New Trump Rules Aim to Make Scientists Quit

New rules from the Trump administration are making it harder for scientists to do their work. Experts say the goal may be to push them out of government-funded research. The strategy is familiar. A politician who wants to destroy a public system—like schools or transit—often starves it of money. The system becomes so broken that people stop using it. Then, it is easy to shut down or hand it over to private companies. Something similar is happening to science. Federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) face grant freezes and administrative chaos. Political appointees now review projects, looking for banned keywords such as "disparity" and "marginalized." New rules also make international collaboration nearly impossible. The result: doing federally-funded research is becoming too difficult. "It’s death by a thousand cuts," says Daniel Malinsky, an assistant professor of biostatistics at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. He asks: is the goal to make scientists simply give up?