Trump vs. Science

Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.

The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or defunded thousands of researchers.

The chaos is confusing: Isn’t science a force for good? Hasn’t it contained disease? Won’t it help us in the competition with China? Doesn’t it attract the kind of immigrants the president says he wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we break out our macroscope to make sense of the turmoil.

An investment

American research thrives under a patronage system that funnels congressionally approved dollars to universities, national labs and institutes. This knowledge factory employs tens of thousands of researchers, draws talent from around the world and generates scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.

It’s a slow-moving system, because science moves slowly. Discoveries are often indirect and iterative, involving collaboration among researchers who need years of subsidized education to become expert. Startups and corporations, which need quick returns on their investment, typically can’t wait as long or risk as much money.

Science is capital. By some measures, every dollar spent on research returns at least $5 to the economy.

President Trump is less patient. He has defunded university studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. (Two prominent researchers are compiling lists of lost N.I.H. grants and N.S.F. awards.) The administration has also laid off thousands of federal scientists, including meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. A next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.

Alienating scientists

Administration officials offer various reasons for the crackdown: cost-cutting, government efficiency, “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Many grants were eliminated because they contain words, including climate, diversity, disability, trans or women. Some drew the administration’s ire because the applications included D.E.I. statements required by the previous administration.

It doesn’t take a telescope to see where this leads. American leaders have historically seen science as an investment in the future. Will this administration foreclose it? One-third of America’s Nobel Prize winners have been foreign-born, but an immigration crackdown has swept up scientists like Kseniia Petrova, a Russian who studied aging at Harvard and now sits in a Louisiana detention center. Australian academics have stopped attending conferences in the U.S. for fear of being detained, The Guardian has reported.

Now some American scientists are looking for the exits. France, Canada and other countries are courting our researchers. In a recent poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists said they were considering working abroad. The journal’s job-search platform saw 32 percent more applications for positions overseas between January and March 2025 than during the same period a year earlier.

Redefining ‘science’

These are mechanical threats to science — who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential worry. The Trump administration is trying to change what counts as science.

One effort aims at what science should show — and at achieving results agreeable to the administration. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to reopen research into a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine hesitancy. The National Science Foundation says it will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” A Justice Department official has accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”

Another gambit is to suppress or avoid politically off-message results, even if the message isn’t yet clear. The government has expunged public data sets on air quality, earthquake intensity and seabed geology. Why cut the budget by erasing records? Perhaps the data would point toward efforts (pollution reduction? seabed mining limits?) that officials might one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge in order to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But action is expensive, at a moment when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Perhaps it’s best to not even know.

One sure way to shut down knowledge is to question who can gather it. The administration is painting scientists with the same liberal brush it has applied to academics more broadly — what Project 2025 describes as “the ‘enlightened,’ highly educated managerial elite.” The N.I.H. is controlled by “a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders,” the Project 2025 authors write. The regulatory work of the Environmental Protection Agency “should embrace so-called citizen science” and be left “for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.”

In science, as in a democracy, there’s plenty of room for skepticism and debate. That’s what makes it work. But at some point, calls for “further research” become disingenuous efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.

Now it’s being weaponized by the government against science generally. Facts are elite, facts are fungible, facts are false. And once nothing is true, anything can be true.

For more

• Trump ordered government agencies to prepare for mining the ocean floor. Nearly all other countries oppose such industrial activity in international waters.

• Below, Alan Blinder, who covers education, describes the scientific research at stake in Trump’s fight with Harvard. Click the video to watch.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March. This could have exposed national security secrets to foreign adversaries, analysts say. Read more here.

In our news meeting yesterday, the Times’s business editor alluded to a treacly smell emanating from her corner of the office. Why? Julie Creswell, who reports on the food industry, was writing a story on food dyes, and the business staff had opened boxes of Froot Loops from Canada and the United States.

The bowl on the left contains the cereal Canadians eat. Its colors come from the juices of blueberries, watermelon and other fruits. The one on the right, for Americans, is colored with synthetic dyes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ban.

“Everybody was shocked at the difference in colors,” Julie said. The natural dyes are muted. “They’re slight variations of beige, and blues are completely gone.”

The duller hues fooled our staff, including one who said: “Your mind thinks it won’t be as strong — it might be a little stale.” But business reporters tasted the samples and agreed the flavors were indistinguishable.

Read Julie’s story about how hard it is for food companies to switch dyes. — Adam B. Kushner

OPINIONS

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments about autistic children not becoming independent rang painfully true for Emily May. A severe form of autism restrains her daughter’s life.

Here’s a column by David Brooks on Trump’s true strength.

MORNING READS

Multitasking: How can bats drink water while flying?

Ask the Therapist: “I hate my parents’ politics. Should I keep my son away?”

Most clicked yesterday: How to cut your risk of stroke, dementia and depression.

Trending online yesterday: Alijah Arenas, a top U.S.C. basketball recruit and the son of N.B.A. start Gilbert Arenas, is in a coma after a car crash.

Lives Lived: Gretchen Dow Simpson was an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose moody, highly geometric images of seaside cottages, snow-covered farms and other totems of New England life drew comparisons to the works of Edward Hopper. They also graced the covers of 58 issues of The New Yorker. She died at 85.

SPORTS

N.F.L. Draft: The Tennessee Titans selected Cam Ward with the No. 1 pick. Travis Hunter, a Heisman winner, is going to Jacksonville.

N.B.A.: The top-seeded Thunder completed the largest halftime comeback in playoff history to take a 3-0 lead against the Grizzlies. The Knicks and Clippers also won their games.

Theo Von is a comedian and host of “This Past Weekend,” a video podcast that routinely garners millions of views and listens. It is one of the most watched shows in the country. But what are his politics? He keeps it more ambiguous than his “bro-cast peers.” That may be why he’s so successful, our critic Jon Caramanica writes. Read more about him.

More on culture

Ask the Morning

After Pope Francis died Monday, we invited Morning readers to submit questions about our coverage and what happens next. Jody Mower, who lives in Alpine, Utah, wrote in about this image, which she said “moved me with its beauty and symbolic framing.” How, she asked, did Gianni Cipriano “get permission to photograph from such a location?”

Gianni, who lives in Naples, has been a freelance photographer for The Times since 2008. He climbed up to the terrace of the Charlemagne Wing out of desperation, only after security forces told him he could not work near the front of St. Peter’s Square. “I was like, where the heck am I supposed to go?” He knew about the terrace from prior work at the Vatican, including the 2013 conclave that selected Francis, so he made his way up the dark, narrow spiral staircase. (Check out his video on Instagram.)

It was about 7:30 p.m. The Rosary prayer was beginning, and the sun starting to set. At first, Gianni was disappointed the square was not full. “But the light was magical,” he said. He framed the image so that one of the 140 statues that line the square — we’re 99 percent sure it’s Saint Andrew Corsini, who died in 1374 and was canonized in 1629, but email us if you know differently — is overlooking the crowd as a pope might.

“It did feel like a metaphor of what had happened that day,” he said of the image. It gave “that sense of sobriety and sadness,” he said, “and I think it did convey a moment of silence and of recollection.”

Gianni is one of three photographers covering the pope’s funeral for The Times. We’ll have a live dispatch from the Vatican in tomorrow’s edition of The Morning. — Jodi Rudoren

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