The war on science began four centuries ago when the Roman Catholic Church outlawed books that reimagined the heavens. Subsequent regimes shot or jailed thousands of scientists. Today, in such places as China and Hungary, a less fearsome type of strongman relies on budget cuts, intimidation and high-tech surveillance to cow scientists into submission.
Then there is President Trump, who voters last year decisively returned to the White House. His blitz on science stands out because America’s labs and their discoveries powered the nation’s rise in the last century and now foster its global influence.
Just last week, Mr. Trump fired the newly confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her lawyers said the move spoke to “the silencing of experts and the dangerous politicization of science.”
In rapid bursts, Mr. Trump has also laid off large teams of scientists, pulled the plug on thousands of research projects and proposed deep spending cuts for new studies. If his proposed $44 billion cut to next year’s budget is enacted, it will prompt the largest drop in federal support for science since World War II, when scientists and Washington began their partnership.
Few if any analysts see Mr. Trump as a Stalin, who crushed science, or even as a direct analog to this era’s strongmen leaders. But his assault on researchers and their institutions is so deep that historians and other experts see similarities to the playbook employed by autocratic regimes to curb science.
For instance, despots over the ages devised a lopsided way of funding science that punished blue-sky thinkers and promoted gadget makers. Mr. Trump’s science policies, experts say, follow that approach. He hails Silicon Valley’s wizards of tech but undermines the basic research that thrives on free thought and sows the seeds of not only Nobel Prizes but trillion-dollar industries.
“Despots want science that has practical results,” said Paul R. Josephson, an emeritus professor of history at Colby College and author of a book on totalitarian science. “They’re afraid that basic knowledge will expose their false claims.”
The president’s backers deny any suggestion that he engages in autocratic moves or has autocratic ambitions.
Mr. Trump “is a threat to bureaucracy, not democracy,” said Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Mr. Trump’s presidency. “He has an extremely high regard for science.”
The ultimate target, according to the president and his supporters, is not science but rather the role experts play in generating the red tape that hobbles the nation’s economy and, they say, the research enterprise itself. They note that Project 2025 called for the dismantling of the administrative state.
Mr. Trump himself insists that, overall, he wants to save science. His defenders argue that he is cutting bloated budgets to restore public trust in science and spark a golden age of discovery.
Defenders of the postwar order concede that federal science management can be improved. But the Trumpian cure is, they add, far worse than any disease. They dismiss his recent moves and pronouncements as little more than pretexts for what they see as repressive tactics inspired by contemporary autocrats.
“Trump did not invent this playbook,” said Thomas M. Countryman, a career diplomat for 36 years who served as assistant secretary of state for international security in the Obama administration. “It depends on the squelching of all independent centers of thought, and that includes universities, law firms and scientists.”
Analysts say authoritarians and their students fear science in part because its feats — unlocking the universe, ending plagues, saving millions of lives — can form bonds of public trust that rival or exceed their own.
“Science is a source of social power,” said Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It always poses a potential threat.”
Threatened or not, Mr. Trump has long scorned experts as overrated and has stated that he prefers to rely on common sense and gut instincts. “The experts are terrible,” he told the crowd at a 2016 rally in La Crosse, Wis. “Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have.”
If analysts differ on the reasons for Mr. Trump’s attacks on science, they agree that his actions could affect America’s longstanding role as the world leader in scientific discovery — either strengthening it or, conceivably, ending it. Will the nation continue to set the global standard for science breakthroughs?
The lead times for science projects can run to years and decades, so the practical impacts of Mr. Trump’s actions will most likely become clear only after he leaves office. For the United States, a time of new uncertainty is expected.
The Church
From the start, modern science faced repression. The backdrop was doctrine: The Roman Catholic Church long held that humans sat at the center of the universe as the stars, planets and sun moved overhead in never-ending tributes.
Not so, argued Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer. In 1543, he laid out evidence showing that the Earth and planets revolve around the sun.
News of his book, 400 pages long and rich in diagrams, moved slowly across Europe. The church in time decided to show its displeasure. In 1600, it had Giordano Bruno, an advocate of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, burned at the stake.
To fight the heresy, the church in 1616 put the Copernican tract on its list of prohibited books. Undeterred, Galileo, an Italian astronomer, in 1632 published his great work, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” It backed Copernicus.
Galileo’s trial by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 was a turning point in Western history. The spectacle of the elderly thinker being forced, under threat of torture, to recant came to symbolize the church’s hostility to open inquiry.
Even so, Rome proceeded to adapt churches and cathedrals to serve as solar observatories, which let the church improve the calendar and better fix the date of Easter. The research also gave credence to the Copernican view. Nonetheless, Rome kept its heliocentric ban in place for centuries.
The Catholic Church’s double standard — crushing blue-sky science while enjoying the practical benefits — became a favorite tactic of monarchs, despots and modern autocrats. Today the two categories of exploratory work are known as basic and applied science. The latter can include development, engineering and technology. By nature, basic studies, though risky, tend to yield the most important discoveries.
The lopsided approach let rulers curb free thought that threatened their authority while promoting technological spinoffs of applied science that could empower their regimes. For instance, they backed research on celestial navigation, which let fleets of tall ships sail the globe to found colonial empires.
Even enlightened despots such as Catherine the Great in 18th-century Russia, while promoting science and progress, retained absolute power and suppressed ideas they saw as challenging their rule.
The State
The dictators of the 20th century turned the suppression of basic science and the promotion of applied research into superweapons of social control.
Upon taking power in 1933, Hitler redefined German science to include the idea that Aryans represent the master race. “If science cannot do without Jews,” he quipped, “we will have to do without science.” Hundreds of Jewish scientists were dismissed, and many fled the country.
Regime dogma guided the remaining scientists. The idea was that nationalistic science was the only true science. Before the war, Germany led the world in such triumphs of the intellect as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Nazi science ended the blue-sky breakthroughs.
Even so, the regime’s tight grip on the German economy let it produce many innovations of applied science that empowered Hitler’s military, including V-2 rockets, jet engines, machine encryption and synthetic fuels.
The deadliest attacks on basic science came from Stalin, the Soviet dictator. In the 1930s, he had thousands of scientists shot or consigned to slave labor.
In addition, he echoed the Nazi push for ideological purity by elevating scientists who forcefully backed Marxism. Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who dominated Soviet biological studies between 1935 and 1965, used his influence with Stalin to reject modern genetics as official policy. The results crippled Soviet agriculture and contributed to famines that killed millions of people.
Like other despots, Stalin also backed applied science for regime building. The results included the atom bomb and Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.
The New Authoritarians
In this century, a new kind of ruler arose. Gone were the gulags and the firing squads. The new autocrats, forsaking military garb for designer suits, relied on subtle threats, budget cuts and high-tech surveillance to curb science.
Dr. Treisman, the U.C.L.A. professor, joined with Sergei Guriev, dean of the London Business School, to write a 2023 book on the new generation. “Spin Dictators” argues that the media-savvy strongmen have recast authoritarian rule for the digital age.
“They don’t want to be controlled by scientists,” Dr. Treisman said. “They want to control them.”
He noted that the new authoritarians, like the old, rely on applied science to bolster the legitimacy of their regimes.
“Dictators need it to fuel economic growth, to make satellites and missiles, to obtain new surveillance technologies,” he said. “They want their own science, not someone else’s. They don’t want to be lectured by liberals on inconvenient truths about the environment or health care.”
The book’s case studies look at leaders like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary.
Mr. Trump and his backers “do occasionally let slip their view of things — that these regimes are not that bad,” said Dr. Josephson of Colby College, whose own book on totalitarian science details many of the crackdowns.
In Brazil, Mr. Bolsonaro, as president from 2019 to 2023, slashed the federal research budget, throwing thousands of scientists into limbo.
In China, Mr. Xi’s rise to power in 2012 led to online censors, televised confessions and the repression of restive populations, such as the Uyghurs. His science investments put applied over basic studies: In a recent report, China ranked last globally in the funding of basic research, lagging behind not only the United States but such comparatively small countries as Israel, Switzerland and Taiwan.
In Russia, Mr. Putin, who first assumed the presidency in 2000, has created what experts consider a police state in which agents falsely arrest scientists on charges of treason and closely monitor their contacts with foreigners. The climate of fear encourages self-censorship. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a mass exodus of scientists.
At the same time, Moscow has used applied science as a stealthy weapon of social control. New tools of digital surveillance aided its crackdowns on the war’s opponents.
In Hungary, Mr. Orban since 2010 has worked to undo free thought and institutional autonomy, typically through intermediaries. In 2018, he had gender studies removed from the country’s list of accredited subjects. The next year, he seized control of the 40 research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he took over 11 universities.
Mr. Trump befriended Mr. Orban. Three times during the year of his successful campaign to return to the White House — in March, July and December — he hosted Mr. Orban at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
On social media, Mr. Trump praised him as “a smart, strong, and compassionate leader of a wonderful Country, Hungary. Great job, Viktor!!!”
The Trump Blitz
In his first term as president, Mr. Trump sought to crush federal science. But Congress often reversed his proposed funding cuts.
In his second term, Mr. Trump’s first target was expert guidance.
Over decades, federal laws gave scientific advisory bodies the power to oversee regulatory agencies, and such oversight slowly spread to the government as a whole. In essence, science and Washington became administrative allies.
On Feb. 19, weeks after taking office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that called for the downsizing and elimination of the advisory panels. The order affected panels that oversaw vaccines, astrophysics, fisheries, mathematics, space, the geosciences, the environment and artificial intelligence.
Next, in March, amid budget cuts and growing protests by scientists, Mr. Trump unveiled an overall science policy that echoed the autocrats in emphasizing technological spinoffs, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In a public letter, the president called for securing the nation’s status “as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies.”
Then in May, the administration made public its proposed cuts to next year’s federal science budget. Independent experts found that the category of basic research would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent.
On the chopping block were studies focused on nursing, clean energy, climate change, air and water quality, chemical safety, minority health disparities, green aviation, the global carbon cycle, the atmosphere of Mars, the planet Jupiter, and the boundary in outer space where the solar system meets the cosmos, among other subjects.
“The cuts are justified,” said Terence Kealey, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Decades of lavish funding have dulled America’s exploratory edge, he argued.
Finally, later in May, Mr. Trump laid out his reform agenda. It called for a “gold standard” that would revitalize science research. But critics, including Nobel laureates, saw it as paving the way for state-controlled science.
Officially, the job of defending Mr. Trump’s agenda falls to his science adviser, Michael Kratsios. He has no degrees in science or engineering but held key technology and military posts during Mr. Trump’s first term and helped speed the rise of artificial intelligence.
Over weeks, multiple requests for an interview with Mr. Kratsios were made to officials in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Possible dates were discussed, but Mr. Kratsios was never made available.
In the end, his office issued a brief statement that hailed Mr. Trump for “reinvigorating a system in which diminishing returns and stagnation have been the status quo for decades.”
Critics see Mr. Trump’s backers either as blind to the ubiquity of the authoritarian parallels and playbook or as trying to give the White House political cover.
In a recent essay, Dr. Josephson of Colby College cast Mr. Trump’s acts as brazenly totalitarian. He cited the firing of thousands of scientists, the support of anti-vaccine propaganda, and the elevation of unqualified officials to science management.
“Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had,” Dr. Josephson wrote. “He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.”
Dr. Treisman of U.C.L.A. said that despite Mr. Trump’s war on science and the federal bureaucracy, he saw reason for hope.
He said democracies often have “politicians like Trump who would like to remove all constraints on their power. The difference between them and successful ones like Mr. Orban isn’t so much in their approach but in the level of resistance they encounter.”
Dr. Treisman said the critics of Mr. Trump might prevail. His own belief, he added, “is that the many forces of civil society will continue to constrain him.”
William J. Broad has reported on science at The Times since 1983. He is based in New York.
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