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Irene Ngun, Associate Director of Policy and Advocacy, Stand Up for Science Foundation
The MAGA base, conservative think tanks, and the tech right have converged under a shared interest in expanding executive power, hollowing out the administrative state, and dismantling regulation—not as an end in itself, but as a way of remaking government in their image. The overlap has produced an uneasy alliance of interest groups that share a distrust of democratic constraint, but differ in their motives and desired end state. The reshaping of the administrative state has left the scientific community with little to no meaningful leverage to inform the science and research agenda.
What the public and the scientific community have been dealt is a new arrangement in how federal science and research funding is organized and controlled, in which the tech right dictates where to aim capital and conservative operatives serve as the moral gatekeepers. Understanding the political and financial bargaining that has led to this moment will show the scientific community the limits of the traditional advocacy and bipartisanship that were tried and true for decades but are no longer effective in advancing positive change, let alone in defending the scientific enterprise.
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Brynn Paulsen, PhD Director of Research, Stand Up for Science Foundation
Federal scientific infrastructure was designed deliberately to distribute authority across career scientists, expert committees, peer-review panels, agency leadership, Congress, and independent boards. These distinct but interacting components serve a key purpose: to limit the influence of any single decision-maker while putting scientific judgments through multiple layers of evaluation.
Despite these tenets of our scientific infrastructure, the Trump administration has made no secret of its ambition to restructure the infrastructure to put these previously independent bodies directly under the control of the executive branch, while simultaneously disrupting the infrastructure in ways that sow confusion, fragmentation, instability, and reduce the rigor of the process. Institutional capacity and scientific integrity were among the earliest casualties of the Trump administration’s drive to dismantle the government.
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Brynn Paulsen, PhD, Director of Research, Stand Up for Science Foundation
The independence of the Federal scientific infrastructure from political ideology creates a particular problem for non-democratic administrations seeking greater control over institutions and the outputs produced by them. Research can document harms a government might prefer to minimize, contradict a politician’s preferred explanations, undermine the empirical basis of a politically preferred policy, or produce evidence supporting policies political leaders oppose.
In pursuit of greater political control over scientific narratives, the Trump administration has sought greater centralized control over the production and circulation of research and scientific knowledge. In doing so it must also delegitimize science and scientists themselves. Across historical cases of political interference with science, several recurring mechanisms emerge. In this report, we organize the administration’s strategy into five major pillars of the delegitimization of expertise and the scientific method: (1) removing access to information, (2) attacking scientists, (3) manufacturing uncertainty about established knowledge, (4) controlling what questions can be asked, and (5) replacing experts with loyalists.
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Cole Donovan, Director of Policy and Advocacy, Stand Up for Science Foundation
The scope and breadth of attacks on the U.S. science and technology ecosystem makes it difficult to challenge any individual set of actions. The administration has at almost every instance attempted to “flood the zone,” forcing organizations to prioritize or select which actions to challenge. Likewise, the administration’s willingness to elevate most of its policy actions immediately to the Supreme Court have amplified the cumulative effect of each of these efforts, often resulting in compounding damage as affected individuals and groups are denied the temporary relief necessary to continue going about their lives.
Some of the hardest to reverse long-term are the efforts effectuated by DOGE and OMB toward the deconstruction of the administrative state. Even if all illegal firings were reversed, agencies have been fundamentally transformed as a result of career staff absence, and many of the protections afforded by oversight mechanisms effectively eliminated. In total, more than 10,000 PhD scientists and almost 100,000 science employees have been removed from federal positions, creating a gaping hole in federal expertise. These disruptions have had significant effects on the government’s ability to deliver services, not only on its ability to award grants. Firings have weakened the administration’s response to public health emergencies, extreme weather, and disasters, and the damage does not stop there.
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Irene Ngun, Associate Director of Policy and Advocacy, Stand Up for Science Foundation
The diversity of members that make up the scientific community has produced a wide range of responses to the administration’s policies. The clearest, most consistent voices have come from advocacy organizations, faculty unions, individual scientists, and whistleblowers. Major scientific organizations have been slow to accept the political realities of the moment and even more hesitant to characterize the actions and policies of the administration as authoritarian. Large societies and institutions most dependent on federal funding and protective of their reputation have been quieter, more measured, and compliant. The asymmetry is the product of funding dependence and a calculation about what to protect. The organizations with the most to lose have chosen the institution over a public defense of scientific integrity.
But sentiment is changing, slowly and unevenly. Two developments in particular have made the systemic nature of the threat harder to ignore. First, OMB’s proposed rewrite of the rules governing federal financial assistance Second, the public targeting and harassment of prominent scientists has underscored that the pressure does not stop at programs and budgets.
