Conservatives hate science. This is why they slashed budgets to science agencies, and put lunatic ideologues in charge of the NIH, NSF, and the environment, with the clear intent to cut the knees out from under science education and policy. Jessica Knurick is precisely right on this matter.
You can also see it in the staffing of all of these critical science organizations.
It’s like science got pushed off a cliff when Trump took office.
Perhaps you would like me to reassure you that once we throw the rascals out and elect responsible politicians who respect the role science has played in American prosperity, we’ll just hire them back. No, sorry, this isn’t like rehiring workers at the Amazon warehouse. A science hire is accompanied by a large investment in equipment and personnel. I’m at a small liberal arts college; when I was hired here, I was also offered tens of thousands of dollars in startup money to set up my lab the way I needed to be able to do my work. I was dirt cheap. I’ve known colleagues who were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even a few who got somewhere near a million dollars, to cover the ancillary costs of setting up a major lab.
It’s not as if a custom lab and technicians and instruments are sitting around waiting for someone with the expertise to do cutting edge research to show up. This stuff needs to be assembled at great cost to fill a need.
The people are also not generic tools you can swap in and out. We pay science staff peanuts for years, and we hang in there to do the work we love — we generally don’t have a massive financial cushion to weather heavy shifts in employment. Some of those laid off personnel are going to leave the country, looking for work in a nation that doesn’t disrespect science, while most are going to simply give up, get a job at that Amazon warehouse or switch to writing software. Their hearts are broken by the American science establishment. They’re not going to revisit this occupation shown to be willing to discard them if an orange moron gets elected or a con man with half his brain eaten by worms gets appointed.
That is a graph of disillusionment. It would take decades and a new generation to repair it, if we even had the will to bring science back. Given that the damage is being delivered right down to support for grade school education, don’t even count on a single generation being enough.
It’s not just a few people being let go. It’s the demolition of a cultural heritage of science.
The world changed at the end of WWII, when only the USA had both the resources and the will to invest in science. Every statistic now only looks back that far, and we NEVER look back to before then.
This is like that. Future generations will only look at science as post 2025. Our 80 year history of leadership will cease to be even a memory. The economic stimulus from it will not come again in the lifetime of any American adults. Sad.
Like so many other things, science takes a hit when capitalists try to run a state like it’s a corporation. If scientists were so smart, after all, they would be the CEOs, not scientists!
This will always be the advantage a country like China has, with a strong central authority that actually values scientific progress.
Mentioning China – when this communist power with > 1 million in concentration camps send taikonauts to the moon, it will signal the American Century is finally over.
In theory this could motivate another “Sputnik scare” and massive investments in science and education… only it will not.
.
Even the Republicans know China is not invading USA. And as the wealthy clique is insulated from the economic slump as China takes over, they have zero motivation to do anything, beyond inviting Chinese oligarchs for business meetings.
This is the standard conduct of the local elite towards colonisers, except the Chinese are too smart to physically annex anything this side the pacific.
The USA used to be the destination for the worlds top scientists. This is over and will never be reclaimed regardless of whether we restore funding and the infrastructure for science. This was a key piece of US soft power.
I still have my copy of Chris Mooney’s ‘The Republican War on Science’ and I’ll be getting it out and re-reading it.
Beholder, please reconsider on the strong central authorities. Remember Nazi Rassenkunde, Lysenkoism and the insistence that all science must conform with Marxist-Leninist Dialectical Materialism. Capitalist Britain was home to James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac and Charles Darwin and others. When strong central authorities impose their rigid ideologies Science has to come to heel.
Once again, I’ll repost the article on how important science is to the USA.
If you’ve seen it fine, don’t read it again.
It’s basically, the driver of our economy and civilization.
This is how you increase GDP per capital.
Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a year ago) position in the world.
Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we will just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
@2. Trump helping Troll Beholder (THTB) :
There is ZERO chance this would be happening under a Kamala Harris, Democratic party Presidency and Congress.
We all know that. Even if you, THTB, never have the decency to admit it and face it or be honest here.
This is what YOU along with the other Trumpists including via Stein & other third party spoilers and non-voters caused.
This is on you.
Because of your Trump helping efforts for years here especially election years attacking the ONLY actual alternative non-fascist party and its leaders whilst deliberately ignoring what the Fascist party was & what it threatened and meant. Every bit of what Trump has done, is doing and will still do. You cannot say you weren’t warned.
Any regrets now Trump enabler & bad faith troll?
Still think the two and only two choices were in your words “equally irredeemably evil?”
You have oceans of metaphorical blood on your hands. Oceans of blood, pain, misery, horror that will only ever get higher and deeper. The continuing impacts on all of our shared planet and species and world for the rest of time are incalculable and beyond any superlatives and emphasis.
There really are NO words to do it justice.
But I guess Silentbob will now cry for you and attack me for telling this perfectly clear truth and trying to hold you in the slightest way accountable.
@ 3. birgerjohansson : Except the consequences of Climate Inaction and Global Overheating aren’t going to respect any borders and are coming faster than any of us likely appreciate and really know.
The PRC is fucked there.
So are the rest of us.
So staggeringly badly.
What I just posted explains the critical role of science in the US’s dominant position in the world.
Science isn’t just an important driver, it is the most important driver of our society.
It isn’t optional, it is absolutely necessary.
The tl;dr version.
.1. US GDP per capita has increased about 9-fold in the last century.
That is income and wealth in other words.
.2. 85% of this increase is explained by advances in science.
.3. The link between science spending and progress and per capita GDP is simple.
Advances in science and technology are about the only way to increase productivity, i.e. output per worker.
Just increasing the number of workers doesn’t do anything. Output increases but output per worker stays the same.
By attacking science, Trump and the GOP will eventually wreck the USA.
In won’t happen all at once, but the USA will gradually just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
You can already see it happening. China, a few decades ago, a basket case failed nation, now leads the USA in a lot of areas.
More really bad news.
Thank you, Trump.
Thank you, Idiot Republicans.
Thank you, media owners who paved the way.
.
“We Just Crossed the Debt Death Spiral | 128% Debt-to-GDP and 2-5 Years Until Collapse ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=_EjnkbBZiWM
What’s even more worrisome is the effect this will have a decade to a decade and a half from now — just beyond the horizon for what might be foreseeable (in detail) as “immediate scientific needs.” By suppressing the current research programs, we’re also suppressing the postdocs, the grad students, the ambitions of advanced undergrads… so they either won’t be there or will be lower on the learning curve themselves at precisely the time they’d be not setting up their own labs, but moving out of the setup phase into being “highly productive,” established, respected scholars ready to be mentors to yet the next generation.
tl;dr Infrastructure — especially infrastructure of people — takes time, and when it fails or isn’t maintained it leaves obvious-to-those-paying-attention but seldom-acknowledged chasms into which other things can fall.
Maybe if we had more science and better science/math education, whoever made that graph might’ve noticed the figures on the north side of that chart are all somehow lopped off to single digits.
It’s like science got pushed off a cliff when Trump took office.
??? Unless I totally misread that chart, it shows all the really heavy cuts happened in the last year of the Biden administration (or in the budget for the year before, taking effect in ’24).
@12, yes the top two values on the ordinate should be 10 and 15, not 0 and 5. Also I was at first confused by the labels on the abscissa. The last value represents the changes for 2025 from the previous year 2024, thus 2024 staffing minus 2025 staffing.
As PZ notes in the OP, it takes many years and decades to set up World Class science programs.
And you can destroy a world class science program in a few months.
I’ve seen this myself, up close.
I was once involved with a world class biomedical/biotech company.
They had some really good scientists, did pioneering work, went public on NASDAQ, and started making a lot of money.
At this point, the BOD hired a new CEO and executive staff who were business type persons.
They had zero knowledge of how to run a Hi Tech science based company.
They looked around and noticed all the scientific staff were dressed in tennis shoes and T shirts. And cost a lot of money in salary and benefits.
Since they couldn’t understand what those young people wearing glasses were doing, they started to fire them all, in order of the best and brightest first.
Nothing happened.
Literally, nothing happened.
The world class research just stopped and product innovation and development also stopped.
A year later, the company was heading towards bankruptcy.
The BOD met in emergency session, fired the entire CEO staff for cause, and hired a scientist as CEO to…rebuild the research departments.
It took years, but they were eventually able to get the research departments up and running.
They never got back to what they were and were sold off to a mega-corporation for an OK but not great price.
Some of those weird people in tennis shoes and T shirts that they fired, went on to form at and work at other companies that became even more successful.
@13; It is a confusing chart. Each point is a percentage change from the previous year. So label the major ticks on the x-axis from 2016 to 2025 as end points for those years and the values as the %change from the previous year end. Then every point above the zero represents an increase in personnel during that year and every point below zero represents a decrease in personnel for that year. So everyone but NOAA (no change) had an increase in 2024 and everyone had a large decrease in 2025.
@5 submoron
I reconsidered, and I came to a similar conclusion. Strong centrally-planned economies can quickly allocate resources where they are needed and begin to address global problems. The Western liberal societies’ complete failure to mitigate global warming should be noted because it suggested a course of action antithetical to the rigid ideology of the free market and market-based solutions.
@7 StevoR
You’re quoting something I haven’t said, again.
[Movie Trailer] Sam Raimi’s Send Help
/This was an accountant who was underestimated, by a bro CEO who recently inherited the company to preen and run it into the ground, firing competant people. She’d studied survival as a hobby.
It’s true: science in America is dead, and it isn’t coming back.
Jerry Coyne got what he was actively working to acheive: the end of DEI in STEM (because it would destroy merit to admit POC and women, not to mention the gays and transes!)
It’s rather like curing a patient’s headache by cutting their throat, but Coyne got what he wished for.
Hope it was worth it.
If America was still an advanced rational sophisticated western nation that staffing graph would be published in every media outlet and Republicans would never govern again. Sadly it’s not.
History has shown many times that strong central authoritarianism can be a bad thing. One example is 1930s Soviet agricultural policy.
Another more pertinent example of strong central authoritarianism being a bad thing is China’s purge of intellectuals during their Cultural Revolution.
Not to mention the Khmer Rouge being so anti-intellectual that they executed people for wearing glasses, the Catholic Church suppressing heliocentrism, and so on and so forth. But it’s not as simple as “authoritarianism is bad for science” or vice versa. The Soviet Union destroyed agricultural science under Lysenko at the same time as its space program was beating NASA to every milestone up to the Moon landings.
It’s almost as if some of our commentariat cannot dissuade themselves from sophomoric thinking even when it leads them to ahistorical justifications for contemporary oppressive regimes.
This is a disaster. I also expect a lot of science interested folks will start looking at the corporate side of things and work on getting into part of the world. That can be be good, it was my world and I ended up with a great, interesting job, a good and honest company, and actually did some pure research. But the job I had before that was all about money and maximizing the amount of goods out the door per production dollar. Oh yeah, and hiding the health risks to workers and those who lived nearby.
@ 17 Lying Bad Faith Trump Helping troll :
Yes you did you disgusting lying piece of toxic waste scraped off a shoe & here are the receipts.
For those who somehow missed it the history here is that consistently asked on this thread like here when asked by #44 badland :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/01/06/a-stupid-person-is-in-control-of-the-us/#comment-2288850
You, Trumpist troll & voter “beholder” trolled, squirmed and eventually sneakily snuck off to the Infinite thread where ya finally answered the question of who you thought was better Kamala or Trump with your off-topic #397 :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-1/#comment-2288948
Every word of which with the exception of is utter bullshit. As I proved and the troll typically failed to respond to with my #419 downthread there.
Kamala Harris is NOT a “Killer” and is a far better human being and had far better policies than Far Worse & More Genocides Trump.
Netanyahu committed – is still committing thanks to you – genocide NOT Biden and certainly NOT Kamala.
Trump is a convicted felon, a traitor responsible for Jan 6th 2020, a self-confessed sexual abuser and court-proven rapist, almost certainly a child rapist too who is in the Epstein files.
By this stage we know who and what Trump is and that Kamala is none of those things is a good human being who actually stated that she felt for the Palestinians suffering and wanted a reasonable two state solution which was Democratic party policy.
To say they are both as “irredeemably evil” is itself evil.
To see no effective difference between them supposedly due to the one Gaza issue – which you then show you care not a whit for yourself after using as an excuse THTB – shows staggering ethical incompetence and apathy or, much more probably, malicious bad faith.
Trump helping Disingenuous troll beholder here is also very probably an actual Trumpist given they have consistently failed to call Trump out or attack him ever & have run away like the disingenuous coward that they are when confronted so many times like here by #29 vucodlak here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/01/15/remember-when-democrats-were-criticizing-people-for-calling-republicans-nazis/comment-page-1/#comment-2290111
The Trumpist troll “beholder” does indeed give off a strong nazi stench. They never seem to show any sign of honesty or integrity, never apologise, reject evidence, lie even about their own words and I really think they have no place on this blog although yes, I know that’s PZ Myers call.
PS. Netanyahu has recently been blaming Biden’s withholding weapons from the IDF as hurting Israel and said it has cost IDF soldiers lives. He has praised Trump for removing those restrictions. Biden – pleaded for restraint, argued with and criticised Netanyahu, sanctioned Israeli settler extremists and, yes, withheld some weapons.
Trump as we know is the most anti-Palestinian POTUS ever – & used the very word “Palestinian” as an insult against Biden.
So just on Gaza alone, Biden would’ve been a better ethical choice had he been the candidate – which, of course, he was not. But obvs Gaza was not the only issue. There’s Ukraine, Global Overheating and, oh yeah, the whole being a literal demented fascist & destroying the USoA’s Democracy thing FFS!
Oh and science funding now with the truth I stated already in #7 :
There is ZERO chance these massive science cuts would be happening under a Kamala Harris Presidency.
On Netanyahu blaming Biden for IDF deaths due to withholding weapons :
Source : https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/netanyahu-blames-biden-era-arms-embargo-israel-idf-soldiers-deaths-gaza-glbs-2858761-2026-01-28
Among many other places.
Thanks StevoR, I don’t frequent the infinite thread and missed that.
So beholder the wanker thinks Trump and Harris are both irredeemably evil eh? Harris would also appoint Kennedy to head HHS, destroy USAID, tear down the East Wing for a “privately-funded” ballroom, shriek testerically about Woke and DEI, threaten Canada, try to destroy NATO, extort law firms and universities, increase ICE funding by tens of billions, bomb Venezuela and steal their oil, bomb Iraq, bomb Yemen, bomb Iran, bomb Nigeria, bomb Somalia, bomb Syria, impose tariffs on every country on earth except Russia, pardon the Jan 6 rioters, weaponise the DoJ, appoint Patel, appoint Pirro, appoint Hegseth, appoint Bondi, appoint Lutnik, appoint McMahon, accept a $400m jet as a bribe, release a memecoin, and accept bribes for pardons? Harris is as irredeemably evil as Trump?
Hey beholder, you’re fucking stupid is what you are.
@25 StevoR
Good job, you went back and found my quote. I can tell you didn’t read it, though, because you overlooked the part you falsely claimed was in my words:
An additional qualifier which is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your chosen rant.
So, people can be more or less “irredeemably evil”?
PZ doesn’t mention some of the other things the US administration is doing to kill science in the US:
The purge of non-US grad students is cutting down on the number of scientists in training, and there experience will discourage other non-US STEM students from coming to the US.
It’s attacking universities that do research in areas and directions that don’t fit in with the Conservatives’ ideological biases.
Before WWII, Germany had probably the best research institutions in the world. The Nazis purged and drove away the best scientists, and research had to fit in with the Nazi’s ideology and prejudices. And any good people that remained after the war left because there was no funding available. Germany still hasn’t recovered from that.
Someone with a large looming shadow over public health via RFK Jr, Peter Duesberg, has croaked:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-01-29/farewell-to-peter-duesberg-godfather-of-scientific-disinformation
@ 28. Trump helping Troll “Beholder” : “@25 StevoR – Good job, you went back and found my quote…”
Yes, the one that shows you lied yet again here and are irredeemably wilfully ignorant / maliciously lying.
No. I thoroughly deconstructed every bit of your bullshit there and in my previous response here :
Source : https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-1/#comment-2289010
Your slimy, squirming, weaselly attempt to avoid admitting that supporting and voting for Kamala Harris was the only ethical choice in order to stop Trump’s Fascism and your refusal to face up to, acknowledge and apologise for your actions over years leading up to the final USoA – and even continuing now – is noted.
You still have yet another opportunity I guess to simply come out and admit how catastrophically wrong you were and that Kamala Harris was the ONLY ethical choice. I doubt you’ll take it.
PS. Note that although the Trump Helping Disingenuous Troll here claims he thinks Trump is also as or even kinda sorta maybe more “..irredeemably evil..” than Kamala, he has spent years here trying to help Trump and the Fascist party and hurt Kamala and the Democratic party.
Priorities and go figure huh?
Question – just how stupid does “beholder” think the rest of us are?
Oh and thinking questions Trumpist troll “beholder” still hasn’t answered these questions :
Slightly modified to fix typois and fit the thread here.
Strangely enough, scientific research is very popular among the US public.
It is 84%.
The people of the USA don’t agree with the current thugs that rule over us.
@ ^ raven : The will of the People..
Yet the unrep[resnetative -literally not representing what the majority of the American People want – rulers of the People.
One. Huge. Disconnect.
Difference. Contrast.
Somehow.
Democracy lost.
Now what?