The MAGA Crusade to Take Down American Science and Medicine

From the start of the Trump administration in January, I have been evaluating what this government is taking from the established autocratic playbook and what, instead, are the elements of innovation. Many things are familiar from the history of autocracy: military in the streets; people rounded up by masked members of state security forces and disappeared into domestic and foreign gulags; government agencies turned into personal tools of a lawless leader; curtailing free speech and domesticating the media.

A few things stand out as new. One is the speed of the changes to domestic and foreign policy, which have no parallel in autocracies where leaders have come to power via elections. The “new kind of coup” launched by DOGE supercharged these changes in the administrative state sphere. Giving a private individual’s shock troops access to the financial and data systems of a sovereign nation is unheard of. DOGE is now entrenched as a “government within a government” and continues to operate without oversight.

A New Kind of Coup: Trump and Musk are Updating the Autocratic Playbook

A second novel element is the sabotage of America by an American president and his American partners. They apparently seek to bring down America in order to consolidate their power at home and allow their foreign autocratic allies to prosper. Many dictators have over time created situations conducive to mass ignorance, impoverishment, and disease. Here we have a focused and intense effort to set America back a generation in education, health, research, and climate policy, and eradicate foreign assistance that brought America goodwill abroad.

Saboteurs: Destroying America for Autocratic Gain

Science and medicine are areas in which the Trump administration’s departure from the traditions of elected autocrats is most evident. Almost all autocrats politicize science and medicine. The history of Nazi racial science and the Soviet practice of deploying mental health professionals to have dissenters committed to psychiatric institutions are two examples.

Yet most dictatorships proceed more gradually to change the institutional framework in which science and medicine are practiced. They close down some universities and research centers, and start others to do the kind of work that is in line with their ideological goals. The Nazis did not create the Reich Ministry for Education and Science until May 1934, fourteen months after the Enabling Act.

Other than in a post-coup or post-revolution environment, launching a wrecking ball on science immediately after you take office, as Trump has done, is unusual. So is naming a conspiracy theorist as Secretary of Health and Human Services who engineered the departures of ¼ of his department (20,000 workers!) in just four months. The speed and resolve to pull federal money for research, and curtail the work of America’s most prestigious institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health, has been shocking.

Trump and MAGA are Americans doing this to America. That’s sabotage on an unprecedented level, and not enough media outlets are writing about it in these terms or asking why this is happening.

The Upside-Down World of Authoritarianism. Image from Department of Health and Human Services website. .

The rush to ruin America is real enough to scientists and public health practitioners. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports 479 attacks on science from January to August, and grant approval and funding processes increasingly politicized to destroy programs and activities in environmental justice, LGBTQ+ health, and other objectionable areas.

“In rapid bursts, Mr. Trump has also laid off large teams of scientists, pulled the plug on thousands of research projects and proposed deep spending cuts for new studies,” the New York Times reported in late August, adding that next year’s proposed $44 billion budget cut would be “the largest drop in federal support for science since World War II.”

Let’s repeat that: the Trump administration wants to bring about the largest drop in federal support for American science since World War II. You’ve got to have a real thirst to end America’s superpower status to want such an ambitious cut. You’ve got to really want other nations to thrive.

But science has been “long a key driver of the US’s global pre-eminence,” as Guardian journalist Robert Tait writes, and so it has to be destroyed. And the purge must be so thorough that it will take decades to recover.

Action Items

Here are some things you can do, via the Union of Concerned Scientists. Ask your members of Congress to advocate for the Scientific Integrity Act. This law would codify protections for science and scientists into law, making it more difficult for any administration to undermine it. Click on this easy link to contact your member of Congress.

Support those who are speaking out, and publicize their acts of courage. More than 30 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees were put on administrative leave out of the 180 who signed an open letter of dissent expressing concern about the agency’s direction and leadership. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over 100 federal workers and scientists were put on administrative leave for speaking out against the administration’s anti-science actions and decisions.

The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) “Bethesda Declaration,” was signed by almost 500 NIH workers and scientists, and almost 300 workers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed their names to the “Voyager Declaration.”

Check out the Stand Up for Science website, and the Substack of former NIH employees who have established the Science and Freedom Alliance.