Research-intensive universities have been targeted in an unprecedented and unrelenting manner since Donald Trump retook the White House on 20 January. In April, nearly a third of the 6000-plus members of the US National Academies of Sciences, which is a nonpartisan organisation charged with providing evidence-based science and technology advice to the government, issued a dire warning. Speaking collectively as individuals, these elected members cautioned that ‘the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated’. Specifically, they cited slashed funding for science agencies, cancelled research grants and investigations launched against more than 50 universities.
Things were so bad by June that the chairs of three dozen prominent US chemistry departments at schools such as Stanford, Caltech and MIT publicly denounced the administration’s actions, including moves to dramatically decrease reimbursement rates paid to research universities for overheads, firing programme managers at science agencies that fund research, and restricting diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion initiatives. They said that these developments ‘threaten the strength of the US research enterprise’, especially chemistry.
Just a couple of months later, disruption to graduate research and education in the chemical sciences prompted the American Chemical Society to launch a new one-year $2.5 million (£1.9 million) funding initiative. This would support up to 100 master’s and PhD chemistry students in the US whose work has been disrupted by cancellation of their adviser’s grants this year amid this tumult.
As these voices have emerged, one that remains conspicuously silent is that of Trump’s science adviser. Despite numerous requests and a couple of false starts, the current head of the White Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), technologist Michael Kratsios, declined to provide any statement offering his or the administration’s perspective.
Even Trump’s former science adviser from his first term, meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, who had made it clear he was not interested in assuming the post this time around, stayed quiet. ‘I don’t openly comment about the administration’s efforts and especially in research/science and universities,’ he told me via email. ‘I was grateful when my predecessors at OSTP didn’t do that so I’m paying it forward.’
But Droegemeier’s predecessors, like physicist Neal Lane and environmental and climate scientist John Holdren, who were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s science advisers, respectively, have never shied away from speaking on the record. They have repeatedly offered important viewpoints and comments for Chemistry World stories.
Kratsios and Droegemeier clearly follow the adage about not saying anything at all if there is nothing nice to say. Had there been anything defensible to express about the current situation facing the US research enterprise they would surely have wanted to share it.
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