Science Isn’t about Domination. It’s about Democracy
Science is key to diplomacy, unity and democracy. What the Trump administration is trying to do to it will weaken the U.S.
Nestled in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the slash-and-burn playbook for the federal government that the Trump administration is following while saying it isn’t, is a call for American “science dominance.”
There is no such thing. And what the project means by the term—turning the Department of Energy into a handmaiden of the coal, oil and natural gas industry—betrays not only the taxpayer but science itself.
Science isn’t a winner-take-all, zero-sum game of flag football. Whether during the cold war or the era of Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the bedrock of science has been international cooperation. People pursue scientific knowledge not solely for the sake of lording our spoils over everyone else. The monetary value of research is not the only reason why humans engage in asking why of the world around us.
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Science breeds diplomacy. It counters division. It tells us what is, not what we want things to be. Science enables democracy. The way the Trump administration is approaching it, by cutting funds for projects that run afoul of conservative values, such as ones related to diversity, or calling for research into claims that have already been debunked, which is the case for the idea that vaccines are linked to autism, defies all this. If that approach succeeds, it will make us a poorer nation in every sense of the word.
By halting federal funds to scientific research, canceling university grants and threatening to deport immigrant scientists, the Trump administration is restricting the flow of ideas. By trying to legitimize debunked scientific ideas and allocating taxpayer dollars to research into those debunked ideas, the administration sows discord and undermines the role of public health in preventing sickness and disease. By canceling global aid for public health projects, the administration is shunning the U.S. role in global health. And in their push for energy dominance, Trump and his allies are kicking years of negotiation over climate change to the curb.
By becoming insular, by cutting out the world, we stand to lose our best and brightest minds in science and the exchange of ideas that leads to innovation. Our country is a scientific and economic powerhouse precisely because we have been so open and collaborative for so long. China’s academic scientific output, as measured by publications in Nature journals, has surpassed that of the U.S. How can cutting federal science funding help the administration’s intellectual war with China? How can the U.S. further its national interests if we shut out ideas and people? How does democracy survive if we stop research and the flow of information?
In setting the stage for the role of the U.S. government in science, Vannevar Bush told President Harry Truman in 1945 that “scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.” He noted the federal government’s role in supporting agricultural research and said, “The time has come when such support should be extended to other fields.”
From the 1950s on, the U.S. government has been the largest funder of scientific research in the nation, not to mention the world. Those dollars have helped develop countless drugs, and a wide assortment of military and domestic machinery, and they have paid the salaries of millions of researchers. Those dollars have saved people and helped industrialize nations the world over.
American scientific research has also influenced policymaking. This is where the tie to democracy matters most: evidence-based policymaking allows the largest number of people in the country to be healthy, be safe and have a voice. This is what cutbacks to science threaten. This is how Trump administration–sponsored research into questions that have basically been answered, because officials don’t like the answer, threatens the ability of all Americans to thrive.
When Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., says the nation will know by the end of the summer what environmental factors cause autism and calls for the private medical records of autistic people as part of this push, this is a fishing expedition. Kennedy doesn’t like the answers that we already have—vaccines do not cause autism, and genetics influences the development of autism—so he wastes taxpayer money.
Recently, a group of scientists from all over the world earned Breakthrough Prize for the work they did at CERN, a multinational facility that tests fundamental ideas in physics. With cuts to science funding, what will happen to projects like this, plans to improve our Antarctic field stations, and efforts like the evidence-driven Paris climate agreement? Such ideas underpin our grasp of the natural world and probe the technologies the U.S. needs. Scuttling science and shutting doors on the world will leave us in the dark. Domination will doom us to failure.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.