Science under Trump: ‘They want to destroy the scientific system and replace it with something that reflects their ideology’

Helmut Schwarz has been reading about what happened to science during the rise of Adolf Hitler, almost a century ago.

The German chemist just received the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation in Spain, due to his contributions to the field of catalysis. For him, there are parallels between the situation in Nazi Germany and Trump’s United States.

“From 1900 to 1932, a third of all Nobel Prizes went to Germany, more than to the U.S. and the U.K. combined,” he tells EL PAÍS. He and two other scientists sat down with EL PAÍS in Bilbao, where they received their awards.

“When Hitler came to power,” he continues, “German science — which led the world — completely disintegrated. But Hitler thought that wouldn’t be a problem,” he continues. Now, Donald Trump’s administration views universities — supposed hotbeds of progressive ideology — as the enemy. He wants to bring them under his control. “In my opinion, the threat isn’t immediate, but it’s very important in the long term,” Schwarz adds.

When comparing the present with Nazi terror, the question arises as to whether the outcry is exaggerated. Schwarz points to another commonality: Hitler outlined his plan to seize power and explained how he wanted to use it, but few took him at his word. Camille Parmesan — a pioneering ecologist, who has used butterflies to demonstrate how climate change forces species to move — recalls the same attitude toward Trump. “When I hear from acquaintances who vote Republican, many say [that the U.S. president’s more outlandish proposals are] bravado and that he doesn’t mean it,” she notes.

Parmesan works at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She arrived in France under the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program. It was created by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2018 to attract U.S. scientists to the country, as their research was likely to be hampered — or even shut down — by Donald Trump’s rise to power.

The explanation for what motivates the president of the most powerful country in the world to attack science seems unclear to the three academics. Narcissism, displays of power and greed are some of the possibilities. Parmesan goes a little further: “They want to destroy the knowledge base in the U.S. They increase their power by keeping people ignorant. They’re starting from age five onwards. They want to completely destroy the current education system and replace it with something that reflects their narrow ideology.”

The researcher then emphasizes that everything happening now was announced well before Trump’s re-election: “J.D. Vance outlined what’s happening now.” While running for a Senate seat in Ohio in 2022, the vice president said: “Our institutions are corrupt. We have to replace the people who run them. Some of those institutions we have to destroy.”

Since coming to power, the Trump administration has shaken the country’s science and healthcare systems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — which oversees public health and develops strategies for disease prevention and control — has suffered thousands of staff cuts. And the federal government has proposed slashing the CDC’s budget by more than half, from $9.2 billion in 2024 down to $4 billion.

Trump has also proposed an $18 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — which funds biomedical research — and cutting a quarter of NASA’s budget and laying off a third of its employees. According to a Nature survey conducted in March of this year, 75% of scientists were considering leaving the U.S. for countries that are less hostile to science.

Richard Petty — a professor at Ohio State University — believes there’s hope that Congress will rescue the science budget. “We’ll soon see what Congress does with the budget. It’s happened before; Congress could save science, history could repeat itself and that’d be great, but Trump could step in and says, ‘No, you have to vote this way.’” Petty argues that the president’s popular support and his power to choose Republican candidates give him unprecedented power to control legislation without opposition within his party, allowing him to extend his hegemony over Congress.

Petty — who has won an award for “revolutionizing the way we understand and measure attitudes” — believes the risks are high: “There’s a different danger; the president is especially powerful, as it’s unclear what will happen to checks and balances. The courts have said he can’t do some things, but the lawsuits continue.”

In his opinion, the 50% cut would be devastating, but it could be even greater in the next budget. “Or maybe the funds won’t go to real science, but to projects like the commission looking for links between vaccines and autism that [Secretary of Health] Robert F. Kennedy has been promoting. Maybe that’s the kind of research that will be funded, rather than peer-reviewed science, or what scientists think should be done,” he laments.

Along with the abundant budget allocations of the richest country in the world, another pillar of U.S. science is made up of the brilliant students, who arrive from every other country on the planet. Trump also threatens to obstruct that flow of talent. “More than two-thirds of the work in experimental sciences in the Americas is done by foreign students, postdocs and doctoral students,” Schwarz points out.

“In the last three or four months, the number of applications from China and India has more than doubled. And these are excellent students who would have previously applied to the United States and are now looking elsewhere,” he adds.

The lack of human capital could be another serious problem for the U.S. scientific system if students seek out nations that are less hostile to foreigners. The European Union has already launched a €500 million ($584 million) initiative to attract foreign talent — especially from the U.S. — in an effort to turn the American scientific chaos into an opportunity to strengthen European science. Parmesan and Petty — both American citizens — believe there may be some scientists from their country who would consider it. However, at least for now, they don’t see a mass exodus, likely because of familial, linguistic, or cultural reasons.

The ban on admitting foreign students is one of the key elements of Donald Trump’s war against Harvard University. The most prestigious academic institution on the planet, Harvard has an endowment of some $50 billion. This confrontation — which has seen the government freeze nearly $2.7 billion in federal funds to Harvard — is at the heart of Trump’s plan to subdue the independence of the country’s universities.

Recently, a judge suspended the blockade on the enrollment of foreign students. Petty sees the judicial response as one of the hopes against the Trumpist onslaught.

In this confrontation, “no one wants to be Harvard,” but the future of U.S. science may be at stake in its fight against Trump in the courts. “If Harvard loses — and if it loses its international students because the courts decide that this action is within the president’s powers — it’ll be the first domino to fall. And then, we would all be vulnerable,” Petty says. If Harvard wins, there would be hope.

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