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.
• A Trump executive order directed EPA to consider reopening its finding that greenhouse gases cause harmful climate change – 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• Trump repealed a Biden executive order protecting scientific integrity.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.
• 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.
• 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.

climate denialism, environmental science, Trump Administration, vaccine denial, war on science