Illustration by Mother Jones; Getty
Over the years, Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been a champion of science. As president and on the campaign trail, he called climate change “aprank«;; supervision back back more than 100 environmental policies; agencies run reduce expert advice; pushed Unproven covid treatments; withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement (and promised to do it again)); and claimed, without proof, that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. Before his next visit to the Oval Office, he nominated a vaccine ship to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, promised to ridding federal agencies of potentially tens of thousands of career staff members and said he intends to close The Ministry of Education.
“Trump basically said he was waging war on science and scientists.”
“Trump basically said he was waging war on science and scientists,” said Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit science advocacy group. lucrative.
And this “war” likely won’t be limited to federal government researchers. To get a better sense of how scientists feel about working under Trump 2.0, I spoke with a handful of researchers at public and private universities, doctoral students, postdocs, and startup founders. Many described concerns about loss of funding, avoidance of terms such as “climate change” in federal grant applications and other documents, and loss of access to federal data sets. Some even feared for their own safety. Others, because of their field, were confident their work would be insulated from the incoming Trump administration. Most spoke about the condition of anonymity to avoid putting their research at further risk.
While their testimony by no means offers a complete picture of where the scientific community stands on Trump, it does shed light on what some researchers think about the next four years, and what exactly keeps them up at night. As one doctoral student in California said, “There are a lot of days where I feel like I should just call it a day.”
Here are some ways another Trump administration may make their job harder:
Funding – and federal research priorities – can change.
In academia, finding funding can be difficult, with or without Trump in office. To cover their salaries, researchers often need multiple grants, which can be competitive and may only cover a few years at a time. “You’re basically building the railroad track by going down the railroad track,” Oliver Bear Don’t Walk IV, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, described it. With Trump promising to shake up federal agencies like the NIH, they said: “This can add a lot more uncertainty to an already quite uncertain process.”
Although none of the researchers I spoke with expressed concern about losing their current Funding under Trump, the future was a different story. “Because I’m already on this existing grant, I’m already funded for the next two years,” said the California doctoral student, a NASA-funded ecologist studying tree health and drought. But “what happens next is a big question mark for me.”
Funding in areas involving climate science, equity and diversity initiatives may be particularly vulnerable. As Inside upper ed reportsTrump allies including Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and tech billionaire Elon Musk have criticized the National Science Foundation, which provides billions of dollars in federal funding to researchers each year, for grants tied to things like gender, race, or social and environmental justice. These “questionable projects,” Cruz explained in a October reportare essentially “Left-wing ideological crusades“And led to, in Musk’s words, “The corruption of science. “
Now, researchers do not know what funding they will be able to count on. Eldrick Millares, co-founder and CEO of Iluminant Surgical, a Los Angeles-based medical device startup aimed at helping doctors make fewer mistakes in spinal surgery, said some of the company’s current the company Federal grants provide additional funding for hiring employees from underrepresented groups. Before Trump’s victory, Millares said Illuminant intended to use those funds to hire people from low-income or rural backgrounds in West Virginia, where some of the company’s potential partners are located. “We were really excited about it,” Millares said. “It could be gone next year.”
As Jones sees it, cutting funding for certain fields of study would fit into part of Trump’s larger campaign of attacks on scientists. (By UCS’s account, the first Trump administration led More than 200 attacks on science.) “By threatening to cut these subsidies, you scare these people into silence.”
Researchers are concerned They will need to avoid controversial buzzwords like “diversity” or “climate change.”
To protect themselves, many researchers I spoke with told me they expected they would have to reframe their research to appeal to the new administration.
“I will finish my doctorate in the middle of the first Trump administration,” the California student said. “There is a NASA postdoctoral program that I could apply to, and I began to shape how I would present continuations of my research in a way that didn’t involve climate.” Hypothetically, he said, he could pivot to describe a project as addressing “wildfire risk,” rather than “climate change.” It’s not ideal, he said, but “there’s a part of me that wants to insure myself against funding changes. (I was) still doing good research, but I was also protecting myself. »
Other researchers might have a harder time pivoting. “It’s hard for me to imagine how I would talk about the injustices that have happened to Indigenous people if it becomes taboo to talk about health equity,” said Bear Don’t Walk, who is a citizen of the Apsáalooke Nation . When he first applied for his postdoctoral grant, he made a point of mentioning how the actions of the U.S. government—including colonization, boarding schools, and land dispossession—continue to affect indigenous health today. today. In other words, equity is at the heart of Bear Don’t Walk’s Research. “It was important to me to not have mute the words…and now I’m like, well, okay, am I going to have to start digging into the words?
“Now I’m like, well, okay, am I going to have to start fumbling with words?”
In some ways, some sources noted, scientists are still tweaking their research proposals to meet agency desires. It’s just good grant writing. But what if the words researchers use impact the research they end up doing? “If we’re no longer able to study certain things in health actions or talk about systemic racism in medical practice and education,” explained one medical researcher, “then we essentially can’t move the needle and try to resolve some of the issues. “
Scientists are not sure they will have access to federal data or tools.
On top of everything else, scientists I spoke to worry that they will have even less access to information under the new Trump administration. “I rely on a lot of federal data,” said a postdoc who studies energy policy. “I think there are a lot of open questions about the quality and reliability and continued provision of federal data.” That includes, he said, U.S. Census data (which, as my colleague Ari Berman reported in detailthe first Trump administration tried to interfere), and agencies like the Energy Information Agency, which has provided “best-in-class” data on U.S. energy use and production since the 1970s, including data on energy companies. “If this is compromised,” says the post-doc. “
“In general, I expect a lot less transparency and a lot less disclosure” from the federal government, he said, “which will make it much more difficult to assess the impacts of federal actions.”
James Hu, Millares’ co-founder at Illuminant, noted that his company is in the process of getting its medical device approved by the Food and Drug Administration. If the FDA experiences an increase inefficiency“, Under an HHS led by Robert Kennedy Jr., there may be shorter wait times for approvals. But if FDA scientists resign en masse in response to Kennedy’s nomination (like current And ancient Government officials reportedly feared this would happen), which could slow things down for the agency. “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to have a good relationship with our critics at the FDA,” Millares said, “and if they leave, it would be really difficult, because then we have to start again,” he said. he declared.
Good scientists may leave the field, be kicked out, or never join at all.
Some researchers have told me they worry about the safety of themselves or their colleagues, especially in red states. The California student, who is trans, said he was unwilling to move to “a good half” of the states after completing his doctorate because of hostility toward trans people. “I would leave science before moving to Florida. I would move into the private sector and get an industry job or something before moving to Missouri or Tennessee. »
“I would leave science before moving to Florida.”
UCS’s Jones, a former professor of environmental studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she was tapped by the university to lead the school’s Center for Environment and Society, says she is leaving in 2023 partly because of Governor Ron DeSantis’ anti-science policies. “It was increasingly clear to me that I had to, at best, just keep quiet, crawl under the table and not do the work I thought I was being led to do.”
Now she worries her experience in Florida may be emblematic of what will happen in the rest of the country. “As Trump warns of a war of intimidation and fear against scientists,” Jones said, “you’re going to have a lot fewer people raising their hands to serve the public good through science in the future , No?”