Category: politics

Administration to Harvard: Fix yourself; Harvard to Administration: STFU

April 15, 2025 • 10:05 am

Four days ago, three members of the Trump Administration (Josh Gruenbaum of the GSA, Thomas Wheeler, acting general Counsel of the Dept. of Education, and Sean R. Keveney, acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services), sent a Big Stick (or a rotten carrot) to the President of Harvard University and the head of the Harvard Corporation (Penny Pritzker, the sister of Illinois’s governor). It was one of those threatening letters that tell a university that they’d better reform—or else. “Else,” of course, is the withdrawal of federal funds. This threat was made to Columbia University, which caved. But Harvard didn’t. I suggest you read the Trump Administration’s letter by clicking on the screenshot below:

This is a Big Demand and covers multiple areas, which I’ll just summarize with bullet points. Quotes are from the letter:

  • Harvard has to fix its leadership, reducing the power held by students, untenured faculty, and by “administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.”
  • All hiring from now on must be based on merit and there will be no hiring based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
  • By August of this year, Harvard must have solely merit-based admissions, again without admissions based on ‘race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.” The “proxies” presumably mean the way universities now get around bans on race-based and similar admissions by asking admission questions like, “describe how you overcame hardships in your life.”
  • Reform international admissions, by not admitting students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”
  • Harvard is to commission an external body to audit the university for viewpoint diversity. Though they’re not clear what “viewpoint diversity” means, it’s obvious that they want more conservative points of view and fewer professors pushing pro-Palestinian points of view
  • Reforming programs with “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”, including information about individual faculty who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or who incited violence
  • Discontinue DEI programs, offices, committees, and the like
  • Students are to be disciplined for violating University speech regulations, and student groups that promote violence, illegal harassment, or act as fronts for banned groups
  • Harvard is to establish a whistleblowing procedure so that noncompliance with the Diktat above can be safely reported.

All this must be started no later than June 30 of this year, and Harvard has to report on its progress every quarter until at least the end of 2028.

Now many of these reforms are laudable (weakening of DEI, effacing any climate of anti-Semitism, mandating the kind of merit-based hiring used at Chicago, etc.), while others are problematic, the most being (to me) assuring “viewpoint diversity” (see Steve Pinker’s quote below). But the most offensive thing about this is the Trump Administration’s attempt to control universities using financial threats.  Many of the people who will suffer by the withholding of government money (probably much of it earmarked for science) are not guilty of these violations, and it’s just a horrible idea to allow the government to demand that universities act this way or that.

Yes, Harvard should have already made some of these reforms, and I know it’s trying to enact some of them, but allowing political forces to control how colleges and universities are run takes one of America’s glories–the quality of its higher education that already attracts students from throughout the world–and turns it into an arm of one political party or another. (It would be just as bad if the Biden administration had threatened universities if they didn’t become more liberal, though of course they already are!). Universities should remain as independent as possible from the vagaries of politics, though of course if politics affects the mission of universities, then schools can speak out.

Harvard responded by giving Trump a big middle finger. Here’s the response from Alan Garber, President of the University, which I mentioned yesterday. Click headline to read:

A quote from the response:

Late Friday night, the administration issued an updated and expanded list of demands, warning that Harvard must comply if we intend to “maintain [our] financial relationship with the federal government.” It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

I encourage you to read the [Administration’s] letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community. They include requirements to “audit” the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduc[e] the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views. We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Harvard’s letter doesn’t address the specific accusations of the administration’s letter, but simply affirms that Harvard will “nurture a climate of open inquiry,” respect free speech save for the appropriate “time, place, and manner” restrictions, and will “foster and support a vibrant community that exemplifies, respects, and embraces difference.”  There’s nothing about anti-Semitism, viewpoint diversity (save the last claim above), or merit-based hiring.  Garber could have responded, point by point, to what it’s already is doing to meet the demands of the government, but that would simply be playing their game.

And so, the administration began punishing Harvard: last night the Trump Administration struck back by freezing 2.2 billion in funds to the school. (archived here). From the NYT article:

Harrison Fields, a spokesperson for the White House, said universities are not entitled to federal funding. “President Trump is working to Make Higher Education Great Again by ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence. Harvard or any institution that wishes to violate Title VI is, by law, not eligible for federal funding.”

The university was the first to formally push back against the government’s efforts to force change in higher education.

Hours later, the multiagency Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism responded by announcing a freeze on $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million in multiyear contract value to Harvard.

And today’s  NYT reports on Harvard’s decision (archived here) with a few words from Steve Pinker: (h/t Greg). They quote Harvard’s pushback as being “momentous”:

Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.

Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.

“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”

Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”

We’ll see if Harvard’s response gives some moxie to other threatened universities. So far Harvard hasn’t been one of them.

And Professor Pinker was quoted giving a good, pithy response:

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

I of course agree with Pinker and Garber. Harvard needs to handle its own problems itself, though yes, it has to handle any real problems judiciously but swiftly lest it lose students and its reputation. Already worried Jewish students are applying elsewhere (see here and here).  The government already has the power to step in if Harvard has permitted a climate of anti-Semitism to occur, but I’m not so connected to my alma mater that I can judge that. And Greg Mayer reminded me that withholding money and making demands in this way is NOT legal. As he said:

Findings of punishable error (e.g., Title VI violations) must be made via the procedures specified in the law alleged to have been broken. There’s a lot of  due process involved, including the right of response and a hearing before a disinterested party, before an allegation can become an actionable fact. And even then, only the violating entity can be punished– you can’t take away a botanist’s NSF grant because some dean of student affairs is anti-semitic.

So what the administration is doing is largely illegal, and certainly unethical and counterproductive.  And universities don’t have to obey anything but court orders—not demands from an administration that wants to bully all of those damn elite, liberal schools.

h/t Norman

Bill Maher visits the White House and has dinner with Trump

April 13, 2025 • 12:15 pm

Not long ago Bill Maher went to the White House to schmooze and dine with, yes, Donald Trump. Trump signed a list of bad names that he called Maher over the years, showed him the small room off the Oval Office which Clinton and Monica Lewinsky made famous, and even gave Maher a MAGA hat.

Overall, Maher found Trump to be a fairly congenial host, not like his public image as a horrible person.  Maher says that Trump was “much more self-aware than he lets on in public,” and even admitted that he lost the 2020 election. He even solicited political advice from Maher about Iran and the bomb.

At about 7:10, Maher lists some things that Trump did that Maher agreed with (“biological men shouldn’t be playing women’s sports,” etc.)  Maher didn’t pander, and Trump didn’t dominate, and even laughed (have you ever seen Trump laugh).

He concludes: “A crazy person doesn’t work in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on t.v. a lot lives there, which I know is fucked up, but it’s not as fucked up as I thought it was.” But Maher certainly lists all the bad things that Trump did and is doing.  I’ll let you listen to the conclusion, which is thought-provoking. Maher concludes, “I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.”

A screenshot:

Now it’s Trump vs. the Smithsonian, and a NYT piece about human races

April 2, 2025 • 10:20 am

On March 17 Trump issued a new executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” And its goal is largely to prevent the dissemination of divisive or negative views of American history, instantiated, for Trump, in the Smithsonian Institution’s new exhibit on sculpture and identity. Here’s the “purpose” of the EO:

 Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.  Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.  Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

The EO then concentrates on a new exhibit at the Smithsonian that deals with race and power:

Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.  This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.  For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power:  Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”  The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

Other institutes also get this kind of treatment, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The Order then decrees that the Department of the Interior must prevent such “divisive” exhibits. Part of Trump’s Diktat to the Department of the Interior telling it what it must do:

(i)    determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology;

(ii)   take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 1451 et seq., 54 U.S.C. 100101 et seq.,and other applicable law; and

(iii)  take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.\

It’s clear that Trump is aiming for a somewhat sanitized version of American history, closer to that of the old sanitized history textbooks we had in junior high and far, far distant from the claims of the 1619 Project.  Of course the truth is somewhere in between: America and its founders had high and admirable ideals, but fell down when it came to the “all men are created equal” with the same “unalienable rights” part.  All people (not just “men,” which to them presumably meant “people”) were not treated as if they were created equal, and the institution of slavery led to the worst war in American history (the Civil War killed 1.5 times the number of Americans who died in WWII and more than ten times the number of American deaths in the Vietnam War).

And bigotry did not end after the Civil War, of course. Immigrants were largely denied opportunities, blacks still faced Jim Crow treatment, and we incarcerated American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.  Our history, while progressing now towards equality of opportunity, has been checkered, and it’s wrong to hide that from people.

On the other hand, it’s misleading to pretend, as woke culture does courtesy of Ibram Kendi et al., that racism is still built heavily into American laws and that all white Americans are bigots determined to hold down minorities. Yes, identity politics is distorting America, but the remnants of the past nevertheless can be seen in the lower well-being and achievement of some minorities, and we need to remedy that as best we can.

In contrast, Trump seems to want to hide America’s past under a basket.  I haven’t seen the Smithsonian’s exhibit so I can’t pass judgement on it, but the NYT, highlighting Trump’s order, takes another tack: it addresses, and pretty much denies, the existence of human race. Read the article by clicking the headline below or find it archived here.

The tenor of this article, which is poorly researched but laden with quotes, is that human races do not exist and are merely a social construct.  A few excerpts to that end:

The president’s order noted, among other things, that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

In interviews, several scholars questioned why the executive order appeared to take issue with that view, which is now broadly held. Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism, said that “the executive order is troubling and out of step with the current consensus.” He added that pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen “in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.”

and   

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the statement says. “Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.”

This is the view throughout the article, and it’s both right and wrong, which means it’s misleading.  The “classical” view, which is that there are a finite number of distinct groups, distinguishable by morphology and with few or no intermediates between groups, is wrong.  Thousands of years ago, when human populations began differentiating in geographical isolation from one another, and were was on the road to formation of distinct biological “races” and then species, this definition may have be closer to accuracy. But human mobility and interbreeding had long since effaced the distinctness of populations. We have groups within groups within groups.

But populations that are genetically distinct continue to exist, and that is what the article neglects. You can call them “races” or “populations” (my preference) or “ethnic groups”, but there’s no doubt that the human species is geographically heterogeneous, with geographic barriers like the Sahara or the Himalayas demarcating the more distinct populations. Further, you can often identify people’s ancestry from their genes. Otherwise, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work at all.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Writing about “race” these days is a hot potato because even discussing it implies that you are ranking populations, which no rational person does any more.  But ignoring the genetic distinctness of populations, based on frequency differences in many genes among populations from different areas, affords a fascinating and informative look into the history of human migration, selection, and so on.

There are few sensible pieces written on the topic of race. Most of them argue that race is a social construct without any biological basis.  But I want to be a bit self-aggrandizing and recommend one section of the paper “The ideological subversion of biology” that Luana Maroja and I wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. It’s free at the title link. The paper takes up six ways that evolutionary biology has been distorted by ideologues. The part you should read is section 5, which starts like this (it is not long but I urge it upon you):

5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.” This is the elephant in the room: the claim that there is no empirical value in studying differences between races, ethnic groups, or populations. Such work is the biggest taboo in biology, claimed to be inherently racist and harmful. But the assertion heading this paragraph, a direct quote from the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is wrong.

and a few excerpts from that section (there are references to all statements):

. . .old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

One more:

On a broader scale, genetic analysis of worldwide populations has allowed us to not only trace the history of human expansions out of Africa (there were several), but to assign dates to when H. sapiens colonized different areas of the world. This has been made easier with recent techniques for sequencing human “fossil DNA.” On top of that, we have fossil DNA from groups such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, which, in conjunction with modern data, tells us these now-extinct groups bred in the past with the ancestors of “modern” Homo sapiens, producing at least some fertile offspring (most of us have some Neanderthal DNA in our genomes). Although archaeology and carbon dating have helped reconstruct the history of our species, these have largely been supplanted by sequencing the DNA of living and ancient humans.

We go on to discuss the taboos of race (the most taboo-sh being studying differences in mentation and IQ among groups) as well as some of the advantages of knowing the genetic differences among human populations.

The point I want to make is that, when you’re talking about “race,” you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, the classical idea of “races” is largely wrong, but we should not pretend that all human populations are genetically identical, or that the existing genetic differences aren’t diagnostic or of interest.  The NYT article above, however, says nothing like that. Instead, it emphasizes the viewpoint expressed above:

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,”

You can see how this is misleading.  Populations are not absolutely distinct, but are distinguishable genetically if you use many genes. And populations do tend to statistically cluster by geography, because geographic isolation promotes genetic differentiation. (Again, this is how ancestry companies figure out where your genes came from.) And yes, of course, “race” was used to prop up colonialism, oppression, and discrimination”. That’s the bathwater we should throw out. But we should keep the baby, which is recognizing that human populations are not genetically identical, and that the genetic differences among them give useful information about several topics. Just read section 5!

Did Harvard cave to Trump?

April 1, 2025 • 9:15 am

Recently, Columbia University caved into the Trump administration’s demands that unless the University reformed itself (mostly doing things to dispel the anti-Semitic climate), they would lose $400 million in federal funding. While most of the changes demanded were good ones, I object to the administration using science funding as a club to bludgeon Columbia into compliance. (On the other hand, Columbia wasn’t doing much, but why should science be the field to take the brunt?)  And Columbia’s caving led to the forced resignation of the interim President, Katrina Armstrong.

It’s no surprise, then, that the next target of the administration is that bastion of Lefty Communist Woke Socialism, Harvard University.  Yep, they’re being bludgeoned, too, and also about anti-Semitism. As the NYT reports (article archived here):

The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing roughly $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard, claiming that the university had allowed antisemitism to run unchecked on its campus.

In a statement on Monday, the administration said that it was examining about $256 million in contracts, as well as an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.”

The announcement of the investigation suggested that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus but was vague about what the university could do to satisfy the Trump administration.

“While Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized antisemitism — though long overdue — are welcome, there is much more that the university must do to retain the privilege of receiving federal taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars,” Josh Gruenbaum, a senior official at the General Services Administration, said in a statement.

“This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow antisemitism to fester,” he added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”

I didn’t know that, though, when I woke up this morning and found this email from the President Alan Garber, who was also an interim President after Claudine Gay’s resignation but now will be serving as a regular President until 2027.  Read what I got and you tell me: is Harvard about to cave, too? I have bolded the parts that suggest that Harvard will do what the administration wants. Again, Harvard did, I think, need to change to get rid of its antisemitic climate, but I would prefer that it do so voluntarily rather than be forced to.

I’ve bolded the parts below suggesting that Harvard is about to cut a deal with the administration:

I cannot interpret this other than as Harvard capitulating to the administration’s demands. Neither the administration nor Harvard are specific here, and Harvard does admit that it still has a “serious problem” of “antisemitic harassment” (I’m not sure how pervasive the problem still is.)  Indeed, Garber says that he himself has been a victim of antisemitism.  How did that happen? The NYT suggests one explanation:

He may have been referring to a poster showing him with horns and a tail that was displayed by a student group during Harvard’s encampment last year.

There’s a lot more in the NYT piece, so have a look if you’re following the Siege of the Universities.  This is only the beginning!

This week’s Bill Maher clip

March 4, 2025 • 10:45 am

In this latest nine-minute comedy/news bit from Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” a show that included Rahm Emanuel and Fareed Zakaria, Maher suggests who the Dems should run for President and Vice-President in 2028.

Ths clip, called “New Rule: The next Democratic Star” proffers a solution to the waning popularity of the Democratic Party and the increasing desire of its members to move to the center. Maher suggests John Fetterman as a potential Prez, because he comes off as someone who understands the average American.  He also notes that Fetterman shares some of the features that helped Trump win, the most important being “authenticity, balls, and charisma.”

Yes, Fetterman had a stroke and suffers from depression, but Trump is unhealthy and suffers from narcissism. Fetterman, however, has sensible and potentially winnable political views; as Maher says, “Fetterman says the four words that strike fear into the heart of every Republican who wants to hang onto power: ‘I am not woke’.”

Maher also suggests Mayor Pete as a possible VP candidate, and I’m for that, too. (He notes that a disabled President combined with a gay VP surely checks as many intersectionality boxes as one person of color.) If not Mayor Pete, than Gretchen Whitmer.

This is a very good one; watch it!

The Atlantic on the government’s attacks on science

February 17, 2025 • 11:15 am

A lot of what the Trump administration is doing is aimed at health and science, and not necessarily in a good way.  The most obvious blunder is the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a palpably unqualified man with some bizarre views, as Secretary of Health and Human Services,  the person who advises the President on all health matters. Given Trump’s abysmal ignorance of science, having someone like RFK Jr. guiding government policy is scary.

There’s a lot of beefing as well about the government cutting the “overhead” (money given to universities, supposedly to support the infrastructure of grants) uniformly to 15%, down from over 60% in some cases (each university negotiates it rate with the government). This slashing will reduce university budgets substantially. But in some cases in which a university has huge endowments, like Harvard ($53 billion),  I can’t shed many tears over that. Given that in many cases we simply don’t know where overhead goes, the assumption has been that many schools simply use it as a source of money for almost anything, and that means that the taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing not just scientific research, but universities in general.

At any rate, the potential damage that the Trump administration will do to American science is outlined in this new Atlantic article by Katherine Wu.  It doesn’t cohere like a good science piece should, but at least lays out some scary things in store for American science. To me, the scariest is the hiding of already-obtained scientific results, financed by taxpayers, that were publicly available but are no long so.

Click below to see the article, or find it archived here.

First, the payoff for funding science. I hope this is accurate as it’s characterizing science as “research and development”:

Every dollar invested in research and development has been estimated to return at least $5 on average—billions annually.

It also looks as if the National Science Foundation is on the chopping block:

The administration’s actions have also affected scientific pursuits in ways that go beyond those orders. The dismantling of USAID has halted clinical trials abroad, leaving participants with experimental drugs and devices still in their bodies. Last week, NIH announced that it would slash the amount its grants would pay for administrative costs—a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge but that would substantially hamper entire institutions from carrying out the day-to-day activities of research. The administration is reportedly planning to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation. Mass layoffs of federal workers have also begun, and two NIH scientists (who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions) told me they participated in a meeting this morning in which it was announced that thousands of staff across the Department of Health and Human Services would be let go starting today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now become the head of that department, after two confirmation hearings in which he showed a lack of basic understanding of the U.S. health system and a flagrant disregard for data that support the safety and effectiveness of various lifesaving vaccines. (The White House did not return repeated requests for comment.)

It’s not clear whether the DEIrestrictions described in the previous post will severely impede science. Wu says this:

Many also expect that the moratorium on DEI-focused programming will have severe impacts on who is able to do the work of science—further impeding women, people of color, and other groups underrepresented in the field from entering and staying in it.

But it’s not clear the restrictions will have that effect, nor that making science more “diverse” (not just via race, but in other traits) will improve our understanding of nature.

There are restrictions on Social-Justice-aimed projects, but again, many of these have been a waste of money and effort, performative efforts not aimed at understandind science, and will we simply have to see how this shakes. But those who do such work are beefing about what the government did. Here’s an example of a peeved but woke scientist whose work I’ve often criticized (click screenshot to go to thread). Most of the commenters don’t support Fuentes’s griping:

 

One problem is that the government is looking for suspicious grants by doing word searches, and those searches include terms like “environment,” “climate”, and “race”.  It’s a quick way to find suspicious grants, but you have to evaluate their quality, not simply defund them because they come up in a keyword search.

Here’s what I find most distressing about what the government did (besides appointing RFK Jr.):

In yesterday’s executive order, Trump highlighted the importance of “protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data.” But that is exactly what the administration’s critics have said it is already failing to do. At the end of last month, the CDC purged its website of several decades’ worth of data and content, including an infectious-disease-surveillance tool as well as surveys tracking health-risk behaviors among youths. (On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the government to restore, for now, these and other missing data and webpages to their pre-purge state.) And as soon as the Trump administration started pulling data sets from public view, scientists started worrying that those data would reappear in an altered form, or that future scientific publications would have to be modified.

I’m not as worried about the reappearance of data in altered form as I am about the simple removal of data—data funded by us, the American taxpayers—from public view. Fortunately, a judge stopped the data removal, but that may be temporary.

What will be the outcome? While Wu thinks this will reduce trust in science, I’m not so sure about that, especially given that trust in science fell strongly during the Biden administration, and trust is reduced simply because science is getting mixed up with politics in every administration. What worries me more is the vulnerability of science to the whims of the administration—an administration that seems to care more about key words than about research itself.  My view is that the government is entitled to vet science funding and cut waste if it wants, but that governments are poorly equipped to judge scientific merit. A grant that looks wasteful may come up with useful results, though of course there are some that simply look like government funded-virtue flaunting. It’s best if a generous dollop of money is allocated to science, and then scientists themselves decide how to dole it out, for they are the best equipped people to do so. In this I agree with Wu’s conclusion:

There will undoubtedly be periods, in the coming weeks and months, when the practice of science feels normal. Many scientists are operating as they usually do until they are told otherwise. But that normalcy is flimsy at best, in part because the Trump administration has shown that it may not care what data, well collected or not, have to say. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy repeatedly refused to acknowledge that vaccines don’t cause autism, insisting that he would do so only “if the data is there.” Confronted by Senator Bill Cassidy with decades of data that were, in fact, there, he continued to equivocate, at one point attempting to counter with a discredited paper funded by an anti-vaccine group.

In all likelihood, more changes are to come—including, potentially, major budgetary cuts to research, as Congress weighs this year’s funding for the nation’s major research agencies. Trump and his administration are now deciding how deep a rift to make in America’s scientific firmament. How long it takes to repair the damage, or whether that will be possible at all, depends on the extent of the damage they inflict now.

I’m just glad that I don’t have to apply for science grants any more.

Hagan Scotten: a person with integrity

February 16, 2025 • 11:10 am

As you probably know, Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney, was asked to dismiss the corruption indictment against NYC mayor Eric Adams after U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon (a Republican) resigned from the Department of Justice rather than be involved in dismissing a criminal indictment on political tit-for-tat grounds.  Here’s Scotten’s own letter of resignation to Trump’s goon Emil Bove, who ordered Sassoon to get Scotten to do the dirty work.

You can download the letter here from the NYT.

The last sentence of the second paragraph will live on as a defense of our Republic, which I fully believe will stand over the next four years.

h/t: David