Trump, Science, and Academia

A Preliminary Evaluation

In this post, I provide a preliminary evaluation of Trump administration actions as they relate to science and academia. But first, allow me to do some throat-clearing…

Trump is doing his Trumpish things. Buy Greenland. Resettle Gazans and turn Gaza into the Middle East Riviera. Tariffs on, tariffs off. Withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council. And on and on. I’ve heard that elections have consequences.

Then there are his opponents providing a relentless drumbeat of histrionic (for now¹) accusations of fascism, authoritarianism, and Anything I Do Not Like is UnConstitutionalism. This addition to the Orwelexicon after the 2020 election was inspired by hundreds of MAGA types on (then) Twitter declaring that the vote-counting in states that Trump lost close was “unconstitutional.”² However, it now seems to apply to the academics and progressives who routinely claim this or that action by Trump (or, more exactly, this, that, this too, the next one, and on and on) are “unconstitutional”:

From The Orwlexicon. I probably should update the text to include Trump Derangement Syndrome-induced claims of “unconstitutional!”

I am not addressing any of those things. I have opinions but no actual relevant experience or expertise. We could shoot the shit about this stuff over a beer or maybe some hot buttered rum someday, but that is not this essay.

Post skiing? No. Winter football game? No. Two tennis buddies of mine and me, after playing tennis. We have a longstanding tradition of shooting the shit over beer, munchies and, occasionally, when its cold enough, hot buttered rum, outdoors, after playing indoors. And, in between stories about travel, sports and family, we have discussed Trump over the years.

But science, and academia, are things I have quite a lot of knowledge about. And a slew of Trump’s executive orders and initiatives directly affect science and academia. I review and evaluate some of them here.

I. Robert F. Kennedy Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)

This is more a policy than science appointment. But HHS does oversee both the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). So having whacko scientific beliefs is not really an ideal qualification. People have gone apoplectic because of his vaccine skepticism, promotion of links of certain vaccines to autism, and some Covid hyperbole widely interpreted as antisemitic. His science beliefs certainly leaves more than a little to be desired.

Even the conservative New York Post headlined a story with:

However, he has some professional accomplishments relevant to HHS that Biden’s appointment, Xavier Becerra, who was an attorney and then a politician for almost 30 years before taking the HHS Secretary job, did not. RFK Jr is also an attorney, but one who has had some pretty extraordinary successes fighting for environmental causes. This seems directly relevant to the mission of HHS. On the other hand, in Congress, Becerra was heavily involved in legislation related to health, so, although he had no scientific bona fides that I can find, he did know more than a little about policy. I am not claiming that RFK Jr is as good for the position as was Becerra or that I think RFK Jr is a great choice. And I can’t blame anyone for thinking RFK Jr’s vaccine views render him unfit to be HHS Secretary.

And then, there is this: In 1983, he was convicted of heroin possession. That was a long time ago. And yet I have heard that once you get stuck on heroin, it is almost impossible to get that monkey off your back. You never know. But maybe it was a one off, and he’s fine. I also believe in redemption.

Conclusion: RFK Jr.

He is not a great appointee. His past statements about vaccines strike me as badly out of touch with the science. His supposedly antisemitic statement³ strikes me as anti-Covid policy hyperbole way more than antisemitism. He also later apologized. But his environmental accomplishments are bona fide.

Last, HHS is mostly about policy not science. One can head a policy arm of the govt without having any serious scientific background, as did Becerra. Neither of Obama’s HHS Secretaries had any scientific background, either.

Of course, none of this vindicates RFK Jr’s misbegotten scientific beliefs. One could argue, reasonably, something like “Well, its not that you need to be expert in science, but if you have beliefs about health-related science that are delusional, maybe this isn’t the job for you.”

And yet… Trump won on a platform of NOT conducting business as usual. Lots of smart people say and do lots of stupid things all the time. Its called dysrationalia.

From The Orwelexicon, although the term first appeared in academic papers

Consider again Biden’s appointment, Alex Becerra. For him, it is not a case of what he said or did, but what he did not say or do. He did nothing to prevent CDC officials from pressuring social media companies to censor, among other people, Jay Bhattacharya (more on him below), for his dissenting Covid policy views.⁴ Sounds pretty authoritarian to me. Authoritarian-esque censorship is bad. Which is worse, failing to act against govt censorship and demonization by one’s underlings or having misbegotten beliefs about vaccines? Reasonable people can disagree on this.

Last, the Secretary of HHS mostly does policy, not science. Is JFK Jr any good at policy? I have no idea. People screamed about Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first term Dept of Education appointment. I did not follow her accomplishments closely, but she upgraded due process protections for people accused of Title IX (sexual harassment, discrimination) violations. Due process is good.

Jay Bhattacharya Nominated to Head NIH

Jay Bhattacharya has been nominated to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is also, to say the least, a controversial figure.

Accomplishments

• Professor of epidemiology and health economics with appointments in multiple units at Stanford

• According to Google Scholar, well over 300 publications.

• Co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a document expressing dissent from the harsh lockdown policies of the Covid era. In my hindsight, I think they were right about this. GBD also referred repeatedly to reaching “herd immunity,” which seems to have been completely wrong.

• Recently named as member and recipient of the Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom of the American Academy of Science and Letters, the highest award it gives.

• He also just helped launch a new open access journal designed to pre-empt most of the conventional academic norms that make peer review such a dysfunctional system, including the types of political biases that function to censor dissent.

The Critics

• He is also author of what has become known as The Santa Clara Study. It was roundly criticized for substantially underestimating the infection fatality rate (IFR) from Covid. IFR=(dead/infected). The paper estimated the IFR at below 0.2%, but 1.2 million Americans died from Covid, and that number is about 0.4% of the population, meaning that, absent the vax, the IFR was probably well over 0.5%. On the other hand, early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that the fatality rate from Covid was about 3.4%, which would have translated to about 11 million American deaths if everyone got infected. I believe about 3/4ish were infected through 2022, so let’s call it a round 8 million. This was still a vast overestimate. Bhattacharya’s estimate was inaccurate, but way less inaccurate than that of WHO. Somehow, if Trump had appointed someone with WHO “pedigree” to head NIH, I suspect the screamers would not be screaming their screetchy screams. Amusingly, Trump declared he had a “hunch” that the IFR was below 1%. How Trump’s hunch could be more scientifically accurate than WHO is worth pondering.

• Stanford’s student newspaper published this shrill call⁵ to block Bhattacharya from heading the NIH.

• Lots of people hated the Great Barrington Declaration. Here is an email from the head of NIH in 2020 referring to its authors as “fringe epidemiologists," calling for a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

  

Conclusion about Bhattacharya

Personally, I like this nomination. It promises to be part of a corrective for academic excess and radical politics-inspired censorship. He is a bona fide, accomplished scientist. He is not afraid of controversy. For the progressives out there, who seem to care about this sort of thing, I believe he is the first Indian (subcontinent, not indigenous American) to head NIH. But, then, Indians are not usually considered “oppressed.” Because he is so accomplished, and willing to serve in the Trump administration, in certain corners of Wokelandia, this must mean he’s been granted “Whiteness.” That type of thinking is progressive “diversity” in a nutshell, and why the Trump administration is gearing up to extirpate DEI. But I digress.

Bhattacharya has already made strengthening academic freedom one of his agendas (and the new journal he helped launch shows he is serious). To me, academic freedom is the foundation on which all good science and social science is built. If he does this well, he could do quite a few things I oppose and I’d still likely be grateful he was tapped to head NIH.

Of course, he’s merely been nominated, so, we will have to wait to see what happens. But I endorse this nomination.

DEI Executive Orders

I have a whole post dedicated to this, so I will only summarize its key points for science and academia. Trump’s executive order (EO):

• embraces civil rights law prohibitions against discrimination. To progressives’ dismay, discrimination against individuals from groups they would deem “oppressor” or even merely “not oppressed” is illegal. What does that have to do with academia? Everything from admissions to hiring was based on the progressives’ Orwellian understanding of “diversity” — which translated into preferences for people from “oppressed” groups.

• Revoked EO’s mandating a variety of forms of affirmative action.

• Prohibited recipients of federal grants (which includes many colleges and universities) from engaging in DEI programs “that violate federal anti-discrimination law.”

Conclusion about DEI EO’s

DEI’s track record is dubious at best and harmful at worst. I have yet to see any evidence that the diversity programs, trainings, and bureaucracies widely instituted throughout academia produce net positive value. If any of you know of such evidence, please post it in the comments. And they tend to be very expensive, often in the millions and sometimes in the tens of millions dollars per year. They should produce an extraordinary benefit for the cost, and I am pretty sure there is nothing out there that justifies it.

Although competence is the prime foundation for good teaching and research, I actually still believe diversity often has benefits to both. But DEI, as actually implemented throughout academia, reflected and facilitated an exacerbation of the academy’s shift toward radical politics. Unsurprisingly, DEI often created a hostile environment for many faculty and students who did not ascribe to progressive sacred values.

From The Orwelexicon

Elections have consequences. Funding of academics’ grants related to DEI, oppression, marginalized groups, and disparities is not a right. The people, through their elected representatives, have the right to decide how to allocate federal grant dollars.

As such, I think Trump’s EO’s attempting to cut off federal funding of DEI, and possibly to strangle it completely, are a necessary corrective, not to DEI’s lofty goals, but to its defective implementation.

Antisemitism in the Academy

Trump has also issued an Executive Order mandating:

the head of each executive department or agency (agency) shall submit a report to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, identifying all civil and criminal authorities or actions within the jurisdiction of that agency, beyond those already implemented under Executive Order 13899, that might be used to curb or combat anti-Semitism, and containing an inventory and analysis of all pending administrative complaints, as of the date of the report, against or involving institutions of higher education alleging civil-rights violations related to or arising from post-October 7, 2023, campus anti-Semitism.

I am a secular Jew. I have published academic articles on, among many other things, anti-Semitism. I have published several Unsafe Science posts on anti-Semitism in the academy, which I believe to be primarily an outgrowth of the academy’s increasing adoption of radical politics. Jews are, in the progressive worldview, a “privileged” “oppressor” group who compound the mortal sin of generally being successful in the democratic west with also generally supporting the settler colonial state of Israel and its ongoing “genocide.” Some have referred to these sorts of ideas as Woke Antisemitism because they unjustifiably demonize Jews.

Available on Amazon. I have only read parts of it.

So you might presume that I think Trump’s anti-Semitism EO is great. I definitely think the feds have a role in combating anti-Semitism when it violates civil rights laws. However, I do not like this EO. I do not like Jews being singled out for special protections. The feds should enforce civil rights laws — which apply to everyone. I doubt that this EO is illegal per se, but, to me, it violates the principle of equal protection. Why special investigations to protect Jews but not Muslims? Or Blacks? Or gays? Or trans people? Or East Asians? Or Hindus? Or White people? White people may sound ridiculous to my progressive readers, but the SCOTUS decision banning use of “diversity” in college admissions was reached, in part, because plenty of White students were, in fact, being discriminated against.

Worse, Trump’s “fact sheet” expanding on his anti-Semitism EO includes snippets like this:

immediate action will be taken by the Department of Justice to…punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.

Here is your periodic reminder that racism typically includes racist speech, and racist speech is protected by the First Amendment. Put differently, expressions of anti-Semitism are a form of protected speech. Worse, the fact sheet includes this:

Immediately after the jihadist terrorist attacks against the people of Israel on October 7, 2023, pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals began a campaign of intimidation, vandalism, and violence on the campuses and streets of America.

• Celebrating Hamas’ mass rape, kidnapping, and murder, they physically blocked Jewish Americans from attending college classes, obstructed synagogues and assaulted worshippers, and vandalized American monuments and statues.

• The Biden Administration turned a blind eye to this coordinated assault on public order; it simply refused to protect the civil rights of Jewish Americans, especially students. According to a December 2024 U.S. House of Representatives Staff Report on anti-Semitism, “the failure of our federal government departments and agencies is astounding.”

The statement about Biden turning a blind eye strongly suggests they think this is bad and they are not going to turn a blind eye. However, celebrating Hamas’s actions is protected speech. The rhetoric in the fact sheet is likely to chill legitimate protest.⁶ I feel most protected by my govt when it abides by the First Amendment, even when that means permitting speech I find abhorrent. No, not “even when” — “especially when.” This is because protecting free speech is the most fundamental, important political protection out there. It is foundational to everything else. If protests glorifying Hamas are punished, when power changes hands down the road, as it surely will someday, you and I may be prohibited from engaging in the types of protest we think are legitimate but others think are evil incarnate.

There definitely was a spike in anti-Semitism after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. So one might argue that the spike warrants special efforts by the feds. But there was also a spike in anti-Muslim bigotry and, I am pretty sure, hate crimes. Anti-Black racism has not disappeared. None of these prejudices have disappeared. The EO strikes me as bad policy because its divisive. We are all Americans and should be treated the same before the law. Almost anything else pisses me off, even when I am a member of supposed beneficiary group.

A bit hyperbolic. And not always true (think FEMA). But, then, it was more joke than literal description of reality. Well, maybe a half-joke. But it applies here.

Conclusion about the Anti-Semitism EO

If Trump wants to fight anti-Semitism, great! But do it as part of a broad effort to enforce civil rights laws for everyone, without affording special treatment to anyone, including Jews.

Disappearing Scientific Data

Scientific data housed by the feds has, for now, disappeared. This Atlantic report⁷ goes through the details. It is possible that some of the data will reappear after a Trump Administration review, but that has not happened at all for several large data sets, including:

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Social Vulnerability Index

Environmental Justice Index

The CDC’s landing page for HIV data.

Check it out. When I wrote this, those links produced Page Not Found errors. Ping me if you discover that has changed. This is censoring scientific data. It is probably not illegal, because the feds are not censoring other people’s data, they have censored their own. It is still censorship of science and that is bad, even if someone believes the science is bad — and I have not evaluated it.

Several other pages still have some data, but include this message:

It is not clear what that means, though one possibility is that it is being scrubbed of terms the Trump administration considers verboten. If that includes variables in the data set that is not good. But I have no idea whether it actually means that.

Conclusion: Disappearing Data

Censoring science is almost always a bad idea. Perhaps the missing data sets will reappear. Perhaps no variables will be purged. Perhaps. However, here is your reminder that academics started the whole idea of censoring science that they deem “harmful.”⁸ What did they think would happen when their side was no longer in control?

Regardless, for now, this is not good.

Pause on Grants and Awarding Grants

First, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo requiring a pause to disbursement of all federal grants and “assistance.”⁹ This sent faculty and administrators into a panicked frenzy, because their work depends on these grants. However, within a week, a court ordered an end to the pause, and the money on existing grants is flowing once again.

However, the National Science Foundation and NIH also paused all of its grant review panels. These are where scientists evaluate the quality of grant proposals, and are a necessary step toward funding most grants. The court order only covered previously awarded grants, not future decisions. Therefore, this pause is still in effect, while NSF and NIH attempts to align its decision-making processes with Trump’s other EO’s, especially the one related to DEI — which was pervasive throughout NSF grant policies.

Rutgers’ admins recently created an FAQ website regarding these issues, where you can find this:

“As is typical.” This is not some draconian authoritarian move by a fascist-wannabe. I mean, lots of academics believe Trump is a fascist-wannabe, but, if so, this is not a manifestation of that. It is business as usual. Its just that, for most academics, its not your guy doing it.¹⁰

Conclusion on Grant Pauses

Existing grants should have been grandfathered in and not subject to any pause in payments. Recipients played by the rules in force at the time, were awarded grants accordingly, and should be allowed to complete those projects.

However, it is also completely reasonable for NSF and other grant-awarding federal agencies to pause to evaluate and probably revise their decision-making processes to bring them in line with the instructions received from the Trump administration.

Wrap Up

So is academia and science likely better or worse off for the policies enacted by the Trump administration in its first few weeks?

RFK Jr? He might be a terrible choice but he might not fulfill his detractors nightmares. Regardless of whatever other bad (or good) things he does, I doubt his appointment will affect either academia or science very much.

Bhattacharya? Definitely good for addressing issues of academic censorship, which has been an increasing problem. It remains to be seen how good he will be otherwise as an administrator of NIH.

DEI? A necessary corrective, but the jury is still out on how effective it will be and whether it will produce a mirror image of the overreach that was so characteristic of so many DEI programs.

Anti-Semitism on campus? Well-intentioned, but fundamentally misguided. It might do some good for Jews on campus, but I am concerned that it is unnecessarily divisive and that the way it threatens speech protections will ultimately do more harm than heightened attempts to eliminate antisemitism do good.

Disappearing Data? Bad, unless it reappears some time soon.

Grant pause? The pausing of already-funded grants was bad; the pausing of the review process for new grants at NSF is business as usual and necessary to align their decisions with Trump’s EOs.

Grand Finale

Ships in a Storm. Ivan Aivozovsky, 1860

At the USC conference on scientific censorship, a very famous and influential public intellectual, a moderate Republican, told me over lunch: “Trump is not your friend.” I am pretty sure that is correct. It is also possible that Trump will do many terrible things while in office. He has definitely done or said lots of things unrelated to science or academia I do not like, including the Jan 6 pardons. I did not like the tariffs, either, but, then, he seems to have used them as a bargaining tool, so maybe I was wrong about that. If you want expertise on international policy, this is not the place to find it. Also, there have been so many EO’s, I am not tracking all of them.

In the nightmares of Trump’s critics, he is a modern fascist, accelerating America’s descent into depravity, despotism and decay. If so, that would be very bad for everyone, including scientists and academics. But we have to move at least a little closer to that scenario for me to become seriously concerned about it.

Overall, I am optimistic that the net effect of the actions that relate to academia so far will do more good than harm, even though there is a bit of both. However, even that conclusion is for me, what the Federal Reserve sometimes calls, data dependent. For those familiar with DEI, the issue is almost always how it is implemented rather than the loftiness of the stated goals. So we will have to wait and see.

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Commenting

Before commenting, please review my commenting guidelines. They will prevent your comments from being deleted. Here are the core ideas:

1. Don’t attack or insult the author or other commenters.

2. Stay relevant to the post.

3. Keep it short.

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5. Do not mindread, its a loser’s game.

6. Don’t tell me how to run Unsafe Science or what to post. (Guest essays are welcome and inquiries about doing one should be submitted by email).

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Footnotes

1. Histrionic drumbeat of accusations that Trump is a fascist. Trump’s election may in some sense express the very democratic “will of the people” but Trump himself would not rank high on my list of “people with a long, deep, principled commitment to liberal democracy.” His business sensibilities naturally flow into quasi-authoritarianism because when you are the CEO, pretty much the rest of the company has to do what you tell em whether they like it or not. Or they can quit. His role in ginning up stolen election conspiracies in 2020 and in (intentionally or not) inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection was not exactly a paragon of democratic commitment. On the other hand, the nightmarish predictions of his opponents do not constitute any sort of indictment of his actual actions so far in his second term.

2. Accusations that 2020 state vote-counting was unconstitutional. The Constitution makes it super clear that States can count votes and allocate electors pretty much however they want. They could — and I mean this quite literally — allocate electors based the number of snow days, the phase of the moon on electoral-allocation day, or anything else. It is left entirely up to the States to decide how to allocate electors. Although it might be possible for some state’s vote-counting to violate its own laws, it is almost impossible for them to violate the Constitution. I don’t want to say completely “impossible” because someone could probably concoct some bizarre but hypothetically possible scenario wherein they assign electors in a way that violates some Constitutional provision. For example, hypothetically, a state could allocate electors based on voting that only permits White people to vote. This would violate both the 14th Amendment and civil rights law.

3. RFK Jr’s supposedly antisemitic statement: ““Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did. Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”

4. Censoring Bhattacharya. This situation is complex. Bhattacharya and others sued for violation of their First Amendment rights. A Court of Appeals ruled in Bhattacharya’s favor. This was overturned by SCOTUS on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. However, the plaintifs have re-opened the case, arguing that they have more evidence than previous to justify that that they should have standing.

5. Shrill call to block Bhattacharya. It has many accusations. I did not track most of them down. For all I know, some might be true.

6. Chill legitimate protest. Protest is legitimate if it does not break the law. It could be misguided, histrionic, hyperbolic and promoting blatant propaganda and falsehoods, but none of these break the law. Protests celebrating Hamas or demonizing Israel over an imaginary genocide may be deeply wrongheaded, even evil, but they are still legitimate. I want protecting legitimate protest to be a high priority for my govt officials.

7. Atlantic report. The link goes to Yahoo News, but that is because The Atlantic is behind a paywall, and it was the easiest way for me to access it. Yahoo News reprinted it in full.

8. Academics started the whole idea of censoring science that they deem “harmful.” Well, this is not exactly right, this idea goes back thousands of years. When I say “started,” I mean “within the time period of my academic career” which started in 1981.

9. Federal grants and “assistance.” I have no clue what federal payments do and do not constitute federal assistance. I mean, I probably could make some plausible guesses, but, then, so could anyone.

10. “For most academics, its not your guy doing it.” He’s not my guy either; I did not vote for him. Somehow, though, I am mostly missing the tribal thing where, because he’s not my guy I have to despise everything he does. Nonetheless, I have now emitted the necessary dogmaflare:

From The Orwelexicon.