The Republican president has laid off thousands of employees from scientific agencies.

On Monday, nearly 2,000 top scientists issued an urgent warning about what they call the Trump administration’s “wholesale assault on U.S. science,” saying the actions threaten America’s health, economy and global leadership in research.

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The scientists, all elected members of the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, released an open letter claiming that the Trump administration had moved with “unprecedented speed” since taking office in January, laying off thousands of employees at U.S. science agencies and announcing reforms to research-grant standards that could drastically reduce federal financial support for science.

In this “SOS” to the public, the signatories included Nobel Prize winners who “call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science.”

The letter emphasized that the signatories are speaking as individuals — not representing the National Academies or their home institutions. This distinction is important as the National Academies organization has remained silent on the Trump administration’s science policies. The signatories represent about 23 percent of the National Academies’ full membership.

According to the letter, the Trump administration is “destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”

One of the most controversial moves came on Feb. 7, when the Trump administration announced a National Institutes of Health policy that would slash billions of dollars of funding annually for U.S. universities, hospitals and other research institutions.

The policy would reduce research overhead costs from an average of about 40 percent to a flat 15 percent rate for research grants. The policy is currently on hold, pending the outcome of lawsuits contending that it is illegal. However, the situation has created growing anxiety in the scientific community.

One academic physicist described the situation as “chaos,” noting that many scientists remained in limbo at thousands of academic institutions and nongovernmental agencies that rely on federal research grants.

The scientists also warned in the open letter that “the administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message,” noting that 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.

Some lawmakers have begun opposing these measures. Representative Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, on Feb. 2 sent a series of letters to several agencies under the committee’s jurisdiction demanding answers regarding each agency’s implementation of the president’s executive orders attacking diversity, equity and inclusion efforts within the federal scientific enterprise.

The impacts extended beyond the United States. An editorial in the journal Nature described the Trump administration’s actions as “an unprecedented assault on science, on research institutions and vital international organizations and initiatives,” adding that these are “unacceptable attacks on people’s rights and on academic freedom” that “will halt, if not reverse, decades of progress in scientific research.”

As the scientists concluded in their open letter, “the quest for truth — the mission of science — requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests.” 

teleSUR/ JF

Source: Xinhua

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