizens’ rights and the government’s obligations and limits. But, as The Constitution did not list citizens’ rights, indicating them, but not listing them, that all other responsibilities and rights ‘rightfully’ belong to the people.
The Bill of Rights represents efforts to delineate those rights.
In opposition to The Bill of Rights was the fear that with the listing of those rights, such enumeration might mean that these were the only rights, since it certainly could not list all rights –
And balancing that, was the concomitant fear, that without such enumeration, tyranny may be the result . . .
Later, playing out, if at no other time, in the late 19th and early 20th century, was labor and capital contending for power against the backdrop of industrialization.
Still later, in 1980, politics smeared racial issues in reaction to the fulfillment of more universal rights, ~20 years earlier.
History, not having the luxury of future-telling, created The Constitution, as The Federalist Papers tells us, hoping to establish language encompassing that future.
And we also had judicial activism creating, from whole clothe, originalism, in about 1971, which has lead to the fount of our current crisis, imho.
Yes, I know that the term ‘judicial activism’ has been used to point to rights that are not enumerated, justifying the fear of not listing the rights.
The term judicial activism, is in service to the gaslighting of the fulfillment of the promise of The Constitution. Smearing that fulfillment as not listed rights, while the true upstart, originalism, masks that historic fear, tyranny.
Not to mention what has been attempted against women.
Then,
YES Peggy: “VOTE!!! PLEASE VOTE!!!!”
It’s all so frustrating, but President Washington warned us early on! “President George Washington warned the nation about the dangers of political parties and factions in his 1796 Farewell Address. He chose to retire and shared this advice to help the young country stay united and strong.” Maybe you could remind all those rabid supporters of “Party First”!
I have stage 4 cancer. I am alive today only because of chemotherapy drugs developed by cancer researchers. Trump fired cancer researchers. I am pissed.