News compilation by the editors of The Multiplural World, Jan 16, 2026
Enclosed are three items in this news compilation, with full texts:
* Donald Trump and Elon Musk put science on the chopping block in 2025, commentary by Chelsea Whyte, in New Scientist (UK weekly), Dec 10, 2025 (year-end, print issue of Dec 13-26, 2025, #3573/4)
* Comment by the editors of The Multiplural World, Jan 16, 2026
* Science still produced many wonders in 2025 despite being under siege, editorial by New Scientist, Dec 10, 2026 (year-end, print issue of Dec 13-26, 2025, #3573/4)
Donald Trump and Elon Musk put science on the chopping block in 2025
Commentary by Chelsea Whyte, in New Scientist (UK weekly), Dec 10, 2025 (year-end, print issue of Dec 13-26, 2025, #3573/4)
One of the most enduring images of 2025 is the picture of billionaire Elon Musk, at the time serving as a special adviser to the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, wielding a shiny, red chainsaw as he crowed about cuts to the U.S. federal government. It was a heavy-handed metaphor for the onslaught to come, and from cancelled space missions to a rejection of vital global warming and public health programmes, science felt the chop.
Trump’s dismantling of nearly a century of U.S. leadership in the sciences was swift, and the effects may endure far longer than we can predict. It began in a frenzy – just one week after Trump was inaugurated in January 2026, he signed an order to temporarily halt grants and loans made by U.S. federal agencies. This disrupted or terminated thousands of grants overseen by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the largest funders of biomedical research in the world, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to Grant Witness, a website tracking federal grant funding changes under Trump, the cut in grants from the NIH and NSF amount to around $3 billion altogether.
In the months that followed, Musk led an independent task force called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on a mission to slash government spending. DOGE’s targets fell across the U.S. government, but many of its decisions affected scientists. There were job cuts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), among many others. And the hits keep coming. As recently as October, the Trump administration revealed that it planned deep cuts at the science centres of the U.S. Geological Survey, which monitor the health of U.S. agricultural and natural resources, and the National Park Service, which oversees federally protected land that serves as a refuge for animals and a living laboratory for biologists and ecologists.
It all adds up to one of the most drastic policy shifts of the Trump era. Since the second world war, the U.S. has invested in scientific pursuits as a path towards progress and economic prosperity. It was an idea set out by the leader of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the 1940s, a predecessor to the NSF. This framework, called the “endless frontier”, was a pioneering approach to becoming a global leader in research and development of key technologies that changed the world.
Trump has brought that crashing down. Not only has he dismantled much of the research apparatus of the federal government, but his administration has also put pressure on universities to align their teaching and research with U.S. government priorities. And he has gone even further in his repudiation of science. To no one’s surprise, Trump began the process of removing the U.S. from the world’s premiere climate deal, the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming emissions, as soon as he took office. Later in the year, speaking at the United Nations, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and labelled renewable energy sources such as wind and solar “a scam”.
Not content with these proclamations, the Trump administration has also axed or undermined key climate databases and reports previously created by the U.S. government. With fewer staff at many of the science-related agencies, monthly climate reporting calls at NOAA have been cancelled, for instance, and key reports such as the U.S. National Climate Assessment have been terminated. The employees who are left are also toeing the Trump line: for example, NOAA scientists refused to link warming weather to climate change earlier this year, to the shock of independent climate researchers.
U.S. public health data has also been gutted. The scientists running the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a crucial tracker for drug use, addiction and mental health in the U.S., were fired in April. A few months later, the government laid off employees at the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and ended reports that monitor food insecurity throughout the country, which help allocate funding for food assistance. Most recently, 100 positions at the National Center for Health Statistics were eliminated, including most of the staff who run the National Vital Statistics System, which tracks births and deaths in the U.S. and monitors causes of deaths and maternal mortality. The National Death Index was also cut, eliminating a key source of information for public health researchers as well as those involved in long-term studies across agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Health policy has become particularly chaotic and evidence-free thanks to Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Kennedy, a long-time vaccine sceptic, has overseen the layoff of more than 10,000 people at the agency, and often clashed with public health officials, inciting a spate of resignations. He is the driving force behind the dangerous – and thoroughly debunked – claim that vaccines contribute to autism and even went so far as to promote an unfounded assertion that Tylenol (paracetamol) taken during pregnancy causes the condition. In June, Kennedy bypassed standard protocols and announced that the CDC would no longer recommend covid-19 vaccines for children and pregnant people. His tenure as head of HHS has made clear that the U.S. anti-vaccine movement is now firmly embedded in the highest ranks of government and has eroded what little trust Americans had in the country’s public health agencies in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.
Under Trump, the U.S. is also turning away from its leadership in space. The president’s budget request, delivered in May but still not signed into law, lays out a plan to cut 47 per cent of NASA’s science budget and eliminate dozens of missions, including some spacecraft and telescopes that have already been built or launched. Samples from Mars already collected by the Perseverance rover would never be returned to Earth. The DAVINCI probe, planned to be the first to enter the clouds of Venus in half a century, would never get off the ground. The OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft, which is already on its way to the asteroid Apophis, would be left to fly by it without learning what we can about asteroids on potential collision courses with Earth. NASA’s leadership has also been in turmoil, with the head of the U.S. transportation agency acting as administrator while Trump has nominated, rescinded his nomination and then re-nominated the billionaire Jared Isaacman for the role. A leaked manifesto written by Isaacman suggests that if confirmed as head of NASA, he would oversee a massive outsourcing of NASA science and space activity to private industry.
This isn’t the only area where the private industry has gained power under the Trump administration. Big tech has cozied up to the president, with a parade of billionaire executives attending his inauguration, bringing him lavish personalised gifts and using their firms to fund the president’s outlandish addition to the White House, a $300 million ballroom. They may be ingratiating themselves to the man who could help them manoeuvre around antitrust litigation, they may be hoping to avoid the worst of Trump’s reckless tariffs or they may simply enjoy the spoils of environmental regulation rollbacks that could allow for the building of massive data centres to fuel their AI products.
After almost a year of the second Trump administration, it is still impossible to say exactly how science will fare, not least because the 2026 federal budget is yet to be fully approved by Congress. But even if not all of Trump’s proposed cuts go through, the haphazard and at times hostile manner with which the entire administration has approached science and the people who do it will probably lead to more confusion, more scientists choosing to leave the U.S. and less funding for work critical to the health and well-being of people and the planet. The end of the endless frontier has diminished the U.S.’s global standing, and its effects will reverberate for many years or even decades to come.
Commentary by the editors of The Multiplural World, Jan 16, 2026
New Scientist is the English-language world’s pre-eminent, weekly science magazine. Yet, the magazine routinely uses the non-scientific term ‘climate change’ to describe the ongoing and worsening global warming emergency. This leads to absurd dances in language, such as the phrase used in the above commentary: ‘linking warming weather to climate change’. That’s like saying ‘drowning is linked to water’ or ‘death is linked to no longer living’. This is environmental science in the 21st century?
‘Climate change’ is one of the nine planetary boundaries what are threatened by global warming, as caused by expansionist capitalism (see image). The linguistic obfuscation of global warming is yet another sign of the harrowing regression from ecological science which even the proponents of science are undertaking as the imperialist countries of the world, all of them, deepen a war drive and vastly increase their burning of fossil fuels.
The imperialists, all of them, are a death cult, engaged in suicidal actions intended to salvage their crumbling capitalist order. They know no better. The liberal environmental movement, including its ‘ecosocialist’ component, has no answers to this threat to human civilization other than whining and complaining. That’s because it fears the political and personal consequences of standing up to the imperialist war threats against Russia and China, and because it has long rejected the science of the post-growth (‘degrowth’) philosophy and strategy for countering the global warming emergency (as caused by the expansionist capitalist order).
Science still produced many wonders in 2025 despite being under siege
Editorial by New Scientist, Dec 10, 2026 (year-end, print issue of Dec 13-26, 2025, #3573/4)
Though there were setbacks on climate change and funding for science this year, there was still plenty of amazing discoveries
From vaccine sceptics at the heart of the U.S. government to the continued global paralysis when it comes to climate action, science has been under siege in 2025. Those who believe in rationality and evidence must continue to fight back against the encroaching darkness – as we hope you agree New Scientist is doing – but also seek out the whimsy and wonder that comes from exploring the universe and everything in it.
Before we break out the party hats for the delightful celebration of science contained here in our double holiday issue, it is worth reflecting on the threats we science-minded folk are facing. Wherever you turn, there are shocking examples of science being misused and abused this past year.
The gutting of U.S. science under President Donald Trump cannot be ignored, even if you don’t live there (see: Donald Trump and Elon Musk put science on the chopping block in 2025). For decades, the U.S. has been one of the biggest funders of science in the world, to the great benefit of both the U.S. itself and everyone else. That all changed this year. By taking an axe (or in the case of Elon Musk, taking a chainsaw) to U.S. science, countless discoveries will go unmade, drugs will go untested and technologies will go undeveloped, leaving us all the poorer.
Of course, governments aren’t the only source of funding, but two stories from this year demonstrate the danger of leaving science at the whim of commercial interests. Regular readers of New Scientist will be familiar with Colossal Biosciences, a U.S. company that claims to be in the business of “de-extinction” (see, De-extinction was big news in 2025 – but didn’t live up to the hype). Its most notable, or perhaps notorious, output this year were three genetically modified grey wolves named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. Colossal claimed that these were the first living dire wolves since the species went extinct 10,000 years ago, a claim widely trumpeted by the world’s media despite the protestations of independent scientists. In the battle of truth versus spectacle, spectacle seemed to take the upper hand.
A similar tale played out in November with the broadcast of the UK documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a dictator. There is no disputing that the scientists involved in the series have successfully identified and sequenced the Nazi dictator’s genome, but the sensationalist interpretation of those results, such as claims that he may have had schizophrenia or been autistic, leaves much to be desired. While the documentary and its accompanying lurid headlines have come and gone, we still await the publication of a scientific paper detailing the work, allowing for a true assessment of the researchers’ claims.
One area where we are definitely not waiting for the science is in the realm of climate [sic] action. Indeed, science and public policy have been perfectly aligned for the past decade, since nations signed the Paris Agreement pledging to keep global warming below 1.5°C. The one small problem is that we haven’t actually done that.
The Paris Agreement had a “ratchet” mechanism designed to ensure we stay on track by asking countries to make new pledges on climate action [sic] every five years. Around 95 per cent of countries failed to do so by the deadline in February this year, and only about 60 per cent managed it in time for the COP30 climate summit, held in November 2025 in Belém, Brazil.
The backsliding didn’t stop there. In our end-of-year leader for 2024, we called on the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “to take to the stage and publicly admit the failure of the COP process to date, flanked by unsmiling world leaders with a clear plan to do better”. Instead, countries couldn’t even agree to include the phrase “fossil fuels” in the final COP30 text.
Ok, ok, that’s enough doom and gloom – it is the holidays, after all, so let’s have some fun. Another major story of 2025 was the 100-year anniversary of quantum mechanics, which we covered extensively, including in an April special issue. To cap the year off, we have the news that a thought experiment dreamed up by Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr has finally been realised (see, Quantum experiment settles a century-old row between Einstein and Bohr). It shows that, yes, quantum mechanics really is that weird.
Other good-news stories from 2025 included the continued success of GLP-1 drugs in treating a range of conditions, not just aiding weight loss (see: The potential of GLP-1 drugs to transform medicine exploded in 2025), and – perhaps most whimsically of all – the people who saw a brand-new colour (see: People saw a new colour for the first time in 2025).
Elsewhere in this issue, you will find an incredible smorgasbord to stuff your mind along with your stomach this holiday season. For a new twist on Charles Dickens, see: How 3 imaginary physics demons tore up the laws of nature for the story of three demons that have been haunting physicists. As you catch your breath from a busy year, consider a new approach to meditation for the time-poor (see: Too busy to meditate? Microdosing mindfulness has big health benefits). To learn about what may be the best job in science, visit the Touch and Tickle lab (see: What the evolution of tickling tells us about being human. And finally, why not wash it all down with the world’s oldest beer (see: Did ancient humans start farming so they could drink more beer??)
As we turn to 2026 and the global challenges ahead, let us remember just how powerful and wonderful science can be. Despite the sceptics and the naysayers, there is no better way of making sense of the world and making the world a better place than scientific inquiry and the application of knowledge it brings. While it may take time to see results – like the hundred-year gap between Einstein and Bohr’s debate and the resulting experiment – science is here to serve, save and delight us all.
Here’s to better luck – or at least a more beneficial draw from a random probability distribution – next year.
