At the start of the cold war, Stalin did not overly worry about ideological conformity among his nuclear physicists, because he needed them too much. He “may well have been mad but he was not stupid,” said the historian Tony Judt.
Donald Trump may or may not be mad, but his stupidity is plain enough in the havoc he has unleashed on American science. His pointless and vindictive assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes (read: trying to broaden the pool of scientific talent) is, to use a Trumpian word, nasty. His edict that words like “climate” might be grounds for rejection in funding applications is anti-scientific idiocy. But the decisions to freeze and slash science funding could damage US science irreparably, trashing its world-leading status.
In an executive order of January 27, Trump froze federal loans and grants to universities, forcing institutions to tell staff not to travel, buy equipment, or plan new projects. “If somehow they are allowed to get away with this, the disruption is almost incalculable,” said the former science adviser to Barack Obama, John Holdren.
The freeze on funding applies also to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the umbrella government agency for much of the biomedical research in the US. Two federal lawsuits were immediately launched in response; one of them, by the National Council of Nonprofits, led a judge to demand just a day later that the order be revoked. To try to evade that ruling, the administration rescinded the original memo while stating that the executive orders themselves “remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented”. But the other court case, mounted by 22 state attorneys led by Massachusetts, led to a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting the funding freeze.
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has also vowed to cut “indirect costs” at NIH – meaning all the things needed to keep research going, such as building and administrative costs. The overhead for these costs is about 30-40% of the total research cost on average, but can be as high as 75%. Trump has demanded it be capped at 15%. Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, has said that “a sane government would never do this”.
If implemented, the cuts would mean, in effect, slowing or stopping a great deal of medical research. The Association of American Medical Colleges says the result would be that “Americans will have to wait longer for cures and our country will cede scientific breakthroughs to foreign competitors”. To put it another way: more people will die.
The National Science Foundation, the central grant-giving agency for US science, also announced a freeze on its grant money, meaning that some scientists would stop receiving not only funds for research but their salaries, too. The NSF also froze review panels, in effect saying it wouldn’t be considering new research applications for an unspecified period. Another court case ensued; another TRO ruled the funding freeze unlawful.
At the same time, databases and web pages are vanishing from government-run agencies. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken down health information relating to gender and diversity, while climate records have disappeared from the site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecasts and tracks weather and climate changes. Elon Musk and members of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to NOAA’s IT systems and are said to be scrutinising its data. NOAA has been told to review grants for projects including words like “climate change”, prompting fears that such research will be one of the prime targets of proposed massive cuts in its budget.
The response to these threats, demands and funding freezes from US scientific institutions and academies has been mostly woeful, even collusive. There’s a chilling German word for it: Gleichshaltung. Nasa has removed material that might be construed as relating to diversity (such as articles about women in space research), while the NSF is said to be scouring grants for “forbidden” keywords. After the American Society for Microbiology removed potentially “problematic” articles from its website, the society’s president admitted that “as a non-profit scientific society, we are a target in the current climate”. Make no mistake: these are ideological purges, even if without (so far) the threat of the gulag.
The story is changing daily. At the time of writing, Trump seems intent on ignoring the TROs, which should precipitate a major constitutional crisis. Who intervenes when the executive is acting unlawfully? That no one seems too sure about the answer sums up the current state of the United States.
