Trump continues to obliterate public interest science research

Polluting for profit is profitable

As we all know by now, MAGA politics hates climate science research, and climate laws and regulations. As part of their anti-public interest holy war, Trump and MAGA elites have almost completely destroyed the EPA and other pro-public interest federal research programs.

A few weeks ago, Trump proposed a 52% budget cut for the EPA’s climate and public health research. He cynically smeared EPA research as “Green New Scam spending”. a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats. In just 15 months, Trump has almost completely dismantled EPA research. About 1,500 biologists, chemists and other experts at the EPA’s Office of Research and Development have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Only 124 researchers remain, and those are under pressure to go away. 

Experts point out that Trump’s wrecking ball to dismantle EPA research seriously weakens the government’s ability to protect public health. But that is the point. So for Trump, MAGA elites and businesses that pollute for profit, the death of EPA research is a huge MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!! moment. For the public interest and public health, it’s a huge kick in the pants.

In other dismal anti-public interest science news, Trump's FY2027 budget proposes 54% cuts to NSF, 47% to NASA Science, 28% to NIST, 13% to DOE Office of Science, 10% to NIH, and eliminating NOAA research funding. In essence, MAGA extremism isn obliterating all federal research. The damage to America’s science infrastructure is catastrophic. Assuming the federal government ever returns to pro-science policy, the damage will take years to repair, assuming American science can be returned to something at least fairly close to MAGA’s anti-science mindset. Link, link, link 

On top of budget cuts and getting rid of experts, Trump and MAGA elites have shut down enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. The goal is to free violators to expand pollution without much or any concern for public health. For example in Jan. 2025, Trump froze all existing environmental litigation and settlement negotiations. He reassigned senior Dept. of Justice environmental enforcement chiefs to immigration work, gutting the federal enforcement effort. Last March, he also sent EPA enforcement employees memo (1) requiring political appointee (Trump sycophants) approval for cases against major polluters, and (2) completely barring enforcement actions from interfering with any phase of energy production. Link, link

In addition, Trump's April 2025 executive order directed the US Attorney General to take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement of state climate laws, specifically targeting California, New York, and Vermont cap-and-trade programs, carbon taxes, and lawsuits against oil companies. Trump also eliminated supplemental environmental projects from pollution settlements, barring EPA from including cleanup projects in agreements with polluters. DOJ terminated environmental justice investigations and settlement agreements in April 2025. An April 2025 executive order directed EPA to revise environmental regulations to automatically terminate by October 2026. Link, link, link

Big oil 💓 Trump!

Public opinion 

Gallup's March 2-18, 2026 Environment poll found Americans’ environmental assessments at their bleakest levels: only 35% rated environmental quality as excellent or good (a record low), while a near-record high 66% said the environment’s quality is worsening. A record-low 63% believe the government is not doing enough to protect the environment. Despite Trump's rollbacks, majorities prioritize environmental quality over economic growth (58%) and energy development (57%). Over 60% of voters believe clean energy development should be a high or very high priority for the President and Congress. Finally, a December 2025 poll indicated that 66% of registered voters favor transitioning the US economy completely from fossil fuels to clean energy by 2050. Link, link, link

MAGA's continuing corruption of American science

By now it is clear that Trump and MAGA policy and tactics has targeted American science for corruption into a taxpayer-paid service center for special interests. Science reports that on April 24, Trump fired all 24 members of the US National Science Foundation’s governing body. That will get rid of its independence and focus on science in the public interest. The tax dollars the NSF controls will be reoriented to serve special interests who pay in Trump's deeply corrupted pay-to-play administration.

Trump's email from his personnel office insultingly dumped them like this: “On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

Those firings removed the institutional safeguard designed to insulate taxpayer-funded scientific research decisions from political interference and special interest capture. Now, all any special interest has to do to get access to those tax dollars is pay Trump what he demands. Miraculously, taxpayer science will start working for special interests to solve special interest problems, not to solve public interest problems. 

For context, the NSF funds ~25% of all federally supported basic research in the US. It has a nearly $9 billion annual budget. 

NSF board members have been critical of Trump’s proposed massive NSF budget cuts, including a proposed 55% reduction. So, Trump got his revenge on both those feisty board members and taxpayer dollars spend in service to the public interest. The mass firings here follow a well-established pattern of executive orders that codify denying or terminating grants not aligned with what Trump and allied special interests want. What they want is to stop research on inconvenient (profit-impairing) things like climate change and mRNA vaccines. 

The concern that tax dollars will be reoriented to serve special interests who pay in Trump's deeply corrupted pay-to-play administration reflects the fundamental incompatibility between merit-based peer review and corrupt, politically directed funding.

Once again, the taxpayer is screwed, while allied pay-to-play special interests can reap big rewards on the taxpayer dime, in return for their "free speech" in the form of bribery of Trump and his elite MAGA allies.

Trump's killers

A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by the editorial board, Measles Is Back. What Comes Next Will Be Worse, focuses on the resurgence of diseases that children are no longer being vaccinated for. Trump's policy as implemented by anti-vaxxer and medicine crackpot Robert Kennedy Jr. is now starting to be felt in the form of children getting infected and dying because they are not vaccinated.

So far this year, 1,700 cases of measles have been reported in the US. There were about 70 per year in the early 2000s. Three children died in 2025. Also surging is cases of  cases of whooping cough in unvaccinated children. Also apparently increasing is meningitis (caused by the Haemophilus influenzae type b bacteria) that killed two unvaccinated Florida children. 

Child with bacterial meningitis

So, preventable deaths that Trump/Kennedy rhetoric and policy have caused are now happening in real time. The MAGA-hyper-stupified state of Florida is trying to get rid of some childhood vaccines, leading parents to distrust vaccines and refuse to get their kids vaccinated.  

One medical doctor comments that under the idiot/killer Kennedy, the CDC intentionally underestimates the current incidence of bacterial meningitis and other diseases in the US because the idiot, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, cut CDC surveillance and reporting of vaccine-preventable diseases. So, MAGA policy is to get rid of effective vaccines and hide the inevitable deaths and disease injuries from us.

Q: Are Trump and Kennedy guilty of murder or manslaughter, or innocent by reason of MAGA-stupification, gross incompetence, malicious, sadistic cruelty, or something else?

Thoughts about regulating lies and dishonest free speech

Cass Sunstein’s 2021 book, Liars: Falsehoods And Free Speech In An Age of Deception, is focused on existing limits on free speech in the US, and the pros and cons of further regulations on free speech. Sunstein is a Harvard law school professor and legal scholar. The book is short (133 pages), non-technical and easy to read. Sunstein’s assessment of America’s situation, analysis and reasoning leads him to propose this:

False statements are not constitutionally protected if the government can [objectively] show that they threaten to cause serious harm that cannot be avoided through a more speech-protective route.

Since Sunstein’s book published in 2021, the damage and intensity of dishonest or dark free speech in politics, e.g., demagoguery, lies, defamation, divisive crackpot reasoning, irrational emotional manipulation, etc., have significantly worsened under Trump and MAGA politics, tactics and policy. Most safeguards and norms that tended to limit dark free speech harms have weakened or fallen completely. The damage to society, American democracy, government and commerce is vast. It is mostly hidden by demagoguery, distractions, defections and lies that soften and normalize free speech harms. Much of the damage will not be reversible any time soon, if ever.

At present, laws regulate several kinds of dark free speech. The main ones are false advertising or fraud, defamation (written libel or spoken slander), perjury under oath in court proceedings, non-trivial false statements to government officials, child porn, incitement of imminent lawless action, “true threats” of unlawful violence, copyrights, and trade secrets. In the case, United States v. Alvarez, the USSC rejected broad bans on “mere lies” when they don’t amount to harms like fraud, perjury, or defamation (significant harm to reputation).

Thus in politics, most dark free speech in the form of demagoguery, lies, crackpot conspiracy theories and irrational emotional manipulation (bigotry, racism, etc.) are constitutionally protected and the government cannot regulate it. But the 1st Amendment right to free speech does not apply to private entities, e.g., blogs like BNR, newspapers, social media or broadcast media. Private entities can regulate what protected speech they allow and disallow.

The pros and cons of speech regulation

Sunstein points out the complexity. He points out that the chances of truth surviving in the face of hostile power are very low. Lies and deceit can always push truth out of the world. Facts are very fragile things, easy to distort and destroy.

He carefully distinguishes between falsehoods based on honest mistakes, intentional lies, and bullshit, i.e., content based on no concern for truth or harm. Honest mistakes are human and unavoidable. But so are lies and BS. The level of harm that falsehoods cause varies from grave and literally lethal to nonexistent. The probability and timing of potential harm varies from (i) certain to highly improbable, and (ii) immediate to distant future. Those factors are relevant to considering regulation of lies. He does not propose regulating honest mistakes because an intent to deceive is absent.

Sunstein points out that liars often believe that their lies are morally justified. In their minds, the ends they believe in lying for justifies their intentional deceit and the risks of harm to innocents their deceit might cause. For example, belief in lies about vaccines can and has caused people to reject them. That has led to the deaths or serious harm of some of them or others they infect. 

Sunstein also points out that lying and falsehoods violates people’s power and autonomy. The reasoning is simple. When people have been deceived, and they think and act of the basis of deceit, deceit has taken from them their power to think and act on the basis of truth. In other words, power flows from the deceived to the deceivers. Deceit is thus inherently authoritarian, corrupt or usually both. So are the deceivers.

The obvious problem inherent in regulating dark free speech, bias and abuse of power, is inherent in the human condition. The natural human urge is to use power to ward off criticism and embarrassing truths. Authoritarians are heavily biased to abuse their power to insulate themselves from criticism and embarrassing truths. Trump is a current example. He attacks and sues the mainstream media and political opponents, but has no basis in law to do so. If there were laws regulating dark free speech, morally rotted authoritarians like Trump would falsely claim that inconvenient truth from his targets are lies and subject to being shut down by the law. That has already happened. Link, link, link

Finally, Sunstein points out that the default human condition is to trust what they hear. That can flip to distrust if the listener is informed of relevant facts or has reason to distrust a known dishonest source, e.g., chronic liars like Trump and MAGA elites. The problem is that most people don’t or can’t do fact checking. Liars and deceivers usually have at least as much access to persuadable minds as truth tellers.

Q: Should objectively demonstrable lies, falsehoods, and BS that are likely to cause significant harm be subject to more stringent regulations than is currently the case, or is the threat of authoritarianism too great to justify that?

Reviews of Sunstein's book: 

The Tyranny Of Loud Idiots 

Sunstein, Cass R. Liars: falsehoods and free speech in an age of deception