Donald Trumps Know-Nothing Science Budget

[riversedge]

Donald Trump’s Know-Nothing Science Budget

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trumps-know-nothing-science-budget

By Alan Burdick

March 4, 2018

Science thrives on curiosity, investigation, and flexibility of thought. The President thrives on the opposite.
Photograph by Jorge Silva / AFP / Getty

Donald Trump’s disregard for science has never been much of a secret. 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. As a candidate, he regularly called global warming a hoax, repeated the false notion that vaccines can cause autism, and stated confidently that spraying hair spray in one’s apartment does not harm the ozone layer (it does, a little). 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, as incoming President, he “should leave behind his damaging and unpopular attitudes and embrace reality, rationality and evidence.”

It’s been downhill ever since. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and the phrases “climate change” and “evidence-based” have been scrubbed from federal Web sites—in the very same year that three once-in-a-century hurricanes and two major drought-fuelled wildfires ravaged parts of the nation. (Last weekend, the temperature in the Arctic soared above forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and today’s forecast calls for historic flooding in Boston.) 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.

In many cases, the logic of the cuts is baldly mercenary—no surprise, perhaps, given the prevalence of former energy executives in the Trump Administration. The few increases to the budgets of the Energy and Interior Departments are designed to fund fossil-fuel research, offshore drilling, and surface mining. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management and the Oil Spill Research Program would be cut by at least fifteen per cent; Interior’s Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses earnings from offshore oil and gas drilling to protect and restore federal public lands, would be cut by two-thirds; and research on clean energy would be cut by more than seventy per cent. Already in 2018, the E.P.A., under Scott Pruitt, has suspended Obama-era changes to the Waters of the U.S. Rule, which would have limited pollution in more than half the nation’s waters and pursued a repeal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Other cuts would simply obfuscate. ......................................

But Trump has already damaged the scientific cause by simply doing nothing.[/b.........................