Donald Trump's all-out assault on pure and applied science, and on academia in general, has been widely reported in the news media. But, as it has come in bits and pieces over a period of time, it is hard to get an overall picture of just how bad things are (which I'm sure was an intentional ploy by the administration).
An Economist article tries to collect it all together and put it in some perspective, something that The Economist does so well. The article's title, "Looming disaster", give a sneak preview of their analysis. Without going into the kind of detail the article provides, a quick summary might be the following:
The US federal government doles out about $120 billion every year to research, of which about $50 billion goes towards tens for thousands of grants and contracts to universities and other higher education institutions, the rest going to public research bodies. Trump's proposed cuts to federal research and grant-making agencies - like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defence (DoD), the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - probably amount to about $40 billion a year, although that could well go up as new features are announced piecemeal (and apparently randomly and/or deliberately chaotically).
Also, some areas that have particularly attracted Trump's spleen are disproportionately affected, something that these overall figures do not reflect. Trump, and the administration that carries out his every imperial whim, seems to have a problem with science in general, but in particular he wants to clamp down on anything to do with DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), sexual orientation and transgender issues, climate change, misinformation research, COVID-19 and vaccination.
Thus, the NIH and NSF between them have cancelled over 3,000 already-approved grants, some of them worthy projects like cancer research that just happen to mention words like "equity", " sexual orientation", even "Latinx". Anything that appears "woke", even superficially or incidentally, is a target. Any criticism of Israel, or even a perceived lack of enthusiasm in countering "antisemitism" (in its broadest, and often misleading, sense) will also attract financial humiliation, as in the cases of Harvard and Columbia Universities. In some cases, Trump or one of his henchmen may just have a personal grudge against an organization or an individual. And in some cases, it is entirely unclear why projects are being cancelled, and transparency and justification is not a requirement.
The Economist article gives many more details and examples, and it makes grim reading. Other articles in the same issue look at how the cuts to science funding might affect ordinary Americans, and how all the uncertainty in American research, once the envy of the world, is resulting in a new academic brain drain. Compelling, but chilling, reporting.
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