The Trump administration is attempting to censor science into its own image
fascism spreads like a bacteria
Last week, I started a new job as a postdoctoral researcher at a large public university in California. As with any new job, I used my first couple days to feel out my new environment. It didn’t take long to sense the vibe: government-mandated chaos.1
In addition to scrambles to preserve programs supporting marginalized community members from Trump’s DEI ban and to train leaders on protecting the community from potential ICE raids, researchers needed to navigate a freeze on federal grant funding. The United States government is the largest funder of science research in the world, primarily through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The now-infamous Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo which initiated the freeze left scientists wondering if they could continue to pay for worker salaries and basic research supplies. While the OMB memo has been withdrawn (seemingly to halt litigation), scattered funding freezes remain. As of Friday, the NSF payment system was still frozen. Some scientists interviewed by STAT report asking for extensions on rent payments and entering credit card debt because the NSF has stopped paying their salary.
The freeze is clearly illegal, but perhaps a convicted felon who is largely immune from prosecution for presidential acts actually doesn’t care about the law. And with a net worth in the billions (with much of that tied up in a crypto scam), perhaps he also doesn’t care about withholding salary from rank-and-file government scientists.
However, he does care about power in the Machiavellian sense. The OMB memo and frozen payments are ultimately about demonstrating the reach of the federal government and the (potential) consequences of disobedience. I mean, the administration has even made a snitch line for government employees who are not surrendering to white supremacist executive orders. (It sure would be a shame if the snitch line was, I don’t know, bombarded with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.)
Trump understands the authority of science and its influence on culture after his tense (and frankly embarrassing) relationship with government scientists at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. His second administration moved quickly to wrest control of science conducted by government agencies. Soon after his inauguration, Trump issued a pause on NIH communications, hiring, travel, and meetings. Conferences were abruptly canceled, and new grant applications remain in limbo.
NIH funding to support the development of scientists from minoritized backgrounds (referred to as diversity supplements) have disappeared — literally. Links to the formal announcements calling for diversity supplement applications now result in a 404 error: “Sorry! The requested url cannot be found. It might have been removed, had its name changed, or is otherwise unavailable.”
Entire NIH offices have been scrubbed from the Internet, such as the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office which focused on health issues concerning queer people. The office served as a central hub to coordinate research across NIH institutes including through data collection, incorporating queer scientists into the governments’ research teams, and communicate research on queer populations. Now, this office (and others focusing on health equity) simply don’t exist. According to a QSL reader whose husband worked on these issues, personnel no longer have jobs.
In addition to amputating whole offices within the government, gender-inclusive language is now verboten in government science according to a memo sent across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The so-called “forbidden terms” include “gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” CDC scientists have been instructed to retract any unpublished manuscript using these terms — including those that have already been accepted by journals and are awaiting publication.2
Further, public government data referencing queer and trans people or gender (rather than sex) have been removed by federal authorities. It’s unclear if the data has been erased from government databases as well or if the data is just not available to the public. Either reality is dark as these data are routinely used by non-government researchers to make basic decisions and analyze historical trends. The scale of destruction is massive. Within 10 days in power, this administration had withdrawn a whopping 2,276 public databases.
The Trump administration is even removing information tangentially related to censored topics. For example, a CDC webpage on how to receive an HIV test is no longer available.3 To be clear, any person (regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation) can contract HIV. Other webpages are disappearing as well, including those offering information on contraceptives, gender-based violence, HPV vaccines, and climate change.
Trump himself is unbothered. When asked about the censorship of government websites on January 31, he told reporters “It doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. DEI would have ruined our country, and now it's dead. I think DEI is dead, so if they want to scrub the websites, that's OK with me." This strategy of government by 404 error proves that Trump has no positive policy to help people. His only impulse is to destroy, and blame anyone who is not a White cis/het man when things go wrong.
In the absence of mass action to hold the government accountable for this twenty-first century memory hole, we must take steps to keep each other healthy and informed. We must stave off the human impacts of policies that seek to turn queer people, immigrants, and people of color into unpersons.
I would love to hear how I can contribute toward this end and best serve at this time. Please comment or reach out if you have ideas (including collabs) on how to do so. You can comment, DM, email, or message me on Signal at evln.25. We are not going back, and we will get through this together.
Doctors aren't trained in queer health. But you can help!
Otherwise, it’s going great!!
If this was me, I would be so pissed ;;;;;;;
As of this writing, some information about HIV is still available including the services locator at hiv.gov. If you want to get tested for HIV, you can still consult HIV service locator, this guide from the Cleveland Clinic, or your doctor.
It's equally appalling that traditional media outlets seem uninterested in covering this as it is happening. While I get that the average person in American society might not understand how important this data is, our media can help us see the importance. Thanks for covering it so that we can see what's happening!!