anti science
trump takes a chainsaw to science, hits federal courts instead
NWS launches another weather balloon to see if facts can still reach the upper atmosphere without prior approval from a Trump political appointee.
The Trump administration spent the last year trying to turn American science into a partisan loyalty program. They gutted thousands of jobs at NASA, NOAA and other agencies, tried to kneecap elite universities over trumped-up antisemitism crusades, yanked grants that smelled like "DEI" and proposed hacking NIH funding by more than 40%. For dessert, they tried to blow up the entire post–World War II model of federally funded university research by capping "indirect costs" — you know, frivolous luxuries like buildings, electricity and lab equipment.
The plan was simple: starve the research you don’t like, then call it fiscal responsibility. Instead, an alphabet soup of people who can read the Constitution — ACLU, AAAS, APHA, AAU — dragged the administration into court and won key rulings blocking the indirect cost cap and forcing NIH to restart grant reviews it had frozen in its little ideological temper tantrum. Meanwhile, Congress looked at Trump’s slash-and-burn budget and said, absolutely not, keeping funding roughly flat and even giving NIH a modest bump.
Of course, "not as bad as Trump wanted" still means NOAA and NASA lost thousands of employees, NIH leadership got purged, climate reports were quietly buried and the National Weather Service is flying fewer weather balloons because apparently forecasting storms is woke now. The White House, naturally, praised the final bill as "fiscally responsible" while courts and Congress shoveled billions of dollars back into the science it tried to suffocate. American research is "enduring as best it can" — which is Washington-speak for "survived an Elon-and-Donald science policy cosplay session by hiding behind the judiciary."
