Scientific Methods

Late last month, the House narrowly advanced President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” budget bill, which aims to slash spending on everything from Medicaid to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program to Pell grants in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It also targets public funding for scientific agencies: the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, for instance, could see their budgets cut by nearly 40 and 50 percent, respectively.

These are just the latest salvo against scientific research from Trump 2.0, who has already enacted cuts to the National Science Foundation, the NIH, and other agencies since returning to the White House. Of course, liberal commentators have bemoaned for decades the right’s presumptive “war on science”—a crusade that some see as just the most recent installment of an entrenched, century-long American tradition of inveighing against scientific authority. But what might decades ago have seemed like overwrought doomsaying has become for many an all-too-accurate depiction of the existential crisis that American science faces today. “If this assault is successful,” Adam Serwer recently wrote in The Atlantic, then the administration’s “comprehensive attack on knowledge . . . will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us.”

Now, the most provocative of Trump’s proposed reductions include cuts to the National Weather Service, situated under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (while the House-passed bill does not make reference to the former, its fate is still uncertain). These cuts include reductions to data-gathering weather balloons, as well as to staff—an unnerving decision, given that the number of meteorologists, like air traffic controllers, was already quite dire before Trump took office, and a further drop will only serve to erode the country’s preparedness in response to weather-related disasters. This is, of course, an unsurprising move for an administration inclined to refer to any environmental policy as part of a “Green New Scam.” But is imperiling weather preparedness simply a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face? It would seem, after all, that natural weather disasters brought on by climate change affect us all; we each suffer if the planet is decimated, and so climate denialism can be nothing more than an unchecked death drive run amok.

But this is not entirely true, at least not in the short run. After all, most data suggests that climate catastrophe disproportionately affects lower-income populations. It’s not simply the case that wealthier nations—and people—tend to be at the forefront of fueling climate disasters, they are also the ones who are either least affected by those disasters or the ones who can more readily recover and recoup financial loses as a consequence of them. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and extreme weather are simply more tolerable for those who can afford them, and, by that logic, outside of historic natural devastation, climatological fluctuations become less significant matters of concern for the wealthy, who can easily flit from one fortified manse to another. In that sense, climate denialism does not always signify “climate change is not real” so much as “climate change is not real to me,” which is to say, “not a matter about which I need concern myself.” In that way, persuading the wealthy to concern themselves with climate catastrophe is structurally tethered to committing them to care about the poor.

To that end, eroding the country’s weather preparedness is neither ignorance nor madness; it is, instead, the most rarefied expression of economic reasoning, the immaculately morbid logic of capitalism at work. As such, what we must begin to see is that it is ultimately economic rationality, and not the will to ignorance, that underwrites so much of today’s so-called war on science. Cuts to basic science research are not expressions of unreason but of a type of reason that may be pathological only insofar as it is ultimately replete with a degree of economic value onto itself, what I have elsewhere dubbed “pathological value.”

Consider, after all, the nature of the cuts themselves and what they ultimately evince in an economic sense. Outwardly, for example, the national narrative concerning cuts to basic research has been framed as a battle pitting Trump against institutional expertise, epitomized in the recent and ongoing standoff with Harvard University. But, in reality, it isn’t the experts who suffer but everyday Americans. Nearly half of the organizations whose grants were either slashed or axed in the first round of NIH cuts were in states that Trump won in November, many of which have higher numbers of rural and low-income residents. Whom will the cuts to basic HIV research affect most, for example, if not the marginalized and disenfranchised communities where HIV is most concentrated today? There has also been a great deal of handwringing over the extent to which cuts will set back ongoing research in cancer treatment. One might think that diseases, such as cancer, could not possibly discriminate based on wealth status; but not only are cancer incidence rates correlated to wealth disparity, so are survival rates. In the United States, availability of medical treatment is directly linked wealth status. Lower-income populations either have less access to clinical treatment trials or simply end up suffering doubly—both medically and financially—as a consequence of a cancer diagnosis.

This leads to an even more fundamental issue about American science. What we are seeing with the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific research—and the tacit economic reasoning that underwrites it—is not a difference in kind but, rather, an acceleration and exacerbation of how science has worked (and for whom it has worked) in this country for decades. While other administrations have been more favorable to federal funding initiatives, there has been, at least with respect to medical research, a general stagnation in funding over the past two decades. When adjusted for inflation, NIH funding in 2024 was—even before Trump took office—nearly 3 percent less than what it was during its 2003 peak (this number even includes the separate Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health funding that has been augmenting the NIH budget since 2022). This is not altogether surprising when we consider that one of the central characteristics of scientific and, particularly, medical research since 1980 has been its rampant and ongoing commercialization and privatization.

Let us keep in mind, of course, that it is not every aspect of science that is under assault. According to the version of the budget that passed the House, military spending would be augmented significantly, and indeed the House bill has allocated an additional $150 billion to cover the costs of, among other things, the so-called “Golden Dome” next-generation missile defense systems as well as next-generation F-47 fighter aircrafts (“The most advanced, capable, and lethal aircraft ever built”). Like it or not, high-tech weapons and defense systems are science too. Military science remains, as always, a profoundly American commitment. As the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer once remarked, “There is no clear-cut distinction between liberalism and authoritarianism in modern science.” Science, in other words, has no inherent moral value, for it possesses only the values of its practitioners. Any science can be used to save lives or take them; and the question of which lives are to be saved or taken, denigrated or valued, and for what reasons, comprises the politics that always underlies scientific research, practice, and support.

The so-called war, then, is not against science as such but, instead, against what we might call public science—that is to say, taxpayer-funded research that ostensibly benefits the public at large. But this leads us to another question: Does publicly funded science actually benefit the people? The economist Paul Krugman seems to think so, calling basic scientific research a “public good” insofar as it functions as a “foundation of social and economic progress.” The fact that economic progress functions as the metric for public good is largely due to the fact that this is precisely what some scientific agencies themselves purport.

Take space research as an example. In 2013, the International Space Exploration and Coordination Group, of which NASA is a participating member, published a report summarizing the general benefits—tangible and intangible—of space exploration. The tangible benefits, however, were entirely organized around economic and market imperatives. Space exploration will generate “new devices and services that spin off into the marketplace,” as well as “an overall stimulation of private companies and industries, all of which contributes significantly to the economic progress of space-faring nations.” From the perspective of the ISECG, the primary material benefit of space exploration is “enlarging the sphere of human economic activity.” The document extols the value of private investments in space exploration—space tourism and research into planetary mining technologies—with the aspirational vision that the global economy could one day expand to encompass the entire solar system. As a case in point, the document praises the first privately funded resupply mission to the International Space Station, carried out in October 2012 by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which had been founded only ten years earlier. How quickly the tables have turned; Musk, once a poster child for the presumably advantageous alliance of private industry and science, has now become implicated in the very demise of basic research in the United States.

The ISECG report expressed no reservations about the potentially disastrous effects of further entangling scientific research with private industry and no recognition that in trying to balance profit with knowledge, it is profit that wins every time. So does publicly funded science—like space exploration—actually benefit the public? Yes, but only so long as the public already enjoys the privilege of unadulterated economic freedom in the marketplace, which does not characterize the status of many Americans; and so, from that standpoint, there is in some crucial cases no material difference between science that is publicly versus privately funded, for the goods that emerge from either are only ever available as market commodities. We might see now why Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” is as relevant a response to the Apollo Moon landings as it is to Blue Origin launching Katy Perry into space.

Now, the private sector, as Krugman rightly avers, could never substitute for government spending on science research. But the same can be said about private health insurance and private student loans, which are no more conducive to facilitating medical care and higher education than the private sector would be to facilitating the demands of basic science research. But to the extent that the private sector has increasingly taken over so many aspects of public operations in the United States—a truly bipartisan endeavor—we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that without some major interventions, the ongoing process of privatization will continue to define the future of American science. And it will do to the sciences what it has already done to health care and college education: entrench a hierarchy of access.

Cynically, we might say that that the loss of public funding will be spun as a boon for the creation of private markets, with biotech startups taking over from where universities left off (and, indeed, universities have been sharing the burden of funding research with private industry for years). Scientists will likely relocate in droves to the private sector, which, in any case, they’ve already been doing for decades; those who do not will likely move to other countries. This would undoubtedly come as a blow for a nation long exalted as a beacon on the hill for science, with more science Nobel laureates than any other country in the world. But the fact that the United States has the most Nobel laureates while also an 11 percent poverty rate, ranking last in health care compared to other high-income countries and forty-ninth in the world for life expectancy, makes you wonder where, or for whom, all of that Nobel knowledge has been directed. And yet the major newspapers continue to churn out op-eds singing the unqualified praises of American science without mentioning its ties to market imperatives and wealth inequity.

Liberal commentators, like Krugman and others, tell us that MAGA wants to destroy science, that scientific facts disrupt their political prejudices, that what we are witnessing is nothing more than a celebration of ignorance. They call it a war on science. It may indeed be a war, but it is not science that is the target. The dramatic reorganization of the conventions of scientific research that we are currently witnessing instead fulfills a very different aim, namely, to continue to disenfranchise socially and economically marginalized populations and communities. So let us call this what it has always been: class war. To that end, science as such is not the object of antagonism; the people are. Science has simply become a preeminent tool for political and economic oppression. For this is all that science is: a craft to be deployed for whatever ends we assign it.