Since January 20, Trump, Musk, and the other members of the administration have been constantly attacking scientific knowledge, scientific methods, and scientific institutions. A group of over 1,900 researchers is now appealing directly to the American public to stop these relentless attacks – because everyone is in danger.
The signatories are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. These organizations provide evidence-based advice to the government, but the Trump government has made it clear where it stands on scientific matters. Hence the open letter addressing the general public.
“We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment,” the letter states. “We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”
The Trump administration has targeted universities and members of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have snatched students off the streets, including Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, which has been described as a violation of the First Amendment.
“The administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message. Columbia University was recently notified that its federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration. Destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education – and the research those institutions conduct,” the open letter continues.
The Trump administration has used many executive orders (EOs) to curtail the freedom of scientific institutions, orders that have been described as illegal, violating the Constitution, and segregationist.
The orders have covered a wide range of topics from the EO on trans and non-binary people to taking the US out of the Paris Agreement and World Health Organization. They focused on purging any mention of diversity and equality from public institutions, for example, NASA changed the stated goal of the Artemis program, which was originally to put the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has cut vital services in so many institutions, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where meteorologists and computer engineers at the Hurricane Research Division, as well as those who worked for the agency’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, etc., have been fired.
US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has canceled meetings to prepare the next winter flu vaccine and is wasting money in trying to prove the widely and thoroughly debunked link between vaccines and autism.
“We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on US science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk,” the letter concludes. “The voice of science must not be silenced. We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.”
You can read the full open letter here.
