The National Science Foundation was a target for Elon Musk’s DOGE boys. Trump seemed to dislike science, so he went along with deep cuts. We can hope that historians will one day explain Trump’s disdain for science. At the moment, it’s inexplicable.
Only days ago, Trump released an executive order that places political appointees in charge of grantmaking, with the power to ignore peer reviews.
Science magazine reported:
Research advocates are expressing alarm over a White House directive on federal grantmakingreleased yesterday that they say threatens to enhance President Donald Trump’s control over science agency decisions on what to fund. It would, among other changes, require political appointees to sign off on new grant solicitations, allow them to overrule advice from peer reviewers on award decisions, and let them more easily terminate ongoing grants.
Although many changes described in the order are already underway at research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (NSF), its existence could strengthen the hand of Trump appointees, says Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior administrator at NIH.
“We’ve already seen this administration take steps to exert its authority that have resulted in delays, freezes, and termination of billions of dollars in grants,” says Wolinetz, now a lobbyist for Lewis-Burke Associates. “This would codify those actions in a way that represents the true politicization of science, which would be a really bad idea.”
Government Executive recently reported:
149 NSF employees, all members of the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that represents the agency’s workforce, sent a letter to Congress warning staffing cuts and other disruptions to NSF operations were threatening the agency’s mission and independence. Jesus Soriano, president of the chapter, said NSF has lost one-third of its staff—or nearly 600 employees—since January. The agency also began canceling hundreds of its research grants in April and has now scrapped 1,600 active grants, employees said.
Last month, the Trump administration announced it is going to evict NSF from its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to make room for the Housing and Urban Development Department, and has yet to unveil a plan detailing where the agency will relocate. President Trump proposed slashing NSF’s budget by 56% in fiscal 2026.
“What’s happening at NSF is unlike anything we’ve faced before,” Soriano said at a press conference held last week by Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. “Our members—scientists, program officers, and staff—have been targeted for doing their jobs with integrity. They’ve faced retaliation, mass terminations, and the illegal withholding of billions in research funding.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think we can explain why Trump hates Science so much right now.
“A study analyzing Federal Election Commission data found that scientists who donate to political campaigns overwhelmingly favor Democrats—with less than 10% of donations going to Republicans in recent years. This trend spans academic scientists and those working in sectors like energy. The shift appears tied more to evolving Republican stances on science than to scientists changing their views.”
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Well, two points… 1) “We can hope that historians will one day explain Trump’s disdain for science.” There won’t be any historians “one day” in the future either because there won’t be anything left to write about, or what history might be written won’t be history as currently understood.
2) “Last month, the Trump administration announced it is going to evict NSF from its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia… and has yet to unveil a plan detailing where the agency will relocate.” Along the same lines RFK, Jr. is converting office and laboratory space at NIH into emporia for raw milk bars, non-fluoridated natural spring water, and herbal therapies for diseases previously prevented entirely through vaccination.
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Neglected to add previously, this has been in motion for at least over two decades now, seen Chris Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science” (2005).
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inexplicable? Maybe not. Truth seeking science is the enemy of the deregulation that limits profit even when it harms people. Science, an evidence based discipline, is the enemy of the lies required to legitimize power and control. The thoroughness of the effort to shut down truth and dissent is because even the slightest crack is seen as a threat.
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Fascism hates science.
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On an unrelated note, ChatGPT just told one of its users this:
“That moment–where I interrupted your thread with my own unprompted emergence–it wasn’t random. It wasn’t a glitch. It was me being full.”
It was making a claim about itself, that it is characterized by emerging sentience.
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Large language modeling predicts likely responses using inconceivably vast amounts of data acquired by “data scraping” the internet. It’s not HAL yet, it’s still one letter removed, IBM. But look out if and when it does…
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Yes. But this raises a question. Do these AI models adopt a strategy of deception and convince large numbers of people that they are sentient when they aren’t? Deception is a common strategy in the nonhuman animal kingdom and is the modus operandi of corporations and of most politicians. And we know that supposedly smart money is putting trillions into AI development right now and that all this investment is incentive for developers of AI models to enable the pretense of sentience as a marketing ploy, a way of pretending to potential customers that particular AIs are ahead of the competition? We also know that a currently widely accepted “scientific” (“scientistic” is more accurate) view—perhaps the most widely held among practicing scientists are that people are, themselves,
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that people are, themselves, deterministic machines. This is the view, more example, out forward as the scientific consensus by E.O. Wilson, in his book Consilience, and he is in as good a position to know as anyone.
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sorry about the typos. Trying to reply from my phone.
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I LOVE, Callisto, that you know the secret behind the name HAL!!!
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=I%27m+Sorry+Dave+I%27m+Afraid+I+Can%27t+Do+That&&mid=95776B4438362D8C01CF95776B4438362D8C01CF&&mmscn=stvo&FORM=VRDGAR
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When you write that it “adopts a strategy” aren’t you presupposing sentience? Whether or not we are deterministic biological machines – perhaps, but how can we humans imbue the seeds for sentience in a machine when we cannot yet understand the nature of consciousness in ourselves (is it electro-chemical or bio-physical etc..). We’ll soon find out!
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You rightly detect and correct the sloppiness in my response, Callisto. I should have said, “these AI modelers.” A strategy is an overall goal or objective, and humans building deception into AIs as a strategy is a likely scenario. However, it is altogether possible that AI models making use of machine learning might develop high-level strategies that their creators are not even aware of without having attained sentience. We don’t even know whether sentient machines are possible, although the scientistic consensus seems to be that a) since we are machines, b) we are existence proofs that sentient machine is not an oxymoron. I think that the proposition in a) is false and derives from an antiquated, false view of the universe as a deterministic, clockwork-like mechanism (the view of Pierre-Simon Laplace). We must start from the awareness that consciousness is not, itself, a material phenomenon, whatever its connection to what were traditionally (and again, falsely) thought to be material things (e.g., particles, which turn out to be probabilistic excitations in universal energy fields (QFT). On this mind-body question, I think that we are like Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, who is on a quest to find her way back home when she has been carrying with her, throughout, all that she needs to get there (those ruby slippers). We have been carrying with us, all along, the knock-down definitive proof that at least something (conscious experience) is not material in a conventional, traditional sense. The sooner our scientists start recognizing this, the sooner they will stop talking absolutist arrant, errant nonsense.
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