The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Perhaps the most prominent targets of the attack on knowledge have been America’s institutions of higher education. Elite colleges and universities have lost billions of dollars in federal funding. Cornell has had more than $1 billion frozen, Princeton had $210 million suspended, and Northwestern lost access to nearly $800 million. In some cases, the freezes weren’t connected to specific demands; the funding was simply revoked outright. Johns Hopkins University is reeling from losing $800 million in grants, which will force the top recipient of federal research dollars to “plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
In some cases, the administration has made specific demands that institutions adhere to Trumpist ideology in what they teach and whom they hire, or face a loss of funding. Some schools are fighting back—Harvard, for example, is suing to retain its independence. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president said in a statement.
The Trump administration’s purge of forbidden texts and ideas at West Point offers a glimpse of what its ideal university might look like. At the military academy, The New York Times reported, leadership “initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
Some institutions have tried to appease the administration. Columbia University, which agreed to Trump’s orders in an effort to retain $400 million in federal funding, discovered the hard way that deals with the president aren’t worth the sweat from the handshake. After Columbia acceded to Trump’s demands, the administration reportedly began considering new ones, including potentially requiring the school to submit to a judicially enforced consent decree that would prolong the government’s control over the institution.
The money these institutions have lost (or could still lose) is not merely symbolic. Federal grants fund research, scholarship, and archival work on college campuses. Without this money—unless schools raise the funds from other sources—labs and departments will close. The right-wing activist Chris Rufo recently told The New York Times that in addition to using funding to force universities to teach or adhere to conservative dogma, he would like to “reduce the size of the sector itself.” Students will have fewer opportunities. Research in many fields will be put on indefinite pause. America will make fewer scientific breakthroughs.
The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is not limited to academia, however. Across the government, workers whose job is to research, investigate, or analyze have lost funding or been fired.
These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.
The most devastating cuts may be those to the government’s scientific-research agencies, such as the NIH and NSF. According to CBS News, since January, more than $2 billion has been cut from NIH and 1,300 employees have been fired. One former NIH employee told CBS that “work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.” The administration is also trying to halt financial support for projects that commit wrongthink, and has already drastically reduced the number of NSF grants.
The scientific journal Nature reported that Trump intends to cut both staff and funding for the NSF by 50 percent or more, especially those grants that fund studies of marginalized groups, dismissing such awards as “DEI.” Hundreds of grants have already been canceled. NASA, the CDC, the EPA, and the Department of Energy would all lose significant funds as well. Staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been fired, hampering states’ ability to prepare for national disasters and endangering the basic weather reports used by everyone.
Also gone are years’ worth of public-health data, which, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has reported, have been removed as part of the “ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility.” This includes both previously published research and works in progress. According to Nature, “NIH staff members have been instructed to identify and potentially cancel grants for projects studying transgender populations, gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific workforce,” or “environmental justice.” At the Department of Health and Human Services, the Associated Press reported, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to have eliminated more than a dozen “data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease,” which, perhaps not coincidentally, will make evaluating his destructive tenure more difficult.
“Not being able to study a problem doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist,” one public-health professional (who requested anonymity because they did not want their organization to become a target) told me. “It only means that we don’t know if it exists or not, because we don’t have the relevant data.”
Trump has sought to justify these cuts by exploiting Americans’ bigotry or ignorance—for example, during his address to Congress in March, the president complained about government funds for research on “making mice transgender.” It’s unclear whether Trump was referring to “transgenic mice,” whose DNA is altered for scientific-research purposes and which are common especially in medical research, or to mice treated with sex hormones for the purpose of studying their effects on certain diseases or treatments. But the clear purpose of such misleading descriptions is to hide the gravity of what is being stolen from the American people by pretending that it has no value.
The first-order effects of the attack on knowledge will be the diminution of American science and, with it, a decline in the sorts of technological achievements that have improved lives over the past century. Modern agriculture and medicine were built on the foundation of federally funded research. Many of the most prominent advances in information technology were also made with government support, including the internet, GPS, and touch screens.
For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble—for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines—the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless. To the extent that private-sector research can even begin to fill the gap, such research is beholden to corporations’ bottom line. Exxon Mobil knew climate change was real decades ago, and nevertheless used its influence to raise doubt about findings it knew were accurate.
But a massive technological stall is only the most apparent aspect of the coming damage. The attack on knowledge also threatens the country’s ability to address subtler social problems, such as racial and economic inequalities in health, opportunity, and civil rights. Research into these disparities is being cut across government and civil society in the name of defeating so-called wokeness. Invoked as a general criticism of left-wing excess, the fight against “wokeness” is destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, for fear the results might make the case for racial or gender equality, the redistribution of wealth, or the regulation of industry. The very slipperiness of the term makes it useful in dismissing work that would yield significant public benefits as inconsequential.
But it’s hard to address problems that have a disparate impact without paying attention to disparities. “I’m talking about narrowing the maternal mortality gap. I’m talking about basic research on long COVID,” Phillip Atiba Solomon, a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale, told me. In his view, this stems from the administration’s ideological discomfort with the facts of this world, and the conclusions scholars draw from them. “It turns out that when you pay close attention to these issues, you don’t end up where they end up,” he added. “So they’ve had to manufacture their own facts, and they’re attacking the places that have the facts on the ground and the reality of history.”
The Trumpist campaign against American history in schools and museums reflects the same impulse. The administration issued an executive order to coerce K–12 public schools into teaching a distorted, one-sided view of American history that excludes or whitewashes its darker episodes. During her confirmation hearing, Education Secretary Linda McMahon declined to say whether teaching a Black-history class would be legal under the order. Another executive order attacked the “distorted narrative” of American history at the Smithsonian Institution, citing an exhibition that mentioned that “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement,” an objective description of centuries of chattel slavery followed by Jim Crow.
The Trump administration is also trying to slash grants made by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supports research, libraries, and museums across the country. Libraries are losing grants from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services as well. In early May, Trump fired Carla Hayden, the first Black woman to run the Library of Congress, part of a pattern of purging women and Black people from leadership positions. Given that the Library of Congress is responsible for providing research to lawmakers, the move was even more sinister than it might seem—the Trump administration is trying to control the flow of information not only to the public, but to the government itself.
A Black-history museum in Boston—located in a meetinghouse where the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison once lectured—is in danger now that its federal grant was terminated on the grounds that it “no longer align[s] with the White House policies.” Trump has also threatened the Smithsonian over descriptions of exhibitions that contradict right-wing dogma, including one at the American Art Museum that stated, “Race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” That race is a malleable social construct and not a biological reality is a matter of genetic science, but one that contradicts the Trump administration’s implicit belief that social inequalities stem from the inherent capabilities of different groups rather than discrimination or public policy.
Further destruction is still coming. Of particular concern is the risk that the administration will manipulate economic data to hide the disastrous effects of Trump’s policies. The administration has floated separating government spending from GDP estimates, an attempt to conceal the negative economic impact of the needless and unlawful layoffs being carried out by Elon Musk under the auspices of DOGE. During Democratic administrations, Trump has—completely without evidence—accused federal agencies of faking economic data. If the usual pattern of Trump doing things he accuses others of doing holds, Trump himself may try to fake economic data for real. As The New York Times reported, remarks by Trump officials have “renewed concerns that the new administration could seek to interfere with federal statistics—especially if they start to show that the economy is slipping into a recession.”
Objective economic data have become even more important given Trump’s ruinous attempt to replace the income tax—a windfall for the rich—with tariffs. Trump reversed course on some of his recent tariffs last month once bond yields began to rise steeply, an indication of impending catastrophe. Avoiding such a catastrophe requires unimpeachable data, but should one occur, the Trump administration may decide that political survival requires lying. Such lies are more effective without the data to contest them.
The reasons for this wholesale destruction are as ideological as they are short-sighted. Conservatives have made no secret of their hostility toward higher education and academia. In 2021, as my colleague Yair Rosenberg recently noted, then-Senator J. D. Vance gave an address in which he quoted Richard Nixon saying, “The professors are the enemy,” and laid out his belief that colleges and universities “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”
Vance’s premise is falsified by the simple existence of the second Trump administration. But it also reveals the administration’s apparent objective, which is to destroy the ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism. Although Vance couched his objections in terms of universities teaching dogma instead of “truth,” the administration’s recent actions suggest it believes that the only truth is Trumpist dogma. “The voting patterns of most university professors,” Vance posted on X over Memorial Day weekend, “are so one-sided that they look like election results in North Korea.” A MAGA re-education to impart the correct political beliefs is demanded.
Workers must be disciplined, the media must be silenced, schools must be brought under political control, and research institutions must not broach forbidden topics. Information that might contain the seed of political opposition—that might interfere with conservative ideas carrying the day—must be suppressed.
Last month, the administration cut a climate-change research grant awarded to Princeton for fear it would give children “climate anxiety.” In a statement calling for the defunding of NPR and PBS, the White House complained about a story correctly describing banana slugs as hermaphrodites, describing it as “woke propaganda.” When American intelligence analysts conveyed their view that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was not a state actor and was not “invading” the United States, some were fired while others were told to “rethink” the analysis—to cook the books for the administration in order to justify its lawless deportation program. As the journalist Spencer Ackerman notes, this is exactly the kind of thing that led America into the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The attack on knowledge is disproportionately an attack on knowledge workers, the part of the white-collar workforce employed in some kind of research, archival, or instructional work. Less funding for scholarly and scientific institutions will mean fewer researchers, analysts, scholars, and scientists. It will mean fewer institutions capable of employing white-collar workers. Fewer people will go to college, and there will be fewer opportunities after graduation for those who do.
Additionally, the Trump administration wants to see fewer underrepresented minorities in these professions—some of its largest cuts have been not only to research focusing on minority groups, but to programs designed to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and math professions. The Trump administration wants fewer highly educated workers, and it wants them as a group to be whiter and from wealthier families.
Trump and his allies see highly educated people, in the aggregate, as a kind of class enemy of the MAGA project. Highly educated voters have trended leftward in recent elections, a phenomenon that has not-so-coincidentally appeared alongside the conservative movement’s growing conviction that higher education must be brought under right-wing political control. In short, destroying American universities will also limit the growth of a Democratic-trending constituency—fewer educated voters will translate to fewer Democrats in office. The tech barons supporting Trump have companies that rely on educated workers, but they want submissive toilers, not active citizens who might conceive of their interests as being different from those of their bosses.
A formal education does not immunize anyone against adopting false beliefs, but two things are true: Many of Trump’s supporters have come to see knowledge-producing institutions and the people who work for them as sources of liberal indoctrination that must be brought to heel or destroyed, and they do not want Americans trusting any sources of authority that are not Trump-aligned. This is of a piece with Trump’s longtime strategy regarding the media, which, as he told CBS News in 2018, is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
In the same 2021 speech, Vance declared, “We have got to get out of the mindset that the only way to live a good life in this country, the only way for our children to succeed, is to go to a four-year university, where people will learn to hate their country and acquire a lot of debt in the process.” This point, on its own, is correct. Having a college degree should not be necessary for fulfilling and gainful employment. But wrecking America’s scholarly and research institutions will not improve the lives of blue-collar workers. If anything improves as a result, it will be the MAGA right’s own political dominance and the wealth of its benefactors, who will have successfully destroyed public services while slashing their own taxes and the regulations that constrain their corporations, and rewarding themselves with government contracts.
In March, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was “moving to privatize a sweeping number of government functions and assets—a long-standing Republican goal that’s being catalyzed by billionaire Elon Musk.” Part of this effort will be to replace human workers with large language models, or artificial intelligence,” automating parts of the federal government with an untested technology that amounts to a bailout for the private companies that have developed AI without finding a profitable use for it. This will make government functions worse, but it will help sustain investment and profitability for the wealthy investors backing the technology. Like most other IT technologies, of course, AI was developed with support from the same federal agencies that the tech barons are now helping dismantle.
The extent of this looting will be difficult to determine, because in effect, the attack on knowledge is also an attack on political accountability. Accountability requires information. The public must know what is happening if it is ever going to demand change. But without information about what the government is doing, the administration and MAGA more generally will entrench themselves, such that their corruption, destruction, and mismanagement can occur without oversight or risk of a public reckoning.
Notwithstanding Musk’s insistence that he is reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the government, the Trump administration has been gutting the very institutions charged with gathering information about what the government does—not just with finding wrongdoing or inefficiency, but with preserving its own records and those produced by investigations of private firms. In early February, Trump fired the head of the National Archives. The damage that would be caused by manipulation or destruction of historical records could be irreversible.
The future record is perhaps at even greater risk. Those past records must be actively destroyed, whereas records of what the government does from now on may simply never be made. The Trump administration has unlawfully fired inspectors general who have done government-accountability work in the past, while taking aim at regulatory agencies responsible for oversight of industry, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose investigations are important not only because they protect investors and consumers but because they produce records of corporate misconduct. The administration has also taken aim at the independence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, closing more than 100 ongoing investigations. All of this ruins the government’s capacity not only to learn how to make itself better, but to monitor the health of financial markets and root out corporate malfeasance.
But corporate misconduct is not the only kind of misconduct, and the Trump administration has also targeted other forms of record-keeping on government abuse, including a database of federal law-enforcement officials who have been fired, sued, or convicted of wrongdoing. The Trump administration removed the database, The Appeal reported. In other words, the Trump administration has deliberately made it easier for bad cops to keep finding work as officers. In key institutions that determine how and when the government uses force, such as the Pentagon and the Justice Department, the administration has been firing lawyers whose troublesome legal advice might prevent the president from committing crimes or who might provide records of the decision to do so. The logic is that of the Mafia—no body, no evidence, no crime.
John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. Johns University who worked in the Department of Justice’s inspector general’s office in the 1990s, offered me a couple of examples of the kind of corruption and abuse that the office uncovered. In one instance, the IG discovered that FBI crime labs had mishandled forensic evidence for years, including “significant instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work and deficient practices.” In another, an IG report found that Bureau of Prisons officials were taking bribes to facilitate drug smuggling and organized crime. Yet another IG investigation found that immigration officials were manipulating statistics to make it seem like they were more successful in deterring illegal immigration than they actually were.
Barrett emphasized that the attack on knowledge will encourage more waste, fraud, and abuse in government. “Sometimes,” he said, referring to when he worked in the inspector general’s office, “there were big-dollar savings; sometimes there were big program mismanagement, identifications, and corrections. Sometimes it was just making people sit up straighter and remember to meet their responsibilities.” Under Trump, he warned, “I think lots of petty corruption will flourish. People do engage in petty corruption, but when they get caught, that deters everybody else on their corridor from basic stuff like per diem fraud and voucher fraud and travel-expense padding.”
If Trump were actively trying to facilitate such petty corruption, it would be hard to see what he would do differently. “What they’ve done is to effectively neuter the institutions that were created to do exactly what they say Musk and DOGE are doing,” Michael Bromwich, a former Department of Justice inspector general who in the 1990s uncovered significant problems at an FBI crime lab that forced the bureau to review hundreds of cases, told me. “You would do that because you want to control the criticism of your appointees, your secretaries of defense, of state, of labor. You would do that because you don’t want to subject them to written criticism that’s contained in both the semiannual reports and the audit, inspection, and investigation reports. You would do that because you want to be able to do things in secret, and you want to be able to do them in a way that’s unverifiable.”
Trump’s attack on knowledge will harm not just the so-called elites he and his allies are punishing. The long-term price of solidifying their power in this way will be high—perhaps even higher than Trumpism’s wealthy benefactors expect. One obvious cost is the damage to technological, scientific, and social advancement. Another will be the impossibility of self-governance, because a public denied access to empirical reality cannot engage in self-determination as the Founders imagined.
“We’ve been having a conversation about who should be the arbiter of truth online for some time, because misinformation was such a major issue, all the way dating back to 2016 and before,” Atiba Solomon, the Yale professor, told me. “And I feel like now it’s not just who’s the arbiter of truth online; it’s who’s going to be the arbiter of truth in the public, formal record. That’s what’s at stake here in terms of long-term stuff. You’re not just talking about uncomfortable lacunae in the knowledge-production process. You’re talking about the possibility of a knowledge-production process.”
A population dependent on whatever engagement-seeking nonsense is fed to them on a manipulated social-media network is one that is much easier to exploit and control. By destroying knowledge, including the very scholarship that would study the effects of the administration’s policies on society, the Trump administration and its allies can ensure that their looting of the federal government and public goods can never be fully rectified or punished.
For Trump and his allies, this large-scale destruction of the knowledge-production process could be quite lucrative in the short term. Some examples of this, such as Musk using his influence to secure himself federal contracts and the administration removing regulations on pollution on behalf of Trump’s oil-industry allies, are obvious. But fewer restraints on business means more corporations getting away with scamming and exploiting their customers, and more money for unscrupulous hucksters like those surrounding the president.
The disappearance of high-quality empirical evidence means not only fewer rebuttals of right-wing dogmas, but also a bigger market for wellness pseudoscience and other scams—such as Kennedy’s imbecilic suggestion to treat the growing measles outbreak in the Southwest with cod-liver oil. America under Trump is rejecting one of the most effective health-care infrastructures in human history and embracing woo-woo nonsense on par with medieval doctors measuring the four humors.
The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.
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