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- Trump repealed a Biden executive order protecting scientific integrity.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.