Donald Trump’s stance toward science varies with his mood. Sometimes he’s an expert: Bleach is a good antidote for Covid; the hurricane went here, not here. Or he doesn’t know, his other, surprisingly frequent claim: “I don’t think science knows,” he said when asked if global warming had a role in the LA fires. Or he claims that nobody cares anyway: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” he said barely months into the pandemic, eager to get back to business.
A tactic that combines knowing and not knowing is to hire other people to deny scientific fact for you. Trump has just named three climate change deniers at Energy, after firing hundreds of experts about to release a major report on the effects of climate change on the country. And of course, at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replaced all 17 expert members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and seated a bunch of anti-vaxxers in their place. On its website, the agency announced, “HHS takes bold steps to restore public trust in vaccines by reconstituting ACIP.”
Still, who fires the weatherman?
The 2026 budget closes 10 labs run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that research the ways climate change is affecting the weather; it’s defunding “hurricane trackers” and flood monitoring programs.
At the same time, the president seeks to whittle FEMA to a few skeleton crews headed by a guy who has never dealt with an emergency in his life (“Honey, I can’t find my socks!!!!). And just to set things up for maximum calamity, Trump took back billions of dollars in grants that communities were using to mitigate future wildfires, hurricanes, and other human-caused “natural” disasters.
Part of the reasoning, I guess, is to make a point: that climate change is a hoax, floods are caused by Democrat-financed cloud seeders, and hurricanes blow when God turns on his celestial ceiling fan.
Science is never free of ideological baggage, of course. The “science” of race, continues to justify any crime from discrimination to extermination. Science was a Cold War warm-power weapon. In 1957, the USSR launched the satellite Sputnik, America flipped out, and in 1961 Democratic President John F. Kennedy instituted a nationwide program to win the space race (including beefed-up phys ed for children: mens sana in corpore sano). In 2004, when the U.S. fell behind other countries in patents and publications—not because the U.S. was flagging but because other countries were speeding up—Republican President George H.W. Bush made sure money kept flowing to scientific research and education. Some critics blamed the slowdown on all the money siphoned into defense spending—$66 billion at the time, compared with almost a trillion today. That was before Silicon Valley was conceived and gestated on military contracts. And now we have the scientific “fact” that there are only two sexes, the ones assigned at birth, and ”science” legitimizes the erasure of transgender people.
You could explain it all as a step toward realizing the Republican dream of privatizing everything the government does. Let Amazon conduct its own goddamn cancer research! So what Musk’s rockets keep blowing up? The Challenger blew up too, and that cost the U.S. taxpayer $3.2 billion.
There is some pushback to the shrinkage of the National Institutes of Health by 18 percent and the CDC by 17 percent; even Republicans seem to feel that cutting a third of federally funded basic research is a bit excessive. Last week, with bipartisan consensus, the Senate subcommittee that oversees funding for Commerce and Justice, including the science agencies, voted out a bill that would reduce the National Science Foundation’s budget by $16 million rather than by $5 billion, as Trump wanted, ending up at just over $9 billion. The bill would also boost NASA and restore $10 million to the National Weather Service to rehire the 17 percent of its employees who were fired or left since January.
Senators are still disputing an amendment in the Commerce-Justice bill pertaining to the site of a new FBI headquarters—so the bill might die, and with it, most of U.S. science funding.
If the goals are parsimony and profit, defunding science is—like mass deportation and tariffs, come to think of it—a dumb way of going about it. The private sector gets a good deal from NOAA and other scientific agencies. Accuweather and the Fox weather forecaster depend on NOAA’s data, as do industries from lobster fishing to wedding planning. Not to mention the payback companies get from state-funded academic research. Taxpayers bankroll university physicists, biologists, and computer scientists. The aeronautics industry, Big Pharma, and Silicon Valley register patents on products derived from the state-funded basic and applied sciences. And then they sell the products back to us and to the government. Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
Perhaps Trump is eager to get his piece of disaster capitalism. Is he hoping to scoop up oceanfront properties obliterated by hurricanes and bereft of FEMA funds to build back? That’s what luxury hoteliers did after the 2004 tsunami that flattened hundreds of fishing villages in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and killed 200,000 people.
What about the day after, you might ask, when another tsunami wipes away the luxury resort? Indonesian hotels advertise their tsunami damage precautions and evacuation planning as amenities. Capital thinks of everything.
But shit, by the time the tsunami hits Palm Beach, the Trump family will be playing golf on Mars.