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This article was originally published by Truthout
The impact of the loss of knowledge and research will be felt for decades — a legacy of Trump’s war on science.
Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration’s relentless war on the U.S.’s scientific infrastructure has picked up speed.
The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman reported in late April that over the past months, more than 1,500 top scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development have either been laid off, pushed into early retirement, or reassigned to desk jobs that have nothing to do with their field of expertise. Friedman’s article referenced a medical doctor with a specialty in lung disease being reassigned to a financial job and an epidemiologist being moved over to a job issuing permits for handling hazardous waste.
Less than 10 percent of the scientists — who run the gamut from biologists to epidemiologists, from toxicologists to greenhouse gas emissions specialists — now remain at the agency. Moving forward, they will be under a political commissar, and their research will have to “align with agency and administration priorities.” Translation: They will no longer be able to do the groundbreaking work on pollution and its health impacts that for decades made the office a world leader in environmental health research. Instead, their work will be co-opted to end regulations that have placed some limits on the levels of pollution that can be spewed into the environment.
The assault on the EPA’s scientific expertise, which closely resembles attacks on independent science by other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes over the past century, hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. Also last week, the 22 members of the National Science Board — which oversees the 76-year-old National Science Foundation (NSF) and helps allocate federal science grants in an independent, nonpartisan manner — were all fired on short notice, despite each of them being appointed for staggered six-year terms. This comes in the wake of a slew of Trump administration attacks on independent advisory boards to the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.
“We hope it only means that new people will be put into place, but that the fundamental work of the National Science Foundation will continue forward,” Marsha Anderson Bomar, 2026 president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, told Truthout. She was not, however, terribly optimistic. “I would think we need to understand what future conditions [around climate and extreme weather] are likely to be so that we can design appropriate infrastructure,” she explained. “This has the potential to change that landscape.”
The memo to board members gave no reason for their firing, but simply said they were terminated “immediately” on behalf of Donald Trump. They joined the more than 30 percent of NSF staff who have left the agency since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. They also join the more than 10,000 Ph.D.s, with more than 100,000 years of federal work experience between them, who have been severed from federal employment across a swath of agencies and departments during Trump’s second term.
Critics noted that the National Science Foundation, founded at the onset of the Cold War to boost national security, was due to release a potentially incendiary report in early May detailing how U.S. cuts to scientific research were ceding vital ground to China; it is unclear whether that report will now be released. Observers also pointed out that the National Science Board is legally required to oversee the NSF budget, but the Trump administration — which attempted to cut its $9 billion budget by more than 50 percent last year, and which is pushing similar cuts again this year — has ordered senior NSF staff not to reveal details of the potential budget cuts to National Science Board members. It is not known whether they have shared with National Science Board members details on the withdrawal of thousands of NSF grants that have already been issued to educational organizations around the country, but which are now being clawed back.
The National Science Board didn’t respond to repeated requests from Truthout for interviews.
Truthout contacted the NSF for clarification on this but received only a terse, one-sentence response: “Please reach out to the White House for comment.” Follow-up phone calls went unreturned.
Historically, the NSF has been one of the country’s largest funders of science, math, and engineering research; over the decades, its dollars have helped seed research on everything from the internet to gene editing. More recently, many of its grants have gone to scientists seeking to understand climate change and its likely impacts. Now, the Trump administration’s assault on the NSF and its oversight board risks marginalizing critical research, leaving U.S. universities and research centers less able to carry out cutting-edge projects, and creating a huge opportunity for other nations to fill the research void left by the United States.
Similar poorly conceived cuts are being proposed across the government. The 2027 White House budget request calls for billions of dollars in cuts to NASA, and the ending of a collaborative program that, in the Trump administration’s terms, “imposed climate extremism on developing countries,” but which in reality helped poorer countries adapt to a changing climate. It proposes eliminating the EPA’s $100 million “atmospheric protection program.” And it pushes a $5 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health.
Cuts of this scale will destroy decades of work and break research webs, both in the U.S. and overseas, that have been spun since World War II. There is no upside to these cuts. They will leave the United States less educated and less skilled, with fewer scientists and fewer cutting-edge research hubs.
Since nature abhors a vacuum, it’s a sure bet that other countries will eventually step in to fund at least some of these projects and to hire some of these scientists. Where once many of the world’s best and brightest flocked to the United States to showcase their talents, increasingly, they will go elsewhere. But those who can’t find work overseas, they will simply be left on the scrapheap, casualties of Trump’s extremist war on any science that doesn’t gel with his preconceived ideas of how the world works. The loss of knowledge and of research projects triggered by these cuts will, in consequence, be a huge loss for humanity over the coming decades. That, ultimately, will be the legacy of Trump’s destructive war on science.
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