No Place for Science, With Trump’s Mad Growth Obsession

by Kirsten Stade

Among his many gifts to big business, President Trump has made it his mission to squash science wherever he can.

The Trump Administration is closing the gates on federal science. (Science.gov)

This is hardly surprising, as scientific realities often interfere with business bottom lines. For corporate interests and allies like those who populate the Trump Administration, climate change and biodiversity collapse are best denied. Along with other manifestations of the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, their messengers are best silenced.

Yet President Trump’s assaults on science are unprecedented. The administration has undertaken a wholesale effort to demolish federal agency scientific integrity policies, paving the way for new levels of political interference in federal science. It has deleted troves of information from science agency websites. It has slashed science agency budgets and staff, and demolished their systems for tracking ecological, weather, and climate data.

Agencies Starved to Sabotage Science

An alarming example concerns the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which conducts most federal weather and climate science. Earlier this year, the administration proposed to cut $1.6 billion for what it called “Green New Scam programs at NOAA.” Proposed cuts included programs on climate adaptation, resilience, and education, and would have amounted to 27 percent of the agency’s budget.

A cut of this magnitude would eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), the agency’s research arm. OAR’s 10 research laboratories and 16 affiliated Cooperative Institutes would close, and hundreds of federal and academic scientists would lose their jobs.

Their work includes the models used by the National Weather Service to generate weather forecasts, predict severe storms, and inform farmers of coming droughts. It includes an El Niño information system, and the U.S. Climate Reference Network of long-term climate monitoring stations. It includes equipment that monitors tsunamis, and that forecasts hurricane intensity and landfall.

The budget request is part of the administration’s plan to “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.” At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the administration sought to cut nearly half of the agency’s science budget. It sought to fire a third of the agency’s staff and cancel most of its earth science missions. It also sought to shut down craft that have been gathering data on the solar system for decades. It would likely close NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and fire its thousands of employees conducting solar, space, climate, and environmental research.

The president’s 2026 and 2027 budget requests also target science programs in the Department of the Interior. They would eliminate the US Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA), the agency’s biological research arm. EMA’s loss would end vital research on wildland fire risk, invasive species, and early detection tools for pandemics. It would end work on the interaction of climate change and other environmental changes: for example, how development has impacted wetland systems, altering their ability to absorb floods.

The Trump Administration has sought to dissolve the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, which conducts vital research into wetlands, wildlife, and climate change. (USGS)

To Trump, this critical program has “supported the woke climate agenda, provided funding for climate research to weaponized universities, and distracted the bureau from its core energy and minerals work.”

Thus far Congress has rejected Trump’s deep cuts to federal science. But traditional checks and balances may be too little and too late to counter Trump’s relentless science wrecking ball. Recent executive orders direct agencies to withhold funds even when Congress appropriates them. This assertion of executive power of the purse, known as impoundment, is likely illegal and litigatory. Meanwhile, however, science faces long-term damage when funds are cut off, projects are cancelled, and scientists and staff are unpaid.

Climate Science Grants Now Too Woke to Fund

Much federal science takes place outside federal agencies, by universities and research centers that receive government funding. This funding is allocated through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Both of these have been slated for deep cuts in the president’s 2027 budget request.

NSF-funded research includes work by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to forecast and research hurricanes, space weather, wildfires, and severe storms. In December, White House Budget Director Russell Vought called NCAR one of the “largest sources of climate alarmism” and announced plans to dismantle it. A federal judge has recently blocked the move, but not soon enough to prevent lost staff, paused projects, and sold equipment that will set back research already underway.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative have been thwarted by Congress—so far. (USGS)

Another NSF-funded program is the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a system of more than 900 ocean sensors in operation since 2016. The array provides a staggering amount of oceanographic data that is free and available to the public. These data inform NOAA’S hurricane forecasting, measure sea-level rise, help predict coastal flooding, and track marine heat waves that impact fisheries. They provide vital insight into how the ocean absorbs greenhouse gases, and into phenomena like El Niño and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

AMOC is a network of Atlantic ocean currents that moderates temperature in Europe and along America’s East Coast. Global heating changes temperature and salinity gradients between deep and surface waters, putting the system in danger of collapse. This would profoundly alter global climate conditions, particularly in Europe, and contribute to significant sea-level rise in the North Atlantic.

This year, in addition, climatologists predict a Super El Niño with likely more intense hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding.

Which makes right now a really bad time to dismantle the program that tracks these extremes, as the Trump administration has begun to do. While Congress has repeatedly refused Trump’s requests to gut the OOI, in May the administration began pulling up sensors in the Pacific. A Senate bill and widespread backlash from scientific and coastal communities have blocked further demolition, and the removed sensors will be restored.

From Scientific Merit to a Political Loyalty Test

A great deal of federal grant-funded science will soon face similar disruption. Agencies award many federal science grants based on recommendations from subject matter experts who comprise independent advisory committees. Committees are bound by confidentiality and conflict-of-interest rules, to ensure scientific quality and utility of taxpayer-funded research.

The National Science Board in 1951, the year after it was formed to independently govern the National Science Foundation (NSF), comprising individuals who “understood science firsthand.” (NSF)

A recent proposed rule would ditch this merit-based grant review system, and allow political appointees final say. Grants will still undergo peer review, but the rule specifies “that peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion.” In other words, agency heads and others with no scientific expertise would have veto power over reviewer recommendations.

Dr. Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that the proposed rule poses a profound threat to scientific integrity. “It replaces scientific merit with a political loyalty test,” Dr. Barbati-Dajches says. It “could be used to silence research that is politically inconvenient to the administration.”

It would certainly silence any research with the remotest chance of tempering GDP growth, especially in this administration.

The proposal bans funding for research on diversity, equity, and inclusion or gender, and restricts funding for international research collaborations. The scientific community is mobilizing to provide public comments opposing the rule. Comments are due by July 13.

Axing Advisory Panels

Not content to disempower and demote scientific advisory panels, Trump has begun simply eliminating them altogether.

The National Science Board comprises industry and university scientists who set policy for the NSF, approve its largest grants, and advise the president and Congress on matters of science. The president appoints its 24 members for six-year terms. Trump has dismissed its entire membership, along with 14 of the 52 committees that advise the NSF in areas such as engineering, math, and physical sciences.

The administration has not yet announced new NSB members, but their likely pro-growth, industry affiliations will further jeopardize NSF science. During Trump’s second term the foundation has had no confirmed director and has lost a third of its staff.

Trump’s scorched-earth policy toward scientific advisory committees has not stopped at the NSF. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) provides for a system of committees to advise federal agencies on matters of science and policy. FACA committee members may be experts selected to advise on matters of science, or they may represent industry or other stakeholder groups. The system has been prone to abuse prior to this administration, as when industry representatives have been appointed to positions reserved for scientific experts.

Those concerns now seem quaint in light of the administration’s latest moves. To date in his second term, Trump has eliminated more than 150 advisory committees at science agencies. These include 77 committees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and more than half of NASA committees.

Committees eliminated at HHS include one charged with recommending research into long COVID, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. After dissolving the latter, the administration issued new dietary guidelines that “packed the plate for GDP.”

Among committees left standing, some have undergone radical change. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). He has replaced many of the 17 terminated independent scientists and medical professionals with known vaccine skeptics.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, former Paypal COO and Trump’s AI and crypto czar, is now co-chair of the President’s Council on Science and Technology. (The White House)

At the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration dismissed all members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the Science Advisory Board. The latter, which reviews the scientific evidence in support of stronger environmental regulation, has been reconstituted with chemical industry employees as one quarter of its members.

PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is a FACA committee newly appointed by each president. Members have typically included a mix of university and industry scientists, who have spurred investment in STEM education and initiatives to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Trump’s PCAST is so far almost entirely constituted of tech CEOs, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Basic Science vs. Industry Science

This administration has shut down independent advisory committees and public input. It has launched a deregulatory evisceration of science-based public health and environmental protections. It has appointed industry representatives to agencies regulating public lands and chemical safety. The hostility toward basic science is clear.

These actions flow naturally from this administration’s extreme commitment to economic growth. Scientific evidence of the importance of wetlands to mitigate flooding could complicate development of those wetlands. Additional increments of climate science further underscore the suicidal nature of the rampant fossil fuel use and land use change that accompany growth.

The threat to the President’s growth agenda posed by basic math, physics, and other scientific disciplines is less immediately obvious. The yields from investment in basic science often skew simply toward advancement of human understanding, without immediate practical application. And the largest proportion of this basic science is federally funded.

The privatization of science risks the loss of basic science that improves human knowledge and offers broad societal benefits. (National Science Foundation)

In the absence of these funds, scientific enterprise contracts. This includes all of academic science and the higher education system itself. As Barbati-Dajches noted in an interview with the Herald, salaries for faculty and graduate students to conduct research are dependent on these grant funds. Without federal grants, science-focused faculty, student bodies, and departments themselves dwindle and disappear.

In short, what remains of the scientific enterprise is focused narrowly on research and development that profits its industry sponsors and perpetuates planetary overshoot. Which is exactly the intention of the current administration: growth for its allies—and GDP growth for Trump—at the expense of knowledge, health, and environmental protection for all.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.