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More than 1,900 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine signed an open letter warning Americans about the “danger” of the Trump administration’s attacks on science.
The letter comes amid the administration’s relentless assault on US scientific institutions which has included threats to private universities, federal grant cancelations and ideological funding reviews, mass government layoffs, resignations and censorship.
“We see real danger in this moment,” the letter states. “We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”
The National Academies of Sciences was established by an act of Congress in 1863, during Abraham Lincoln’s administration.
Today, the organization operates as a non-profit with two additional academies under its charter – the National Academies of Engineering and Medicine. The academies are seen as representing American scientific excellence, and together claim more than 6,800 peer-elected members between the three branches.
“The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration,” the letter states.
“The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students – the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.”
The letter continued: “The quest for truth – the mission of science – requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence. It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.”
Scientific institutions have seen major upheaval since the beginning of this Trump administration and there are fears that the cuts are in preparation for privatization.
Last week, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced the administration would seek to cut a total of 20,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or roughly a quarter of the department’s workforce. Branches with imminent losses include agencies that are household names in the US, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist who was once the nation’s foremost vaccine skeptic, has also attacked the nation’s vaccine policies – issuing lukewarm support for measles shots despite an ongoing outbreak; threatening the technology that underpins Covid-19 vaccines; canceling a nearly $600m contract to study potential treatments for bird flu and canceling meetings of expert scientific advisors.
The government’s top vaccine expert, Dr Peter Marks at FDA, resigned over the weekend, impugning the administration’s “unprecedented assault on scientific truth”.
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“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter. “But rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Environmental sciences have also seen attacks. The administration has sought to cut more than 1,100 scientists as it dissolves the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) office of research and development. The administration is also seeking to cut as much as one-fifth of the workforce from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the agency perhaps best known to Americans for forecasting hurricanes.
“The nation’s scientific enterprise is being annihilated and the silence of too many of our scientific leaders is only making the ongoing catastrophe worse,” said Dr Robert Steinbrook, health research group director at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
“The ‘SOS’ signal from 1,900 scientists must be a wake-up call for our leading scientific and medical organizations to show courage and speak out at this critical moment,” he said. “If scientists and scientific and medical organizations will not forcefully speak out in defense of science and public health, who will? There is no alternative.”
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