Science Isn’t Waste Or Fraud

The daily damage being done by the Trump administration has given rise to a grim debate: how much of the wreckage can be remedied, or at least ameliorated, and how much is irremediable? How many of the attacks on purportedly “wasteful” and/or “fraudulent” expenditures are really based upon the appalling ignorance of those leveling the attacks–their profound lack of understanding of how things work?

Example: The sudden and draconian cuts to scientific and medical research don’t just threaten to cripple US global research prominence. They’ve thrown a wrench into promising research into cures for diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and Cancer. 

Last week, the news media reported on two breakthroughs: the use of advances in gene editing to cure a baby born with a rare genetic disorder; and a new blood test to detect Alzheimers. The exciting aspect of the technique used to cure the 9½-month-old baby is its potential to help people suffering with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases. The blood test makes it possible to detect Alzheimer’s disease much earlier. As one doctor pointed out, the test will allow primary care physicians to order a blood test and, if that test is positive, immediately refer a patient to a neurologist. He predicted that the test will “dramatically change clinical care.”

These advances and others like them didn’t emerge from a few weeks experiments in a laboratory. They built on years of scientific research, much of which had no immediate relevance to the reported advancements.

Most Americans don’t recognize the importance of basic research–it simply isn’t salient to citizens the way cuts in Medicaid or attacks on Social Security are. And very few Americans understand the long-term and disastrous effects of abrupt terminations of multi-year grants.

As Josh Marshall has argued at Talking Points Memo,

Basic and applied research generates huge dividends for a society. But its immediate and salient relevance to the average voter varies greatly. Theoretical physics is very worth funding and has many real world applications. But its relevance to — and just as importantly, its political traction with — a middle income couple in your average community where he’s a bus driver and she’s a nurse may not be crystal clear. Yet everyone knows a family member or loved one or friend stricken with cancer, or conditions tied to aging and dementia, heart disease, or any number of other conditions against which medical science is making steady progress. The point is so obvious it barely merits arguing: People fear death and disease. They look to science for hope of cures and some promise of long and robust lives. For two or three generations, that hope has been tied to researchers, somewhere, perhaps operating with something akin to magic but consistently producing new and wonderful things….

The challenge is that the world of biomedical research is insular. It operates with a system of internal governance and mores that are broadly understandable to people who’ve been exposed to university life, especially in the sciences. But that’s a very, very rarified discourse — peer review, study sections, fundamental vs. applied research, pipelines of new researchers, etc. Let’s start with just the foundational point that almost no one has any fucking idea what any of those terms and concepts mean. And for most things, that’s fine. Society should be well-run and knowledgeable enough to keep its scientists and researchers funded so that they don’t need to focus on the song and dance of making the case for what they do in the public square. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we’re living in right now.

Researchers have an additional and under-ordinary-circumstances very understandable desire not to overpromise or give false hope. This is rooted both in ethical imperatives and the uncertainty-driven empiricism that is the hallmark of any good scientist. But at the moment, it is a big problem because it is providing an unmerited advantage to those who are using lies to shut down medical research in the U.S. 

Marshall’s essay is worth reading in its entirety, but his essential point is that people with big megaphones–those in the various “disease communities”– should inform the general public about what is happening. Loudly. As he says, “The more widely known this becomes, the more salient it becomes, the worse it will get for those people who are pushing these cuts, or at least trying to make them permanent through the 2026 budget process.”

Trump and Musk gave carte blanche to know-it-all interns who have no comprehension of how science or government works. Millions of Americans will suffer unnecessarily as a result.

Welcome to MAGA (Morons Are Governing America) world.

Comments

Protection Of Religion?

Well well well…I think the veil has just come off the Indiana GOP’s pious concern for (certain) religious beliefs. 

Indiana media outlets have reported on a Church “Bill of Rights” recently authored by two of the state’s most embarrassing Christian Nationalist officials, Todd Rokita and Micah Beckwith. Interestingly, that document mostly focused on the churches’ “rights” to engage in specified political advocacy: How churches can participate in the electoral process; what election-related activities a church can engage in without risking the loss of its tax-exempt status; whether the First Amendment offers any protection to churches when they engage in election-related activities; and whether religious objections to vaccines are protected in the workplace. In other words, the document outlines how much protection the law offers churches that want to engage in far-Right political advocacy.

But what about legal protections for religions pursuing more progressive values? Well, as the saying goes, that is a horse of a different color….

For those churches, “Christian” Warrior Todd Rokita has a very different message. The media has recently reported on Rokita’s “investigation” of Notre Dame, an effort to determine whether that institution might be–horrors of horrors–engaging in the DEI practices forbidden by the Trump administration.

DEI–like “woke”–is a term adopted as an all-purpose (and highly pejorative) epithet describing people who believe that their God and/or their understanding of moral behavior requires efforts to ameliorate past injustices, to foster equal treatment, and to welcome all persons to full participation in the civic enterprise. 

Rokita has informed the Catholic university that

Publicly available materials suggest that various aspects of Notre Dame’s operations may be governed by University policies that treat individuals—including students, prospective students, faculty, staff, and job applicants…differently based on the individuals’ race or ethnicity… employ race in a negative manner… or utilize racial stereotyping.”

The letter directly threatens Notre Dame’s non-profit status.

Failure to correct such policies and bring them into compliance with state and federal law could result in legal action by my office pursuant to Indiana Code § 23-17-24. I ask that the University respond to the questions contained herein to assist my office in evaluating whether further action is warranted to ensure Notre Dame is acting consistent with the terms of its nonprofit status. 

You might wonder what happened to Rokita and Beckwith’s purported concerns for the ability of religious organizations to follow their beliefs without legal concerns or government harassment. (That’s a sarcastic question, because the answer is obvious.)

It seems that our Christian Nationalist officials are only concerned to protect certain religions. 

This contempt for citizens who follow non-fundamentalist and non-Christian religions is hardly new to Indiana. When the state passed its ban on abortion (following a Dobbs decision that ignored precedent while reflecting Justice Alito’s Rightwing Christianity), our “pious” legislators ignored testimony that other religions disagreed with Christian fundamentalists about such terminations. Jewish and liberal Protestant clergy objected to the ban on religious liberty grounds, noting that the obvious basis of the legislation was religious dogma from some–but certainly not all– religious traditions, and that the application of the ban to people of other religions (or none) was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Silly folks! In Indiana, our elected “faith warriors” protect only the “real” religions–those that support their theocratic political ambitions.

The juxtaposition of these two announcements–the issuance of the “Church Bill of Rights” and the investigation of Notre Dame–perfectly illustrates the Christian Right agenda: If your religion teaches you that God wants Republicans in office, that He (in these churches, God is most definitely a White male) wants women and minority folks to be submissive and subservient–why then, the laws of the land will be interpreted to protect you.

If, however, your religion happens to teach that all people–even women and those with dark skin (Beckwith’s three-fifths)– are entitled to human dignity, and that all persons should be welcomed and treated as equals in our various communities, such beliefs are not entitled to legal protection.

And if you happen to fall within the growing number of “nones”–if you depend upon a considered philosophy or moral framework to guide your interactions with your fellow humans, rather than adopting the dogma of a particular organized religion–our elected theocrats will simply ignore your right to intellectual autonomy, a right protected by the real Bill of Rights.

Have I mentioned how obvious and embarrassing these people are?

Comments

Taxes And Spending

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on this blog. But let’s talk about economics and Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reported, despite the GOP’s pious (and entirely bogus) expressed concerns about the deficit, the speed with which Congressional Republicans are trying to pass this monstrosity is rooted in their effort to avoid widespread recognition of what it actually does. The bill blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and connected, and it does so by sticking it to the needy, via draconian cuts to Medicaid.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that extending the tax cuts for the already-rich will cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. (And in an especially despicable twist, the tax cuts would go into effect immediately but the cuts to Medicaid wouldn’t hit until 2029, after both the midterms and the 2028 election.)

The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”

The difficulty in passing this monstrosity has been the insistence of hardline Republicans that the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP weren’t draconian enough.

It’s a standard Republican accusation that federal spending is out of control, but as Richardson notes, discretionary spending has actually fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has really caused rising deficits were the Bush and Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman described the Big Beautiful Bill as a “big tax giveaway to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans,” writing that the measure’s cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards, and noting that it relies on

claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas. And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

Krugman writes that this slashing of Medicaid will cause almost inconceivable hardship to the bottom 40 percent of Americans, especially to the poorest fifth. (Medicaid actually covers far more Americans than Medicare, including 39 percent of the nation’s children.)

Among the ways Republicans will slash Medicaid is by requiring that adult Medicaid recipients be gainfully employed — or, as Krugman points out, “more accurately, that they demonstrate to the satisfaction of government bureaucrats that they are gainfully employed, which is not at all the same thing.”

The belief that many Americans receiving government support are malingering, that they could and should be working but are choosing to be lazy, is a classic zombie idea. That is, like the claim that cutting taxes on the rich will unleash an economic miracle, it’s a doctrine that should be long dead. It has, after all, been proved wrong by experience again and again.

But right-wingers simply refuse to accept the reality that almost everyone on Medicaid is either a child, a senior, disabled or between jobs.

The evidence from state efforts to impose work requirements shows that–while such rules don’t get presumably “lazy” people to work–they do  take benefits away from people who are legally entitled to them through onerous paperwork and administrative barriers. 

If Republicans really cared about deficits, they’d tax the rich, not screw over the poor. They could begin by simply enforcing current tax rates, which our plutocrats evade to the tune of 150 billion dollars a year.

Your GOP at work…..

Comments

More Of This, Please!

If there was any lingering doubt that MAGA and Trumpism are rooted in racism, the extension of refugee status to White South Africans–at the same time Trump rescinded the similar status of vetted Afghans who had, at significant risk, worked with U.S. forces during the war–should put an end to it. That “in your face” evidence joins the administration’s barely-less-obvious measures to “protect” White folks from perceived victimhood: the dismissal of Blacks and Women from positions of authority (and their replacement with laughingly unqualified Whites), the scrubbing of websites documenting the achievements of women and minorities, and especially the disgraceful and dishonest all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

An embarrassing number of institutions have folded under that attack, but others have not. Vernon shared an entirely appropriate response to the federal government’s anti-DEI demand from one school superintendent.

Here is that letter.

___________-

To Whom It May (Unfortunately) Concern at the U.S. Department of Education:

Thank you for your April 3 memorandum, which I read several times — not because it was legally persuasive, but because I kept checking to see if it was satire. Alas, it appears you are serious.

You’ve asked me, as superintendent of a public school district, to sign a “certification” declaring that we are not violating federal civil rights law — by, apparently, acknowledging that ci1vil rights issues still exist. You cite Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, then proceed to argue that offering targeted support to historically marginalized students is somehow discriminatory.

That’s not just legally incoherent — it’s a philosophical Möbius strip of bad faith.

Let me see if I understand your logic:

If we acknowledge racial disparities, that’s racism.

If we help English learners catch up, that’s favoritism.

If we give a disabled child a reading aide, we’re denying someone else the chance to struggle equally.

And if we train teachers to understand bias, we’re indoctrinating them — but if we train them to ignore it, we’re “restoring neutrality”?

How convenient that your sudden concern for “equal treatment” seems to apply only when it’s used to silence conversations about race, identity, or inequality.

Let’s talk about our English learners. Would you like us to stop offering translation services during parent-teacher conferences? Should we cancel bilingual support staff to avoid the appearance of “special treatment”? Or would you prefer we just teach all content in English and hope for the best, since acknowledging linguistic barriers now counts as discrimination?

And while we’re at it — what’s your official stance on IEPs? Because last I checked, individualized education plans intentionally give students with disabilities extra support. Should we start removing accommodations to avoid offending the able-bodied majority? Maybe cancel occupational therapy altogether so no one feels left out?

If a student with a learning disability receives extended time on a test, should we now give everyone extended time, even if they don’t need it? Just to keep the playing field sufficiently flat and unthinking?

Your letter paints equity as a threat. But equity is not the threat. It’s the antidote to decades of failure. Equity is what ensures all students have a fair shot. Equity is what makes it possible for a child with a speech impediment to present at the science fair. It’s what helps the nonverbal kindergartner use an AAC device. It’s what gets the newcomer from Ukraine the ESL support she needs without being left behind.

And let’s not skip past the most insulting part of your directive — the ten-day deadline. A national directive sent to thousands of districts with the subtlety of a ransom note, demanding signatures within a week and a half or else you’ll cut funding that supports… wait for it… low-income students, disabled students, and English learners.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. A moral victory for bullies and bureaucrats everywhere.

So no, we will not be signing your “certification.”

We are not interested in joining your theater of compliance.

We are not interested in gutting equity programs that serve actual children in exchange for your political approval.

We are not interested in abandoning our legal, ethical, and educational responsibilities to satisfy your fear of facts.

We are interested in teaching the truth.

We are interested in honoring our students’ identities.

We are interested in building a school system where no child is invisible, and no teacher is punished for caring too much.

And yes — we are prepared to fight this. In the courts. In the press. In the community. In Congress, if need be.

Because this district will not be remembered as the one that folded under pressure.

We will be remembered as the one that stood its ground — not for politics, but for kids.

Still Teaching. Still Caring. Still Not Signing.

_________________

May that Superintendent’s tribe increase.

Comments

Justice Souter

David Souter died earlier this month.

When George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, I watched the confirmation hearings on television. I saw a brilliant, thoughtful jurist. His purported “evolution” on the high court bench didn’t surprise me; his jurisprudence remained grounded in precedent and reverence for what I call the American Idea.

A few years after he retired from the Court, I was fortunate enough to attend a small conference on civic literacy at Harvard Law School, convened by then-Dean Martha Minow. Both Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor participated, and I was especially impressed by Souter’s remarks. I asked him if he would allow a copy to be published in the Journal of Civic Literacy –a publication of the Center I’d established at IUPUI (now IU-Indy). He graciously agreed. That was in 2013, and his observations have become even more pertinent.

Here they are.

____________________________________ 

Dean Minow: Nearly three years ago, Justice Souter gave a truly extraordinary commencement address here at Harvard, upon receiving an honorary degree. In his exploration of the tensions among the values embodied in the United States Constitution, he offered deep insights into important decision making by the Supreme Court and equally conveyed the hard work that is necessary to advance the values of democracy and freedom, individual rights, and democratic participation. We are so touched and honored by your participation here today, which I know reflects your admiration and affection for your colleague, Justice O’Connor, and also your deep abiding commitment to this subject [civics]. Why does it matter to you so much?

Justice Souter: I’ve come by stages, I guess, to the answer. I’ll take you through the stages. By the way, I should issue two disclaimers to begin with. The first is, we are talking about civics and I’m going to talk in terms of civics. But, you cannot have civics without history. So, I might just as well be making the argument for history. The second disclaimer is, I don’t mean to take positions in the pedagogy controversy. I don’t know how to teach, I don’t know where the proper midpoint is between interactive learning and book learning and participatory exercises and so on. I’m not taking a position there. Maybe with one exception, and that is, if you’re going to test in math and reading you better test in civics or it’s going to be a poor child of the curriculum.

On the question why I think it matters, as I’ve said, I’ve come to my feelings by stages and the first stage was set by Justice O’Connor at a series of conferences she and Justice Breyer sponsored in Washington, provoked by the concern for the independence of the courts. The judiciary at the time was under a lot of attack and almost from the beginning the thing we learned there was the degree of civic illiteracy. We learned the statistic, which I believe is still true today, that there are only about a third of the people in the United States who can name the three branches of government. And the lesson that everyone learned was that without some knowledge of the structure, without, frankly, some constitutional knowledge, the value of an independent judiciary is a value that makes no sense. Independent from whom? From what? Well, we know the answer. The rest of the government, etcetera.

But, the first point of focus that came to me was that without a bedrock grounding in a lot of fundamentals that my own generation did learn as kids, constitutional values will frequently make no sense because there is no context for them.

The second stage of thinking why this subject of civics matters has come as a result of the recent calls for constitutional amendment and constitutional change, which we have been getting from all corners. There have been calls for an amendment in response to Roe v. Wade, calls for an amendment in response to the Citizens United campaign contribution limitation decision, calls for change in response to the possibility of a disparity between the Electoral College vote and the popular vote, and so on. It’s pretty obvious that someone who has no idea of what we have in the Constitution to start with is in no position to make any kind of critical judgment about what we might change, whether we ought to change it, and if so what change we ought or ought not to make. Ignorance is no foundation for constitutional thinking but, like it or not, we are being asked as a country to engage in constitutional thinking. None of it may in fact lead to a formally proposed amendment, let alone a convention, but who knows. So, I guess the second point in my feeling was about what is at stake: simply the need for a foundation for critical judgment on the part of citizens.

But finally, I’ve come, to a third, umbrella position, which certainly subsumes the two stages that I’ve already mentioned. And I will warn you right now that my ultimate line is like the remarks of several other people here this morning. Let me make my point this way. The American constitutional system is in effect a constant exercise in balancing, and perhaps a precarious balancing, between two very fundamental tendencies in American society and American political organization: the tendency to fragment into pursuit of individual interests and the tendency to pull together.

I could spend a long time this morning, which I won’t, simply cataloging what seems to me the growing force of the former sort, the centrifugal tendencies that pull us apart. Just think about these.To begin with, the very nature of the United States as it has developed is a conglomeration of fragmenting tendencies. We do not have a national religion. We do not have a homogenized national private culture, as distinct from political culture. We are in fact an amalgamation. We are a patchwork. We are a nation of immigrants, and people remember where they came from, whether they look back one generation or fourteen. There is a disuniting tendency built into the very nature of the United States, and it’s not going to go away. And I don’t suppose there’s anyone who wants it to go away entirely. I don’t.

Number two, there is great force in a philosophical tenant that we like to think of as ours. It’s not a coincidence that Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American. Consider the notion of Emersonian individualism, Emersonian self-reliance. They feed a kind of admirably atomistic tendency that I suppose can be called a widely shared character, a powerful element of our scrambled culture.

Number three, we are living at a time when the class divide in the United States is growing larger and the possibility of bridging that class divide is in fact shrinking. We are at a point now where the spread of wealth disparity is greater than it has been for over a century. And it is now a very unfortunate fact of life in the United States that social mobility is greater in a number of European countries than it is in this one. Parents in the United States cannot assume that their children have a real opportunity to be better off than they were.

Number four, there is an increasingly apparent divisiveness inherent in current developments in the news media. You can cherry-pick the news you want on the device that you hold in your hand. A substantial portion of the country is not even exposed to the breadth of traditional newspapers.

And, finally, I’ll stop by simply echoing what others have said about the growing tendency toward cynicism about the processes of government for which there is a very good foundation. Too many people are realistically looking upon government as basically a clash between a public interest and more powerful interests, exerting power through lobbies financed by huge amounts of money, with the names of the people behind them being to a great extent undisclosed. These are conditions, historical and contemporary, that drive us apart and tend to disunite us. What have we got pulling on the other side? By and large, what we have pulling on the other side is an adherence to an American Constitutional system. The American Constitution is not simply a blueprint for structure, though it is that. It is not merely a Bill of Rights, though it is that, too. It is in essence, a value system, a value system that identifies the legitimate objects of power, the importance of distributing power, and the need to limit power by a shared and enforceable conception of human worth.

That value system is the counterpoise to the divisive tendencies that are so strong today, and civic ignorance is its enemy. It is beyond me how anyone can assume that our system of constitutional values is going to survive in the current divisive atmosphere while being unknown to the majority of the people of the United States. So, what is driving me right now is simply the indispensability of our increasingly unrecognized and ignored constitutional value system. Without it, there is no chance of overcoming, of surviving the polarization that everyone decries. It is only in the common acceptance of that value system that at the end of the day, no matter what we are fighting about, no matter what the vote is in Congress or the State House or the town meeting, we will still understand that something holds us together.

Ultimately, what is driving me in working for the renewal of civic education is the need to share the threatened aspirations that should mark us as people who belong together as a nation.   

___________________________________

Indeed.
 
 

Comments