The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration has apparently decided that outright banning science is too on-the-nose, so they’re going with the more elegant solution: make doing research so suffocatingly bureaucratic that scientists simply walk away. The Office of Management and Budget’s new proposed rules would let political appointees rummage through federal grants, vetoing anything that doesn’t sufficiently flatter the president’s policy whims, while hunting for forbidden words like “disparity” and “marginalized” as if epidemiology were a woke slur. Peer review by scientists? Downgraded. Oversight by hacks? Upgraded.

To really spice things up, the rules also aim to kneecap international collaboration, especially with places like China, because nothing says “serious cancer research” like banning your best possible collaborators. At the same time, NIH funding is frozen or erratic enough that junior scientists are being nudged out of the field or out of the country. It’s a slow-motion brain drain, except the drain is being dug on purpose.

And while they’re starving basic research, the National Science Foundation is allegedly slashing core science programs to shovel $1.5 billion into something called “X-Labs,” which appears to be: what if we just gave the money to private tech companies instead? So public science gets defunded, private firms get taxpayer cash, and research priorities quietly shift from public health and long-term knowledge to whatever makes shareholders happiest this quarter. It’s the public transit privatization scam, but for the entire scientific enterprise.

The plan is simple: make public science chaotic, underfunded, and politically policed, then point at the wreckage and announce that the market will save us. Scientists and the public are being begged to file comments against the OMB rules before the deadline, because apparently the only thing standing between US science and death by a thousand bureaucratic shivs is how many people can navigate regulations.gov in time.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier for deregulation: turning the ocean into a SpaceX parking lot. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management put out a Request for Information asking how we might repurpose the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf — you know, the part already abused by oil and gas drilling — for offshore space launches and reentry. Why clean up decaying rigs when you can slap a launch pad on them and call it innovation?

All of this is wrapped in an executive order titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” because of course it is. Environmental advocates like Miyoko Sakashita point out that rockets are already blasting wildlife refuges and now Trump wants to push the debris field out to sea, where whales, sea turtles, and marine ecosystems can enjoy front-row seats to billionaire hobby rockets and abandoned fossil fuel junk. It’s the perfect Trump-era compromise: don’t make Big Oil clean up its mess, just strap rockets to the trash and pretend it’s a space program.

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, because of course it is — shut down NOAA’s hugely popular Climate.gov site, then slapped up a notice citing Executive Order 14303 and told everyone the data would still exist somewhere on NOAA.gov if you just believe hard enough and enjoy clicking through 47 dead-end links. It’s like they renovated the climate store and then moved the entrance into a broom closet.

So now a bunch of former NOAA employees, laid off by Trump’s efficiency cosplay, have had to crowdfund about $280,000 and beg volunteers to re-create their own former government site as Climate.us, just so farmers, teachers, and researchers can find basic climate data without spelunking through a federal labyrinth. Nearly a million people a month used Climate.gov, which apparently triggered the administration’s core doctrine: if science makes you look bad, bury it under an executive order and call it streamlining.

The data is technically “public,” the way a safe at the bottom of the ocean is technically “accessible.” Ex-staffers like Rebecca Lindsey are now running what amounts to a parallel shadow NOAA, complete with an 80-scientist panel, because the actual government decided that helping people understand climate risk was less important than appeasing a fossil-fuel donor’s feelings. Trump gets to claim he didn’t delete the science — he just made it unusable — while the adults pass the digital hat to rebuild the public’s front door to reality.

The Trump administration looked at a $386m ocean monitoring network that tracks climate change, extreme weather, and marine ecosystems and said: what if we just destroyed it? The National Science Foundation, facing a proposed 55% budget cut from Trump’s 2026 budget, quietly ordered most of the Ocean Observatories Initiative torn out of the water by 2027 – no scientific review, no real warning, and, according to House Democrats, no legally required notice to Congress. Just a casual federal agency speedrunning "how to make your own appropriation law violation" while calling it a "descoping" aligned with "evolving priorities".

Sen. Jeff Merkley called the plan "supreme stupidity" and a violation of the constitutional balance of powers, which is a polite way of saying the executive branch is taking congressionally funded infrastructure and treating it like Trump treats NDAs. Merkley and Republican Lisa Murkowski led a bipartisan letter demanding NSF stop dismantling the system and actually consult scientists before ripping out 900 sensors that have produced a decade of publicly available climate and ocean data. House Democrats went further, telling NSF to halt this "expensive, destructive, and – crucially – illegal" action, noting that instead of using a world-class monitoring network during an approaching El Niño, taxpayers now get to fund boats to sail around the ocean yanking out perfectly good instruments.

This is all part of Trump’s broader campaign to defund, gut, or otherwise kneecap anything that measures reality: slashing climate research, bleeding NOAA and EPA, and rolling back emissions rules while dismantling the systems that could prove how bad it all is. If you were trying to make sure coastal communities, fishermen, and emergency responders had less information about storms, heatwaves, and ocean conditions, you’d do exactly what this administration is doing. Why fear rising seas when you can just delete the data and pretend beachfront Mar-a-Lago will be fine forever?

American health policy has achieved a stunning new milestone: the insurance industry is now the voice of reason. While Donald Trump and Health Secretary RFK Jr cosplay as YouTube wellness influencers with executive orders to "realign" childhood vaccines, AHIP — the lobby for insurers, not doctors — announces it will keep covering routine vaccines through 2027. When the people whose entire business model is not paying for things step up to fund shots, it's because they've checked the receipts: measles hospitalizations are more expensive than a jab, and also, minor detail, kids dying is bad.

Meanwhile, the administration’s anti-vax fan fiction keeps running into that pesky "rule of law" thing. The American Academy of Pediatrics had to sue to stop ACIP’s hacked-up vaccine schedule after RFK Jr’s team tried to gut recommendations by a third, and a judge basically put the committee in time-out over its politicized selection process. Trump responded with another executive order that mostly functions as a press release for Facebook aunties, while experts quietly note that any real change would straight-up violate the court order.

Trump’s own pollsters are reportedly waving giant red flags that attacking vaccines is unpopular and, medically speaking, bad for reelection. Yet here we are: nearly 2,000 measles cases, record whooping cough, and a White House so committed to anti-science performance art that it’s willing to lose both lawsuits and midterms to keep RFK Jr happy. The government is undermining vaccines, pediatricians are in court trying to stop them, and the insurance companies are the ones defending public health. Truly, the Founders envisioned this.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new national security threat: not climate change, not foreign wars, but the tragic possibility that coal barons might have to sell one of their yachts. So he’s breaking out the Defense Production Act—a cold war tool meant for actual emergencies—to hand $700 million in grants to coal-fired power plants, including ones built to export the stuff. Wartime powers, but for propping up the energy equivalent of rotary phones.

This is just the latest chapter in the administration’s coal fanfic: hundreds of millions already doled out, orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra to keep zombie plants shambling along, and environmental rules shredded so more toxins can drift into Americans’ lungs and water. All wrapped in a PR campaign so deranged it includes a giant-eyed coal mascot named Coalie and federal social posts of coal in sunglasses, like black lung meets Love Island.

The minor inconvenience that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, linked to an estimated 460,000 deaths from air pollution between 1999 and 2020, is apparently just a branding issue to Team "Clean, Beautiful Coal." While jobs in coal have cratered to the point that more Americans work at Waffle House than in the entire coal sector, Trump is using emergency powers to stage a corpse revival, all while trying to kneecap cheaper, cleaner solar and wind. Higher bills, dirtier air, and a climate crisis on fast-forward—brought to you as a patriotic duty.

Industry lobbyists, naturally, are thrilled, claiming coal is now vital to meet AI-driven electricity demand and to cope with Middle East conflicts, as if ChatGPT and Gaza both run on soot. The rest of us get to fund a wartime-level bailout so that a handful of coal executives can keep cashing checks while their plants slowly kill people. Truly, a vital national security mission: defending America from the terrifying prospect of an efficient, modern energy grid.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new climate strategy: if the oceans are screaming, just smash the microphones. Days after Trump fired every member of the independent board overseeing the National Science Foundation, the now-housebroken NSF announced it is "descoping" the $368m Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of 900+ deep-sea instruments that has quietly been doing the unforgivable: producing real-time, inconvenient climate data.

The plan: yank all the in-water infrastructure off North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and the Irminger Sea, shutting down more than a decade of continuous monitoring of currents, marine ecosystems, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the critical ocean conveyor belt that, among other things, helps decide whether Europe has weather or a plotline from a Roland Emmerich movie. Scientists note that the system was just reaching its full potential; Trumpworld heard "better data on warming oceans" and apparently translated that as "emergency, terminate with extreme prejudice".

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse helpfully summarized the policy: fossil fuels are heating the oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s "corrupt fossil fuel stooges" want to turn off the monitors. Meanwhile, NSF’s PR shop insists the program isn’t being cancelled, just made "nimbler" — a charming way to describe dismantling the hardware, disbanding the expert teams, and creating a multi-year gap in data and expertise that will be nearly impossible to rebuild. Authoritarian lesson of the day: if you can’t bend reality to your narrative, defund the instruments measuring reality and call it "smart lifecycle management".