Know-Nothing Science Budget
By Alan Burdick
March 2, 2018
... Well before he became President, he tweeted that light bulbs can cause cancer, that wind farms are unhealthy, that fracking “poses ZERO health risks,” and that Ebola “is much easier to transmit” than the government lets on ... He avoids exercise, proudly fears germs, and, in Mike Pence, has chosen a Vice-President who, when pointedly asked, won’t say whether he believes in evolution. The day after Trump won the 2016 election, the editors of the journal Nature wrote that .. he "should leave behind his damaging and unpopular attitudes and embrace reality, rationality and evidence" ...
Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and the phrases “climate change” and “evidence-based” have been scrubbed from federal Web sites ... Two national monuments have been shrunk to make way for mining; the Affordable Care Act is being dismantled, with nothing to replace it; the Environmental Protection Agency has banned E.P.A.-funded scientists, but not industry representatives, from serving on its advisory boards; and the Centers for Disease Control, facing steep budget cuts, will soon all but shut down a vital program that helps more than three dozen developing countries detect and control the spread of infectious diseases ...
Trump’s newly proposed federal budget for 2019 continues the assault on knowledge and reason. Funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the E.P.A. would each be cut by eighteen per cent or more, compared with the final 2017 budget, which was drafted by the Obama Administration and amended by Trump. The Institutes of Health would see its funding remain flat while it absorbed the work of three agencies from the Department of Health and Human Services. The National Institute of Mental Health would see its budget slashed by thirty per cent, despite Trump’s recent avowals that better mental-health treatment is the solution to gun violence. nasa’s budget would stay roughly the same, but a number of important Earth-science missions would be eliminated, and Trump would attempt to defund and privatize the International Space Station by 2025 ...
... Twelve months into his first term, key posts at numerous federal agencies remain unfilled, including the administrator positions for nasa and noaa. The Department of the Interior lacks eleven of its seventeen senior officials, and Trump has yet to propose nominees for six of them, including the directors of the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Needless to say, it’s easier to ransack a store when no one is officially minding it ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trumps-know-nothing-science-budget
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