Science is more than knowledge. It is a system of inquiry built on evidence, transparency, replicability, and intellectual honesty. Because of this, when governments substitute their political judgment and ideology for science, the consequences can be profound.
In modern history, this substitution by governments is often less about public skepticism than state-directed suppression—a deliberate attempt to control or erase scientific knowledge that threatens political or economic interests. During Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, for example, agricultural science was subverted to promote pseudoscientific theories, leading to massive crop failures and famine. In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration failed to act on the emerging AIDS crisis and hid federal research on air pollution and tobacco harms. In the early 2000s, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki rejected the scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS, promoting denialist views that contributed to more than 300,000 preventable deaths. Under Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s government systematically dismantled its environmental science apparatus—firing scientists, defunding research, and censoring satellite deforestation data. In Canada, the Harper administration muzzled federal scientists by requiring political approval before they could speak to journalists or publish findings on climate change, fisheries, and air pollution. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government took over the country’s main scientific research body and replaced peer review with political oversight. In Nigeria, lawmakers have justified anti-LGBTQ laws using fabricated medical claims, while governments in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia have promoted nationalist myths in place of evidence-based history or archaeology. And in the United States, the first Trump administration attempted to redefine evidence-based science at the EPA to exclude epidemiological studies that used confidential health data—a move widely condemned as an assault on public health research. Federal climate reports were rewritten or shelved, and agency scientists were sidelined or forced out.
Suppression can also happen through persistent political interference, vague mandates, and the quiet manipulation of public education. In the US, campaigns in Kansas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have repeatedly sought to weaken or eliminate the teaching of evolution in public schools. In Texas, textbook standards have required that “intelligent design” be presented as a scientifically credible theory, despite its rejection by the scientific community and federal courts. These efforts aren’t about scientific rigor—they’re about reshaping science to fit religious or ideological agendas. A century after the Scopes “Monkey Trial” made headlines, the same basic battle continues.
Of course, the substitution of science is not confined to legislative chambers or school boards. Around the world, disinformation—whether state-sponsored, crowd-sourced, religiously motivated, or simply reinforcing long-standing biases—has long been used to manufacture controversy and suppress knowledge. This is not a new phenomenon. For centuries, scientific thinkers and marginalized people alike have been targeted by societies in crisis. Especially during periods of social upheaval and fear, pseudoscientific thinking has been used to justify brutal actions—from the burning of so-called witches to the persecution of Jews, unmarried women, and dissenters. Witch hunts were not only acts of social hysteria—they were attempts to explain misfortune by inventing invisible enemies, wrapped in the language of folk belief and early natural philosophy.
One of the most insidious chapters in this long history came in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with the ideologically driven misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s work on evolution. During this period, political and cultural leaders bent legitimate science into the pseudoscience of eugenics, giving a false veneer of credibility to racism, forced sterilization, and the idea of a “master race.” In the early 20th century, American eugenics laws inspired Nazi officials and helped legitimize policies based on racial hierarchy and genetic purity. These abuses still echo today in conspiracy theories and discredited arguments about biological superiority.
Today, the targets of scientific distortion have shifted, but the strategy remains the same. False claims about climate change, vaccine safety, evolutionary biology, and even the shape of the Earth now circulate widely online. In parts of Eastern Europe, anti-vaccine movements have gained traction through coordinated social media networks that amplify conspiracy theories and undermine trust in health authorities. In Germany and France, far-right groups have spread climate misinformation as part of broader campaigns against green energy transitions. In the UK, conspiracy theories about 5G technology led to attacks on telecommunications infrastructure during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Russian state media has promoted contradictory health narratives abroad—not to persuade, but to confuse.
These efforts thrive in an information environment where traditional gatekeepers—scientific institutions, peer-reviewed journals, and independent media—are increasingly bypassed in favor of personalized feeds and algorithmic engagement. As social media becomes the primary source of news for billions of people, the line between credible science and ideological fiction has blurred. Scientific authority is no longer determined by expertise, but by virality. And when disinformation outpaces correction, even well-established knowledge becomes vulnerable to public doubt.
In each of these cases, science was not simply questioned—it was strategically overridden, reframed, or erased. The strategy is rarely to attack science head-on, but to undermine it subtly through budget constraints, leadership changes, regulatory ambiguity, and public confusion. What starts as a “rebalancing” of perspectives quickly morphs into the suppression of knowledge. The result has often been measurable harm: needless deaths, ecological degradation, scientific brain drain, and generational setbacks in public understanding.
Today in the US, everything old is new again. The Trump Administration has installed vaccine skeptics in senior health leadership, climate change deniers in key environmental agencies, and a wrestling promoter in the US Department of Education with a mandate to shutter the agency. It has removed references to political trigger words like “climate change” from public-facing documents and agency missions, “restructured” funding priorities to delegitimize climate, equity, environment, and vaccine-focused work, withdrawn the US from global science institutions, threatened to prevent US scientists from publishing their work in leading journals, and plans to install political appointees at the apex of the scientific process who can edit or discard science that does not satisfy the administration’s ideological criteria.
In the meantime, NOAA—the agency responsible for weather forecasting, satellite monitoring, ocean and atmospheric research, and long-range climate data—has experienced an unprecedented gutting. Around 1,800 positions were eliminated this spring alone, with proposals underway to terminate another 2,000 in the coming year. Tens of thousands of other federal science jobs have disappeared from the National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, NASA, and other science agencies, undermining data collection, research continuity, medical treatment, and emergency preparedness.
Programs tracking methane leaks, ocean warming, and hurricane risk have been targeted for elimination or “realignment.” Staff at multiple agencies have reported being prohibited from using terms like “climate resilience” or “environmental justice” in official materials. Several universities have been threatened with the loss of federal cooperative agreements unless they restructure or remove entire research portfolios. Billions of dollars in Congressionally allocated funding awards have been illegally frozen or rescinded, and entire research lines have been scaled back or eliminated.
None of this restructuring is about improving efficiency. Science and technology together account for less than 4% of federal spending—spending that consistently generates economic multiplier effects. Rather, these actions are part of a broader plan to suppress knowledge and replace scientific integrity with political loyalty. This is not responsible governing, but a systematic dismantling of the scientific infrastructure that underpins the nation’s ability to participate in science for the betterment of humankind, and to respond to complex, long-term threats—and it is all being done in broad daylight.
Research budgets have been cut before, but what distinguishes our current moment in history is the collapse of constraints. Legal boundaries that once prevented political meddling in grantmaking have eroded. Congressional oversight has all but disappeared. Impoundment of approved funding and the partisan targeting of specific scientific fields have now become normalized, despite the fact that these actions are illegal. With courts too slow to intervene, the usual checks and balances no longer offer protection.
Scientists and research leaders have spoken out, though with limited recourse. The Association of American Universities has warned that the politicization of science funding is a direct threat to the national interest. Leading researchers at NOAA, NIH, and NSF have resigned in protest, while private foundations increasingly view US-based research partnerships as politically vulnerable. The long-term impacts are already emerging: some of our most talented scientists are taking their labs to other countries; federal agencies are losing their technical depth; and the research infrastructure that the US painstakingly built over many generations—an infrastructure that until last year was the envy of the world—is at risk of imploding.
What makes the current US situation especially calamitous is that it comes at a time of growing distrust in institutions and increasing polarization. According to the Pew Research Center, 76% of Americans say they trust scientists to act in the public interest—more than for journalists, business leaders, or elected officials. But these numbers conceal a widening partisan gap. Among Democrats, trust in science remains high. Among Republicans, it has declined sharply, from 82% in 2019 to 66% in 2024. In fields like climate science, environmental regulation, and vaccine safety, that divide is even deeper. The idea that science is “just another political opinion” has gained traction—fueling efforts to treat scientific findings not as tested knowledge, but as ideological statements to be debated, dismissed, or ignored.
Complicating this further is the perception—especially in marginalized communities and among populist movements—that science is elitist, remote, and self-reinforcing. In some cases, this view reflects a disconnect between scientific institutions and the public: policies made without meaningful public input, researchers perceived as distant from everyday concerns, and little accountability for missteps. But in other cases, this perception has been actively cultivated—amplified by media figures and political influencers who frame science as part of the same elite establishment ostensibly responsible for economic hardship, cultural displacement, and government overreach. The result is a kind of weaponized cynicism, where facts are filtered through suspicion, and expertise is treated as bias in disguise.
This erosion of trust is not merely a cultural phenomenon. It has tangible consequences for national capacity. When government agencies can no longer gather data or issue evidence-based guidance, their ability to protect the public—whether from pandemics, hurricanes, heatwaves, or emerging technologies—is compromised. When researchers fear political retaliation for pursuing inconvenient questions, entire fields of inquiry begin to vanish. And when science becomes a wedge issue, rather than a shared foundation for problem-solving, the country loses the ability to act in its own long-term interest.
It is important to recognize that doubt itself is not the problem. Doubt is essential to science. It drives experimentation, peer review, replication, and the gradual refinement of knowledge. A healthy scientific culture welcomes dissent—as long as that dissent is grounded in evidence and conducted in good faith.
But the doubt being propagated today is not that kind. It is not the skepticism of scientists testing theories, but the suspicion of political operatives seeking to confuse, delay, and discredit. In virtually every major campaign to politicize science—whether around climate change, tobacco, vaccines, or evolution—the most vocal dissenters have not been working scientists, but paid dissidents, public relations strategists, or industry consultants. Their job is not to propose better theories, but to undermine public understanding just enough to preserve the status quo. When they succeed, political leaders are given cover to ignore evidence and stall progress. And the public, deprived of clarity, loses its ability to assess risks and solutions.
Despite all this, the scientific enterprise in the United States is not yet lost. Across federal agencies, academic institutions, nonprofits, and private labs, scientists continue to do the work: collecting data, asking hard questions, and building a base of knowledge that is still the envy of the world. The system still functions—but it is under strain. And like any system, it requires maintenance: legal safeguards, political insulation, public investment, and civic understanding.
The goal of all this caretaking and fine-tuning isn’t perfection. It’s preservation. Science is not infallible, but it remains the only system we have for steadily approaching truth—a system that reshaped the arc of human civilization, lifting us from an age of superstition into an age of reason and evidence. This is its power—and its promise.
To weaken science for the sake of short-term politics is to trade truth for propaganda, and abandon a future built on knowledge and discovery for one ruled by superstition, distortion, and decline. What we are witnessing today in the United States is not a routine policy shift—it is a profound and dangerous unraveling that threatens the very fabric of modern civilization and must not be allowed to stand.
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This essay was edited on September 9th.
