Who needs science anyway?

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

One thing about Trump, the guy is consistent. He wants to destroy everything. Even with all the campaigning he has to do and insults he has to fling, he still finds time to pour scalding water on US scientific institutions. Who needs science, amirite! Guesswork is better.

The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.

The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.

The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be screened for their loyalty to his goals. The report, issued by the Pentagon, pointed to “potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense.”

Nah, just round up some good loyal Republicans and give them their instructions. Problem solved!

The turmoil inside scientific research has extended beyond the Pentagon. The Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff. The National Science Foundation, for decades a primary backer of long-term, foundational research, has withheld more than $1 billion in funding. And at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of medical research, officials delayed or canceled more than 2,000 grants to biomedical researchers focused on topics such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.

Fraud waste and abuse. All these pesky scientists are just lining their pockets on the taxpayer’s dime.

The damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.

One is the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still reverberating across the bureaucracy.

Of course it’s wasteful. It’s the government. Only entrepreneurial guys like Trump know how to do everything the right way and for pennies.

Comments

One response to “Who needs science anyway?”

  1. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    One thing I learned while doing evaluations of private contracts with government…and working for years in both private and public jobs…the government is orders of magnitude more efficient than private. They also cost less, because there is no need for profit (not to mention, tax free supplies and…well, this isn’t so good…the employees aren’t paid as much). There have been studies that suggested government was the best entity for providing charity, because they have the infrastructure and the ability to reach a wide swath of the populace than any private charity (and you don’t have to pray before you get your bowl of soup…or, you didn’t have to until

    this administration, right?)

    The information that the government is efficient and cost-effective is difficult to get through to some people…most people. They have heard otherwise for so long, and they hear nothing in the news to tell them “today the government did most of their tasks cheaply and correctly”. They hear about $900 hammers and Hurricane Katrina and a million errors in the SS database (by the way, a million errors in Social Security? This amounts to an accuracy rate so high it is almost astronomical. When you consider the size of the database, and the number of entries made every day, there is no private business in the world, I bet, that has such a high accuracy rate. I tried to explain this to Benjamin Radford once, but of course, he knows better than I).

    I was saying to my husband the other night that one of the biggest reasons we have so many problems in our political and social systems is that so few people understand statistics even at the most basic level. I stand by that statement.

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