Science

Trump vs. Science

Published

10 months ago

April 25, 2025

Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.

The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or defunded thousands of researchers.

The chaos is confusing: Isn’t science a force for good? Hasn’t it contained disease? Won’t it help us in the competition with China? Doesn’t it attract the kind of immigrants the president says he wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we break out our macroscope to make sense of the turmoil.

An investment

American research thrives under a patronage system that funnels congressionally approved dollars to universities, national labs and institutes. This knowledge factory employs tens of thousands of researchers, draws talent from around the world and generates scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.

It’s a slow-moving system, because science moves slowly. Discoveries are often indirect and iterative, involving collaboration among researchers who need years of subsidized education to become expert. Startups and corporations, which need quick returns on their investment, typically can’t wait as long or risk as much money.

Science is capital. By some measures, every dollar spent on research returns at least $5 to the economy.

President Trump is less patient. He has defunded university studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. (Two prominent researchers are compiling lists of lost N.I.H. grants and N.S.F. awards.) The administration has also laid off thousands of federal scientists, including meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. A next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.

Alienating scientists

Administration officials offer various reasons for the crackdown: cost-cutting, government efficiency, “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Many grants were eliminated because they contain words, including climate, diversity, disability, trans or women. Some drew the administration’s ire because the applications included D.E.I. statements required by the previous administration.

It doesn’t take a telescope to see where this leads. American leaders have historically seen science as an investment in the future. Will this administration foreclose it? One-third of America’s Nobel Prize winners have been foreign-born, but an immigration crackdown has swept up scientists like Kseniia Petrova, a Russian who studied aging at Harvard and now sits in a Louisiana detention center. Australian academics have stopped attending conferences in the U.S. for fear of being detained, The Guardian has reported.

Now some American scientists are looking for the exits. France, Canada and other countries are courting our researchers. In a recent poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists said they were considering working abroad. The journal’s job-search platform saw 32 percent more applications for positions overseas between January and March 2025 than during the same period a year earlier.

Redefining ‘science’

These are mechanical threats to science — who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential worry. The Trump administration is trying to change what counts as science.

One effort aims at what science should show — and at achieving results agreeable to the administration. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to reopen research into a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine hesitancy. The National Science Foundation says it will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” A Justice Department official has accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”

Another gambit is to suppress or avoid politically off-message results, even if the message isn’t yet clear. The government has expunged public data sets on air quality, earthquake intensity and seabed geology. Why cut the budget by erasing records? Perhaps the data would point toward efforts (pollution reduction? seabed mining limits?) that officials might one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge in order to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But action is expensive, at a moment when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Perhaps it’s best to not even know.

One sure way to shut down knowledge is to question who can gather it. The administration is painting scientists with the same liberal brush it has applied to academics more broadly — what Project 2025 describes as “the ‘enlightened,’ highly educated managerial elite.” The N.I.H. is controlled by “a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders,” the Project 2025 authors write. The regulatory work of the Environmental Protection Agency “should embrace so-called citizen science” and be left “for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.”

In science, as in a democracy, there’s plenty of room for skepticism and debate. That’s what makes it work. But at some point, calls for “further research” become disingenuous efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.

Now it’s being weaponized by the government against science generally. Facts are elite, facts are fungible, facts are false. And once nothing is true, anything can be true.

For more

Trump ordered government agencies to prepare for mining the ocean floor. Nearly all other countries oppose such industrial activity in international waters.
Below, Alan Blinder, who covers education, describes the scientific research at stake in Trump’s fight with Harvard. Click the video to watch.

THE LATEST NEWS

Pete Hegseth

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March. This could have exposed national security secrets to foreign adversaries, analysts say. Read more here.

In our news meeting yesterday, the Times’s business editor alluded to a treacly smell emanating from her corner of the office. Why? Julie Creswell, who reports on the food industry, was writing a story on food dyes, and the business staff had opened boxes of Froot Loops from Canada and the United States.

The bowl on the left contains the cereal Canadians eat. Its colors come from the juices of blueberries, watermelon and other fruits. The one on the right, for Americans, is colored with synthetic dyes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ban.

“Everybody was shocked at the difference in colors,” Julie said. The natural dyes are muted. “They’re slight variations of beige, and blues are completely gone.”

The duller hues fooled our staff, including one who said: “Your mind thinks it won’t be as strong — it might be a little stale.” But business reporters tasted the samples and agreed the flavors were indistinguishable.

Read Julie’s story about how hard it is for food companies to switch dyes. — Adam B. Kushner

OPINIONS

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments about autistic children not becoming independent rang painfully true for Emily May. A severe form of autism restrains her daughter’s life.

Here’s a column by David Brooks on Trump’s true strength.

MORNING READS

Multitasking: How can bats drink water while flying?

Ask the Therapist: “I hate my parents’ politics. Should I keep my son away?”

Most clicked yesterday: How to cut your risk of stroke, dementia and depression.

Trending online yesterday: Alijah Arenas, a top U.S.C. basketball recruit and the son of N.B.A. start Gilbert Arenas, is in a coma after a car crash.

Lives Lived: Gretchen Dow Simpson was an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose moody, highly geometric images of seaside cottages, snow-covered farms and other totems of New England life drew comparisons to the works of Edward Hopper. They also graced the covers of 58 issues of The New Yorker. She died at 85.

SPORTS

N.F.L. Draft: The Tennessee Titans selected Cam Ward with the No. 1 pick. Travis Hunter, a Heisman winner, is going to Jacksonville.

N.B.A.: The top-seeded Thunder completed the largest halftime comeback in playoff history to take a 3-0 lead against the Grizzlies. The Knicks and Clippers also won their games.

Theo Von is a comedian and host of “This Past Weekend,” a video podcast that routinely garners millions of views and listens. It is one of the most watched shows in the country. But what are his politics? He keeps it more ambiguous than his “bro-cast peers.” That may be why he’s so successful, our critic Jon Caramanica writes. Read more about him.

Ask the Morning

After Pope Francis died Monday, we invited Morning readers to submit questions about our coverage and what happens next. Jody Mower, who lives in Alpine, Utah, wrote in about this image, which she said “moved me with its beauty and symbolic framing.” How, she asked, did Gianni Cipriano “get permission to photograph from such a location?”

Gianni, who lives in Naples, has been a freelance photographer for The Times since 2008. He climbed up to the terrace of the Charlemagne Wing out of desperation, only after security forces told him he could not work near the front of St. Peter’s Square. “I was like, where the heck am I supposed to go?” He knew about the terrace from prior work at the Vatican, including the 2013 conclave that selected Francis, so he made his way up the dark, narrow spiral staircase. (Check out his video on Instagram.)

It was about 7:30 p.m. The Rosary prayer was beginning, and the sun starting to set. At first, Gianni was disappointed the square was not full. “But the light was magical,” he said. He framed the image so that one of the 140 statues that line the square — we’re 99 percent sure it’s Saint Andrew Corsini, who died in 1374 and was canonized in 1629, but email us if you know differently — is overlooking the crowd as a pope might.

“It did feel like a metaphor of what had happened that day,” he said of the image. It gave “that sense of sobriety and sadness,” he said, “and I think it did convey a moment of silence and of recollection.”

Gianni is one of three photographers covering the pope’s funeral for The Times. We’ll have a live dispatch from the Vatican in tomorrow’s edition of The Morning. — Jodi Rudoren

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Related Topics:Columbia university Featured harvard university National Institutes of Health politics and government research

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Science

Video: Why Mountain Lions in California Are Threatened

Published

1 day ago

February 9, 2026

Press Room

Video: Why Mountain Lions in California Are Threatened

new video loaded: Why Mountain Lions in California Are Threatened

Six subpopulations of mountain lions in California face mounting threats, including habitat fragmentation from highways, urban sprawl, and wildfires, as well as widespread rodenticide poisoning. Loren Elliott, a photojournalist for The New York Times, shows how he documents these elusive animals.

By Loren Elliott, Gabriel Blanco and Rebecca Suner

February 9, 2026

Science

Torrance residents call for the ban of ‘flesh-eating’ chemical used at refinery

Published

2 days ago

February 8, 2026

Press Room

Torrance residents call for the ban of ‘flesh-eating’ chemical used at refinery

Residents and advocates gathered Saturday to demand the ban of a chemical that’s used at a Torrance oil refinery and that they say has the potential to cause a mass casualty disaster.

Hydrofluoric acid is used in about 40 gasoline refineries across the United States, according to the National Resources Defense Council. The defense council states that “exposing as little as 1% of a person’s skin to HF (about the size of one’s hand) can lead to death. When inhaled, HF can fatally damage lungs, disrupt heart rhythms, and cause other serious health effects.”

The Torrance Refinery uses modified hydrofluoric acid, or MHF, which the refinery considers to be a safer alternative to HF, though the claim is disputed by advocates. Steve Goldsmith, president of the Torrance Refinery Action Alliance, which hosted the Saturday event, said that if MHF were to be been released into the air, it would create irreversible health effects within 6.2 miles of the refinery, trickling into other parts of Los Angeles County.

And in 2015, he said, this almost happened.

On Feb. 18, 2015, there was an explosion at the refinery, then operated by ExxonMobil, caused by the rupture of an eroded valve. The incident, which released flammable hydrocarbons, injured four workers and forced 14 schools into lockdown.

The Saturday event, held at North High School’s Performing Arts Center in Torrance, marked the 11th anniversary of the explosion.

Goldsmith described the chemical as “murderous.”

Audience members participate in a “peace clap” at North Torrance High as they listen to speakers against the use of hydrofluoric acid in the Los Angeles region and across the country.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“Torrance Refinery had an enormous explosion, and a piece of equipment the size of a bus came within five feet of the hydrofluoric acid, causing a near miss,” Goldsmith said. “We’ve been working to get rid of it.”

Residents like Christopher Truman say replacing MHF with an alternative option is the least that can be done. His parents live near the refinery.

“I’m born and raised in the South Bay, and my family lives in, effectively, what would be the blast radius if another accident happened,” Truman said. “So just in that aspect, I’m very worried about it.”

MHF is also used to clean semiconductor surfaces and produce pesticides and herbicides in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, according to the Torrance Refinery.

County Supervisor Janice Hahn said residents should not assume “they will be lucky” if another refinery accident were to occur.

“Only two refineries in California use MHF, Torrance Refinery and the Valero Refinery in Wilmington,” Hahn said. “MHF is simply too dangerous to use. It is a flesh-eating, low-crawling, toxic vapor cloud. Our communities will not be safe until this chemical is gone.”

Goldsmith said a Chevron refinery in Salt Lake City found an ionic-liquid alkylation process as an alternative to MHF. He added that the 2025 Chevron refinery explosion in El Segundo “would have been different if they had been using MHF.”

“They used another chemical that did not endanger the community,” Goldsmith said. “And that’s the thing about refineries, they have explosions. But that’s why you can’t have [MHF] around things that can blow up.”

U.S. Representative

Congressmember Maxine Waters appears on a video message explaining her legislation

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, (D-Los Angeles), who represents the city of Torrance, greeted attendees in a prerecorded message, in which she reintroduced her bill, the “Preventing Mass Casualties from Release of Hydrofluoric Acid at Refineries Act,” which targets plants using MHF.

“I originally introduced this bill in December of 2024,” Waters said in the video. “I faced considerable opposition, especially from the United Steel Workers Union, [who were] concerned that if refineries converted to safer technologies, some of the refineries might close, leaving workers without jobs. They agreed with me that hydrofluoric acid is dangerous. But they still would not support my bill. So I decided to go ahead and reintroduce this bill, [without] union support.”

The bill would give refineries five years to find an alternative to the dangerous chemical. Violators may be subject to fines up to $37,000 per infraction.

Supervisor Janice Hahn speaks out against the use of hydrofluoric acid in the Los Angeles region and across the country

Some residents stressed the need for transparency from local officials.

Ian Patton, a Long Beach resident, said most parts of the investigation into the 2015 explosion were withheld.

“Why can’t they not make this report public? The [Torrance Refinery Action Alliance] has been asking for it for years,” Patton said. “The next step was to look at litigation under the California Public Records Act. It’s not something that we want to do, but the public deserves to know whether these plants are safe.”

Science

TrumpRx is launched: How it works and what Democrats say about it

Published

3 days ago

February 7, 2026

Press Room

TrumpRx is launched: How it works and what Democrats say about it

WASHINGTON — The White House’s TrumpRx website went live Thursday with a promise to instantly deliver prescription drugs at “the lowest price anywhere in the world.”

“This launch represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times, and it’s not even close,” President Trump said at a news conference announcing the launch of the platform.

Drug policy experts say the jury is still out on whether the platform will provide the significant savings Trump promises, though it will probably help people who need drugs not commonly covered by insurance.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called the site a “vanity project” and questioned whether the program presents a possible conflict of interest involving the pharmaceutical industry and the Trump family.

What is TrumpRx, really?

The new platform, trumprx.gov, is designed to help uninsured Americans find discounted prices for high-cost, brand-name prescriptions, including fertility, obesity and diabetes treatments.

The site does not directly sell drugs. Instead, consumers browse a list of discounted medicines, and select one for purchase. From there, they either receive a coupon accepted at certain pharmacies or are routed directly to a drug manufacturer’s website to purchase the prescription.

The White House said the reduced prices are possible after the administration negotiated voluntary “most favored nation” agreements with 16 major drugmakers including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

Under these deals, manufacturers have agreed to set certain U.S. drug prices no higher than those paid in other wealthy nations in exchange for three-year tariff exemptions. However, the full legal and financial details of the deals have not been made public, leaving lawmakers to speculate how TrumpRx’s pricing model works.

What does it accomplish?

Though the White House has framed TrumpRx as a historic reset for prescription drug costs, economists said the platform offers limited new savings.

But it does move the needle on the issue of drug pricing transparency, away from the hidden mechanisms behind how prescription drugs are priced, rebated and distributed, according to Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

“This has been a murky world, a terrible, obscure, opaque marketplace where drug prices have been inconsistently priced to different consumers,” Joyce said, “So this is a little step in the right direction, but it’s mostly performative from my perspective, which is kind of Trump in a nutshell.”

Still, for the uninsured or people seeking “lifestyle drugs” — like those for fertility or weight loss that insurers have historically declined to cover — TrumpRx could become a useful option, Joyce said.

“It’s kind of a win for Trump and a win for Pfizer,” Joyce said. “They get to say, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re lowering prices. We’re keeping Trump happy, but it’s on our low-volume drugs, and drugs that we were discounting big time anyway.’”

Where does it fall short?

Early analyses by drug policy experts suggest many of the discounted medications listed on the TrumpRx site were already on offer through other drug databases before the platform launched.

For example, Pfizer’s Duavee menopause treatment is listed at $30.30 on TrumpRx, but it is also available for the same price at some pharmacies via GoodRx.

Weight management drug Wegovy starts at $199 on TrumpRx. Manufacturers were already selling the same discounted rates through its NovoCare Pharmacy program before the portal’s launch.

“[TrumpRx] uses data from GoodRx, an existing price-search database for prescription drugs,” said Darius N. Lakdawalla, a senior health policy researcher at USC. “It seems to provide prices that are essentially the same as the lowest price GoodRx reports on its website.”

Compared to GoodRx, TrumpRx covers a modest subset of drugs: 43 in all.

“Uninsured consumers, who do not use or know about GoodRx and need one of the specific drugs covered by the site, might benefit from TrumpRx. That seems like a very specific set of people,” Lakdawalla said.

Where do Democrats stand?

Democrats slammed the program this week, saying it would not provide substantial discounts for patients, and called for greater transparency around the administration’s dealings with drugmakers. To date, the administration has not disclosed the terms of the pricing agreements with manufacturers such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

In the lead-up to the TrumpRx launch, Democratic members of Congress questioned its usefulness and urged federal health regulators to delay its debut.

“This is just another Donald Trump pet project to rebrand something that already exists, take credit for it, and do nothing to actually lower healthcare prices,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Friday. “Democrats will continue fighting to lower healthcare costs and push Republicans to stop giving handouts to billionaires at the expense of working-class Americans.”

Three other Democratic senators — Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch — raised another concern in a Jan. 29 letter to Thomas March Bell, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The three senators pointed to potential conflicts of interest between TrumpRx and an online dispensing company, BlinkRx.

One of Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., joined the BlinkRx Board of Directors in February 2025.

Months before, he became a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that holds a significant stake in BlinkRx and led the startup’s $140-million funding round in 2024. After his appointment, BlinkRx launched a service to help pharmaceutical companies build direct-to-patient sales platforms quickly.

“The timing of the BlinkRx announcement so closely following the administration’s outreach to the largest drug companies, and the involvement of President Trump’s immediate family, raises questions about potential coordination, influence and self-dealing,” according to an October 2025 statement by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Both BlinkRx and Donald Trump Jr. have denied any coordination.

What’s next?

The rollout of TrumpRx fits into a suite of White House programs designed to address rising costs, an area of vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the November midterms.

The White House issued a statement Friday urging support for the president’s healthcare initiative, dubbed “the great healthcare plan,” which it said will further reduce drug prices and lower insurance premiums.

For the roughly 8% of Americans without health insurance, TrumpRx’s website promises that more high-cost, brand-name drugs will be discounted on the platform in the future.

“It’s possible the benefits will become broader in the future,” Lakdawalla said. “I would say that the jury remains out on its long-run structure and its long-run pricing effects.”