‘Waging war on science’: Researchers worry about their jobs under Trump 2.0

Over the years, Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been a champion of science. As president and on the campaign trail, he called climate change a “hoax“; oversaw the rolling back of more than 100 environmental policies; directed agencies to cut down on expert guidance; pushed unproven COVID treatments; pulled out of the Paris climate agreement (and pledged to do so again); and claimed, without evidence, that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. Ahead of his next stint in the Oval Office, he has nominated a vaccine denier to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, promised to rid federal agencies of potentially tens of thousands of career staffers, and said he intends to shutter the Department of Education.

“Trump has basically said he is waging war on science and scientists,” said Jennifer Jones, the director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS, a nonprofit science advocacy group.

And that “war” likely won’t be limited to researchers within the federal government. To get a better sense of how scientists are feeling about their work under Trump 2.0, I spoke with a handful of researchers at public and private universities, Ph.D. students, postdocs, and startup founders. Many described concerns about losing funding, avoiding terms like “climate change” in federal grant applications and other paperwork, and losing access to federal datasets. Some even feared for their own safety. Others, due to their field, felt confident their work would be insulated from the future Trump administration. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid putting their research at further risk.

While their testimonials by no means offer a comprehensive picture of the scientific community’s stance on Trump, they do shed some light on how some researchers feel about the next four years, and what exactly is keeping them up at night. As one Ph.D. student in California bluntly put it, “There are a lot of days where I feel very much like just quitting all of this.”

Here are some ways another Trump administration may complicate their work.

Funding — and federal research priorities — may change

In academia, finding funding can be a struggle, with or without Trump in office. To cover their salaries, researchers often require several grants, which can be competitive and may only cover a few years at a time. “You’re essentially building the railroad track as you’re going down the railroad track,” Oliver Bear Don’t Walk IV, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington studying Indigenous health, described it. With Trump promising to shake up federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, they said, “it can add a lot more uncertainty to an already pretty uncertain process.”

While 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 couple years,” the California Ph.D. student, a NASA-funded ecologist studying tree health and drought, said. But “what happens next is a big question mark for me.”

Funding in fields that involve climate science, equity, and diversity initiatives may be particularly vulnerable. As Inside Higher Ed reports, Trump allies including Texas Republican Senator 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 related to things like gender, race, or social and environmental justice. These “questionable projects,” Cruz argued in an October report, are essentially “left-wing ideological crusades” and have led to, in Musk’s words, “the corruption of science.”

Now researchers aren’t sure what funding they’ll be able to rely on. Eldrick Millares, the co-founder and CEO of Illuminant Surgical, a Los Angeles–based medical-device startup aimed at helping doctors make fewer mistakes in spinal surgery, said that some of the company’s current federal grants offer extra funding for hiring employees from underrepresented groups. Before Trump’s victory, Millares said Illuminant had plans to use those funds to hire people from lower-income or rural backgrounds in West Virginia, where some of the company’s potential partners are located. “We were really excited about that,” Millares said. “That might be gone next year.”

As Jones sees it, cutting funding for certain areas of study would fit into part of Trump’s larger campaign of attacks against scientists. (By UCS’s count, the first Trump administration led more than 200 attacks on science.) “By threatening to shrink those grants, you’re scaring those people into silence.”

Researchers worry they’ll have to avoid controversial buzzwords like “diversity” or “climate change”

To protect themselves, many of the researchers I spoke with told me they expect they may need to reframe their research to appeal to the new administration.

“I’ll be finishing my Ph.D. smack in the middle of the early Trump administration,” the California student said. “There’s a NASA postdoc program that I might apply to, and I’ve started to mold how I would pitch continuations of my research in ways that don’t involve climate.” Hypothetically, he said, he could pivot to describing a project as addressing “wildfire risk,” rather than “climate change.” It’s not ideal, he said, but “there’s part of me that wants to insulate myself against whatever funding changes come. [I’d] still do good research, but also protect myself.”

Other researchers might have more difficulty 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,” Bear Don’t Walk, who is a citizen of the Apsáalooke Nation, said. When he first applied for his postdoc grant, he made a point to mention how the U.S. government’s actions — including colonization, boarding schools, and land dispossession — continue to affect Indigenous health today. In other words, equity is at the heart of Bear Don’t Walk’s research. “It was important to me that I didn’t mince words. … And now I’m like, ‘Well, OK, am I going to have to start mincing words?’”

In some ways, some sources noted, scientists are always tweaking their research proposals to fit the wants of agencies. That’s just good grant writing. But what if the words researchers use impact the research that eventually gets done? “If we’re no longer able to study certain things in health equity or talk about systemic racism in medical practice and education,” one medical researcher argued, “then we essentially can’t move the needle and try to fix some of the issues.”

Scientists aren’t sure they’ll have access to federal data or tools

On top of everything else, the scientists I talked to worry they’ll have even less access to information under the new Trump administration. “I rely on a lot of federal data,” one postdoc who studies energy policy said. “I think there are a lot of open questions as to the quality and reliability and continued provision of federal data.” That includes, he said, data from the U.S. Census (which, as my colleague Ari Berman has reported in detail, the first Trump administration attempted to meddle with), and agencies like the Energy Information Agency, which has provided “best-in-class” data on energy consumption and production in the U.S. since the ’70s, including data about energy companies. “If that gets compromised,” the postdoc says, “I think researchers in general will be much more dependent on the companies themselves to provide the data, and there’s no real reason to think that the companies will be totally honest or transparent in doing that.”

“In general, I expect a lot less transparency and a lot less disclosure” from the federal government, he said, “which will make it much harder to evaluate 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 undergoes an increase in “efficiency,” 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 appointment (as current and former government officials reportedly fear will happen), that might slow things down for the agency. “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to get a good relationship with our FDA reviewers,” Millares said, “and if they leave, that would be really tough, because then we kind of have to start over,” he said.

Good scientists may leave the field, be pushed out, or never join at all

Some researchers told me they’re worried about their or their colleagues’ safety, particularly in red states. The California student, who is trans, said he’s not willing to move to “a good half” of states after he finishes his Ph.D. due to hostility toward trans people. “I would leave science before I moved to Florida. I would move to the private sector and get an industry job or something well before I moved to Missouri or Tennessee.”

UCS’s Jones, a former environmental studies professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she was tapped by the university to direct the school’s Center for Environment and Society, says she left in 2023 in part due to Governor Ron DeSantis’ anti-science policies. “It was just increasingly clear to me that I was, at best, going to have to just shut up, crawl underneath the table, and not do the work that I thought I had been brought to do.”

Now she worries her experience in Florida may be emblematic of what’s about to happen in the rest of the country. “As Trump wages a war of intimidation and fear against scientists,” Jones said, “you’re going to have a lot fewer people raising their hand to serve the public good through science into the future, right?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Waging war on science’: Researchers worry about their jobs under Trump 2.0 on Dec 14, 2024.