The Trump administration is undermining publicly produced data, slashing public investments in research, and intimidating civil society institutions that produce fact-based analyses. Enervating organizations that inform the public about vital issues like public health, economic growth, and—most of all—the actions of policymakers leaves the citizenry less able to hold officials to account. Attacks on the public’s right to know are a key front in a broader assault on popular sovereignty, the bedrock American principle that the government derives its legitimacy from the informed consent of the governed.
Trump administration officials have sought to reduce public access to data and to diminish or eliminate federal agencies responsible for vital data collection. Thousands of webpages and datasets on public health, demography, and climate change disappeared in February. The administration also disbanded several external expert committees that help agencies create accurate economic statistics. Agencies with essential data collection responsibilities, including the Department of Education, NOAA, and the CFPB have also been slated for immense cuts or even closure. The consequences are not merely national, they are global, as my colleague Caren Grown has eloquently explained. Here and abroad, businesses, policymakers, and families rely on the American government’s data. At the same time, the administration has been releasing inaccurate data and refusing to comply with FOIA requests related to its own activities.
These actions have not occurred without resistance. Many of the administration’s efforts are being challenged in court, with some success. Nonprofit institutions are working hard to build new systems to preserve and protect the data that the government once reliably provided. But even under the best-case scenarios, the courts will not be able to entirely roll back the current chaos, and philanthropic investments cannot operate at the scale of government action.
The executive branch’s interference in the congressional authority to appropriate federal monies does not just endanger federal data collection. It also threatens to incapacitate the nation’s scientific research. The administration has moved to reduce National Institutes of Health spending by about $4 billion and suspended scheduled grant-review meetings, undermining medical research institutions across the country. More recently, the NIH terminated grants for vaccine hesitancy research, and mRNA vaccine technology may also be at risk. Policy changes have made it hard for scientists to purchase basic research supplies. National Science Foundation research projects that include keywords such as “trauma,” “disability,” or “women” are also at risk of arbitrary cancellation.
The implications for science are severe. The NIH is the single largest funder of biomedical research in the world; around 55% of American higher education R&D funding came from the federal government in fiscal year 2022. In response, universities are already reducing graduate admissions, which will disrupt a generation of early career researchers. Science trainees are “questioning the viability of being a scientist in the U.S. going forward,” said Carole Labonne, a professor of molecular biosciences at Northwestern.
The attacks on data and science should be understood in the context of administration actions that the Committee to Protect Journalists has described as “an alarming pattern of retaliation against a free press.” As I noted last year, knowledge institutions are often an early target of autocratic regimes. Authoritarians demand the right to define what is true; the reporting of empirical facts endangers that power. There is no meaningful version of a university, newspaper, library, or research center that survives the successful suppression of dissent; these institutions require free inquiry. Journalism under state censorship is no longer journalism, it is stenography for the regime.
And yet, many knowledge organizations seem prepared to compromise themselves beyond recognition. Earlier this month, Columbia chose to comply with a wide array of administration demands after $400 million in federal funding were frozen. “With American democracy on the line, the University has crawled into a protective shell,” wrote Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Ryan Enos. That strategy is misguided, they conclude, both ethically and strategically: “Remaining silent will not protect us.” Since the administration froze funding to Columbia, $175 million owed to the University of Pennsylvania has also been stopped.
The attacks on knowledge institutions have occurred with startling rapidity, but their effects are not yet entrenched. There is still time for a concerted defense of free speech, scientific inquiry, and political dissent. Given that the level of popular protest to the Trump administration is by some measures higher than it was in 2017, the sluggishness of elite institutions is as startling as it is indefensible.