America is demolishing its brain

From NASA to the National Science Foundation to the Centres for Disease Control to the educational system, the United States under the Trump administration is deconstructing its own ability to think and to comprehend the complex global situation. A whole fleet of spacecraft — each unique in human history — risks being scrapped because the country is ruled by an anti-science ideology. They are coming with particular venom for spacecraft intended to help us understand the Earth’s climate and how we are disrupting it. Across every domain of human life which science and medicine have improved, we are in the process of being pulled backwards by those who reject learning from the truth the universe reveals to us, in preference to ‘truths’ from religious texts which were assembled with little factual understanding in order to reassert and justify the prejudices of their creators.

The anti-science agenda will have a baleful influence on the young and America’s position in the world. In any country, you are liable to see nerds embracing the NASA logo and pictures of iconic spacecraft — a form of cultural cachet which serves America well in being perceived as a global leader. Now, when an American rover has intriguing signs of possible fossil life on Mars, there is little prospect that the follow-on sample return mission will be funded. Perhaps the near-term prospect of a Chinese human presence on the moon will bend the curve of political thought back toward funding space, though perhaps things will have further decayed by then.

The young are being doled out a double-dose of pain. As Christian nationalism and far-right ideology erode the value of the educational system (transitioning toward a Chinese-style system of memorizing the government’s official lies and doctrine rather than seeking truth through skeptical inquiry), young people become less able to cope in a future where a high degree of technical and scientific knowledge is necessary to comprehend and thrive in the world. Meanwhile, ideologues are ravaging the medical system and, of course, there is a tremendous intergenerational conflict brewing between the still-young and the soon-to-be-retired (if retirement continues to be a thing for any significant fraction of the population). Whereas we recently hoped for ever-improving health outcomes for everyone as technology advances, now there is a spectre of near-eradicated diseases re-emerging, in alliance with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria which we have so foolishly cultivated.

What’s happening is madness — another of the spasmodic reactionary responses to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution which have been echoing for centuries. Unfortunately, it is taking place against the backdrop in which humanity is collectively choosing between learning to function as a planetary species and experiencing the catastrophe of civilizational collapse. Nuclear weapons have never posed a greater danger, and it exists alongside new risks from AI and biotechnology, and in a setting where the climate change which we have already locked in will continue to strain every societal system.

Perhaps I have watched too much Aaron Sorkin, but when I was watching the live coverage of the January 6th U.S. Capital take-over, I expected that once security forces had restored order politicians from both sides would condemn the political violence and wake up to the dangerousness of the far-right populist movement. When they instead jumped right back to partisan mudslinging, I concluded that the forces pulling the United States apart are stronger than those holding it together. There is a kind of implicit assumption about the science and tech world, that it will continue independently and separately regardless of the silliness that politicians are getting up to. This misses several things, including how America’s scientific strength is very much a government-created and government-funded phenomenon, going back to the second world war and beyond. It also misses the pan-societal ambition of the anti-science forces; they don’t want a science-free nook to sit in and read the bible, but rather to impose a theocratic society on everyone. That is the prospect now facing us, and the evidence so far is that the forces in favour of truth, intelligence, and tolerance are not triumphing.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.

23 thoughts on “America is demolishing its brain”

  6. The big point that I wanted to make, though, is that there’s a certain type of person in history, they’re called the court favorite. You’ve got a king or a queen who’s taken a shine to some stable boy, or an actor, or some woman that they’ve decided to sleep with, or some man. And because they’re the court favorite they’re suddenly made the Secretary of State, and all the other nobles in the kingdom are like, “Why is that guy a secretary? Why is he going to negotiate with the Hapsburgs?” And the guy’s an idiot and he’s stupid, and he usually winds up either thrown out, or assassinated, or beheaded because they’re way over their heads.

    What our government currently presupposes is, “What if everyone running the government was a court favorite?” At the level of court favorite: ability, intelligence, awareness of what’s going on, like, actually good ideas, they have none of these things. Our entire government is run by the court favorites. Instead of just having it be like one person who’s messing things up, it’s literally everybody.

    https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fall-of-rome-united-states-america-decline-mike-duncan-1235430424/

  7. The proposed federal budget would see drastic cuts made to most of the agencies that fund science. The sheer magnitude of the cuts—including a 40 percent slashing of money going to the National Institutes of Health—would do severe harm to biomedical researchers and the industries that serve or rely on them. And, ultimately, that is likely to do harm to all of us.

    In today’s issue of Science, some researchers have attempted to put numbers on those indirect effects that fall within that “ultimately” category. They’ve identified which grants wouldn’t have been funded had similar cuts been made earlier in this century and tracked the impact that likely had on drug patents. Their conclusion: Development of roughly half the newly approved drugs relied on work that was funded by a grant that would need to be cut.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/study-planned-budget-cuts-would-hurt-drug-development-badly/

  10. “The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it would stop making polluting companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to it, eliminating a crucial tool the US uses to track emissions and form climate policy. Climate NGOs say their work could help plug some of the data gap, but they and other experts fear the EPA’s work can’t be fully matched.

    …

    The Clean Air Act requires states to collect data on local pollution levels, which states then turn over to the federal government. For the past 15 years, the EPA has also collected data on carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from sources around the country that emit over a certain threshold of emissions. This program is known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) and “is really the backbone of the air quality reporting system in the United States,” says Kevin Gurney, a professor of atmospheric science at Northern Arizona University.

    Like a myriad of other data-collection processes that have been stalled or halted since the start of this year, the Trump administration has put this program in the crosshairs. In March, the EPA announced it would be reconsidering the GHGRP program entirely. In September, the agency trotted out a proposed rule to eliminate reporting obligations from sources ranging from power plants to oil and gas refineries to chemical facilities—all major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (The agency claims that rolling back the GHGRP will save $2.4 billion in regulatory costs, and that the program is “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”)”

  13. CDC Cuts Threaten Public Health Nationwide, Fired Employees Say

    A quarter of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff is gone after the Trump administration’s latest reductions in force and earlier layoffs

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cdc-cuts-threaten-public-health-nationwide-fired-employees-say/

    —

    The U.S. Won’t Win the New Space Race by Defunding NASA

    The U.S. wants to remain a superpower in space. It can’t without supporting NASA

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-is-crucial-to-the-u-s-winning-the-new-space-race/

  14. How have the departures changed NASA’s culture?

    That was the next generation of leaders. And now they’re all chopped off. They’re all gone. And the folks who are left don’t have that experience. They needed those people to bring them up to that level.

    NASA’s fundamental identity has been stripped away. The secret sauce has been poured down the drain.

    How would you describe the impact this will have on the U.S.?

    It’s just catastrophic. Nothing short of catastrophic.

    There is no brand on the planet better than the NASA meatball. It is the best brand in the world, and we have just thrown it into the gutter. It is a way of putting our money where our mouth is when we Americans talk about democratic values, liberty, and freedom.

    Folks growing up thinking: this is what we do. We go to other planets. You don’t think about it every day, but you grow up knowing: you live in a place that can go to other worlds. And to have that tacit, unspoken thing — that I live in a country where we go to other planets — to all of a sudden realize, whoa, we’re not that country anymore?

    It’s hard for me to not have anything but despair, frankly, for what’s happening to the agency.

    https://www.planetary.org/articles/4000-gone-inside-nasas-brain-drain

  15. The federal agency responsible for overseeing and modernizing the US nuclear stockpile will furlough the vast majority of its staff Monday as the government shutdown drags on, according to the Department of Energy.

    About 1,400 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, will receive furlough notices Monday, while fewer than 400 employees will remain on the job to safeguard the stockpile, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN.

    Energy Secretary Chris Wright will speak about the shutdown’s impact on the US’ nuclear deterrent efforts Monday while visiting the Nevada National Security Site.

    The NNSA Office of Secure Transportation, which oversees the transportation of nuclear weapons around the country, will be funded through October 27.

    “Since its creation in 2000, NNSA has never before furloughed federal workers during funding lapses,” Dietderich said in a statement. “We are left with no choice this time. We’ve extended funding as long as we could.”

    The furloughs will first impact NNSA sites that assemble nuclear weapons, such as Pantex in Texas and Y-12 in Tennessee, a source familiar with the situation told CNN. Because those facilities require large teams to manufacture weapons, furloughs will force those sites into safe shutdown mode.

    “Contractors will continue doing very minimal work until they themselves run out of money,” another NNSA source said. “But the day-to-day rhythm of federal oversight, the approvals and monitoring of these contractors, keeping everything on track, will grind to a halt because the people responsible for oversight will be furloughed.”

    Monday’s furloughs mark the first wave of disruption for the agency.

    “Whatever minimal work contractors are able to continue to do as far as building weapons, enriching special nuclear material, stockpile surveillance, that will stop when the contractors run out of money,” the second source warned. “The earliest we could see that happen is around October 28.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/19/politics/national-nuclear-security-administration-furloughs-shutdown

  18. NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say

    https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-is-sinking-its-flagship-science-center-during-the-government-shutdown-and-may-be-breaking-the-law-in-the-process

    By Josh Dinner published 5 hours ago

    “There is just a general acknowledgement that a lot of what is happening is illegal…”

    …

    GSFC hosts the largest single concentration of researchers in the NASA workforce, encompassing the agency’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD). Nearly 10,000 scientists and engineers work at Goddard in total, around 7,000 of whom are employed through NASA contractors. Center staff said they felt what they perceived as the new administration’s vitriol for science early on.

    “The atmosphere, from my perspective, at least, has been incredibly dark and depressing,” Goddard astrophysicist Casey McGrath told Space.com, clarifying that he was not speaking on behalf of NASA or his agency contract employer. “I feel like the people I work with, myself included, have just been demoralized, exhausted, terrified, frustrated and angry, for months and months on end with no pause whatsoever.”

  19. Disruption to science will last longer than the US government shutdown

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/disruption-to-science-will-last-longer-than-the-us-government-shutdown/

    …

    This year, the government faces mounting challenges to overcome once the shutdown ends: Trump and the director of the White House budget office, Russell Vought, are using the shutdown as an opportunity to “shutter the bureaucracy” and pressure universities to bend to the administration’s ideological positions on topics such as campus speech, gender identity, and admission standards.

    As the budget standoff nears the record for the longest shutdown ever, agency furloughs, reductions in force, canceled grants, and jeopardized infrastructure projects document the devastating and immediate damage to the government’s ability to serve the public.

    However, the full impact of the shutdown and the Trump administration’s broader assaults on science to US international competitiveness, economic security, and electoral politics could take years to materialize.

    In parallel, the dramatic drop in international student enrollment, the financial squeeze facing research institutions, and research security measures to curb foreign interference spell an uncertain future for American higher education.

    With neither the White House nor Congress showing signs of reaching a budget deal, Trump continues to test the limits of executive authority, reinterpreting the law—or simply ignoring it.

    Earlier in October, Trump redirected unspent research funding to pay furloughed service members before they missed their Oct. 15 paycheck. Changing appropriated funds directly challenges the power vested in Congress—not the president—to control federal spending.

  20. Another area of concern is planetary science. When one picks apart Trump’s budget priorities, there are two clear and disturbing trends.

    The first is that there are no significant planetary science missions in the pipeline after the ambitious Dragonfly mission, which is scheduled to launch to Titan in July 2028. It becomes difficult to escape the reality that this administration is not prioritizing any mission that launches after Trump leaves office in January 2029. As a result, after Dragonfly, the planetary pipeline is running low.

    Another major concern is the fate of the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The lab laid off 550 people last month, which followed previous cuts. The center director, Laurie Leshin, stepped down on June 1. With the Mars Sample Return mission on hold, and quite possibly canceled, the future of NASA’s premier planetary science mission center is cloudy.

    https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/nasa-is-kind-of-a-mess-here-are-the-top-priorities-for-a-new-administrator/

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