According to the news article in Damage Assessment (paywall that may be surmounted by registration) in Science by Jeffrey Mervis, the stated goals of Trump v2.0 have been consistent and were implicit during Trump v1.0. These have been: (1) shrink the size and scope of the federal government, (2) expand the power of the presidency, (3) restrict immigration, and (4) crack down on top U.S. universities for allegedly promoting a far-left ideology that hates the United States. Here we will concentrate on the consequences for American science:
But Trump has come much closer to achieving those goals since returning to the White House one year ago, and the toll on the U.S. research establishment has been heavy. To date it includes billions of dollars of academic research grants killed or frozen; long delays in grant reviews; hundreds of canceled programs, notably those said to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and combat climate change; the departure of thousands of government employees; and a restructuring of several science agencies.
Basic scientists, who in the United States depend upon public support of their research, have been fairly shocked by it all. They should not have been, but more on that at the end. Mervis asked several former leaders of the US scientific establishment for their views, including Neal Lane, Director of the National Science Foundation during the Clinton Administration, and Elias Zerhouni, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine radiologist who was Director of the National Institutes of Health under George W. Bush.
According to Lane, a physicist now at Rice University, this list includes reduction in overhead payments that support research and the disappearance or withholding of data that is the product of publicly supported research, and basically “It’s an attack on anything that doesn’t conform to Trump’s political agenda.” Zerhouni “agrees the situation is perilous but is willing to give this White House the benefit of the doubt. “When I talk to people in this administration, they tell me: ‘No, we don’t want America to lose its supremacy in science and technology’…But the reality is that we’re facing a perfect storm threatening a research ecosystem that has existed since 1945.”
Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation presents a definitive description of the current situation: “There’s Muskism, there’s Voughtism, and there’s Trumpism.”
Muskism was the foundation of the faux-but-active Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with “its slash-and-burn tactics to lay off government workers, terminate grants and contracts, and eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other units of government. DOGE was not really a department of the federal government, but the damage done was significant.” Elon Musk has not been a “special government employee” for some time and Muskism has mostly fallen off the radar:
Although USAID [1] is unlikely to be resurrected anytime soon [but those depending on USAID support for their health and welfare will remain damaged], many of Musk’s professed goals are still unrealized. Musk relished issuing daily postings of how much “waste” DOGE had eliminated, for example, but it’s now believed that most of those numbers were exaggerated (and at times fictitious). And although DOGE staffers terminated or froze many grants and contracts and orchestrated a mass firing of newly hired or promoted federal employees at several research agencies, many of the most extreme moves were ultimately rescinded after federal judges ruled they were illegal. And some laid-off scientists were rehired.
“Eliminating waste is maybe a good idea, if you do it right,” (Atkinson) says. “But DOGE was never intended to be done right. It was done recklessly. And now it’s over.” Musk admitted in a recent interview that DOGE was only “somewhat successful” and that he “wouldn’t do it again.”
That DOGE never crossed the Potomac to delve into the muti-trillion-dollar behemoth that has not passed an audit in living memory (see the Monday link to Stephen Semler) is proof positive that DOGE was thoroughly performative. [2] Nevertheless, severe damage was done to those who were doing the scientific research and saw their careers evaporate as uncertainty forced universities and other research institutions to retrench. Once a project is stopped for any reason, it is often impossible to restart. I have experienced this, and more often than not, the activation energy to restart is simply not available. Are American scientists and international scientists who were working in the United States looking to Europe, China, Australia, and other places where they might be able to continue? Yes. Will this mean that American science loses its allure? That has already happened for those with alternatives. Can the damage be reversed? Possibly, but I doubt I will live to see it. One of the Right’s favorite little books is Ideas Have Consequences. Yes, they and the actions they prescribe do.
Elon Musk has always been successful by conventional measures, but he has also also been performative throughout (at 1:30), while failing to acknowledge that he has not succeeded all by his lone self. Voughtism refers to Russell Vought, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Russell Vought is the exact opposite of performative. Grover Norquist mused about his desire to shrink the government to a size “where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Russell Vought is in a position to do just that, and he aims to succeed:
Voughtism has the potential to leave a more lasting mark on the U.S. research enterprise. It draws inspiration from Project 2025, a 900-page policy road map for Trump’s second term released in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation. [3] Vought contributed to the plan, which calls for a government that is as small as possible in scope, budgets, and staffing.
“In Russ Vought’s world, spending money is the worst thing the government can do,” Atkinson says. That worldview envisions the president controlling all levers of government, including the legislative and judicial branches. “I think Vought and OMB are pushing the boundaries to see how far they can take that,” says Tony Mills, a science policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.
The Congress has not yet gone along with the president’s wishes to permanently slash the budgets of NIH and NSF by ~40%, but that is not reassuring to American scientists and their collaborators across the world. It seems that the president’s power of impoundment of appropriated budgets has not been completely settled since the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which was passed in response to Richard Nixon’s actions as he asserted his “authority to act on his own to withhold funds or curtail programs he opposed.” These came before Watergate but undoubtedly facilitated that idiocy. The modern imperial presidency has a long history:
In September 2025, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to impound $4 billion in foreign aid, and he’s promised to do it again, including perhaps at research agencies. If he does, the move will almost certainly trigger lawsuits that would give the Supreme Court another chance to weigh in.
Zerhouni believes a second Trump win before the high court could be catastrophic. “When I was at NIH, it never occurred to me that I could say we’re not paying for something that Congress had appropriated money for because it was not in line with my policies,” he recalls. “But if that power is given to the executive branch to use whenever it wants, then all bets are off.”
And this is where Trumpism enters the picture as “policies implemented unilaterally by (the president’s) administration, including mass deportations, removing environmental regulations, and unraveling DEI programs.” One could add the dissolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. All will be right with the ecosphere if you stop measuring things such as temperature, carbon dioxide and methane levels, particulate matter in the air, and heavy metals and forever chemicals in the ground and water.
DEI is a fraught subject for another time. Suffice it to say in the meantime that a gatekeeping exam such as the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) is not reliably predictive of academic achievement in medical school and has no relationship to professional performance as a resident physician-in-training or independent physician who has been licensed to practice medicine. Nor does undergraduate grade point average (GPA) predict very much. Still, the antipathy to DEI naturally led in other directions:
Trump’s attack on DEI also spawned a potentially precedent-setting August 2025 executive order that gives political appointees a larger say in federal grantmaking – another change that may endure. “They were still awarding a lot of DEI-related grants, and some grants in areas that were not priorities, like climate science,” the former White House official explains about the perception among her colleagues last summer. “So, the White House said, ‘Well, we have to put an administration official in there [at every agency] to enforce what we thought we’d already made clear.’”
The order begins by citing a list of “problematic grants” that, in Trump’s view, “propagate absurd ideologies … attack free speech … and work against American interests.” Research needs “strong oversight,” it states, to prevent agencies from continuing to fund those types of grants. Some science advocates worry future presidents, regardless of party or ideology, may want to retain such control, accelerating a decades-old trend of expanding presidential authority.
But one thing to keep in mind about the harmful/irrelevant/unnecessary/un-American “influence” of DEI in publicly supported research is that until 2025 a research proposal to the National Science Foundation would not even be considered without the final page (of 15) devoted to “Broader Impacts.” I just reviewed one of my Broader Impacts sections entitled “Broader Impacts – Integration of Research and Education.” Among other things, these impacts included outreach to high school students. The goal was to include these students in research to show them that biology is something other than words and pictures they find in the textbook. Many of these students whose parents did not attend college would otherwise have been none the wiser, for reasons obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to feel. The research would have advanced our knowledge while reaching out to the public. Alas, the grant was not funded. But the intention was public-spirited and scientifically sound (overall Excellent in grantspeak but unfortunately “Excellent” is terrible; only “Outstanding” works, and the fine distinction depends solely on the reviewer and the Program Director).
This antipathy to DEI lead to an absurd obsession with something members of the Trump administration have repeatedly called “gold standard science.” This is described in another executive order, Restoring Gold Standard Science. [4] Trumpian gold standard science will be:
- Reproducible
- Transparent
- Communicative of error and uncertainty
- Collaborative and interdisciplinary
- Skeptical of its findings and assumptions
- Structured for falsifiability of hypotheses
- Subject to unbiased peer review
- Accepting of negative results as positive outcomes
- Without conflicts of interest
This, of course, is a perfect description of science without the superfluous Trumpian modifier. We should also remember that the gold standard is an economic fetish not unlike the stone money of Yap Island. It’s not just me. Stone money has been likened to the gold standard by none other than Milton Friedman (direct link to pdf). Not one scientist would dispute any of these nine descriptors, as we have discussed here several times. [5] There is absolutely nothing new here. From the article:
Many researchers saw the order as a thinly disguised effort to further undermine public confidence in the scientific community by criticizing current practices. “What I found offensive is that the standards were presented as if they were something new,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison microbiologist Jo Handelsman, who served in the White House under former President Barack Obama. “We’ve always lived by those principles.
Not so, says Mark Lewis, an aerospace engineer who was a senior Pentagon research official during Trump’s first term and now leads an applied research center at Purdue University. Lewis thinks academics have been too focused on science for its own sake rather than on the broader goals – to strengthen national defense, accelerate economic growth, and improve public health – outlined in a 1945 report to then-President Harry Truman as the rationale for sustained federal funding of university research. The prevailing research culture is at “the root of a lot of what’s wrong with U.S. science,” asserts Lewis, who sees Trump’s executive order as a good-faith attempt to update that 80-year-old relationship.
No. This executive order is a bad faith attempt to destroy an 80-year-old relationship that made American science the envy of the world. The 1945 report to President Truman was written by Vannevar Bush of MIT. This has also been discussed here previously several times. Here, for example (please excuse the self-citation):
During the final summer of World War II Vannevar Bush, who was leader of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the White House, wrote a report for President Truman that he called Science, the Endless Frontier. The report was recently republished with an introductory chapter by Rush Holt, Jr, a physicist and was an 8-term congressman from New Jersey from 1999 to 2015. Although Vannevar Bush was primarily an engineer, he appreciated that science, engineering, and technology are not one and the same, but that each is dependent upon the other. Science, the Endless Frontier was a thoroughgoing brief for basic scientific research, explaining why government support of science was an essential component contributing to the wellbeing of all.
A major result of the Bush report was the establishment of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950, followed by the transformation of what began as the Hygienic Laboratory in 1887 into the National Institutes of Health (NIH) we know today, with its 27 separate centers and institutes and a budget of $42B in 2020. Although the Cold War tended to subvert certain priorities, a topic for another time, the Golden Age of American Science from the 1950s through the 1990s was real. Although there were ups and downs associated with budgetary constraints and politics, and there has always been some logrolling among the chosen, both agencies funded what Karl Popper would have called “good science” that was directed at answering interesting questions of what was once called “natural history.” I am a biologist by temperament and vocation…I will briefly tell a story of biological research that would be characterized today by reviewers and program officers at funding agencies using the killer epithet “descriptive,” but nevertheless resulted in knowledge that revolutionized cell biology in remarkable and entirely unforeseeable ways.
With all due respect, Dr. Lewis of Purdue University misses the point of Science: The Endless Frontier, as it has been understood for eighty years. Basic scientific research for its own sake is the foundation upon which his “broader goals – to strengthen national defense, accelerate economic growth, and improve public health” are based. There are no reliable shortcuts. Does this mean that basic science “fails” sometimes? Of course it does, because one cannot know the outcomes before the experiments. And sometimes the outcomes are not appreciated for a long time. Peyton Rous was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1966 for cancer research he first published in 1910.
But this does not mean that how science is funded and carried out cannot be improved. And this is where the current scientific community has made serious errors. While the so-called replication crisis has been overblown, scientists have not taken it upon themselves to explain why. It is also true that private funding agencies generally limit the overhead rate on their grants to 15%. But it is also true that these agencies require a laboratory to have funding from NIH or other sources so that the research can be done if the grant is awarded. I have served on and chaired these review panels for over twenty years. I cannot remember one that was funded in the absence or strong support already in place. These usually small grants are the icing on the cake that is a research program – sweet and useful but not the cake. This also leads back to Vannevar Bush’s vision of spreading the scientific wealth instead of keeping it in one place, Bethesda, Maryland, for example. The overall overhead rate for individual NIH grants averages ~50% but the total for all NIH funding is about 30%. And the universities and medical schools have built the infrastructure required, not the government.
As we have also discussed in Gresham’s Law Comes for Science, too many working scientists have come to lead publication factories rather than research laboratories, and the scientific literature has been debased in an open-access, pay-to-publish-anything environment. Peer review has deteriorated. The handling of COVID-19 by scientists and politicians was bungled. But, the way to improve science is not to tear it down with no plan for what comes after, other than satisfaction. Thus, one hopes that Robert Atkinson is correct:
The Trump administration’s assault on science might have an upside if it prompts some introspection by the academic research community. The ideas animating the Make America Great Again movement will be “around for a long, long time…So universities (and by extension all scientists) need to ask themselves how they got into this situation and what they need to do to get out of it. Right now, most of them are in denial.”
Denial is the correct term. If the United States is to retain a leading role, not necessarily the leading role, in scientific research in all disciplines from particle physics to microbiology to anthropology to cosmology, introspection on our part as scientists is essential. Those in charge at the moment are not serious scientists, but they are doing serious damage, here as an example. My colleagues and I, who are not part of some radical far left that hates America, opened the door for them and stepped aside. Hubris, especially when covered in overweening PMC self-regard, never leads to good outcomes.
Notes
[1] USAID was an appurtenance of the Deep State, but much of the work it did around the world was also a projection of so-called American “soft power” that fed the hungry and healed the sick.
[2] But one must suppose it would have been more difficult for a DOGE man like the 19-year-old Big Balls to get past armed and well-trained soldiers at the entrance to the Pentagon than an unarmed security guard at the readily accessible front door of the National Science Foundation (jpg), also across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia.
[3] Heritage Foundation is just one of many gifts of the Powell Memo that keeps on giving. Justice Powell’s other gifts are described in Merchants of Doubt.
[4] I suppose it might be tacky to note the president is enamored with the color gold? But here is the evidence.
[5] Beginning with my first formal contribution to Naked Capitalism the practice of science has been a continuing theme here. I was present before the modern creation began with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Bayh-Dole was first mentioned in Why Trust Science in the 21st Century? An Object Lesson. That post covers something the current administration does not want to talk about, and they are taking direct action to prevent it with the planned dissolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR is a disquieting source of climate alarmism according to none other than Russell Vought.
