Undermining Science in the Name of Ideology
There’s no room in MAGA for free scientific inquiry.
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- Trump repealed a Biden executive order protecting scientific integrity.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.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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Refusing entry into the country to a scientist from France who was going to attend a conference in Houston because he had texts on his phone (chilling that they can ask you to show them the contents of your phone) criticizing science funding cuts – draconian.
What is the land of the free becoming in front of our very eyes!!!
Very well documented reasons why Trump controlled republican politicians that control Washington refuse to meet the challenges of climate change to protect quality of life future for our newest generations Dan.
Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Lessons of History” concludes you are our last resort for saving our civilization.
The most important question thus remains, why don’t intellectual leaders, such as those at UC, provide leadership to protect our civilization from out of control climate changes by expediting the implementation of solutions that will protect us from major disasters that are already killing large numbers of people around the planet?
I see the universities, especially public ones and those doing research, being extremely reluctant to do anything that might anger The King or his DOGEs. They’re already losing grants; losing everything at once or being threatened with it as an extortion measure certainly restricts the desire to say something. I could even extend that to people who are retired, but receiving Social Security: their benefits could be at risk due to “mistakes” by the administration that can’t be corrected if they become too well known as The Opposition (“Loyal” to the Constitution perhaps, but not to The Donald).