Donald Trump isn’t waging war on science. He just doesn’t care

The first time the word “science” appeared in a tweet by Donald Trump was on 13 September 2012, long before he became US president, when he wrote: “Wake Up America! See article: ‘Israeli Science: Obama Birth Certificate is a Fake’.” Since becoming president, Trump has not mentioned the words “science” or “technology” in his tweets, reflecting not so much disdain for these issues but an abject lack of interest.

After the 2016 election, the benign neglect of science policy was not an option anticipated by many, including Jack Stilgoe and me on this blog (though Robert Cook-Deegan did). It may not be a bad thing for the scientific community, but it does leave policy gaps that need to be filled.

President Trump has gone more than 400 days without appointing a director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP (this person would also serve as the president’s science adviser). Occasional rumors circulate about the position being filled, but 14 months into the Trump presidency, it remains vacant. Nonetheless, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, OSTP now has about 50 staffers, leading Tobin L. Smith, vice president for policy at the Association for American Universities, to suggest that “it now appears that OSTP is staffed and is up and running”.

Perhaps, but if so, where is OSTP running to? The answer seems to be “in circles”. Consider that in the president’s 2018 federal budget proposal – the administration’s first – research and development were targeted for large cuts, a 4.6% reduction overall. But for 2019 the president’s budget went in the opposite direction, proposing an overall 4.1% increase in R&D.

The whipsaw back-and-forth on science budgets almost certainly doesn’t reflect changing administration priorities, or priorities at all. Rather, the proposed budget increase for 2019 likely reflects the fact that Congress has added money to the discretionary budgetary pie, allowing for a larger slice to be allocated to R&D. The Trump R&D budgets merely illustrate a dynamic identified by Dan Sarewitz more than a decade ago: “marginal changes in the R&D budget are tightly coupled to trends in discretionary spending as a whole”.

For the scientific community, at least where R&D budgets are concerned, benign neglect under the Trump administration might be better than possible alternatives. When Trump has voiced opinions on policy issues valued by the scientific community, such as the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal, he has been far out of step with the views of most scientists. Were OSTP to have a director appointed with a coherent approach to science and technology policy, there is no guarantee that outcomes would be better for science than the current rudderless approach from the administration. Congress deals with research and development in its highly decentralised and fractious ways, but regardless which party has been in charge, it has historically seen R&D very favorably.

If Trump lacks conviction on matters of science and technology, the same cannot be said of some of his appointees. Perhaps most visibly, Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency has resulted in sweeping changes to how that agency does business, notably how it uses science advice. Policy actions related to science and technology, such as Trump’s space policy directive late last year, more likely reflect the work of determined policy entrepreneurs in the bureaucracy rather than any top-down strategy. It may be a mistake to conceptualise a “Trump science and technology policy” in such a free-for-all environment.

The Trump administration’s neglect of science and technology has made it difficult for his opponents to generate the sort of outrage that was aimed at George W. Bush’s supposed “war on science”. For example, Trump’s 2019 budget proposal has been called an “assault on knowledge and reason”, but the reality is far less exciting. With Republicans controlling the congressional appropriations process, and the Trump administration now following their lead, the federal R&D budget has come to look like what might be expected from conservatives, for instance less funding for environmental research and more for fossil fuel exploitation.

Last December the outrage machine kicked into high gear when the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had banned seven words at the Centers for Disease Control: “vulnerable”, “entitlement”, “diversity”, “transgender”, “fetus”, “evidence-based” and “science-based.” The Post editorialised that the ban raised “concerns that higher-ups at [Health and Human Services, the CDC parent body] are insisting on banned words to enforce a political and ideological agenda”. Twitter lit up. It seemed the war on science was on again. It was exciting for a few days.

It turns out that there never was a list of banned words. According to reporting by Daniel Engber, the list of words originated not with Trump administration political appointees but with career bureaucrats brainstorming on what language to use in their budget requests to avoid irritating those same political appointees. The story morphed into something that Trump would label “fake news”, a misleading story so politically perfect that it must be true. Instead, as Engber explained, the list reads “like some left-leaning functionary’s best guess about the words that might be banned by the White House, if the White House were to bother banning words”.

In this episode there is are at least two lessons for the scientific community. One is to beware ascribing greater organisation and intent to the Trump administration than it deserves. As Goethe wrote: “misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice.” The Trump administration’s neglect of science and technology policy means there is no systematic effort to undercut science and technology policy. Instead, they just don’t care.

A second lesson is that scientists who are opposed to Trump (and please count me among them) should take care that their zeal does not backfire. Perceived partisanship within the scientific community carries some political risks, and so too do repetitive, routine expressions of actual or faux outrage. Almost one year after the March for Science, there is seemingly little energy in any follow-up or the building of a movement. It is hard to sustain outrage when your opponent doesn’t care, the public overall supports science and technology, and Congress is increasing overall R&D budgets. In this context, Trump can do more outrageous things longer than the community can stay outraged.

A more productive use of oppositional energy would be for the scientific community to develop well-considered approaches to science and technology policies. If the president and his administration won’t lead, then groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science or the National Academy of Sciences should instead.

This might mean getting into the weeds of science and technology policy, by, for example, putting together a shadow, bipartisan version of the National Science and Technology Council, a body within OSTP normally tasked with “clear national goals for Federal science and technology investments in a broad array of areas spanning virtually all the mission areas of the Executive Branch”. There is of course no guarantee that any such expert advice would be taken by the administration or Congress, but in the absence of alternatives making available coherent science and technology policy options could help to shape policy discussions in productive ways.

There is not much of a US science and technology policy under the Trump administration. However, science and technology policies remain important to the nation. There is a gap here that the science community might fill, if they can avoid getting distracted by the outrageous guy in the White House who just doesn’t seem to care.