SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
science
'Real Danger in This Moment': 1,900 Scientists Issue SOS Over Trump's Attack
"The voice of science must not be silenced," the scientists wrote. "We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation's research enterprise is destroyed."
Mar 31, 2025
With an open letter Monday addressed to the American people, nearly 2,000 scientists sounded the alarm on U.S. President Donald Trump's "wholesale assault" on science—warning that his administration's actions threaten the talent pipeline for the country's future scientists, the nation's "scientific edge," and more.
The 1,900 scientists are all elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—a private, nongovernmental institution established by Congress in the 19th century that aims to "provide independent, objective advice to inform policy with evidence"—though speaking out as individuals in the letter and not the organizations for which they work, the signers represent some of the country's foremost scientists, engineers, and medical researchers.
"For over 80 years, wise investments by the U.S. government have built up the nation's research enterprise, making it the envy of the world," the scientists wrote. "Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds."
"We see real danger in this moment," they added. "We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation's scientific enterprise is being decimated."
Since Trump returned to the White House, funding for the National Institutes of Health—the largest biomedical research funding provider in the country—has plummeted by more than $3 billion compared with grants issued during the same period in 2024, according to The Washington Post.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also announced last week that it intends to lay off 10,000 full-time employees at the department in order to restructure the agency under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Also last week, HHS canceled more than $12 billion in federal funding for state health departments across the nation, money used to track infectious diseases and provide mental health services, addiction treatment, and other critical care.
Meanwhile, the administration has also cut funding on research into specific areas, like vaccine access and HIV/AIDs prevention in young people.
Robert Steinbrook, the health research group director at the watchdog Public Citizen, said Monday the open letter should be "a wake-up call for our leading scientific and medical organizations to show courage and speak out at this critical moment."
According to the scientists, "a climate of fear" has permeated the research community since Trump returned to the White House.
"Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding," they wrote.
The scientists are urging the public speak out against the Trump administration's "assault" on science and called on people to contact their lawmakers in Congress about the matter.
"The voice of science must not be silenced," they wrote. "We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation's research enterprise is destroyed."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Saving the EPA's Research Arm From Trump Will Save Lives
The scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.
Mar 27, 2025
When I was an undergraduate, I landed a paid internship that set me on a trajectory to a career in science policy—though of course I didn’t know it at the time. Like many college students, I had no idea what I wanted to do for work.
But my summer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development in North Carolina opened my eyes. The smart, thoughtful federal scientists I worked with were using their scientific expertise to serve the public good. It was a revelation for a student who wanted to choose a path that positively impacted the world.
Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.
Over the summer, I learned from a team of hard-working people about everything from pesticide research to health effects of air pollution to detecting water quality contamination. In my mentors, I saw their pride in being federal scientists, part of a robust scientific enterprise, and in advancing the public health and environmental mission of the EPA. I observed the tremendous impact they had improving environmental conditions for the nation, all because they chose to devote their expertise to federal service.
And after that experience, and throughout the years of my career at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and in government, I continued to witness firsthand the incredible impact of the EPA Office of Research and Development in Washington, D.C., and across the country.
What Does the Office Do?
The Research and Development Office is the scientific research arm of the EPA. Its scientists research and communicate the science that serves as the foundation for public health protections for the nation. The office’s work informs decisions on issues that affect our health: from groundbreaking work on the cumulative impacts of pollution on our bodies, to advancing detection and prevention of water and soil pollution, to air quality monitoring and modeling advances, and the integration of climate change and its effects across disciplines.
Despite a long record of world-class research and demonstrated success in its mission, the Trump administration has indicated plans to close the Research and Development Office. But the scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.
Earlier this spring, UCS organized and delivered a sign-on letter from 54 scientific societies representing more than 100,000 scientists, demanding that Congress protect and restore life-saving and essential scientific research that benefits families and communities in the U.S.—including the research done by the Research and Development Office.
U.S. Science Is in Danger
The threats to this specific office join a growing list of attacks on federal research activities at large. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which conducts medical research and funds such projects at other institutions, measures implemented by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) are hindering federal scientists’ ability to do their jobs within the agency. Cuts to NIH funding for more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions across the country have resulted in canceled clinical trials and studies on diseases, job losses for promising young researchers, and an abrupt end to any research that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s incoherent preferences.
How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution.
Cuts to federal funding of academic research are threatening to upend the U.S. university research enterprise and set back the infrastructure and people supporting U.S.-produced science and research by decades. Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.
Shutting down the research operations of the federal government means closing the door on bright-eyed students like me and other early career researchers, limiting their options in this country (and in many cases, driving them to work abroad). It means missed opportunities to bring young talented scientists into government, creating a brain drain with lasting effects. Shutting down research means chipping away at the scaffolding that upholds federal policy decisions across issue areas, and threatening our ability to make evidence-based policy choices as a nation. And that’s why we cannot allow this to happen.
For Policy Decisions Today and Scientific Progress Tomorrow
As an intern with the EPA Research and Development Office, my project that summer was to analyze air pollution measurements collected in Detroit neighborhoods. The study was intended to help us better understand people’s exposure to air pollution—near roads, in their homes, in the central city, and everywhere in between. How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution. The sense of wonder I experienced in that lab sparked a personal mission to apply science to help people that has carried me throughout my career.
I think of the wealth of science that’s been produced, the many evidence-based environmental policy decisions made, and the lives saved from air pollution standards in the years since that summer. We’ve come a long way since I was an ambitious young researcher on that tree-covered campus. We can’t give up now. Join us in fighting against these attacks with our Save Science, Save Lives campaign.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Totalitarian Science in the White House
By promoting pseudoscience, purging government scientists, and censoring their work and speech, U.S. President Donald Trump is following Stalin, Hitler, and Putin’s playbook.
Mar 12, 2025
As he sat in his Kremlin office in autumn 1948, Joseph Stalin faced hard decisions about the dangers facing Soviet science. Spies threatened to steal state secrets. Agents of capitalist ideology promoted false research paradigms. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin dictated real Soviet science. He endorsed the bogus theory of “Lysenkoism” with its rejection of genetics. He oversaw the firing, arrests, and imprisonment of biologists. He next identified so-called materialist state physics that repudiated relativity theory—Albert Einstein was a Jewish theorist, after all. And Stalin shut down cybernetics, which waylaid the development of computers into the 1990s.
Under Hitler, too, the Nazi state imposed restrictions on science owing to prevailing racist, antisemitic ideas. What had once been the world’s greatest scientific establishment was destroyed by ideological interference even before its physical devastation in World War II. Nonpareil U.S. science arose in the postwar years on the foundations of scientific freedom and extensive funding.
Shockingly, U.S. President Donald Trump also pursues pseudoscience through false proclamations. He hopes, with the stroke of a pen, to abolish transgender people, vaccinations, and climate change. To manage research and development, Trump has turned science portfolios over to singularly unqualified ideological agents. And he has adopted authoritarian tactics to control science in two major ways.
Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
First, Trump has purged thousands of scientists. Firings have been promoted as a way to cut waste in the federal government, but reflect the desire of the White House to halt research that Trump and his minions reject ranging from sickle cell medicine to obstetrics and gynecology; from ecology to climate change; and from vaccinations to Alzheimer’s investigations. Trump, still bruised from his failed attempt to force Hurricane Dorian to follow the path of his Sharpie, not scientific forecasts, fired 880 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.
Like under Stalin, no bureaucracy is free from interference: the Food and Drug Administration (to prevent a range of medicines from being used), National Institutes of Health (to cut research on gender, health equity, and environmental justice), U.S. Fish and Wildlife (to limit the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act), the Department of Agriculture (to close down the battle with avian flu), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (to weaken the nation’s nuclear arsenal). The wanton firings include researchers, physicians, nurses, clinicians, and even park rangers and foresters, putting the nation’s natural heritage at risk.
Second, the Trump administration is censoring scientific speech and publication. Such world-leading publications as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reportwere temporarily shut down. Federal scientists whose work uses “gender” and other suspect words are being required to withdraw in-press articles, and are being prevented from submitting future work using these terms. Zealous Trump acolytes have cleansed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites of information about immunization, contraception, racism, and health. Others have removed data on climate on which farmers and others rely. A French university in Marseilles is offering a research haven to U.S. scientists who worry about censorship of their work.
Federal scientific agencies have been told in recent weeks to remove such words as nonbinary, woman, disabled, and elderly from their purview. Only in the 1990s did U.S. scientific administrators and researchers began to redress the heavily skewed underparticipation of women in clinical studies, and the inattention to women’s health issues in the national research agenda. Trump administration policies will return women and minorities to being outsiders in R, D, and employment. Indeed, as in Nazi Germany there are natalist, racial, and homophobic overtones to current Trump scientific protocols, not the least in implicit prohibitions against research involving LGBTQ individuals. Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy asserts that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule than whites on the basis of his false claims that Blacks need fewer antigens.
The Stalinists, similarly, slowed scientific publication through a censorship bureau called Glavlit. As a result of this censorship, Soviet science failed to perform well by many measures: scientific citation indices, Nobel, and other major international prizes.
To achieve censorship, Trump is pursuing scientific isolation. The Communist Party prevented scientists from attending international conferences from the 1930s until the 1980s, stultifying the development of Soviet science. In the U.S., the White House has embargoed travel funds. The president has closed down conferences and prohibited such groups as an independent expert vaccine panel from meeting which at the very least delays the funding of cutting edge research in all fields. Not content with the natural sciences, like the Stalinists in the 1940s, the administration has turned on the social sciences as well, for example, closing the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
The impacts are already being felt. Trump has long accepted baseless anti-vaccination propaganda. As a result, the CDC ended a successful flu vaccination campaign, while Trump signed a dictate to prohibit federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, over the past 50 years, vaccination against 14 major diseases has directly contributed to reducing infant deaths by 40% globally and saved over 150 million lives. Meanwhile, the worst measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the last 30 years has sickened 125 people, most of them children; measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. In a throwback to the medical nonsense suggested by the president to downing bleach to cure Covid-19, Bobby Kennedy is proposing drinking cod liver oil to combat the outbreak.
Engineering is similarly being hit with a funding cudgel, with programs in wind and solar power and high-speed trains cancelled. This can only lead to the end of U.S. scientific priority in a variety of fields, the closing down of promising research directions, and damage to strategic national interests. Personal whims play a role here. Embarrassed by the success of the Chips Act (2022) that rejuvenated the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump plans to destroy the “horrible, horrible” program.
If Trump seeks contemporary examples of authoritarian interference in modern science, he can look to Russia again. Under President Vladimir Putin, the security police have arrested scientists on accusations of espionage; several have died in custody. In May 2001 the Russian Academy of Sciences ordered specialists to report all their foreign contacts to the authorities for monitoring. Universities followed suit. Next the FSB closed down NGOs. And Russian scientists are again isolated.
Stalin purged his officer corps on the eve of World War II, severely handicapping the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Stalin published a book in 1948 called Marxism and Linguistics to establish himself as the leader in the field. Trump, apparently hoping to be recognized as a scientific expert, recently pontificated on “transgender” mice; of course, he does not understand the value of transgenic research with applications for human health from asthma to chronic wounds to heart disease any more than Stalin fathomed linguistics. But this utterance is in keeping with his firing of military personnel from leadership positions based on pseudoscientific notions of lower intelligence for soldiers of color. Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular