CONTEXT
Enough time has passed for reasonable assessments of the astounding damage that Trump and MAGA elites have caused and will continue to cause. All major aspects of American society, government, law, science, education, commerce and religion are under relentless attack by authoritarian MAGA extremism.
Trump and MAGA elites make America great again for themselves by destroying what it was and turning it into their plaything for their pleasure and wealth. The elites Trump chooses to run his ghastly horror show are a cadre of absolute loyalists. For the most part, the elites are a group consisting of opportunistic, self-serving authoritarian liars, cranks, crackpots, grifters, theocratic Christian zealots and sex perverts. Yes, that includes grifters and sex perverts. Destroying American science means nothing to them. Link, link, link, link, link, link
Clueless about science, and doesn’t care
The MAGA attack on American science
A NYT opinion, (not paywalled) lays out just some of the vast damage done to science and future research. The op-ed by Jeff Coller, an RNA biologist at Johns Hopkins, uses the origin story of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy as a parable about the irreplaceable value of basic, curiosity-driven science. The central claim is that the Trump administration’s proposed rule requiring all federal research grants to be approved by political appointees and to “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities” would have made drugs like Ozempic impossible to develop.
Coller’s points out that the OMB’s, run by hyper-radical Christian nationalist theocrat Russell Vought, proposed 412-page Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, published May 29, 2026. Vought’s anti-science rule subordinates peer review to review by political loyalists. Federal research grants now must to align with presidential priorities or they will not be funded. What are the president’s priorities? No one know, including the president. He is clueless about science and doesn’t care about it.
Under Vought’s proposal, the long-standing gold standard of peer review at NIH and NSF gets reduced to a vague “advisory” function with no decision-making power. The OMB is accepting public comments through July 13, 2026. This comes on top of already steep damage: the Trump administration froze or canceled billions in research grants in 2025, courts ordered much of the money released, yet agencies have still funded fewer grants monthly compared to prior years. The White House’s proposed FY2026 budget would cut NSF funding by 56.9% and NIH by 39.3%.
Coller points out accumulating harms. Graduate programs at top research universities reduced fall admissions. That will deplete the next generation of scientists. A cancer researcher Rachel Sirianni told NPR that her promising pediatric brain tumor drug combination had virtually no chance of getting funded today. A report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation warned that the current trajectory of science funding cuts could cost the US nearly $1 trillion in economic output over the next decade. Separately, researchers at institutions like the Broad Institute report lab funding cut by one-third to two-thirds, forcing painful choices about which personnel and projects to keep.
MAGA is at war against science in the public interest. Now, whatever is left will be science in the interest of Trump and allied elites. What that will be is unknown to us. Some of the elites probably have an idea of how to piss away our money for their own wealth and power, including serving their extremist ideologies such as laissez-faire capitalism, and bigoted fundamentalist Old Testament Christian theocracy.
Regardless of cynical propaganda that Trump or MAGA elites use to hide what they are doing, e.g., improving efficiency, the evidence is solid that no one can pick the winners of basic research in advance. Science progress is unpredictable and driven by factors such as curiosity. It is not driven by corrupt, crackpot politics. Making science research funding subject to political whim by arrogant, corrupt science ignoramuses, has nothing to do with improving efficiency. That is an anti-efficiency policy. Simply put, MAGA is ending American science in service to the public interest and that is a fact, not an opinion. Link, link
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