Views from the front lines of Trump's war on the science community

The Trump administration has unleashed a tsunami of budget cuts to federal science programs. Mass firings have taken place at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, part of a deliberate decimation of research staff across the federal government.

Since January, the administration has systematically cut science funding to its lowest level in decades and issued a flood of budget plans and executive orders that are reshaping how the government uses and supports science.

Some outcomes have been immediate and tragic, including staffing shortages that have left cancer patients stranded during experimental drug trials and delays in approving COVID-19 vaccines.

The extent of these actions is unprecedented. The administration for a time froze all grant funding at the National Science Foundation and abruptly terminated thousands of the ongoing projects that it funds, as well as those of the National Institutes of Health.

As scientists at leading research institutions, we have personally witnessed the effects of the administration's policies — including colleagues relocating overseas and students leaving research altogether.

Undergraduate science internship programs have been canceled, and graduate programs in many research universities paused. As a result, scientists are increasingly seeking jobs abroad.

The administration claims its goals are to increase efficiency and raise the standards of scientific research. In fact, thousands of programs and projects have been cut solely on the basis of ideologically motivated keyword searches, without any concern for their performance, design or conduct. That's not efficient.  

A Trump executive order issued in May underscores the purely political nature of these attacks. Titled "Restoring Gold Standard Science," the order puts hand-picked presidential appointees into every agency to review and "correct" any evidence or conclusions with which they disagree. That's not scientific.

Further, many of the administration's policies effectively punish researchers simply for asking discomfiting questions and punish institutions for teaching about unpopular ideas. 

Viewed together, these outline a political strategy toward science that is both systematic and dangerous: a full-scale war on the scientific community, the network of individual researchers across many institutions whose collaboration is essential for scientific progress.

Despite the media stereotype of a lone genius in a lab coat, science is really a communal activity.  As Isaac Newton, one of the most important scientists of all time, wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” 

Every research project builds on foundational theory, tested methods and vetted findings created and refined through previous research.

And every scientist depends on the distributed efforts of an extensive community to vet and review manuscripts for publication and proposals for new research, maintain common journals, databases and tools needed to share and build upon knowledge and educate and train the next generation of talent who help operate their labs. 

Institutions of higher education are the traditional hosts for the scientific community in the U.S, providing an independent forum for developing and refining ideas, an environment for training students and infrastructure for labs and shared resources. For more than 80 years, U.S. society has partnered with these institutions to foster a healthy scientific community. 

Federal funding enabled universities to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary for scientific research and support the most promising students. The scientific community collaborated to evaluate proposals for research across fields, ensuring resources were directed to the highest-quality projects, independent of political and institutional bias.

No system is perfect, but the external scientific community has successfully partnered with the government to provide independent guidance and vetting — balancing competing interests and perspectives to evaluate proposals, advise the agencies that set funding priorities, accredit the programs that train researchers, review research findings and publish research results. 

Scientists within the government participate in the larger scientific community, reinforcing community standards as they move between jobs, and preserve the autonomy to ask scientific questions and share their findings. 

The administration’s policies represent a three-fold attack on the scientific community. 

First, the administration aims to directly seize control over the key community functions that support scientific independence: Administrative actions have politicized the review processes for funding at National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, suppressed scientific data and withdrawn support for students. 

Second, the administration aims to subdue universities that provide an independent home for the community by weaponizing institutional accreditation and student visas, threatening individual institutions and their leadership when they are slow to align with the administration's ideology. 

Third, the administration is isolating scientists and scientific functions within the government. 

It does so by sidelining scientific expertise, firing entire independent expert advisory panels, canceling government access to scientific journals, preventing government scientists from publishing in them and, now, subjecting scientific analysis to systematic political modification and censorship.

The government’s war against science is a disaster for both. Without intellectual and political independence, the scientific community can’t function effectively to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems. 

It's magical thinking for politicians to expect to receive truthful answers about the world when they poll to find the most popular answer, pay to get the answers they want or ignore data they dislike. And it's anti-democratic when political leaders dictate whether questions, data, and conclusions are appropriately scientific.

Society needs science to tackle complex problems and to teach others how to do so. Science doesn't function without a healthy scientific community. 

As citizens, we should debate what problems are essential. As voters, we should decide which problems deserve public research funding. As free people, we should not tolerate political attacks on science and the scientific community. 

Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT's Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, MIT Libraries. Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.