Post-Trump priorities (8): Government, democracy and science

The eighth of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is:

Restore the role of science in government decision-making.

This could actually be interpreted more broadly to mean government needs to take science and science education seriously.

As John Cook observes, “But the damage caused by misinformation goes beyond beliefs, affecting people’s behavior in ways that harm society.” And he gives this example: “For example, hearing a conspiracy theory about climate change makes people less likely to engage in politics.” (2)

It’s a sad fact that Robert Kennedy, Jr. is now head of the fe4deral Secretary of Health and Human Services and is basically a crackpot anti-vaxxer and more generally a promoter of pseudoscience. The podcaster Wajahat Ali has been saying that the Trump 2.0 Administration is doing “generational damage” to generational damage to scientific and medical research in particular. Presumably meaning it will take 20 years or more to fully repair the damage done, from promoting woo-woo notions on health and medicine, to restoring federal support for scientific research to restaffing agencies that are currently firing or driving out scientists from important functions to promoting evidence-based science education. Not to mention reversing the MAGA/Christian nationalist war on public schools.

The editors of Scientific American recently sounded the alarm about the damage being done to public edition in a piece that gives a good overview of how using evidence- and reality-based decision-making is critical not just to science education but to American education more generally.

Some of the biggest battles about the right to comprehensive knowledge have been waged in public schools. They include the fight over the ability to teach evolution at Rhea County High School in Tennessee, which was at the center of the Scopes Trial 100 years ago, and clashes over the inclusion of climate change science in textbooks that serve millions of public school students in Texas and elsewhere. School districts nationwide have removed school library books that contain information on changing bodies or that explore mental health, not to mention ones that discuss slavery, race and gender identity. Under the guise of protecting children from harm, censors instead seek to whitewash the inconvenient truths that make it harder for them to maintain their profiteering and social hegemony: Earth is warming, and humans are responsible; slavery did happen; neither race nor gender is hierarchical.

Among the most egregious examples of the drive to undermine public education are school voucher programs. These efforts funnel taxpayer dollars to private and parochial schools, frequently at the expense of the long-term funding of public education. Often sold as “school choice,” these legislative initiatives are championed as a way to help students escape poorly performing public schools or to give families of lesser means more options in education. But problems abound. (3)

The cover of the September 2025 Scientific American in which that article appears is this (4):

Gosh, the gigantic ice sheet of Greenland melting? It seems like that might be something scientists and government officials need to understand.

Or, they could just consult a Tarot card reader or ChatGPT to get a definitive explanation.

The cover article explains that the first “long ice cores” Greenland, a critical elemnt of assessing patterns over time in ice sheets, were extracted by SIPRI (Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment), part of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Government-sponsored based scientific research, in other words. (5)

Democracy cannot survive a situation where education and critical decision-making are based on superstition, crackpot science and medicine, and TechBro billionaires’ dystopian futurist fantasies. Economic progress and performance will also be severely damaged. And at the moment, the US is on a truly dystopian path.

Superficial “efficiency“ measures like magical AI of the type that Elon Musk and Big Balls and the rest of his incel crew of tech nerds were touting in the DOGE project only work if their design is appropriate to the task they are supposed to facilitation and if the human operators are informed enough about the subject to verify what the magic tech AI programs produce.

As Asmelash Teka Hadgu and Timnit Gebru explain:

There is no “one weird trick” that removes experts and creates miracle machines capable of doing everything humans can do but better. The prospect of replacing federal workers who handle critical tasks—ones that could result in life- and- death scenarios for hundreds of millions of people - with automated systems that can’t even perform basic speech- to- text transcription without making up large swaths of text is catastrophic. If these automated systems can’t even reliably parrot back the exact information that is given to them, then their outputs will be riddled with errors, leading to inappropriate or even dangerous actions. Automated systems cannot be trusted to make decisions the way federal workers - actual people - can. (6)

Dan Wilson notes that there is a challenge to explaining arcane scientific research problems that justify spending millions of public dollars on basic research about them: “convincing people that science funding is important means telling stories like this that can apply more to the average person.” (6) And it will fall primarily on Democratic politicians and pro-democracy, pro-science media to tell that story as long as the whole Republican Party remains in thrall to Christian nationalist ideologues who think this here “science” stuff is all the work of the Devil.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Editors (2025): Investing in Public Education Will Strengthen the U.S. Scientific American 08/08/2025. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/public-education-needs-our-support/> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).

(3) Cook, John (2025): The Cranky Uncle Game: A Way to Logic-Check Misinformation about Climate Change. Skeptical Inquirer Jan-Feb 2025, 13-19

(4) Delviscio, Jeffery (2025): Greenland’s Frozen Secret. Scientific American Sept 2025, 24-37.

(5) Teka Hadgu, Asmelash & Gebru, Timnit (2025); A Chatbot Dystopian Nightmare. Scientific American July-Aug 2025, 89-90.

(6) Wilson, Dan (2025): NIH Funding Cuts Hurt Basic Research and Patients. Skeptical Inquirer Jan-Feb 2025, 39-40.