Trump’s executive orders put science’s reliability at risk

Imagine you’re a medical researcher studying a critical disease that affects millions of Americans. Funding for your federal grant has been suspended because of “incompatibility with agency priorities.”

After weeks of uncertainty, a government official says they will resume the grant — provided you agree not to investigate or report on how the disease affects a certain minority group. What would you do?

Right now, similar dilemmas are being faced by researchers nationwide due to two legally dubious executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and transgender people. Proponents claim these orders will eliminate ideology in science, but in reality, President Donald Trump’s EOs limit the ability of science to benefit humanity.

As a prior recipient of federal research funds and a legal scholar who studies free speech and the history of science, we both understand that the scientific method is a process for making observations and taking informed actions based upon them.

On the most basic level, a scientist must be willing to admit that their original hypothesis is wrong. That means science requires a fundamental openness to following where those observations lead you. Sidestepping lines of inquiry that are ideologically disfavored by the administration runs counter to the goals of science and the principle of academic freedom.

Funding priorities shape the course of scientific research. When the government suppresses particular questions — either through lists of banned keywords or by shuttering dozens of National Science Foundation divisions — scientists tend to change their research agendas accordingly.

Researchers at many institutions are under intense pressure to compete for funding in order to earn tenure and promotion, to pay their postdocs and graduate students, and to bring their institutions the overhead fees that keep the lights on and the fume hoods running.

The choice between pursuing a funded project that is regime-approved and an unfunded project that dares to challenge the government’s worldview is no choice at all for most scientists, who still have to pay rent and support themselves and their families. We have already begun to see the effects play out.

The harms of these attacks go beyond the limits on the choices of individual scientists. For all of the administration’s claims about promoting “gold standard science,” mandated censorship and restrictions on funding harm the scientific record.

What we call science is a mutually reinforcing network of people, institutions, and practices that rests on the “shoulders of giants,” that is, the work of others. When certain projects are suppressed, it makes it harder for all researchers to understand the state of the world and draw the correct conclusions.

We’ve already seen that normal, reasonable preferences in science publishing, such as the bias against negative results, can have dramatic effects on our ability to know things about the world. Ideological restrictions on science threaten to be much worse, akin to religious suppression of Galileo’s evidence for the heliocentric model of the solar system. And that is before we even account for specific funding for fringe or discredited ideologies.

To be sure, there is much about the ecosystem of American science research that could be improved. Science is done by humans, with all of our curiosities, frailties, and biases. And sometimes, science’s self-correction can be a lengthy and thankless process.

Mandated censorship and restrictions on funding harm the scientific record.

But rather than supporting more robust scientific inquiry or eliminating “ideological biases,” the federal government’s targeted ideological bans and defunding efforts make it more difficult to do the kind of work that teaches us about our world.

And while many scientists are rightfully dismayed by the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting Trump’s National Institutes of Health grant cuts to move forward, a prominent legal scholar and Supreme Court watcher has predicted that individual grantees may yet prevail in court to recoup their funds.

No one should have to make the choice before many federally-funded scientists: “sanitize” your research or lose your funding.

Academic institutions, philanthropic foundations, and, yes, everyday people need to stand up for science and for research and researchers that the federal government has decided are ideologically disfavored. Otherwise, we risk creating an environment where our ability to know things, and act upon them, is profoundly compromised.

Matt Zucker is a professor of engineering at Swarthmore College. Kendra Albert is a partner at Albert Sellars LLP.