Yesterday afternoon, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to direct the National Foundation of Sciences five years ago, he resigned. He did not say why, but he was clear enough: last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 Active Research Awards for the NSF, and is pressing Congress in half of the $ 9 billion budget agencies.
The Trump administration has attacked the American scientific company, an engine of research and innovation that has noise for decades. It has reduced or frozen budgets in the National Institutes of Health, the National Foundation of Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. He has shot or disbursed thousands or researchers.
Chaos is confusing: isn’t science for a force for good? Haven’t you contained disease? Did you earn us in the competition with China? Don’t you attract the son of immigrants that the president says he hears wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we broke our macroscope to make sense of agitation.
An investment
American Research Prospera under a sponsorship system that Funnels approved Congress dollars to universities, laboratories and national institutes. This knowledge factory uses tens of thousands of researchers, extracts talent from all over the world and generates scientific advances and Nobel awards.
It is a slow motion system, because science moves slowly. Discoveries are often indirect and iterative, which implies collaboration between researchers who need subsidized education to become experts. New companies and corporations, which need rapid yields of their investment, cannot generally expect so much or risk so much money.
Science is capital. According to some measures, every dollar spent research returns at least $ 5 to the economy.
President Trump is less patient. He has disheveled university studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physical. (Two prominent researchers are compiling lists of nih losses and NSF awards). The administration has also fired thousands of federal scientists, including meteorologists of the National Meteorological Service; Pandemic preparation experts in CDC; Black lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety. A next -generation space observatory, already built with $ 3.5 billion for a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.
Alienating scientists
Administration officials offer several reasons for repression: cost reduction, government efficiency, “defending women from the extremism of gender ideology.” Many subsidies were eliminated because they contain words, which include climate, diversity, disability, trans or women. Some launched the anger of the administration because the requests included DEI statements requested by the previous administration.
A telescope is not needed to see where this leads. American leaders have historically seen science as an investment in the future. Will this administration exclude it? A third of the winners of the Nobel Prize in the United States has been born abroad, but an immigration repression has swept scientists such as Kseniia Petrova, a Russian who studied aging in Harvard and is now in a Louisiana detention center. Australian academics have stopped attending conferences in the United States for fear of being arrested, the Guardian said.
Now some American scientists are looking for the exits. France, Canada and other countries are courting our researchers. In a recently survey of Nature magazine, more than 1,200 American scientists said they were consulting working abroad. The Employment Search Platform of the Magazine VIO 32 percent more applications for abroad positions between January and March 2025 than the duration of the same period of the previous year.
Redefine ‘science’
These are mechanical threats for science, who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential concern. The Trump administration is trying to change what account As science.
An effort points to what science should show, and by achieving acumable results for administration. The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to investigate research on a bond of bottles between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine. The National Science Foundation says that it will no longer finance “research with the aim of combating” erroneous information “,” misinformation “and” evil formation “that could be used to violate the rights of constitutionally protected speech of US citizens.” An official of the Department of Justice accused outstanding medical magazines of political prejudice for not issuing “competitors views.”
Another gambit is to suppress or avoid political results outside the engines, even if the message is not yet clear. The Government has eliminated public data sets on air quality, the intensity of the earthquake and geology of the seabed. Why reduce the budget by erasing the records? Perhaps the data would point to efforts (pollution reduction? Marine bed mining limits?) That officials could one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But the action is exhaustive, at a time when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Maybe it’s better not to know.
A safe way to close knowledge is to question who can gather it. The administration is painting scientists with the same liberal brush that has applied to academics in a broader way: what the 2025 project describes as “the ‘highly educated and highly educated management elite.” The NIH is controlled by “a small group of highly paid and inexplicable experts,” write the 2025 authors project. The regulatory work of the Environmental Protection Agency “must adopt the so -called citizen science” and stay “for the public to identify scientific failures and bad research behavior.”
In science, as in a democracy, there is a lot of space for skepticism and debate. That is what makes it work. But at some point, calls to “additional research” become poor efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It is an old play book, operated in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recent by fossil fuel companies.
He is now being armed by the Government against science in general. The facts are elite, the facts are fungible, the facts are false. And once nothing is true, anything can be true.
For more
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Trump ordered the government agencies to prepare to extract the background of the ocean. Almost all other countries oppose such industrial activity in international waters.
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Next, Alan Blinder, who covers education, describes scientific research at play in Trump’s struggle with Harvard. Click the video to see.
The latest news
Pete Hegseeth
The personal telephone number of the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseeth, the one used in a recent signal chat, was easily accessible on the Internet and public applications as recently as March. This could have exhibited national security secrets to foreign adversaries, analysts say. Read more here.
In our news meeting yesterday, the Times business editor alluded to a smell of molasses emanating from his corner of the office. Because? Julie Creswell, who reports on the food industry, was writing a story about food dyes, and business staff had opened Froot boxes in Canada and the United States.
The bowl of the left contains the cereals that the Canadians eat. Its colors come from blueberry juices, watermelon and other fruits. The one on the right, for the Americans, is colored with synthetic dyes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ban.
“Everyone was surprised by colored differentiation,” Julie said. Natural dyes are silenced. “They are light beige variations, and the blues have been completely.”
The most boring tones deceived our staff, including one that said: “Your mind believes that it won that it is so strong, it could be a bit obsolete.” But business reporters proved the samples and agreed that the flavors were indistinguishable.
Read Julie’s story about how difficult it is for food companies to change dyes. – Adam B. Kushner
Opinions
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments about autistic children who do not become independent are painful Emily May. A severe form of autism refuge the life of his daughter.
Here is a column of David Brooks On Trump’s true strength.
Morning readings
Multitask: How can bats drink water while flying?
Ask the therapist: The “hate my parents” policy. Should I keep my son away? “
Most click yesterday: How to reduce your risk of stroke, dementia and depression.
Trends online yesterday: Alijah Arenas, a Basketball recruit of the USC and the son of the NBA star Gilbert Arenas, is in a coma after a car accident.
LIVED LIVES: Gretchen Dow Simpson was an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose images of bad mood and highly geometric coastal cabins, snow -covered farms and other totems of New England’s life made comparisons with Edward Hopper’s works. They also adorned the covers of 58 numbers of The New Yorker. She died at age 85.
Sports
NFL draft: Tennessee’s Titans selected Cam Ward with Selection No. 1. Travis Hunter, a Heisman winner, will go to Jacksonville.
NBA: The best sown Thunder completed the greatest part-time return in the history of the playoffs to take a 3-0 advantage against the Grizzlies. The Knicks and Clippers also won their games.
Theo von is a comedian and presenter of “This past weekend”, a video podcast that routinely obtains millions of views and listening. It is one of the most watched programs in the country. But what are your policies? He keeps him more ambiguous than his “companions of how much.” That may be the reason he is so successful, writes our critic Jon Caramanica. Read more about him.
More about culture
Ask the morning
After Pope Francis died on Monday, we invited the morning readers to send questions about our coverage and what happens later. Jody Mokeer, who lives in Alpine, Utah, wrote about this image, which said “moved me with its beauty and symbolic frame.” How, asked, Gianni Cipriano “obtained permission to photograph from such location?”
Gianni, who lives in Naples, has been an independent photographer for the Times since 2008. Hello, he went up to the terrace of the Charlemagne wing for despair, only after the security forces told him that he could not work near the front of the Plaza de San Pedro. “I thought, where the hell is I supposed to go?” He knew about the terrace of previous work in the Vatican, including the 2013 conclave that selected Francis, so the dark and narrow snail ladder rose. (Watch your video on Instagram).
It was around 7:30 pm, the rosary prayer began, and the sun began to wear. At first, Gianni was disappointed that the square was not full. “But the light was magical,” he said. He framed the image so that of the 140 statues that are aligned in the square: we are 99 percent sure that Saint Andrew Corsini, who died in 1374 and was canonized in 1629, but send us an email if he knows differently.
“I felt a metaphor of what had happened that day,” he said about the image. It is a gift “that feeling of sobriety and sadness,” he said, “and I think he transmitted a moment of silence and memory.”
Gianni is one of the three photographers that cover the Pope’s funeral for the Times. We will have a live dispatch of the Vatican in the morning edition of the morning. – Jodi Rudoren
