It's the End of American Science As We Know It
We have 45 days to express our opposition to catastrophic changes.
My book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, is now available in North America, UK, and Europe wherever you get your hardcovers, ebooks, and audiobooks. I encourage you to shop your local indie, use Bookshop for ebooks, and Libro for audiobooks. There are signed copies of the hardcover at Water Street Books and Harvard Books, which is also the only bookstore in the world that has signed paperbacks of The Disordered Cosmos. Loyalty Books has signed book plates for both books while supplies last.
THIS NEWSLETTER IS ABOUT SOMETHING URGENT! I’m going to explain the problem. I’m also going to suggest some actions you can take because WE MUST FIGHT. So if it’s tl;dr, please skip to the section “Here’s What You Can Do.”
How to Make a Dystopia
A few weeks after the 2016 election, I sent an urgent call to fellow theorists of history and science studies in physics and said that we needed to warn scientists about what Donald Trump could mean for them. We organized a (fairly poorly-attended) session at the January 2017 American Physical Society meeting, where I gave a talk about the Nazi takeover of German physics. You can read my slides from that talk here. In them, I explained there was a specific bureaucratic playbook for authoritarian capture of science.
I am not exaggerating when I say that today is the day that this historical travesty becomes our terrifying present. While the Trump administration has already done egregious damage to science, today the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unveiled major changes to how federal funding is allocated and distributed. For the first time, they are sharing their plans to permanently and systematically move American science from a system that values evidence-based evaluations to a political patronage system. This will not only damage American science but the entire global research ecosystem since the U.S. has historically been the world’s biggest investor in scientific research. Other countries are not stepping up to make up for the losses, which means that unless something changes, the losses will be globally permanent.
These rules, which we have 45 days to comment on starting today, will affect every federal agency, affecting Housing, Education, Health and Human Services, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy among all the others.
I urge you to read Elizabeth Ginexi’s detailed summary. The broad brush strokes reflect the historical authoritarian moves described in my talk:
Diminishing or eliminating peer review in favor of political appointee decision-making. The peer-review process is where experts anonymously assess scientific proposals and outcomes on the basis of their expertise. Removing this means that funding decisions will be made on the basis of political sensibilities, rather than scientific sense.
Targeting climate change research, which is our best hope for sustaining all life on Earth. U.S. government agencies are some of the biggest climate change research organizations in the world and gutting their capacity to do this work literally puts the future of our species at risk.
Targeting and cutting research by and about disfavored minority groups (specifically trans people and anyone doing “DEI,” where it’s clear “DEI” is primarily a placeholder for “Black people” in the eyes of this administration).
Political litmus tests for researchers that allow grants to be cut if the researcher is a member of a civil rights organization the administration doesn’t like, even when their membership activities are kept completely separate from grant activity.
Total control over researcher conference attendance.
Functionally this means a political takeover of university research apparatuses by encouraging universities to censor their researchers.
This will also function as fiscal influence over professional societies through cuts to researcher attendance of conference and membership dues.
These changes are dystopian and ecologically unsustainable. They also completely unravel the American scientific enterprise in a way that is so thorough that you’d think only someone who really hates the United States would do this. For all the allegations flying around about anarchists who hate America, it’s the Trump administration that is gutting the institutions that serve Americans and are the source of American soft power on the global stage. When you think about how grey and colorless life is in 1984, it is because of the way authoritarians gut cultural institutions. That is what we are facing right now: a total attack on American culture and the government institutions that contribute to the ways in which it is lively.
But who cares about American soft power? As I write in The Edge of Space-Time, I’m not especially concerned with the American project. But I also see that over the years, the government has been shaped by forces, including the Civil Rights movement (voting rights, education rights, culturally-engaged arts funding, community health centers) and the Black power movement (free breakfasts and lunches in public schools), which have made these institutions sometimes useful to everyday people. I also see how science has the power and potential to make our lives better, both materially and spiritually. And perhaps most importantly, I do not believe our species will survive these rules being implemented and remaining in place because the cuts to climate change research will be catastrophic and maybe world ending. I also do not trust the Democrats to fix what the Republicans break, not without a significant pressure campaign.
Here’s What You Can Do
Submit a comment opposing these changes. You can use Elizabeth Ginexi’s summary to help you highlight the problems. YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE A GOOD WRITER TO DO THIS! JUST WRITE WHAT IS IN YOUR HEART!
This is a federal government issue, but it will affect the states because many of them get grants from the federal government. Contact your state reps — House and Senate — and governor and urge them to publicly and vigorously oppose these changes. Yes even if they are Republican. Remind them of how this will hurt farmers who get funding from the Department of Agriculture, state public health infrastructure, etc. These rule changes are almost certainly illegal under Congressionally-passed laws, and we need the states to be ready to sue if they get implemented.
Contact your Congressional representatives. Phone calls are better than emails, but do the best you can. You can use 5 Calls to find the numbers. Yes you need to call Republicans. Be a thorn in their side, even if you think they won’t listen.
Tell everyone who will listen. Forward this email. Text people the link to Elizabeth Ginexi’s summary.
Please do something. I don’t want to be among the last of my kind. Even if we don’t succeed, we owe it to the future to try.
