Opinion: Trump’s Attack on Science Drowns Common Sense

Blocking research funds challenges president’s promise of a “proud, prosperous, and free” nation. 

By Keith Schneider, February 26, 2025

Attacking the virtue and validity of research science is nothing new in certain corners of American culture. A century ago, in the famous Scopes trial, a high school teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolutionary biology in violation of state law and religious doctrine.

In the 21st century, Christian conservatives are at it again. They’ve united with fossil fuel industry executives to attack the scientific research that projects with astonishing accuracy the pace and damaging consequences of increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere on water resources, agriculture, and communities. 

Never before, though, has the United States confronted an attack on science like the one President Trump launched in January 2025. For the first time in U.S. history, raw ideological menace is blocking federal funding that supports scientific advance. 

Like a coach drawing up a diabolical game plan, Trump launched the assault on January 20, Inauguration Day, when he signed an executive order that directed every federal agency to terminate any reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in all programs and activities. A week later, a vital member of his cabinet team, the Office of Management and Budget, froze all federal grants, including over $75 billion for scientific research in and outside government, in order to review them for evidence of Trump’s despised woke influences. 

Supporting players then forced themselves onto the field, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who targeted research grants issued by the National Science Foundation and described $2 billion worth that Cruz claims promoted DEI principles. Federal judges issued orders in late February that temporarily block the freeze on federal grants and enforcement of the anti-DEI mandates, but the pall of suppression remains. 

By any measure of economics, environmental quality, public health, and human advancement, the president’s dogmatic crusade against science is more than despicable. It’s ruinous for the country. And it will make impossible Trump’s own Inaugural promise to “create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.”

The reason is perfectly plain. Federal science grants have supported breakthroughs in technology, health, and environmental quality that affect every corner of the country and every person in the United States. The country is safer, more prosperous, more enlightened because of research projects paid for by taxpayers. 

For instance, one of the contemporary National Science Foundation projects is developing responses to the national and global degradation of land and water resources caused by the warming planet. Water scarcity, as Circle of Blue has extensively reported, is particularly severe in the West. Researchers are identifying agricultural practices, essential for meeting national and international food demands, that rely on less water for irrigation. 

It is deep-dive, long-term scientific investigations like this, supported by federal research grants, that culminate in changes that make the American way of life safer and more prosperous. An economic study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that every dollar of non-defense research spending had 150 to 300 percent returns, and was responsible for a quarter of U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

Radically altering that system of federally sponsored research also has significant ramifications for the institutions and researchers that receive the grants. In Michigan alone, the University of Michigan received more than $1 billion in federal science research grants last year. Michigan State’s federal grants exceeded $435 million. Wayne State received about $135 million.

Across all three campuses, researchers and administrators are growing increasingly alarmed about their projects and their jobs. The same is true for federal science agencies like the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Academy researchers are scrubbing phrases such as “health equity,” “marginalized populations,” and “restorative justice” from reports and replacing them with vaguer terms in an effort to appease the Trump administration, according to STAT, a health news group.  

Readers of Circle of Blue know that among the highest priority challenges confronting the United States and the planet is the declining reserves of freshwater needed for the environment, people, and industries. Those goals have no ideological foundation, no DEI reference. Bringing freshwater supply into balance with demand requires new concepts of water use and distribution. Science is delivering most of the reasoned and achievable responses. Hampering scientists with ideological interference is a foul approach to securing the nation’s well-being.

Keith Schneider

Circle of Blue’s senior editor and chief correspondent based in Traverse City, Michigan. He has reported on the contest for energy, food, and water in the era of climate change from six continents. Contact
Keith Schneider