One of the things that has made the US a leader in the global economy is the high quality of its science research. The infrastructure that has been set up to promote science, with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation giving out grants to scientists or, in the case of the NIH, also doing research doing research internally, has resulted in prospective students and researchers from around the world flocking to the US. That has changed more recently with China luring foreign scientists with promises of greater access to research funds. India too has been making attempts to have scientists return to that country.

But the moves by the Trump administration may threaten US dominance much more than the efforts of those countries to attract scientists away.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is already having a big impact at the $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the new administration imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings such as grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.
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Today, for example, officials halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
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NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
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Separately, HHS announced a communications ban through 1 February in a memo issued yesterday. (The Washington Post and Associated Press first reported the memo’s existence.) It orders a stop on the publishing of regulations, guidance documents, grant announcements, social media posts, press releases, and other “communications,” and the canceling of speaking engagements. Any exceptions must be applied for and approved through the president’s appointees.

“This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization,” an NIH spokesperson says.

Another consequence of the communications pause is a freeze on meetings of federal advisory committees and study sections. NIH today canceled meetings of advisory councils at its dental and bioengineering institutes.

The council meetings include a closed-door session where grant proposals from extramural researchers that have already been approved by peer-review panels undergo a final review before the awards are made. It is not clear what will happen to those grants if the council meeting to finalize the review is canceled. Many more councils for NIH’s 24 grantmaking institutes and centers are scheduled to meet in the coming weeks.

Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.

These research advisory bodies and grant proposal review committees (I have served on some) serve as a buffer between the funding agencies and scientists. They are composed of scientists familiar with the field who are not employees of the funding agencies, who meet to evaluate the relative merits of research proposals. The process can be slow and cumbersome (it would be. much faster to have one government employee make all the decisions) but they serve to ensure some level of objectivity and quality control.

The Trump moves and the proposed appointment of cranks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr as secretary of the department of Health and Human Services are warning sings for science. The HHS oversees agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the NIH that play major roles in US health and safety. The NSF is an independent agency that funds research in non-medical areas, complementing the work of the NIH. The Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies also fund research in the sciences. The DoE had long been a target for elimination by Republicans and its future is now uncertain.

These moves remind me of the infamous Lysenko episode in the Soviet Union.

[Trofim Lysenko] was a proponent of Lamarckism, and rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own idiosyncratic, pseudoscientific ideas later termed Lysenkoism.

In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.

Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov, whose sentence was commuted to prison. Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.

Science is solidly based in reality with its emphasis on evidence and reasoning to arrive at conclusions. This it has always been an irritating obstacle to the fantasies created by ideologues who want to promote some pet idea of theirs.. So it is not surprising that ideologues want to curtail science, or at least remove the shields and buffers that protect it from direct ideological control.

I am not saying that what might happen here will be as extreme as imprisoning and executing dissident scientists. But the worrying thing is that the end results may be as damaging, since it will imply ideological pressures in directing science research along pre-approved directions. What this will likely lead to is that foreign students and researchers will no longer be attracted to pursue careers in the US (the highly restrictive visa requirements had already made that difficult) and those already here may be more easily lured away, leading to a decline in the quality of science done here.