Undermining Science in the Name of Ideology

The Trump Administration seemingly views scientific research as a threat.  The result has been a wave of censorship and a general effort to undermine the scientific enterprise.  I’ve been compiling a list of anti-science actions. Despite being incomplete, the list seems to be growing quickly.

• For an extended period, the National Institutes of Health was effectively shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing crucial data. NIH announced it was cutting $250 million in research grants to Columbia with no legal justification.
• EPA is shutting down its research office.
• A Trump executive order directed EPA to consider reopening its finding that greenhouse gases cause harmful climate change, which EPA is now planning to do – despite hundreds if not thousands of scientific papers supporting the finding.
• The Trump EPA fired every member of two important and highly respected scientific advisory boards.
• Trump repealed a Biden executive order protecting scientific integrity.
• The EPA took down an online screening tool with analytical data about cancer risk and pollution exposure in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. EPA is now planning to close its database on toxic chemicals.
• NSF officials have flagged any research project that contains words like “women” and “historically.”
• Some agencies have scrubbed all mentions of climate change from their websites.
• Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose views are often detached from the scientific evidence, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy continues to advocate quack remedies such as cod liver oil for measles.
• The CDC’a research journal has been coopted by political appointees.

The climate for science in America was bad in Trump’s first term, as I wrote in a 2019 post. It promises to be worse this time around.