Those of us opposed to Trump have lots of choices when it comes to his most dangerous actions.
Mass deportations of law-abiding undocumented migrants. Tax breaks for the wealthy paid for by huge cuts to Medicaid. Slow-walking support for Ukraine. Mass firings of career federal employees. To name but a few.
But in the long run, I suspect that historians of the future will look back and judge that Trump's most disastrous action in his second term was to engage in a war against science, notably including the science of climate change.
The world has already surpassed the 1.5 C increase in temperature that was considered an important goal to preserve the habitability of our planet for us humans. More efforts are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not less.
Yet Trump and his Republican cronies have been dismantling Biden's climate initiatives both by executive orders and legislative action. More burning of coal and oil is exactly what isn't needed now, but Trump is working to cripple our nation's renewable energy industry, the wave of the future, and support the fossil fuel industry, the stagnant pool of the past.
Mentions of climate change have been deleted from federal agency web sites, an absurd head-in-the-sand approach akin to a young child putting a blanket over their head and crying, "Now I'm invisible!" Today the Washington Post had a story about how a tool to help communities prepare for future flooding exacerbated by climate change has been eliminated by the Trump administration.
The Commerce Department has indefinitely suspended work on a tool to help communities predict how rising global temperatures will alter the frequency of extreme rainfall, according to three current and former federal officials familiar with the decision, a move that experts said will make the country more vulnerable to storms supercharged by climate change.
All this is part of a broader war Trump is waging against science. In the June 14, 2025 issue of New Scientist, Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, has a column called The Big Picture: The universe is still there to be understood, despite brutal new cuts to US science budgets. But the damage to future research will be huge.
Here's a PDF file of her column, along with an excerpt.
Download Trump's cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation will have huge consequences | New Scientist
Our current political moment instead feels like realising that we had been living with a false sense of security – that US science and government support for it would be there tomorrow – but without a cool new reality on the other side. Instead, the US government is dispensing with publicly funded culture, throwing it into a black hole. I don’t make that metaphor lightly; I think it’s important. When an object crosses a black hole’s event horizon, it is the point of no return. The object can’t go back.
We are in the same situation. While the universe will still be there to be understood, the damage to our capacity for research will be long lasting and the alteration to our trajectory permanent. Already, a generation of master’s and PhD students has had the number of available slots reduced. Aspiring professors aren’t being trained in the same numbers; this affects not just future scientists but science communicators, too.
A whole future is being disposed of. And while Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA’s astrophysics budget and the National Science Foundation’s physics, mathematics and astronomy budgets won’t keep the rest of the world from doing science, there will be far-reaching consequences. This is due to the US’s role as a global investor in particle physics, cosmology and research into fundamental reality.
It's even worse than this, of course. Trump is also slashing the budget for the National Institutes of Health, a move decried by an article in the JAMA Health Forum, "Cutting the NIH -- the $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe." Excerpts:
Scientists researching new cancer cures are neither culture warriors nor campus protesters. But so far, the biggest financial blows against academia have been borne by biomedical research. The Trump administration has selectively canceled grants, fired intramural researchers, and plans to cut billions that are paid by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for indirect costs.
The administration has proposed to Congress a 43% cut to next year’s NIH budget, equivalent to $20 billion per year. The government has threatened to stop funding virtually all biomedical research if certain universities do not accept demands for changes in curriculum, admissions, hiring, and other policies—none of which are related to lifesaving science. As a result, hiring freezes are common at medical centers, and clinical trials are or might be put on hold.
...New therapies lengthen lives. Buxbaum et al estimate that new medical therapies generated 48% of the 3.3-year increase in life expectancy in the US between 1990 and 2015. If biomedical research remains as important in the future as in the past, a 15.3% reduction in new therapies would lead to a reduction in life expectancy of 0.24 years per person over the next 25 years. In a population of more than 340 million, this reflects 82 million fewer years of life.
Economists use various methods to estimate the value of life and typically find that years of life are valued at roughly between $100 000 and $200 000 per year. Even using the lower value in calculations, the lost health from the NIH cuts translates into more than $8.2 trillion ($100 000 × 82 million years).
These losses would be weighed against the gains that emerge from reduced public spending. Over 25 years, the proposed annual savings of $20 billion amounts to $500 billion in budgetary reductions. This pales in comparison to the $8.2 trillion in lost health, which is 16 times greater than the proposed cost savings. Put another way, punishing campuses by cutting health research funding would destroy the equivalent of one-quarter of annual gross domestic product in the US.
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