How stupid has science been

Trump’s 2025 Anti-Science Policies: An Empirical Assessment of Deregulation, Censorship, and Corporate Influence on U.S. Scientific Integrity, 2025

This paper provides an empirical assessment of President Trump’s anti-science policies implemented during the early months of 2025, examining their profound implications for evidence-based governance in the United States. Through a detailed analysis of executive actions—such as the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, aggressive regulatory rollbacks, and the reclassification of civil servants—the study reveals how these measures have systematically undermined environmental protections, public health initiatives, and scientific integrity. The paper explores the ideological motivations and corporate influences that drive these policies, highlighting the deliberate censorship of scientific data and the sidelining of expert voices. By drawing historical parallels with Soviet Lysenkoism, Nazi science manipulation, and other instances of science suppression, this research situates the current crisis within a broader global and historical context. Finally, the paper discusses the long-term consequences of these actions on innovation and global leadership, and proposes potential reforms to restore accountability and protect science from political interference.

In the exploration of the consistently complex and brutal interplay between politics and scientific and technological advancements, significant insights can be found within a number of large government-sponsored programs in which exceptional new technologies were developed and significant scientific research was either accomplished or seeded for future discoverers. Those specific projects are the Apollo Program, the Space Shuttle (Space Transportation System) project, the Superconducting Super Collider, and the Space Launch System. The numerous failures of nuclear power in the decades following the Manhattan Project also provides a window through which socioeconomic and political influences can afflict science and technology. These projects all share some form of significant failure or premature cancellation wrought upon them by industrial, managerial, and political failures of all kinds, failures which severely inhibited or even completely destroyed the original potential of these projects. The roles of overwhelming bureaucracy and of overbearing mistakes on behalf of the government are central to these failures, and as a result it is clear that the importance of the interactions between science and the political systems and industrial complexes that they must coexist with to succeed cannot be exaggerated. Throughout the history of governmental interactions with scientific endeavors, it becomes clear that the support of a government in scientific research carries with it an expectation that the research conducted is inherently a means to an end. This expectation, illustrated time and time again in undertakings like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo

SSRN, 2025

We begin this paper by tracing the history of science and technology in the United States in brief. Both science and technology in the United States have had a long and an impressive history, and have created a great deal of intrinsic value that has greatly impacted the whole world, and changed it fundamentally and foundationally for the better. Science in the USA has had its zenith in the 1960's and 1970's, and American scientists bagged the most Nobel prizes among any country on earth; in comparison, countries like India continue to remain midgets, and peripheral to most science activity following western ideals and models blindly and without self-inspiration. Most people believe science is currently experiencing a rapid or at least a relative decline due to the myopic policies of the current federal administration. We want the glory days of science in the USA to continue as it portends and augurs a great deal of good for the world. There is a concept known as creative destruction. This process is often self-initiated, and in this case must reorient and redirect much of scientific activity, particularly in the social sciences towards new goalposts, and one that makes it broader and much more inclusive in its underpinnings and orientation. This is what might indeed ultimately happen; we must however, accelerate and precipitate the process.

Two or three times a year, principal investigators closet themselves in their offices for about a month to prepare grant applications for National Institutes of Health (NIH) or similar agencies to ensure funding. It is no longer research as usual but rather a feverish production of pictures, graphs and preliminary experimental data to be incorporated into proposals to make them more attractive. It is a matter of life and death because, somehow, NIH awards have become not only the icing on the cake as was originally intended, but the entire cake. The National Institutes of Health had a rather humble beginning as a bacteriological laboratory "for investigating the origin and causes of epidemic diseases, especially yellow fever and cholera" in 1878. As is typical for all pre-cancerous lesions, the early stages of NIH evolution were rather benign until the creation of the Research Grants Office within NIH in 1946. This office was charged with administering a program of extramural research grants and fellowship awards, with multiple study sections for review of research grant applications. Today, NIH is a monstrously big and complex organization that controls every facet of scientific activity (and, incidentally, livelihood of all scientists) in the United States through awarding or withholding funding for research, presumably, based on merit determined by peer review.