One of the Trump Administration’s most dramatic departures from preceding administrations is an open hostility to commonly agreed up facts and scientific findings, a stance culminating in new notions of “alternative facts.” While far from the first administration to lie–this is part of the office’s skillset—what’s new is the open attack on science itself, or more specifically on basing public policy on the findings of physics, biology, chemistry, and climate science. Trump is remarkably frank about what he doesn’t want to know; he intends to limit the impact of independent science on informing the policies of his administration.
The Trump Administration’s anti-science position is the foundation of their denials of human roles in climate change—with announcements of new limitations on the EPA and promises of ending NASA projects studying climate change. In his brief time in office, President Trump has issued new gag orders for governmental scientists, and proposals for new limits placed on the research these scientists can undertake and report. Scientists inside and outside of government have been vocal in their opposition to the Administration’s attacks on science, with news reports of scientists backing up massive data bases with information on environmental pollutants and climate data off-site, to protect it if from possible data purges.
All states seek to control not just the directions of scientific…