The damage under Trump is the culmination of the GOP’s longstanding war on science for the benefit of corporations.
In less than four years, the Trump administration has mounted more than 150 attacks on science. “The harms and costs of the Trump administration’s attacks on science are staggering,” says the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a U.S. science-advocacy group. Nature, the prestigious British science journal, recently cataloged many of Trump’s assaults on science, saying some of the damage “could be permanent.” “The Trump folks have poured an acid on public institutions that is much more powerful than anything we’ve seen before,” said David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. For example, during the summer, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, mounted a campaign to force the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to downplay the dangers facing children returning to school. CDC scientists objected, but they got steamrolled by the White House. “Just hours before the rewritten school guidance document was to be published, top White House officials — including Mark Meadows, the chief of staff; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser; Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council; and Stephen Miller, a White House policy adviser — were allowed to make ‘critical edits’ to the document. This led to the addition of language in the document that CDC officials had previously objected to, that the novel coronavirus was less deadly to children than the seasonal flu, UCS reported. Of course, we now know that Trump himself on February 7 had acknowledged in a taped interview that coronavirus is five times as deadly as “even the most strenuous” flu. Despite knowing the truth about the coronavirus, the president and vice president strong-armed the CDC to downplay the danger, consistent with Trump’s plan to undermine the public school system. Trump’s suppression and distortion of data about the coronavirus “is not just ineptitude, it’s sabotage. He has sabotaged efforts to keep people safe,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. “I’ve never seen such an orchestrated war on the environment or science,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican former governor of New Jersey who headed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the George W. Bush administration. However, Whitman has participated in Republican assaults on science herself. Just as she was leaving her post as head of the EPA in 2003, she allowed the Bush White House to delete a whole section on climate change from a report on the state of the environment, which her agency had prepared. Back then, Whitman said she was “perfectly comfortable” with the White House deleting scientific data from an EPA scientific report, but now she seems surprised that it has become standard practice among Republicans. In 2019,56 percent of Republicans polled said scientists should stay out of policy debates. Trump is continuing a long GOP tradition of warring against science. Over at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), scientific findings are being suppressed. The USDA has refused to issue press releases announcing 45 separate studies of the impacts of climate change on farms and farming. Farmers in Iowa — where excessive rain, droughts and wind storms have devastated crops in recent years — are complaining that the USDA has stopped giving them scientific advice about how to deal with the climate crisis.
