New Trump administration rules would undermine longstanding research practices. It’s death by a thousand cuts

A politician who aims to gradually privatize and ultimately destroy an institution funded by tax dollars – say, a public school system or public transportation network – may choose to do so by strategically disinvesting resources from that institution until it becomes barely functional, leading users to look elsewhere to meet their needs. Eventually, the user-base of the public system gets so low or frustrated that it seems reasonable to scrap the thing entirely, or re-direct public funds to private companies as contractors to provide the needed “service”. We’ve seen this strategy play out many times in states and city councils across America.

It appears that the endgame of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and the research funding ecosystem is similar: grant freezes and administrative disarray at federal funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), new layers of project review by political appointees hunting for forbidden keywords such as “disparity” and “marginalized”, and proposed new restrictions to make international collaboration difficult or impossible all point towards a world where it’s just too onerous to do federally-funded scientific research. Is the goal to make scientists simply give up on the endeavor?

Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University

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