Trump Wages War on Science

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Donald Trump isn’t exactly a champion of science. His actions as president and on the campaign trail prove as much.

Ahead of his next stint in the Oval Office, he has nominated a vaccine skeptic to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, promised to rid federal agencies of potentially tens of thousands of career staffers, and said he intends to shutter the Department of Education.

“Trump has basically said he is waging war on science and scientists.” said Jennifer Jones, the director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit science advocacy group.

And that “war” likely won’t be limited to researchers within the federal government.

To get a better sense of how scientists are feeling about their work under Trump 2.0, Jackie Flynn Mogensen spoke with a handful of researchers at public and private universities, PhD students, postdocs, and startup founders.

Many described concerns about losing funding, avoiding terms like “climate change” in federal grant applications and other paperwork, and losing access to federal datasets. Some even feared for their own safety. Others, due to their field, felt confident their work would be insulated from the future Trump administration. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid putting their research at further risk.

While their testimonials by no means offer a comprehensive picture of the scientific community’s stance on Trump, they do shed some light on how some researchers feel about the next four years, and what exactly is keeping them up at night.

As one PhD student in California bluntly put it, “There are a lot of days where I feel very much like just quitting all of this.”

#science #trump #climatechange

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