Trump and his throwback henchmen have set scientific research back for decades. This piece from the Atlantic (gift link) spells it out and it’s just so depressing:
Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.
So much of scientific discovery is research for research’s sake and these weirdos are either biased toward snake oil nonsense or committed to short term profits. It will slow down progress significantly.
Of course these crackpots don’t care about that.
In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”
I think you can see what their priorities are.
I thought this was particularly poignant:
Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.
The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.
We won’t be doing that anymore because it doesn’t prioritize “evidence-based research with real health impact.” In other words, pure scientific research is worthless to these cretins. And even within their narrow parameters, they will not be looking at anything that might be considered DEI, which means health issues that might impact certain populations that aren’t white and male. (I’m not kidding, they even told the NIH to eliminate all research that contained the words gender and female — and obviously anything that applied specifically to populations like LGBTQ, African Americans etc.)
The funding can be restored but as with everything else having to do with our government, the trust is gone. Now that we know that cranks, charlatans and theocratic extremists can wreak such havoc in record time, scientists will no doubt think twice about pursuing long term basic research.
There’s just so much of this to reckon with that I truly wonder if our political system is capable of dealing with it all. I suspect more of it will be permanent than we might think and that’s just sad. All because too many people couldn’t stand the idea that others might just be entitled to an equal place in our society.
The reaction to “woke” and “DEI” has been so extreme that it’s shaken my faith in the progress I thought we had made in this country. It seems that rather than 2 steps forward, one step back, it’s actually one step forward two steps back. I hope I turn out to be wrong about that but I’m afraid I’ll be long gone before we find out.
.jpg){kind=link}