2025: the year when Trump changed US science beyond recognition

These actions are part of a broader plan to bend science for political purposes. “The attack on science must be seen as one component of a larger attack on information, on facts, on independent analysis,” says John Holdren, a physicist at Harvard, “I think Trump sees science as the fortress of the opposition.”

Some people and institutions have fought the government over such changes. Harvard University sued the Trump administration after it cancelled billions of dollars in grants amid claims that Harvard had failed to combat campus antisemitism. Several lawsuits have been filed challenging both the administration’s firing of employees and its cancellation of grants. Climate scientists pushed back against the administration’s efforts to deny the threat of global warming. And six former surgeons general who served during both Republican and Democrat administrations published an article in The Washington Post criticizing Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They wrote that he was “endangering the health of the nation” by amplifying misinformation and undermining public confidence in medicine and the very public-health agency that he oversees — the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest biomedical funder. “The consequences aren’t abstract,” the surgeons general wrote. “They are measured in lives lost, disease outbreaks and an erosion of public trust that will take years to rebuild.”

Now we are all bracing ourselves for what 2026 might bring. I say “we” because Trump’s destruction of science is not just an American calamity, it will have effects across the globe.