Stakeholders fear for Trump-era science

Under the headline “Trump sparks fears of war on science,” The Hill recently suggested that President Trump may be “considering slashing” Energy Department research offices. Science magazine offered “President Trump and science: 10 things to look for (and fear?).” A Washington Post op-ed argued that society’s relationship with science can erode:

As the new presidential administration begins, concerns pervade science-related media coverage. A 26 January New York Times article began, “Scientists and environmentalists reacted with fear this week as the Trump administration purged nearly all mention of climate change programs from the White House and State Department websites and ordered a freeze on federal grant spending at the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies.” The article reported “a broad halt to external communications while the Trump administration struggles to put political appointees into position.” Targets of the ordered halt included National Park Service employees’ Twitter campaign opposing the president on climate change. It was conducted, the Washington Post reported , “on official social media accounts.” The Times quoted Princeton climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer: “If the Trump administration doesn’t want rumor, invective and anxiety running amok, they should get out there and say publicly and firmly that they believe in science.”

Concerning threats to openness, a PBS article began, “The Trump administration has instituted a media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency.” PBS reported that the executive director of the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Jeff Ruch, sees such orders as going beyond precedents from past presidential transitions. The article quoted Ruch’s bitter allusion to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “We’re watching the dark cloud of Mordor extend over federal service.”

As has been widely obvious well beyond the science community, many see a dark cloud in the president’s 27 January executive order called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” A Nature news report summarized the order: It “blocks refugees … for 120 days and stops Syrian refugees indefinitely.” It bans for 90 days citizens of majority-Muslim countries “compromised by terrorism": Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Nature added that conflicting official statements have ensued concerning visas, including permanent-resident green cards. Like similar pieces at Mashable and elsewhere, the article described individual researchers’ “fear, shock and determination.”

A Nature editorial cautioned against letting new modifications defray clear understanding of what the editors condemn as the order’s fundamental perniciousness. A New York Times headline predicted that “science will suffer.” In a letter, more than 160 scientific organizations urged the president to rescind the immigration order. A science policy bulletin posted by the American Institute of Physics (which also publishes Physics Today) summarizes : “The organizations say it will block the open flow of scientists and engineers in industry and academia, discourage top international students and scholars from studying and working in the U.S., and reduce science and engineering productivity.”

Headlines telegraph fears for Trump-era science. A December Nature headline cited scientists’ “uncertain future” and concern about the president-elect’s “choice of advisers.” After the inauguration, another Nature headline called scientists “uneasy.” The online version said they “struggle” with a “foggy future.” The Washington Post‘s Joel Achenbach offered “The nation’s top scientists can’t get through to Trump—and they’re alarmed.” Soon Chris Mooney added the article “A new battle over politics and science could be brewing. And scientists are ready for it.” Days later, the Post published “Canadian scientists were followed, threatened and censored. They warn that Trump could do the same.”

The Verge warned “Trump silences government scientists with gag orders.” Scientific American summarized a story: “Scientists find a voice at massive rally for immigrants: Students, doctors and researchers join a big protest in the academic hub of Boston.” The Guardian announced , “Donald Trump ‘taking steps to abolish Environmental Protection Agency.’”

Some of the headlined fear and dread has focused on climate science. The Guardian offered , “Here’s how we know Trump’s cabinet picks are wrong on human-caused global warming.” The Times of London published “Trump and Charles in climate row: President ‘won’t take lecture’ from prince.” The New York Times published “Gauging how fast Trump can undo Obama’s climate legacy.”

And it’s not just headlines that convey the concern. Circulating online is the 4-minute-long “Erosion: Donald Trump vs Global Warming Music Video.” A newly created March for Science Facebook page , which has about 330 000 likes as of afternoon on 3 February, calls itself “a public page for discussion about a march on Washington by scientists and science enthusiasts.” The march is scheduled for 22 April—Earth Day. In part via the New York Times op-ed “Thanks to Trump, the Doomsday Clock advances toward midnight,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that, in consultation with 15 Nobel laureates, it was marking the clock’s 70th anniversary by moving the hands 30 seconds closer to midnight. The Atlantic ran a report on the organization 314 Action , named after pi and professing to “aggressively advocate for real solutions to climate change and elect more STEM trained candidates to public office"—though only Democratic candidates for now, a segregation that will surely get noticed in the science-politics realm.

But the biggest Trump-era technoscience issue in that realm is truth, facts, and science. That’s a phrase from New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s accusation that President Trump “corrupts and corrodes the absoluteness of truth, facts and science.” At the Wall Street Journal, editor in chief Gerard Baker confirmed the issue’s importance in his much-discussed op-ed “Trump, ‘lies’ and honest journalism.” In the process of cautioning against overuse of the word lie, he stipulated: “Mr. Trump has a record of saying things that are, as far as the available evidence tells us, untruthful.”

A December Times editorial charged that Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody: “The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.” A 26 January Nature editorial urged scientists to “fight for the facts,” declared that “rejecting mainstream science has become a theme for Trump,” and condemned what the editors called the president’s “long-standing disregard for the truth.”

The 29 January Times editorial “Can Mr. Trump handle the truth?” brought up a term invented 30 years ago: truthful hyperbole. Ghostwriter Tony Schwartz invented it specifically for Trump long before comedian Stephen Colbert invented truthiness and even longer before post-truth became ubiquitous. The New Yorker reports that Schwartz, stricken last summer with horror at the Trump candidacy, condemned the phrase as a way of saying “It’s a lie, but who cares?” Yet that Times editorial also quotes the belief of Republican congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman, that it’s “better to get your news directly from the president. In fact it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.”

Unvarnished truth? Much of the media discussion of these matters has invoked George Orwell’s novel 1984, which imagines life in a tyrannical dystopia built on pervasive, brutally enforced truth rejection. But some of the media discussion comes from conservatives who aren’t buying the fear, concern, consternation, perplexity, and uncertainty—or the Orwell allusion.

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Joseph Rago disdains that allusion as “preposterous,” arguing that Orwell was merely, and hyperbolically, taking malign political tendencies to logical extremes, not predicting the Trump era. Rago does predict that the Trump administration “more than most will feature ambiguity, imprecision, exaggeration and intellectual contradiction,” but he avoids colleague Baker’s flirtation with calling lies lies. At the conservative City Journal, John Tierney sees in the new president “a practical outlook” concerning science that “makes a welcome contrast with Barack Obama’s crusading spirit.” Tierney observes that the election has “left the science establishment aghast.” The Financial Times and other publications have circulated the word expertariat, which Trump transition official Myron Ebell used contemptuously when calling the environmental movement the world’s “greatest threat to freedom and prosperity.” Breitbart.com, the website formerly run by presidential adviser Steve Bannon, posted “Trump’s climate plans just made the media’s heads explode.”

But whether or not from “liberal media bias,” most of the Trump-era science coverage has aligned with a front-page Washington Post article on “a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing any new president’s agenda"—a wave attributed by former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to “firmly entrenched liberals.” The article emphasized worry at the EPA, where a union was considering how to defend scientists who might be “disciplined for speaking out or for defending scientific facts,” particularly about climate change.

In a recent Nature commentary , Anita Makri accuses scientists of seeing themselves as victims in troubling debates. She urges action instead, even though it’s risky and hard. Scientists, she says, must forthrightly engage the public concerning science “that’s inconclusive, ambivalent, incremental and even political.”

Back in December, a Nature editorial prescribed an approach for that kind of hard technocivic work:

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.