“But truth’s a menace. Science is a public danger.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932). Huxley’s “World State” promotes stability and social harmony over scientific progress. According to the dystopian World State, science is a threat that challenges existing beliefs, which leads to “questioning the established order.”
2025 – America Decommissions Science
The decommissioning of government-funded science appears to be a directive calling for: “Decommission but leave just enough of a shell to make it appear to be operational.”
In reaction to deep budget cuts, America’s most respected science journal, Nature, reports, “Trump Proposes Unprecedented Budget Cuts to US Science,” May 2, 2025: “Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline.” Excusez-moi! What about Making America Great Again?
Or is America’s premier science journal “making stuff up about competitiveness?” Here’s where science becomes a nuisance by exposing haphazard wussy illogical policy decisions that serve to diminish the economy, unless, of course, Nature is erroneously making stuff up, but nobody can Make America Great Again by undercutting ‘competitiveness’. That’s backwards, not forwards.
Looking forward: “Federal funding for basic scientific research delivers demonstrable returns on investment. A recent economic impact study found that every dollar invested in federal biomedical research funding generated nearly $2.56 in economic impact, supporting more than 400,000 jobs and catalyzing nearly $95 billion in new economic activity nationwide in 2024. Economists have also found that government investments in scientific research and development have provided returns of 150% to 300% since World War II.” (The Science Coalition)
Science Budget Cuts Will Target US GDP, Down!
Over the past 50 years, science research and development (R&D) have contributed significantly to economic growth, with estimates ranging from one-quarter to one-half of the total growth (Source: Association of American Universities). Sorrowfully, the Trump administration budget cuts, as well as proposed additional cuts, to federally funded science research are certain to cut GDP growth, based upon 50 years of statistics.
Indeed, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists picked up on the damage caused by outrageous, unnecessary budget-cuts to science: “Decommissioned, Retired, Paused: The Weather, Climate, and Earth Science Data the Government Doesn’t Want You to See,” May 20, 2025: “On May 12, the Unidata program paused most of its operations due to a lapse in funding from the National Science Foundation… Shuyi Chen, a professor of atmospheric and climate science, told the Bulletin that virtually any university faculty member who teaches oceanography, atmospheric science, or climate science uses Unidata for research and educational purposes. But it’s not just researchers, in the United States and abroad, who depend on Unidata. These are also tools used for weather forecasting and preparing for extreme events, like floods, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires. She also has had students go on to work in the insurance industry, many of whom use Unidata for risk analysis.”
But Unidata is only one of many data sources vastly cut by the new administration. NOAA recently announced that it is retiring the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which has tracked the damage from floods, hurricanes, and other large disasters since 1980. Twenty-two other NOAA data products have likewise been retired or decommissioned over the past month.
The DEI Sham
The Trump administration has made radical reductions in staffing and funding in U.S. science-related agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the nation’s crown jewel of healthcare research) and the Food and Drug Administration. The elimination of key NIH programs based on concerns about DEI will severely damage effective solutions for health research. It is bone-headed.
“Over the past two decades, the NIH has, as the Trump administration decries, prioritized expanding the scope of populations considered in the research it funds. It did so for very good, evidence-based reasons.” (“The Trump Administration’s NIH and FDA Cuts Will Negatively Impact Patients,” Brookings, May 14, 2025).
The key to effective healthcare research has universally moved away from discoveries and treatments based upon restricted, homogeneous sample populations that disregard diversity of populations; rather, recognizing DEI for its value proposition as previous discoveries/treatments based upon narrowly defined homogeneous samples once introduced to the real world proved to be inadequate, hence the term “efficiency effectiveness gap.” DEI makes research much more effectively broad reaching and profitable.
“DEI is not some free-floating ideology that considers a range of backgrounds, treatment differentials, and geographical gaps as ends in themselves. In practice, the NIH infrastructure shifted toward a prioritization of conditions and approaches that evidence indicated were more likely to close the gap between technological development and effectiveness in practice,” Ibid.
America’s Crippled Interior DoD
Cuts to agencies within the United States Department of Health and Human Services such as FDA, CDC, and NIH are cuts to the “interior department of defense” much as the Pentagon is the Department of Defense against foreign attack. Yet, the Pentagon budget at $850 billion hasn’t seen a foreign invasion since Pearl Harbor (1941). Meanwhile. the department of interior defense, where budgets are being heavily slashed at FDA, CDC, NIH met the challenge of 103,000,000 Americans hit by Covid-19 with 1,200,000 deaths five years ago by performing a “medical miracle,” orchestrating/funding a vaccine within one year to save millions of lives. Previously, the record time to bring a vaccine to market was four years for the mumps outbreak in the 1960s
Indeed, interior department of defense agencies should be on the same budgetary footing as the Department of Defense for the Pentagon. Yet the budget for the nation’s interior department of defense, NIH, FDA, CDC is unbelievably slashed. For example, the largest most important of the three agencies for internal defense, NIH’s budget for 2025 was/is $48.5billion but Trump proposes cutting to $27 billion for 2026. This is the “crown jewel” of biomedical research in America. Former NIH employees, anonymously, claim the next pandemic or epidemic will be the disaster of all disasters. Meanwhile, the Pentagon ($850 billion), twiddling its thumbs, patiently waits, and waits, and waits for the next “Pearl Harbor.”
Repeating the obvious: That’s $850 billion to prevent the next Pearl Harbor versus $48 billion (soon dropping to $27 billion) for NIH interior defense against diseases.
Already, the NIH has $2.4 Billion in canceled and frozen grants and contracts, fired 1,200 employees, plus induced retirement and resignations from a yet unspecified number. The Trump administration’s 2026 Budget proposes a 37% further cut to the agency. Meanwhile, over 3,500 jobs at the FDA have been eliminated, and the administration has hinted at further restructuring of the agency. The former head of the FDA claims the FDA ‘as we know it’ is gone for good.
Eureka! Ninety-three years since Huxley’s epigram, “Truth is a menace. Science is a public danger” resurfaces in full living color in the year 2025, as America’s interior department of defense for healthcare is ironically crippled, and the country reverts to principles espoused in literature on the heels of the Roaring Twenties (1920-29) at the doorstep of the Great Depression (1929-39) in a time of indecisive decisions, once again, history repeating itself. How’d that work out?
The post Science Decommissioned! first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.