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Practicing science in the United States has become more politically fraught in the past seven months than it has ever been in this country’s history. As the Trump administration has fired vaccine advisers, terminated research grants in droves, denied the existence of gender, and accused federal scientists of corruption while publicly denigrating their work, the nation’s leaders have shown that they believe American science should be done only on their terms.
As of late, some in the scientific community have been pushing back, organizing marches and rallies, publicly criticizing government reports and agency priorities, and quitting their jobs at federal agencies. Professional medical societies have banded together to sue the Department of Health and Human Services over Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unfounded restrictions of COVID vaccines and dismissal of vaccine experts. Academic scientists have done the same, to fight for grant funding. Researchers are convening extragovernmental panels to evaluate evidence on vaccines; the American Academy of Pediatrics has published vaccine recommendations that deviate from the CDC’s, and several states in New England are mulling doing the same. This week, for the second time, hundreds of HHS officials have signed a public letter criticizing the department’s leaders for interfering with the integrity of their work.
And yet, these counterattacks may be ensnaring scientists in a catch-22. Their goal is to defend their work from political interference. “If scientists don’t ever speak up, then the court of public opinion is lost,” one university dean, who requested anonymity to avoid financial retaliation against their school from the federal government, told me: Americans would have little reason to question the government’s actions. But in retaliating, scientists also run the risk of advancing the narrative they want to fight—that science in the U.S. is a political endeavor, and that the academic status quo has been tainted by an overly liberal view of reality. “When you face a partisan attack, it’s extremely hard to respond in a way that doesn’t look partisan,” Alexander Furnas, a science-policy expert at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s a bit of a trap.”
Many scientists prefer to view their work as largely severed from politics. But in practice, politicians control how science is funded and how its findings are codified into policy. Some science has also been actively coded as partisan: The existence of climate change has been publicly questioned by conservative groups; since the early days of COVID vaccines, skepticism of them has split along party lines. And studies show that trust in the scientific community has been eroding among conservatives since the 1970s. Still, for decades, science in the U.S. has enjoyed bipartisan support. Furnas’s unpublished research, for instance, has found that over the past 40 years, Republicans have appropriated more money to science than Democrats.
But if any previous politicizations of science were matchsticks tossed onto embers, the Trump administration “has been pouring gasoline,” Azim Shariff, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, who has studied how the politicization of science influences trust in it, told me. Many of the administration’s assaults have been openly political—its leaders have repeatedly criticized American research as riddled with problematic ideologies, and claimed that the Biden administration manipulated science for its own purposes. And it has treated academic centers of science as threats that must be forcibly dismantled. “There is virtually no part of science that is not seen as belonging to one side, particularly the Democrats,” the university dean told me. “Science in general has been cast as being the work of one party, while those of another party destroy the system as it exists.” (HHS and the White House did not return requests for comment.)
Government scientists in particular have usually stayed out of the political fray. The federal workforce is largely made up of rule followers, Anna Yousaf, a scientist in CDC’s respiratory-virus division who signed her name publicly to this week’s HHS letter, told me. (She and other federal employees I spoke with emphasized that they were talking in their personal capacity, rather than on behalf of their agency.) “In terms of feeling comfortable about this? I don’t,” Yousaf said. But now these scientists’ livelihoods are on the line, as well the scientific principles they’ve dedicated their careers to.
And many fear for their personal safety. Earlier this month, a man who had expressed “discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations” fired hundreds of rounds at the CDC’s headquarters, killing a police officer. The shooting, and the administration’s muted response to it, was a major motivation for Fiona Havers, who recently quit her job at the CDC in protest of Kennedy’s actions, to sign her name to the letter. Kennedy’s inflammatory accusations about public-health officials—including calling the CDC “a cesspool of corruption”—have “endangered the lives of my friends and former colleagues,” she told me. (Kennedy’s earliest response, a post on X, came the day after the shooting; two days later, HHS released the administration’s only official statement to date. Neither acknowledged the role that misinformation about COVID vaccines may have played, and hours after HHS’s statement, Kennedy publicly criticized the CDC’s pandemic response, arguing that the government said “things that are not always true” to persuade the public to get vaccinated.)
Many of the scientists I spoke with for this story insisted that they didn’t feel their actions were political—and expressed concern over them being perceived as such. Although they were fighting back against the government, they told me, their intentions are to advocate for evidence. That line feels especially important to hold, they said, as Kennedy and other political leaders repeatedly flaunt their disregard for facts and scientific consensus. “We have not made this political,” Susan Kressly, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics—which has sued HHS, boycotted meetings of its vaccine advisory committee, and continued to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for populations that the CDC does not—told me. “It is the politicians doing that.” Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, one of the professional societies that has sued HHS, told me that he felt similarly. “People tend to think of us as very much left-leaning,” Benjamin said, but the APHA, like the AAP, identifies as nonpartisan. He and Kressly each pointed out that their society has criticized the government during both Democratic and Republican administrations. For example, both groups were among the organizations that, in 2024, called out the Biden administration for delaying prohibitions on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars.
In the past, scientists have successfully engaged in advocacy without polarizing public perceptions of them and their work. And enough Americans object to the Trump administration’s campaign against science that Floyd Zhang, an economist who has studied public attitudes toward science, told me he could see trust in researchers increasing now. His research has shown that engaging politics can hurt scientists: In 2020, after the scientific journal Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president, Trump supporters who were told about the endorsement lost trust in the journal—and in scientists in general. Researchers, he said, seemed to be speaking out of turn—Who are you, telling me how to vote? But he thinks what’s happening in 2025 may play out differently. Scientists’ advocacy—for themselves, their institutions, and scientific principles—should look like scientists staying in their lane, and fighting on behalf of science.
Still, some scientists are behaving more like political activists and politicians. The writers of the HHS letters understand that defending their idea of the department requires political allies: Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health and one of the signers of both letters, told me that a main goal of the public outcry is to stir up further congressional support. A social-media account run by anonymous NIH officials explicitly calls out the “rightwing billionaires” who are trying to corrupt their agency. And scientists and physicians have cited the Trump administration’s actions as motivation in their run for Democratic congressional seats.
Their choice of party is not just a protest against this administration. Scientists, as a group, lean more Democratic and less Republican than the rest of the public, a trend that seems to have intensified in recent decades. Pediatrics—the subgroup of medicine that communicates most regularly with families about vaccines—is among the most left-leaning medical specialties.
Already, public opinion on the Trump administration’s siege on science divides along party lines. An April poll from the health nonprofit KFF showed that a majority of Republicans supported Trump’s massive cuts to staff and spending at federal health agencies, whereas nearly all Democrats opposed them. (Another, more recent survey, from the Civic Health and Institutions Project, noted more muted enthusiasm from Republicans—but still found that more Republicans approved of Trump’s attacks on science than did not.) More Republicans than Democrats support slashing funding to universities, too. And 41 percent of Republicans say that HHS’s recent changes to vaccine policy will make people safer, compared with just 4 percent of Democrats.
Whatever the scientists’ intentions, their actions may inadvertently bolster the Trump administration’s case that scientists represent a particular liberal worldview. Shariff, the social psychologist, has found in his research that—even when politicization aligns with their own beliefs—“people don’t like to see their science politicized,” he told me. “They lose trust in it.” That decline in trust, Shariff predicts, will concentrate among those on the right, who “will see science as more politicized than they did before,” he said, “because it’s taking a side.”
If that happens, the administration could leverage the validation of public opinion as permission to escalate. Trump and his appointees have loudly asserted that their vision for science in America is the correct one, representing truth rather than politics. In their view, the problem originated with the scientists who allowed ideology to infiltrate their thinking, fell prey to the distortive influence of industry, and discouraged the public from doing “your own research.” They seem ready, too, to blame scientists for the ongoing fracas. In July, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya sat down with some members of his staff to discuss the letter they had signed, calling for a restoration of the agency’s scientific integrity. After a fairly cordial meeting, Bhattacharya’s staff invited him to join them at a pro-NIH rally—perhaps even speak, Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute who attended the meeting, told me. “That appeared to anger him,” Kobrin said. Bhattacharya declined and stood to leave, adding, “I’m disappointed that you are politicizing this.”
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