Scientists are Wary and Uncertain as Trump Returns to Power

By Joel Achenbach, Mark Johnson, Carolyn Y. Johnson / The Washington Post

17:31 JST, November 10, 2024

Eight years ago, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president sent shock waves through the scientific community. Trump had called global warming a hoax and promiscuously spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. His political allies took aim at environmental regulations and climate change research. Trump’s initial budget proposals called for cuts in funding of scientific research.

A resistance coalesced, and on Earth Day 2017, tens of thousands of people converged on rain-soaked Washington for the “March for Science.”

“Build labs, not walls!” people chanted, and “Hey, Trump, have you heard, you can’t silence every nerd!”

Now Trump is returning to the White House as the 47th president, his agenda potentially aided by complete Republican control of Congress and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. In the aftermath of the election, leaders in the scientific community are girding themselves for what Trump’s return might portend.

The day after the election, the journal Nature published an editorial encouraging scientists to “hold President Trump to account with courage and unity.” The progressive Union of Concerned Scientists launched a campaign to defend science in government decision-making and vowed to fight unqualified science agency nominations. And environmental groups promised to combat attempts to roll back gains on global warming.

But these are early days. Some of the responses so far from the scientific establishment have had a wait-and-see attitude.

“While the U.S. election is over, it is too soon to tell whether campaign rhetoric will translate into new policies,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in a post-election press release. “In many areas, science broadly enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. AAAS is committed to working with all elected officials to craft science-informed policies while raising concerns when rigorous scientific evidence is ignored.”

Other scientific organizations are not hesitating to sound the alarm.

Jennifer Jones, a program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a blog post that the impending return of Trump “is likely to be a dangerous time for science, scientists and democracy. The last Trump presidency saw 207 attacks on science, including censorship, falsified records, political interference, and intimidation of scientists.”

Scientific organizations typically characterize themselves as nonpartisan, but some scientists have not hesitated to enter the political fray, including this fall, when 82 Nobel Prize winners endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. They warned that a second Trump administration “would undermine future US leadership” on multiple fronts and slow the progress of science and technology.

Political advocacy by scientists can backfire, however. A study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour found that when the journal Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 election, it caused reductions in trust in the journal from those who supported Trump.

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Who will lead?

It is unclear who will lead the government agencies and congressional agencies that bankroll research. Several influential patrons of scientific research are no longer on Capitol Hill, such as former Republican senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who chose not to run for reelection two years ago.

A wild card is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who built a national following with his anti-vaccine rhetoric but has denied to The Washington Post that he is anti-vaccine. Trump has promised Kennedy an important but still-vague role in his administration.

“He’s a great guy, and he really means that he wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said in his victory speech the night of the election.

Covid hangs over the coming assemblage of an administration. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s top health official, had been mentioned before the election as a candidate to run the Department of Health and Human Services or become the U.S. surgeon general, according to people familiar with the process. Ladapo raised doubts about the safety of coronavirus vaccines and was warned against doing so by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The most important Trump whisperer might be the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Musk, who donated at least $118 million to a pro-Trump PAC, could influence Trump and his administration to invest more dollars in human spaceflight, military and national security satellites and battery technology. Musk’s company SpaceX has become dominant in the launch industry and has flourished in significant part due to billions of dollars in government contracts.

Trump has endorsed Musk’s aspiration to send humans to Mars as soon as 2028. NASA is focused on the Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon before the end of this decade, and any sudden pivot to Mars might roil the agency.

Musk has railed against the regulatory bureaucracy. Trump has said he would appoint Musk to lead a commission on government efficiency. Musk has advocated cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, which is more than the entire discretionary budget. Scientists who depend on government funding are keenly aware that any gutting of the discretionary budget would be devastating to their work.

Representatives for Trump and Space X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Will past be prologue?

The history of the first Trump administration does not offer perfect clarity on what comes next. But Trump and the scientific community have generally had an oil-and-water relationship.

Watchdog organizations documented cases where Trump’s political appointees interfered with, slowed or halted research findings in government agencies related to hurricane forecasting, the coronavirus, reproductive health and environmental protections. Many government scientists fled to the private sector.

But what Trump and his allies discovered, as had many incoming presidents who promised radical change, is that the government bureaucracy and the Constitution create guardrails that inhibit sudden or radical pivots in policy. Federal scientists under Biden have been working to finalize environmental rules and policies before Trump takes office.

Still, the first Trump administration seeded the court system with conservative jurists skeptical of “the administrative state.” Those jurists included three Supreme Court justices who not only voted to overrule Roe v. Wade, but in June also overturned a 40-year-old court precedent, known as Chevron deference, that was critical to empowering government experts to issue regulations.

For decades, courts generally deferred to the judgment of federal agency officials to administer ambiguous federal laws that regulate everything from drugs, food, the environment and more. But the ruling from the high court this summer means judges, not agency experts and scientists, will have more discretion making scientific and technical judgments as they rule on lawsuits over agency regulations.

What didn’t happen during the Trump years was a major gutting of scientific funding. That has continued to enjoy bipartisan congressional support, with lawmakers eager to send taxpayer dollars toward their home districts. Patrons of science have occupied both sides of the aisle in both the House and Senate.

“It’s true that Trump put in some horrible cuts for science in his budgets, but those never came to fruition,” Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the journal Science, said Thursday.

Some early Trump administration policies overturned by the Biden administration could be reinstated. For example, the first Trump administration halted research by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that used human fetal tissue, and Biden reversed that decision, said Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director of the nonpartisan Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

“I think the worry that we have is continuing the bipartisan commitment and support for biomedical research,” Zeitzer said.

In his first budget request, submitted to Congress for fiscal 2018, Trump called for a nearly $6 billion cut, a reduction of about one-fifth, in the NIH budget. Congress did not go along with the plan, sending a budget with a $3 billion increase for NIH – one of the largest boosts the institute had seen in a decade – that Trump wound up signing.

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Trust in science

Trump’s “bully pulpit” during his first term often sowed confusion and promoted misinformation. His administration’s successful Operation Warp Speed produced coronavirus vaccines in record time, but Trump often undermined the advice of public health professionals or pulled back on global efforts to deal with the pandemic. He temporarily suspended payments to the World Health Organization as it was fighting the outbreak and later announced the United States would withdrawal from the organization before President Joe Biden pulled the decision back. He promoted treatments for covid that lacked scientific evidence of effectiveness. At one point he seemed to suggest in a White House briefing that injecting disinfectants could be a way to kill the coronavirus. Trump later claimed he was speaking sarcastically.

Thorp, the journal editor, said Trump’s rhetoric filtered into public attitudes. Leaders in the scientific community have witnessed a marked decline in trust in their field. The pandemic, with its debates over masking, social distancing, school closures and the origin of the virus, pushed scientific research into the front lines of the culture wars.

A Pew Research Center survey in 2023 found that the percentage of respondents saying science has a mostly positive impact on society had dropped 16 points since before the pandemic.

“There have always been these political disputes over science, whether it’s about evolution or climate change, or genetically modified crops, but none of them have had the intensity and extensive polarization that occurred around covid,” Thorp said. “Covid was kerosene on the fire.”

Kim Waddell, acting president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement released after the election that Trump’s victory was a difficult day for “everyone who cares about a safe and sustainable future. There’s every reason to expect that a second Trump administration will pose a risk to our values and priorities at least as severe as the first term, if not more.”

Waddell urged scientists not to give in to despair, complacency or cynicism.

Elias Zerhouni, who was appointed director of NIH by President George W. Bush, said he was optimistic about the future of science because it has bipartisan support, but acknowledged that “it’s all up in the air” at this point.

“It’s such an evident truth that you cannot destroy your own science and technology enterprise and make the country stronger,” Zerhouni said.