By Steve Macek
Contemporary liberal democracies such as the United States depend on more than free elections and stable, functioning economies. They also rely on what are sometimes called epistemic institutions, organizations such as universities, news outlets, scientific associations, and government research agencies whose main purpose is to discover truth and make reliable knowledge public.
Over the years, such institutions—and the people who run them—have clashed with politicians and corporate leaders when those elites attempt to suppress inconvenient truths. On occasion, epistemic institutions have been hampered by internal organizational struggles or their own conflicts of interest. Yet, until very recently, overt political tampering with the operation of universities, independent research agencies, scientific organizations, and the like in this country has been the exception rather than the rule. After all, effective government policy, the fair adjudication of legal disputes, protection of public health, and even the day-to-day operations of businesses of various kinds are all predicated on institutions such as these functioning with a substantial degree of autonomy from partisan political interference and on the fact that they can be counted on to produce consistently trustworthy information and sound scientific insights.
Unfortunately, since Donald Trump returned to office in January, his administration has worked systematically to destroy or disable the epistemic institutions upon which we all rely to understand our society, the natural world, and the problems facing us as a nation.
The Assault on Universities
Conservative activists and Republican elected officials have long been hostile to colleges and universities, often framing them as hotbeds of liberalism run wild. Denunciations of the supposedly homogeneous left-wing culture that prevails on college campuses have been a staple of GOP rhetoric for decades. Think, for instance, of George H.W. Bush’s 1991 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, condemning “political correctness” in academia or the more recent obsession of GOP lawmakers with the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in both K-12 and higher ed classrooms.
During the recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump claimed that “academics” are “obsessed with indoctrinating our youth” and that our colleges are “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” And back in 2021, now-Vice President J.D. Vance gave an address at the National Conservatism Conference titled, “The Universities are the Enemy,” in which he claimed that colleges spread “deceit and lies, not to the truth.”
Since taking office, Trump, Vance, and company have done everything in their power to undermine American higher education as it has existed for the past fifty or so years.
The administration has used baseless charges of antisemitism to force schools that were sites of 2024 pro-Palestine demonstrations, such as Columbia and Northwestern University, to pay massive monetary settlements to the government. Not only was Columbia required to pay the US Treasury $200 million, but it also agreed to immediately review its “portfolio of regional studies programs, starting immediately with those that teach about the Middle East and Israel,” thus forcing the university to effectively relinquish control over its own curriculum. This direct attack on academic freedom sets a chilling precedent for federal government control over what can be taught in college classrooms.
Trump has also issued a series of executive orders designed to combat the so-called “woke” culture he and his allies imagine permeates higher education. For instance, his January 25, 2025, order on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion called for the end of all “DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions); all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs, ‘equity-related’ grants or contracts” at any institution receiving federal funds, including colleges and universities. The Department of Education subsequently told schools to stop considering race as a factor in college admission decisions. It also opened investigations into forty-five universities—including Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin—for partnering with the Ph.D. Project, a group whose mission is to diversify the ranks of business faculty across the country, because it operates programs explicitly designed to support minority graduate students.
And, of course, Trump and his minions have launched countless ideologically motivated attacks on individual students and faculty during the past year. Following the September 10 assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a Trump confidant and the founder of Turning Point USA, a group that specializes in targeting and harassing professors with left-leaning politics, several professors were either fired or suspended for their public comments about the killing, often at the urging of conservative politicians and commentators. At Emory University, a cancer researcher was fired for posting “good riddance” on social media in response to Kirk’s murder. Meanwhile, Florida Atlantic University suspended three professors— art history professor Karen Leader, English professor Kate Polak, and finance professor Rebel Cole—for provocative comments made online about the assassination; Leader and Polak were later allowed to return to work.
Slashing Funds for Scientific and Medical Research
Even more alarming, the Trump administration has also been systematically cutting funding for medical and scientific research it deems incompatible with its reactionary ideology. According to a November 18 analysis by Science News, this year more than 3,800 research grants totaling some $3 billion from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation were “terminated or frozen as part of the Trump administration’s effort to realign funding priorities.” In March, for instance, it canceled sixty-eight grants focused on LGBTQ+ health—many dealing with HIV/AIDS or suicide prevention—previously awarded to forty-six different schools. These cuts put lives at risk, particularly among LGBTQ+ youth already facing elevated rates of mental health crises and among people living with HIV.
Many of the research projects that the Trump administration defunded were going to be led by women or people of color. Indeed, a May report by Science found that “58% of the grants canceled to date were led by women, although only 34% of the total pool of active NSF grants have women as [Principal Investigators]” and observed that Black Principal Investigators “held 17% of the canceled grants, although they only make up 4% of the total NSF pool of active grants.” This targeting of research by women and people of color is hardly coincidental. It is of a piece with the Trump administration’s broader effort to exclude the voices and perspectives of the historically disempowered from public life.
Dismantling Government Research Agencies
While there has been a modicum of corporate media coverage devoted to the Trump administration’s assault on universities and university-based research, considerably less attention has been paid to the administration’s dismantling of government-sponsored research agencies and its suppression of government-generated data that is vital for scholarship in fields like education, climatology, and medicine.
For instance, in February, the Department of Education halted one hundred research contracts worth more than $1 billion. Among other things, those contracts helped fund ten Regional Education Laboratories designed to develop and share innovations in K-12 education with state departments of education across the country. The money also supported ongoing research focused on matters such as state-level literacy and math skills programs, the educational outcomes of disabled students, and the gathering of demographic data about students, “essential for administering the highly regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal test that tracks reading and math achievement.” In March, the DOE dismissed nearly half of its employees, “including almost 90 percent of staffers assigned to the research and statistics division.” By June, the Department was unable to issue its Congress-mandated “Condition of Education Report” because it lacked the necessary data.
At one government agency after another, crucial surveys and data gathering efforts have been summarily terminated.
In May, Tom Perkins of The Guardian reported that the Trump administration had shuttered twenty-five of the US Geological Service’s water science centers that “monitor US waters for flooding and drought, and manage supply levels to ensure communities don’t run out of water.” Just five months earlier, the USGS released a report showing that twenty-seven million Americans live in areas with “a high degree of local water stress.” The closure of so many research centers will make collecting accurate data on water access impossible. and studies revealing the scale of US water stress may no longer be possible.
The US Department of Agriculture in September announced that it would end its long-running food insecurity survey, asserting that studies based on the survey were “redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous” and “do nothing more than fear monger.” This Orwellian maneuver eliminates the very data needed to document hunger in America, making it much easier for Trump to boast that his administration has eradicated poverty and hunger. At the same time, millions will likely continue to struggle to feed their families.
The Trump administration recently proposed drastic cuts to the budget for climate-related research and has already fired, or plans to lay off, hundreds of federal climate scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and at NASA. According to one estimate, the administration spent “nearly $100 million, or 14% less, on the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) than the level mandated by Congress” for 2025, with even deeper cuts planned for 2026.
The Suppression of Government Data
Almost as disturbing as the Trump administration’s closing of government research agencies and the defunding of research have been its efforts to hide or alter scientific data that the government has already collected and already published.
According to 404 Media, in just the three weeks following Trump’s second inauguration, the administration removed more than 2,000 datasets from data.gov, the central repository of US government data online.
For instance, as the National Security Archive explained in a February 6 post, the Biden Administration had created “the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a public web tool which allowed users to locate communities in the U.S. facing marginalization and disproportionate climate and pollution impacts.” Yet by February, the Trump administration had already removed CEJST from White House webpages. The Department of State’s webpage on “Climate Crisis” was also deleted, and the USDA nixed all webpages referencing “climate crisis,” including the US Forestry Service’s “Climate Change Resource Center.”
In a September 30 update on the Trump administration’s ongoing “dismantling of access to public information,” the National Security Archive pointed out that the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) webpage, which hosted all of the government’s quadrennially published National Climate Assessments (NCAs), had since been shut down. Several National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) datasets have been taken offline, as has a database that tracked the mounting number of $1 billion climate disasters. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense “erased important climate datasets and resources from public view on its own initiative.”
Why Exactly Is This Happening?
Like the Trump administration’s well-documented campaign against the press, the aim of these attacks on our most critical epistemic institutions is fairly clear: to stifle uncomfortable truths and embarrassing facts that threaten to expose Donald Trump’s lies about, among other things, the US-supported Israeli war on Gaza and Palestinians, climate change, race relations, gender inequality, the state of American education, hunger, and so on.
It is difficult to maintain that Republican policies are “making America great again” when millions of Americans are being threatened by perfectly avoidable climate and water calamities or having their educations hampered by persistent gender and racial inequalities. The solution for Trump and his supporters is not to admit that his policies on these and other issues are seriously misguided but, instead, to bash and weaken the epistemic institutions that document the carnage those policies are causing.
There’s more at stake here than Trump’s ability to spin and fabricate without fear of contradiction or challenge. The assault on epistemic institutions serves the interests of powerful corporations and wealthy elites who benefit from public ignorance about climate change, worker exploitation, environmental racism, corporate malfeasance, and crimes against humanity committed by our allies. By impairing our ability to know what’s happening in our country and our world, the Trump administration is creating the conditions for unchecked corporate power, growing immiseration, and rampant environmental destruction.
Countering the war on epistemic institutions will require more than simply filing lawsuit after lawsuit—although, in September, a Harvard lawsuit was victorious in forcing the Trump administration to restore $2.3 billion in research funding for the university that had been frozen. After all, the federal courts themselves are increasingly under the control of right-wing zealots eager to remove constitutional guardrails on the President’s executive powers.
What we need, ultimately, is a broad movement composed not just of academics and scientists but also of K-12 teachers, students, union workers, and social justice activists who are willing to take to the streets to protest what the Trump administration is doing, who will defy its censorship by sharing widely the data the administration wants to make disappear, and who will rally together to protect vulnerable faculty, students, and researchers.
Encouragingly, there’s a hunger in higher ed and beyond for such a movement, and in big and small ways, it is beginning to take shape.
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