At least that's the Republican platform. Adam Rogers in Scientific American tells the depressing story of the Dump administration's destruction of the American scientific enterprise. You should read the whole thing, but I'll just pull out a couple of points and look at them from my point of view as a public health researcher.
There are two main themes in Rogers's piece. One is that after World War II the U.S. invested heavily in basic science. The National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation funded a lot of basic research without regard for potential for monetary profit, or even for the most part any consideration of the likelihood of practical technological results. The philosophy was that you can't predict how basic knowledge might turn into commercial products or public benefits, but the more we learn about the universe and our own biology the more we'll surprise ourselves with technological progress.
I'll digress a bit from Rogers to give you an example. You probably don't think that quantum mechanics is of much practical importance, but you're wrong. The Global Positioning System that enables your phone to direct you to out of the way places depends on atomic clocks which work on quantum principles. The design of the transistors in your computer depends on understanding quantum effects. Without the quantum theory, the world would be very different. As for biomedicine, NIH in 2025 cut the amount of grant funding it awarded by 40%. An analysis that Rogers reports on finds that if grants in the bottom 40% of reviewer scores had not been funded over the years, half of all FDA-approved drugs would not exist today.
What has happened is that venture capitalists and their philosophy of moving fast, breaking things, and making a shitload of money has taken over. The idea of pursuing knowledge for its own sake is no longer part of conservative philosophy. But there's another pernicious element of the conservative approach to science which is, essentially, that any facts that threaten conservative ideology have to be rejected. In public health, and indeed in medicine, we know that so-called social determinants of health are very important -- in fact more important to health outcomes than any medical intervention.
But NIH now refuses to fund any research into social determinants of health, or even that focuses on particular disadvantaged categories of people. As Rogers tells us:
When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.” . . .
Researchers who manage to get grants to study health outcomes on the condition that they ignore the effects of variables such as socioeconomic status, gender and ethnicity won’t even be able to publish their findings, because peer reviewers, an NSF director says, “are not going to suddenly indulge this fantasy.” They’re going to demand that studies factor in relevant variables.
If this had happened 20 years ago, I would not have had an academic career at all, and neither would most of my colleagues. In fact I don't think the Brown School of Public Health would ever have come to exist. And many people are being forced to leave academia, or leave the country, and many are in fact doing the latter. The U.S. is being diminished in so many ways under the present regime, for which I will coin the term lunaticocracy, but the ruination of our scientific infrastructure is one of the worst, and it isn't getting enough attention.
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