War On Science in Overdrive

The real operation warp speed.
Ignorance with urgency.

Paul Krugman on Substack:

It was obvious, if you thought about it, that the second Trump administration would be hostile to science and intellectual endeavor in general.

After all, look at some key elements of the MAGA coalition. Fossil fuel interests don’t want anyone studying climate change. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones make much of their money selling quack medical remedies, which makes them hostile to conventional medicine. (And partisan orientation became a key factor determining whether people were willing to be vaccinated against Covid.) Practitioners of voodoo economics don’t want anyone looking into the actual results of cutting taxes on the rich. Nativists proclaiming an immigrant crime wave don’t want anyone examining who commits violent crimes. And so on.

Even so, the extreme nature of the assault has caught almost everyone by surprise. American scientific leadership and the prestige of our research universities are key pillars of U.S. power and prosperity. Corporate America certainly understands that our scientific and educational institutions contribute to its bottom line. So you might have expected even MAGA enthusiasts to be a bit cautious about killing this particular golden-egg-laying goose.

You would have been wrong. Everything points to an effort to effectively destroy U.S. science — not gradually as part of a long-term plan, but over the next year or two.

Start with the money. The preliminary budget the Trump administration released last month called for a cut of almost 40 percent in funding for the National Institutes of Health, more than 50 percent in the budget of the National Science Foundation, the virtual elimination of federal spending on climate and ecological research and a drastic cut in NASA’s research budget. All of this was for fiscal 2026, which begins in October — that is, something like half the federal government’s financial support for science would be eliminated within a few months.

Donald Ingber in The Scientist:

he Trump administration has launched an unprecedented attack on science by targeting research activities at many leading universities. I was on the frontlines at Harvard when the first missiles fell. As Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, I received stop-work orders on three government contracts within five hours after Harvard rejected the administration’s unprecedented demands for ideological control of the university on April 14. I am the principal investigator on two Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) contracts, totaling nearly $20 million, that were stopped. One project focused on leveraging human organ chip technology to develop novel radiation countermeasure drugs. In the other project, we intended to employ these chips to investigate the effects of microgravity by lining them with cells from astronauts participating in the upcoming ARTEMIS II lunar mission and flying the chips alongside them. David Walt, a recent recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Biden, is the principal investigator on the third contract from NIH that was also stopped midstream. He was developing a groundbreaking approach to detect Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases using just a drop of blood. Now, this potentially life-changing technology will not move forward—a major loss for patients and their families. 

This initial damage was significant, but we at Harvard have experienced repeated strikes in the weeks that followed. Two weeks ago, the NIH, NSF, DoD, and other government funding agencies terminated their grants to Harvard. This week, the US General Services Administration notified the universities that all government contracts with Harvard will end immediately. This wave of attacks has resulted in the cessation of research on disease mechanisms, abrupt cancellation of ongoing clinical studies, compromise of clinical data repositories, and potentially meaningless euthanasia of multiple non-human primates. These actions were accompanied by proposals to reduce indirect cost reimbursement to 15 percent, which would cover only a fraction of the costs of doing business in science today, and to tax university endowments as much as 21 percent.