The all-purpose adage offering optimism — and sometimes pessimism — to those confronting a crisis head-on is: “This too shall pass.”
One gets the impression that this is a crutch favored by some major institutions that have capitulated to Donald Trump’s demands — such as universities that have committed to fines and payouts stretching out several years, beyond the end of Trump’s current (and final) term and law firms that have made nebulous commitments to represent Trump’s favored litigants in cases that may not even be brought until after the 2028 elections.
Some institutions and services that have suffered major cuts in government funding may be tempted to hunker down, covering what they think may be a temporary shortfall in the expectation that a subsequent administration will restore the withheld funding and cover their interim losses. Recovery, however, may be tougher than they think.
The best-case scenario is that we limp along for the next three and a half years…But that’s just a hope.
— Jonathan Howard, New York University
I reached out to some of my most trusted contacts in science, medicine, labor and other fields, hoping to hear encouragement that the current situation will be fleeting and it isn’t too soon to look ahead; Trump’s presidential term, after all, is finite.
I ended up with a string of the gloomiest conversations in my long career — and I’ve covered two foreign civil wars and more stock market crashes and economic slumps than I can count. (Well, let’s say more than a dozen.)
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“We’re still in free fall and people are still in a ‘shock and awe’ phase,” says vaccinologist Peter Hotez, who has written to defend sound science throughout Trump’s terms. “What’s happening right now is continuing to evolve, and we don’t really know where it’s going. It’s important not to take the attitude of ‘this too will pass,’ hunker down for a couple of years and then it will go back to the way it was.”
The administration’s cuts in biomedical research funding, the “continuing ascendance of the MAHA movement” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disdain for accepted science in favor of pseudoscience — betokens a dark period ahead, Hotez told me. “Even if these things stop tomorrow, you’ve got a pretty demoralized physician and scientific workforce. What this administration has done has given being a scientist an unsavory element — it’s no longer a noble profession.”
Of particular concern is the administration’s injection of partisan ideologies into the scientific grant-making process, shattering applicants’ confidence that their submissions are considered fairly. The scoring of grant applications by professional panels used to be the key element in the process.
“Now, even if you get a fundable score,” Hotez says, “there’s still somebody behind the curtain who still could nix it for ideological reasons. And even if your first year is funded there’s no guarantee for out years.”
The uncertainty that injects could hamstring scientific research for a generation, or longer.
“How easy is it to rebuild a lab that’s been hit by cuts?” says John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, where labs have been hobbled by the administration’s toying with grants. “The answer is it’s very difficult, once you lose key members of a research group, who are often the senior technicians who have institutional memory and keep a program going day to day. At a certain point, a freeze or a termination is not reversible.”
Moore also points to the consequences of a loss of foreign-born scientists. “America is now not a welcoming country for immigrants, period. Scientists who are here on short-term visas are realizing that their future is not in this country. Other countries are seeking to suck up talent that otherwise would have come here. That’s going to have an impact over time, and it’s not going to be easy to reverse.”
In my conversations with scientists, one name kept coming up: Trofim Lysenko, the charlatan whose reign over Soviet science during Stalin’s regime from the 1930s to the 1960s and whose promotion of an anti-science ideology, especially a campaign against genetics research, encompassed repeated crop failures and famines costing some 7 million lives. I made the connection between Lysenkoism and Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services in November.
“The Soviet Union did everything they could to invest back in science and genetics and molecular biology, but it was still stagnant,” says Angela Rasmussen, a leading American virologist now working in Canada. “But despite the attempts to rebuild what Lysenko had torn down, they were never able to compete with people everywhere else because they had lost so much by shutting down all genetics research during that time.”
Three factors could be lasting obstacles: Trump’s undermining of federal employment, of the law and of the economy.
Trump has systematically demoralized the workforce responsible for enforcing the regulations that remain. That’s the observation of David Weil, a labor expert at Brandeis University whose nomination by President Biden for a top-level post at the Department of Labor was sidelined by conservative opposition in 2022.
The law has been a thin reed to lean on, Weil observes. A key example is the attack by Elon Musk’s SpaceX on the National Labor Relations Board, which garnered an opinion from the notoriously right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last month finding that the NLRB’s structure “violates the separation of powers” established by the Constitution. That’s a remarkable finding, given that the NLRB was established 90 years ago, in 1935.
“If the Supreme Court upholds the 5th Circuit, “ Weil told me, “that’s the end of the NLRA,” the act that established the board, “and we go back to a system where there’s no federal statutory method for protecting private sector workers.”
What Weil finds especially disquieting is the Supreme Court’s practice of allowing Trump to continue challenged policies while the underlying issues are litigated. “Instead of letting the status quo to prevail until we adjudicate the issues, they’re letting Trump prevail until they adjudicate. That, to me, is a formula for destruction. How do you rebuild then?”
The court has done this by lifting the stays on Trump policies imposed by lower courts, pending further rulings. That’s what happened as recently as Monday, when the court overturned a Los Angeles federal judge’s order that had barred “roving patrols” of immigration officers from snatching people off Southern California streets based on how they look, what language they speak, what work they do or where they happen to be.
One issue casting a shadow over all others is the future course of Trump’s economy. At this moment, the warning signs are all flashing red. Inflation is on the rise — core inflation as measured by the personal consumption index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred metric, rose in July to an annualized rate of 2.9%, the highest rate since February; economists expect the rate to keep rising as businesses pass through more of their tariff-related costs to consumers.
Meanwhile, new hiring has ground to a screeching halt, according to the latest government statistics. The unemployment rate notched up to 4.3% in July, not the direction Trump would like to see. The rate hasn’t been this high since the pandemic year of 2021.
Trump also has remade the government’s relationship with industry, extracting a fee from the AI chipmaker Nvidia of 15% of its revenue from selling chips to China and taking a 9.9% equity stake in the faltering chipmaker Intel. That’s not the first time the government has owned a piece of a public company — it owned most of GM during the Great Recession, but later sold its stake; Trump is talking about making a habit of these buy-ins through a sovereign wealth fund, an idea that’s far from universally favored by political leaders and economists.
Trump’s rampage through government agencies, especially those devoted to science, health and the economy, has left some so severely damaged that fixing what’s broken might require the establishment of a Cabinet-level post to oversee the repair job.
Consider the state of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where five top officials resigned or were forced out late last month — including CDC Director Susan Monarez, who was fired after less than a month on the job after tangling with Health and Human Affairs Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Anyone tasked by a future administration with rebuilding the CDC, which once set the global gold standard for public health, will have to be told: “You know you’ll be starting from scratch, right?”
It’s only fair to say that the GOP hasn’t had a monopoly on philistine attacks on scientific research. The pioneer of such cocksure philistinism was Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), who started issuing his “Golden Fleece” awards in 1975. Proxmire became addicted to the fawning press attention he got from caricaturing serious scientific research as ludicrous. His know-nothing rabble-rousing appalled progressives who otherwise admired him for his principled stands against the Vietnam War and in favor of campaign finance reform.
But its more lasting and destructive effect was to render political attacks on scientific research acceptable. Proxmire’s goal was personal aggrandizement. The goal of the current attackers is more sinister — they’re engaged in an anti-science campaign for strictly ideological purposes.
“The best-case scenario is that we limp along for the next three and a half years,” says Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at New York University and a practiced debunker of the pseudoscience that contaminated efforts to fight the pandemic. “Good people stay on and do good work the best they can and we get a reprieve in three and a half years and the amount of damage they’re able to do is limited in that time. But that’s just a hope.”