Trump Escalates War on Science

A little over a year ago, the Trump administration opened a new front in its war on science when the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia sent threatening letters to editors of several leading medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, CHEST and the American Journal of Public Health. Edward R. Martin, the conservative activist-attorney who now manages pardons for the president, questioned their editors’ alleged bias against “competing viewpoints” when deciding what to publish.

Several replied with ringing defenses of their editorial practices. “As practicing physicians, our editors recognize our responsibility to doctors and patients. We use rigorous peer review and editorial processes to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the research we publish,” NEJM editor Eric Rubin wrote Martin. “We support the editorial independence of medical journals and their First Amendment rights to free expression.”

Critics warned the letters true intent was “to send a message to academic publishers to avoid crossing the Trump administration and push them to publish viewpoints more favorable to the current administration,” STAT reported at the time.

The Health and Human Services Department under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. subsequently canceled much of the research into racial health disparities, reproductive health, and the social determinants of health, branding such studies as “woke” and a waste of taxpayer money. A Trump administration HHS spokeswoman said, “Spending billions on divisive, politically driven D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives that don’t deliver results is not just bad health policy—it’s bad government.”

Kennedy sent clear signals prior to his confirmation that he intended to attack science. During his run for president, he threatened to prosecute medical journals under federal anti-corruption statutes for allowing drug companies to influence their editorial decisions. His anti-vax organization’s research, which claimed vaccines caused autism, never made it past journal editors and peer reviewers. The one study published over a quarter century ago that found such a link had been retracted as fraudulent.

“There is a substantial resentment that they’ve not been able to get traction for these heterodox ideas within the scientific community itself,” Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington and a frequent critic of low-quality science, told Stat. “So, they are willing to tear down the fabric of science in order to try to impose these ideas on the community.”

Kennedy’s group wasn’t the only Trump coalition faction seeking to force changes in the scientific publication process. Christian conservatives have frequently attacked the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and their publications for promoting abortion, LGBTQ rights and birth control access.

Just two weeks before the interim district attorney letter was sent to Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG’s flagship journal), the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative advocacy law firm, demanded the HHS secretary cut funding and investigate the group. “Paying ACOG to spend taxpayer dollars (is) inconsistent with this administration’s policies on the biological basis for sex, ending racial discrimination and ‘equity’ programs, and preventing taxpayer funding for the promotion of abortion,” its letter said.

A new assault on science

This week the Trump regime escalated its war on science by attacking the independence of the vetting process for studies appearing in medical and scientific journals. For the most part, the process relies on independent peer review, both at the agency level when making grants and at the journals after study results are submitted for publication.

The Office of Management and Budget proposed a rule that will subject every federal research grant to a second political review. The rule, which is open for public comment until July 13, essentially gives political appointees at agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration veto power over grant proposals.

The proposed rule also allows political appointees to summarily cancel already-awarded grants; use what an editorial on the Science Magazine website called “vague criteria” for giving favored institutions preferable treatment; and subject every grant that involves spending money abroad to political review. “This bureaucratic hurdle would effectively prevent most if not all (international) partnerships from moving forward,” an editorial in Science said.

Even before releasing this proposed rule, the regime’s editorial intimidation strategy, and the publicity surrounding the initial letters sent to journal editors, triggered a dramatic slowdown in publication of articles on the subjects that Trump’s most avid supporters find objectionable. This week, I conducted a small research project measuring the number of articles catalogued on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website that mention various hot-button issues in either their title or abstract.

Here’s what I found: Over the first five months of 2026, when compared to the similar period a year ago, there was a 24 percent drop in articles and research studies published about abortion and LBGTQ health; a 23 percent reduction in articles published in the medical literature that include the terms “race” or “racial” and “health disparities”; and a 15 percent decline in articles mentioning the “social determinants of health” and “health disparities.”

Source: PubMed

The reductions in published research in those four areas far exceeded the general slowdown in published new studies, which through May 30 was about 9 percent below the comparable period a year ago. Public health experts say a number of factors are driving the overall slowdown: Cuts in research spending; the time it takes to “scrub” publishable studies to avoid topics or phrases that might get researchers or the publications in trouble; and disruptions to the peer review process. Beleaguered researchers in every scientific field have less time under Trump for conducting peer reviews as they struggle to maintain funding for their own projects and labs.

“If you can’t get reviewers, there is going to be a slowdown in getting stuff published and that’s across the board,” said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology and an American Cancer Society clinical researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “My university had a total blockage of grant funding for a period of time, no matter what kind of research you were doing. If you were doing a clinical trial or a genetic study that had nothing to do with health equity, your lab was affected.”

All science under attack

The attack on science isn’t just affecting medical research. The National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) division, which funds more than 60 percent of all psychology, sociology and economics research, is threatened with closure. The NSF, whose budget is just a sixth of NIH’s $48.5 billion annual budget, has also ended all support for doctoral-dissertation research in archaeology, linguistics, geography, and anthropology. Six weeks ago, it fired the 22 members of the agency’s board.

The Atlantic reported last month that the NSF has awarded just five social science grants this year. In a typical year, it makes about 250 grants. A White House spokesperson told the magazine’s reporter the administration will fund “advancements in hard sciences, not in ideologically driven social sciences.”

What that ignores are the advances in NSF-funded social science that help improve the nation’s health. In the 1990s, NSF financed the economics research that created major improvements in the kidney-donor-matching system. The SBE division is the primary funder of three major social-science surveys, including the world’s longest running survey of families, child poverty and economic mobility. At least nine federal agencies rely on its data.

The Trump regime’s unceasing attacks on “woke” science, coupled with its demands that prestigious journals pay more attention to quack theories, has an historical precedent. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin promoted an obscure agronomist named Trofim Lysenko to be the Soviet Union’s top scientist based on his rejection of genetics and natural selection. Lysenko claimed acquired traits could be passed along to children. Many of the scientists who opposed his views wound up in Stalin’s Gulags. Some were shot. Russia never recovered, having yet to play a major role in the biological sciences.

The Trump regime’s science overlords, when the media come calling, have downplayed their embrace of quack science by characterizing studies of racial disparities in health outcomes, the social determinants of health and reproductive and LGBTQ health as “waste.” Their spokespersons claim “billions” of taxpayer dollars are being frittered away on diversity, equity and inclusion-motivated research.

Yet during 2025, the total number of articles, studies and commentaries mentioning those terms in their titles or abstracts (7,798) accounted for less than one-half of one percent of all studies listed in PubMed for the year (nearly 1.9 million). Given that the average NIH grant ($622,000) generates an average of about 6.5 published articles, the total amount spent on “woke” research can be roughly estimated at about $766 million — not the “billions” claimed by HHS spokespersons. “To say there is a waste of funding on this kind of research is empirically false,” Harvard’s Krieger said.

If the U.S. truly wants to reduce health care spending and make it more affordable for everyone, it needs to step up its investment in researching the causes of racial disparities in health; the role the social determinants of health (food, housing, poverty, social stress) play in driving health outcomes; and the various roadblocks subcommunities of Americans face in addressing their health needs and achieving better health.

Congress has historically defined NIH’s mission as both identifying the causes of disease as well as developing cures. It cannot come up with cures for the chronic diseases plaguing this nation unless it addresses the social factors that are its primary cause. That requires more research into those social factors, not less.

The Trump regime’s proposed rule will set back that kind of scientific research for years. That’s probably why the editors of Science is a clarion call for political action this week, something one rarely sees in the academic literature.

“Higher education and its associations need to firmly oppose these changes, which would create a massive morale and financial problem in addition to curtailing important research,” Editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp wrote in the editorial. “The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized.

“I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then,” he wrote. “The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.”

The post Trump Escalates War on Science appeared first on Washington Monthly.