FORMS OF GOVERNANCE

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Trump Is Winning the Race to the Bottom


Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

David Brooks
By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Confidence. Some people have more of it and some people have less. Confident people have what psychologists call a strong internal locus of control. They believe they have the resources to control their own destiny. They have a bias toward action. They venture into the future.

When it comes to confidence, some nations have it and some don’t. Some nations once had it but then lost it. Last week on his blog, “Marginal Revolution,” Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason economist, asked us to compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.

In the 1950s, American intelligence suggested that the Soviet Union was leapfrogging U.S. capabilities across a range of military technologies. Then on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

Americans were shocked but responded with confidence. Within a year the United States had created NASA and A.R.P.A. (later DARPA), the research agency that among other things helped create the internet. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most important education reforms of the 20th century, which improved training, especially in math, science and foreign languages. The National Science Foundation budget tripled. The Department of Defense vastly increased spending on research and development. Within a few years total research and development spending across many agencies zoomed up to nearly 12 percent of the entire federal budget. (It’s about 3 percent today.)

America’s leaders understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one. It’s who can out-innovate whom. So they fought the Soviet threat with education, with the goal of maximizing talent on our side.

“One reason the U.S. economy had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one,” the historian Hal Brands writes in his book “The Twilight Struggle.” Federal support for academic research rose to $1.45 billion in 1970 from $254 million in 1958. Earlier in that century, American universities lagged behind their “best” European peers, Brands observes; by the end of the Cold War, they dominated the globe.

Today we are in a second Cold War. For the first couple of decades it wasn’t clear whether China was a rival or a friend, but now it’s pretty clear that China is more a rival than a friend. As the scholar Robert D. Atkinson argued in The Times this year, for the Chinese regime, the desire to make money is secondary. “Its primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way for China to become the world’s pre-eminent power,” he wrote.

China is a country that, according a 2024 House committee inquiry, was directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of fentanyl materials, even though drug overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans 18 to 44.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has moved — confidently — to seize the future, especially in the realm of innovation and ideas. China’s total research and development funding has grown 16-fold since 2000. Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres. In 2003, Chinese scholars produced very few broadly cited research papers. Now they produce more “high impact” research papers than Americans do, and according to The Economist, they absolutely dominate research in the following fields: materials science, chemistry, engineering, computer science, the environment and ecology, agricultural science, physics and math.

These achievements of course lead directly to China’s advantages across a range of high-tech industries. It’s not just high-tech manufacturing of things like electric vehicles, drones and solar panels. It’s high-tech everything. In the years between 2003 and 2007, according to a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the United States led the way in 60 of 64 frontier technologies — stretching across sectors such as defense, space, energy, the environment, computing and biotech. By the period between 2019 and 2023, the Chinese led among 57 of those 64 key technologies, while the United States led in only seven.

The Chinese gains in biotech are startling. In 2015 Chinese drugmakers accounted for just under 6 percent of the innovative drugs under development in the world. Ten years later, Chinese drugmakers are nearly at parity with American ones.

Then along came A.I. Americans overall are fearful about it. Last year, the polling organization Ipsos asked people from 32 countries if they were excited for the A.I. future or nervous about it. Americans are among the most nervous people in the world. The countries most excited by the prospect of that future? China, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand. The fact is that nobody knows what the A.I. future holds; people’s projections about it mostly reflect their emotional states. Americans used to be the youthful optimists of the globe. Not right now.

Still, America has its big tech companies filled with bright young things charging into the future, so you’d think our lead would be secure. But over the past year, Chinese firms like Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent have produced A.I. models whose quality is nearly equal to that of American models. DeepSeek has produced a model that comes in at a fraction of the cost of American ones. In A.I., as in military and economic might generally, the United States retains a lead, but China has a lot of momentum.

The A.I. race is perhaps the most crucial one, because it will presumably be the dominant technology of the next several decades. “The No. 1 factor that will define whether the U.S. or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told a congressional hearing. “Whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant.”

So how is America responding to the greatest challenge of Cold War II? With huge increases in research? By infusing money into schools and universities that train young minds and produce new ideas? We’re doing the exact opposite. Today’s leaders don’t seem to understand what the Chinese clearly understand — that the future will be dominated by the country that makes the most of its talent. On his blog, Tabarrok gets it about right: “The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat.”

Populists are anti-intellectual. President Trump isn’t pumping research money into the universities; he’s draining it out. The administration is not tripling the National Science Foundation’s budget; it’s trying to gut it. The administration is trying to cut all federal basic research funding by a third, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A survey by the journal Nature of 1,600 scientists in the United States found that three-quarters of them have considered leaving the country.

The response to the Sputnik threat was to go outward and compete. Trump’s response to the Chinese threat generally is to build walls, to erect trade barriers and to turn inward. A normal country would be strengthening friendships with all nations not named China, but the United States is burning bridges in all directions. A normal country would be trying to restore America’s shipbuilding industry by making it the best in the world. We’re trying to save it through protectionism. The thinking seems to be: We can protect our mediocre industries by walling ourselves off from the world. That’s a recipe for national decline.

The problem is not just Trump. China has been displaying intellectual and innovative vitality for decades and the United States has scarcely mobilized. This country sometimes feels exhausted, gridlocked, as if it has lost its faith in itself and contact with its future.

In the progressive era, America built new institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Reserve. During the New Deal, Americans created an alphabet soup of new agencies. By 1949, Americans had created NATO and the precursor to the World Bank. Where are the new institutions fit for today? Government itself is not great at innovation, but for a century, public sector money has been necessary to fuel the fires of creativity — in the United States, in Israel and in China. On that front, America is in retreat.

Can confidence be restored? Of course. Franklin Roosevelt did it and Ronald Reagan did it. Is China’s dominance inevitable? Of course not. Centrally controlled economies are prone to monumental blunders.

But the primary contest is psychological — almost spiritual. Do Americans have faith in the power of the human mind? Are they willing to invest to enlarge the national talent pool? Right now, no. Americans, on the left and the right, have become highly attentive to threat, risk-averse and self-doubting about the national project. What do you do with a country with astounding advantages but that no longer believes in itself?

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opin ... e9677ea768

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Japan’s Long-Dominant Party Suffers Election Defeat as Voters Swing Right

The loss on Sunday left the Liberal Democrats a minority party in both houses of Parliament, while two new nationalist parties surged.


Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan, center left, vowed to stay in office despite the poor showing by his Liberal Democratic Party, which has led Japan for all but five of the last 70 years.Credit...Pool photo by Franck Robichon

Japan’s long-governing Liberal Democratic Party suffered a defeat in parliamentary elections on Sunday that saw new right-wing populist groups make gains, heralding what could be a tectonic shift in what has been one of the world’s most stable democracies.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba vowed to stay on after his Liberal Democrats and their coalition partner lost 19 of their 66 seats that were up for re-election, depriving them of control of the less powerful Upper House. But he is facing calls to step down after the setback left the Liberal Democrats, who have led Japan for all but five of the last 70 years, a minority party in both chambers of the Diet, the country’s Parliament.

Mr. Ishiba and his party failed to convince enough voters that they could resolve a host of challenges that included rising prices of staples like rice, tariff talks with the United States and the growing burden that supporting Japan’s aging population has placed on working-age people.

The election results exposed a growing generational fissure that is altering the nation’s politics. While two-thirds of the 124 seats up for grabs on Sunday went to opposition parties, the biggest gains were made not by the traditional liberal opposition, but by a gaggle of new parties that drew younger voters with stridently nationalist messages. Among them was Sanseito, a populist party led by a politician inspired by President Trump.

“With the L.D.P. in decline, Japan’s political landscape is diversifying,” said Romeo Marcantuoni, a Ph.D. candidate at Waseda University in Tokyo who has written about Sanseito. “For the first time, we’re seeing far-right populism similar to what we’ve seen in Europe.”

Before all the votes had even been counted, powerful members of the governing party were calling on Mr. Ishiba to step down, to take responsibility for what exit polls suggested would be a poor showing. Taro Aso, a former deputy prime minister, said he “couldn’t accept” Mr. Ishiba staying on as prime minister, TV Asahi reported.

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Long blue tables are seen from overhead, with people on both sides of them handling boxes of paper ballots.

Election officials in Tokyo counting votes in the Upper House election on Sunday.Credit...Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Ishiba conceded in a television interview late Sunday that the Liberal Democrats had not done well, but he said he had no intention to resign, as he still had important duties to fulfill. They included reaching a trade deal with the Trump administration, which Japan has failed to do despite repeated rounds of talks.

“Whether it’s the tariff negotiations with Mr. Trump or disasters and the aging population or prices rising faster than wages, we still face many issues,” Mr. Ishiba said. “I have a responsibility to the nation to deal with these.”

But analysts say Mr. Ishiba could struggle to maintain support within his party — especially since this defeat follows one last year that robbed the Liberal Democrats of a majority in the Lower House, which chooses the prime minister. At the time, Mr. Ishiba managed to survive politically by gathering enough votes to form a minority government.

“I don’t see how the L.D.P. stays with someone who has led them to two defeats in both houses,” said Tobias Harris, founder of Japan Foresight, a firm that advises clients on Japanese politics.

If Mr. Ishiba is forced to step down, Mr. Harris and other analysts said, it could create political paralysis at a time when Japan faces an increasingly assertive China, as well as the tough tariff negotiations.

On Sunday, half of the upper chamber’s 248 seats were up for re-election. The biggest winners were two new nationalist parties, the Democratic Party for the People and Sanseito. The Democrats gained 13 seats, more than doubling their total presence in the Upper House to 22. Sanseito, a newer and more extreme party, also won 13 seats, bringing their total to 15.

Both parties won over younger voters with populist appeals to strengthen the military and cut a consumption tax that has paid for pensions and other costs to support Japan’s growing population of retirees. Sanseito, which had barely been a presence in national politics, rose seemingly overnight with promises to put “Japanese First.”

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A man in polo shirt on a road surrounded by reporters.

Sohei Kamiya, leader of the Sanseito party, campaigning this month in Saitama Prefecture in Japan. His party won 13 seats in the Upper House, taking its total to 15.Credit...Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

The party called for stopping an influx of immigrants who fill jobs left vacant amid Japan’s declining birthrate, but who Sanseito says threaten social stability.

Voters interviewed at polling stations in Tokyo said that while some of these populist policies were extreme, they wanted to protest against the Liberal Democrats, whom they described as out of touch. Most of their anger was about the rising price of staples, including rice.

“I used to be an L.D.P. voter, but I want change,” said Mika Inoue, a 49-year-old bank employee. “In this election, my focus was on policies that would increase the incomes of the Japanese people. Prices are rising, but incomes are not.”

Hiroshi Sugita, who owns a real estate company, said he had switched from supporting the Liberal Democrats to Sanseito.

“The L.D.P.’s policies are so inconsistent, particularly the rice price policy,” Mr. Sugita, 68, said. ”Japan is not growing anymore, the economy is rather in the downward trend and we can’t keep supporting the same party any more.”

Martin Fackler is the acting Tokyo bureau chief for The Times.

Hisako Ueno is a reporter and researcher based in Tokyo, writing on Japanese politics, business, labor, gender and culture.

Kiuko Notoya is a Tokyo-based reporter and researcher for The Times, covering news and features from Japan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/worl ... e9677ea768

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Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump’s Attacks on Science

Authoritarians have long feared and suppressed science as a rival for social influence. Experts see President Trump as borrowing some of their tactics.


The 1633 trial of Galileo over his backing of the heliocentric theory came to symbolize the church’s hostility to open inquiry.Credit...Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

William J. Broad
By William J. Broad
William J. Broad has a graduate degree in the history of science and has reported on the Trump administration’s science plans and appointments.

Aug. 31, 2025

The war on science began four centuries ago when the Roman Catholic Church outlawed books that reimagined the heavens. Subsequent regimes shot or jailed thousands of scientists. Today, in such places as China and Hungary, a less fearsome type of strongman relies on budget cuts, intimidation and high-tech surveillance to cow scientists into submission.

Then there is President Trump, who voters last year decisively returned to the White House. His blitz on science stands out because America’s labs and their discoveries powered the nation’s rise in the last century and now foster its global influence.

Just last week, Mr. Trump fired the newly confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her lawyers said the move spoke to “the silencing of experts and the dangerous politicization of science.”

In rapid bursts, Mr. Trump has also laid off large teams of scientists, pulled the plug on thousands of research projects and proposed deep spending cuts for new studies. If his proposed $44 billion cut to next year’s budget is enacted, it will prompt the largest drop in federal support for science since World War II, when scientists and Washington began their partnership.

Few if any analysts see Mr. Trump as a Stalin, who crushed science, or even as a direct analog to this era’s strongmen leaders. But his assault on researchers and their institutions is so deep that historians and other experts see similarities to the playbook employed by autocratic regimes to curb science.

For instance, despots over the ages devised a lopsided way of funding science that punished blue-sky thinkers and promoted gadget makers. Mr. Trump’s science policies, experts say, follow that approach. He hails Silicon Valley’s wizards of tech but undermines the basic research that thrives on free thought and sows the seeds of not only Nobel Prizes but trillion-dollar industries.

“Despots want science that has practical results,” said Paul R. Josephson, an emeritus professor of history at Colby College and author of a book on totalitarian science. “They’re afraid that basic knowledge will expose their false claims.”

ImagePresident Trump frowns at a person in a white coat holding a model of the coronavirus, as Anthony Fauci looks on.

President Trump visiting the National Institutes of Health’s vaccine research center in Bethesda, Md., in March 2020.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
The president’s backers deny any suggestion that he engages in autocratic moves or has autocratic ambitions.

Mr. Trump “is a threat to bureaucracy, not democracy,” said Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Mr. Trump’s presidency. “He has an extremely high regard for science.”

The ultimate target, according to the president and his supporters, is not science but rather the role experts play in generating the red tape that hobbles the nation’s economy and, they say, the research enterprise itself. They note that Project 2025 called for the dismantling of the administrative state.

Mr. Trump himself insists that, overall, he wants to save science. His defenders argue that he is cutting bloated budgets to restore public trust in science and spark a golden age of discovery.

Defenders of the postwar order concede that federal science management can be improved. But the Trumpian cure is, they add, far worse than any disease. They dismiss his recent moves and pronouncements as little more than pretexts for what they see as repressive tactics inspired by contemporary autocrats.

“Trump did not invent this playbook,” said Thomas M. Countryman, a career diplomat for 36 years who served as assistant secretary of state for international security in the Obama administration. “It depends on the squelching of all independent centers of thought, and that includes universities, law firms and scientists.”

Analysts say authoritarians and their students fear science in part because its feats — unlocking the universe, ending plagues, saving millions of lives — can form bonds of public trust that rival or exceed their own.

“Science is a source of social power,” said Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It always poses a potential threat.”

Threatened or not, Mr. Trump has long scorned experts as overrated and has stated that he prefers to rely on common sense and gut instincts. “The experts are terrible,” he told the crowd at a 2016 rally in La Crosse, Wis. “Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have.”

If analysts differ on the reasons for Mr. Trump’s attacks on science, they agree that his actions could affect America’s longstanding role as the world leader in scientific discovery — either strengthening it or, conceivably, ending it. Will the nation continue to set the global standard for science breakthroughs?

The lead times for science projects can run to years and decades, so the practical impacts of Mr. Trump’s actions will most likely become clear only after he leaves office. For the United States, a time of new uncertainty is expected.

The Church

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A statue of a hooded Giordano Bruno on a pedestal in a public square.

A statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, where he was burned at the stake in 1600 for defending Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism.Credit...Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

From the start, modern science faced repression. The backdrop was doctrine: The Roman Catholic Church long held that humans sat at the center of the universe as the stars, planets and sun moved overhead in never-ending tributes.

Not so, argued Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer. In 1543, he laid out evidence showing that the Earth and planets revolve around the sun.

News of his book, 400 pages long and rich in diagrams, moved slowly across Europe. The church in time decided to show its displeasure. In 1600, it had Giordano Bruno, an advocate of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, burned at the stake.

To fight the heresy, the church in 1616 put the Copernican tract on its list of prohibited books. Undeterred, Galileo, an Italian astronomer, in 1632 published his great work, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” It backed Copernicus.

Galileo’s trial by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 was a turning point in Western history. The spectacle of the elderly thinker being forced, under threat of torture, to recant came to symbolize the church’s hostility to open inquiry.

Even so, Rome proceeded to adapt churches and cathedrals to serve as solar observatories, which let the church improve the calendar and better fix the date of Easter. The research also gave credence to the Copernican view. Nonetheless, Rome kept its heliocentric ban in place for centuries.

The Catholic Church’s double standard — crushing blue-sky science while enjoying the practical benefits — became a favorite tactic of monarchs, despots and modern autocrats. Today the two categories of exploratory work are known as basic and applied science. The latter can include development, engineering and technology. By nature, basic studies, though risky, tend to yield the most important discoveries.

The lopsided approach let rulers curb free thought that threatened their authority while promoting technological spinoffs of applied science that could empower their regimes. For instance, they backed research on celestial navigation, which let fleets of tall ships sail the globe to found colonial empires.

Even enlightened despots such as Catherine the Great in 18th-century Russia, while promoting science and progress, retained absolute power and suppressed ideas they saw as challenging their rule.

The State

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A black-and-white photo of Trofim Lysenko crouching in a wheat field as two other men look on.

Trofim Lysenko, right, led Soviet biological studies between 1935 and 1965 and used his influence to reject modern genetics, with catastrophic results.Credit...Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

The dictators of the 20th century turned the suppression of basic science and the promotion of applied research into superweapons of social control.

Upon taking power in 1933, Hitler redefined German science to include the idea that Aryans represent the master race. “If science cannot do without Jews,” he quipped, “we will have to do without science.” Hundreds of Jewish scientists were dismissed, and many fled the country.

Regime dogma guided the remaining scientists. The idea was that nationalistic science was the only true science. Before the war, Germany led the world in such triumphs of the intellect as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Nazi science ended the blue-sky breakthroughs.

Even so, the regime’s tight grip on the German economy let it produce many innovations of applied science that empowered Hitler’s military, including V-2 rockets, jet engines, machine encryption and synthetic fuels.

The deadliest attacks on basic science came from Stalin, the Soviet dictator. In the 1930s, he had thousands of scientists shot or consigned to slave labor.

In addition, he echoed the Nazi push for ideological purity by elevating scientists who forcefully backed Marxism. Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who dominated Soviet biological studies between 1935 and 1965, used his influence with Stalin to reject modern genetics as official policy. The results crippled Soviet agriculture and contributed to famines that killed millions of people.

Like other despots, Stalin also backed applied science for regime building. The results included the atom bomb and Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.

The New Authoritarians

Image
Viktor Orban and Mr. Trump, both in blue suits, give thumbs-up in an ornate room.

A handout photograph released by the Hungarian prime minister’s office in July 2024 showing Prime Minister Viktor Orban with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In this century, a new kind of ruler arose. Gone were the gulags and the firing squads. The new autocrats, forsaking military garb for designer suits, relied on subtle threats, budget cuts and high-tech surveillance to curb science.

Dr. Treisman, the U.C.L.A. professor, joined with Sergei Guriev, dean of the London Business School, to write a 2023 book on the new generation. “Spin Dictators” argues that the media-savvy strongmen have recast authoritarian rule for the digital age.

“They don’t want to be controlled by scientists,” Dr. Treisman said. “They want to control them.”

He noted that the new authoritarians, like the old, rely on applied science to bolster the legitimacy of their regimes.

“Dictators need it to fuel economic growth, to make satellites and missiles, to obtain new surveillance technologies,” he said. “They want their own science, not someone else’s. They don’t want to be lectured by liberals on inconvenient truths about the environment or health care.”

The book’s case studies look at leaders like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary.

Mr. Trump and his backers “do occasionally let slip their view of things — that these regimes are not that bad,” said Dr. Josephson of Colby College, whose own book on totalitarian science details many of the crackdowns.

In Brazil, Mr. Bolsonaro, as president from 2019 to 2023, slashed the federal research budget, throwing thousands of scientists into limbo.

In China, Mr. Xi’s rise to power in 2012 led to online censors, televised confessions and the repression of restive populations, such as the Uyghurs. His science investments put applied over basic studies: In a recent report, China ranked last globally in the funding of basic research, lagging behind not only the United States but such comparatively small countries as Israel, Switzerland and Taiwan.

In Russia, Mr. Putin, who first assumed the presidency in 2000, has created what experts consider a police state in which agents falsely arrest scientists on charges of treason and closely monitor their contacts with foreigners. The climate of fear encourages self-censorship. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a mass exodus of scientists.

At the same time, Moscow has used applied science as a stealthy weapon of social control. New tools of digital surveillance aided its crackdowns on the war’s opponents.

In Hungary, Mr. Orban since 2010 has worked to undo free thought and institutional autonomy, typically through intermediaries. In 2018, he had gender studies removed from the country’s list of accredited subjects. The next year, he seized control of the 40 research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he took over 11 universities.

Mr. Trump befriended Mr. Orban. Three times during the year of his successful campaign to return to the White House — in March, July and December — he hosted Mr. Orban at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

On social media, Mr. Trump praised him as “a smart, strong, and compassionate leader of a wonderful Country, Hungary. Great job, Viktor!!!”

The Trump Blitz

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A crowd of people sitting or standing on the National Mall, many holding signs with slogans like “Censoring science makes societies weaker” and “Science is for everyone.”

The Stand Up for Science rally in Washington in March.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

In his first term as president, Mr. Trump sought to crush federal science. But Congress often reversed his proposed funding cuts.

In his second term, Mr. Trump’s first target was expert guidance.

Over decades, federal laws gave scientific advisory bodies the power to oversee regulatory agencies, and such oversight slowly spread to the government as a whole. In essence, science and Washington became administrative allies.

On Feb. 19, weeks after taking office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that called for the downsizing and elimination of the advisory panels. The order affected panels that oversaw vaccines, astrophysics, fisheries, mathematics, space, the geosciences, the environment and artificial intelligence.

Next, in March, amid budget cuts and growing protests by scientists, Mr. Trump unveiled an overall science policy that echoed the autocrats in emphasizing technological spinoffs, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In a public letter, the president called for securing the nation’s status “as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies.”

Then in May, the administration made public its proposed cuts to next year’s federal science budget. Independent experts found that the category of basic research would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent.

On the chopping block were studies focused on nursing, clean energy, climate change, air and water quality, chemical safety, minority health disparities, green aviation, the global carbon cycle, the atmosphere of Mars, the planet Jupiter, and the boundary in outer space where the solar system meets the cosmos, among other subjects.

“The cuts are justified,” said Terence Kealey, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Decades of lavish funding have dulled America’s exploratory edge, he argued.

Finally, later in May, Mr. Trump laid out his reform agenda. It called for a “gold standard” that would revitalize science research. But critics, including Nobel laureates, saw it as paving the way for state-controlled science.

Officially, the job of defending Mr. Trump’s agenda falls to his science adviser, Michael Kratsios. He has no degrees in science or engineering but held key technology and military posts during Mr. Trump’s first term and helped speed the rise of artificial intelligence.

Image
Michael Kratsios speaking at a clear lectern onstage.

Michael Kratsios, now the president’s science adviser, in 2019. In Mr. Trump’s first term, he served as chief technology officer of the United States.Credit...Miguel A. Lopes/EPA, via Shutterstock

Over weeks, multiple requests for an interview with Mr. Kratsios were made to officials in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Possible dates were discussed, but Mr. Kratsios was never made available.

In the end, his office issued a brief statement that hailed Mr. Trump for “reinvigorating a system in which diminishing returns and stagnation have been the status quo for decades.”

Critics see Mr. Trump’s backers either as blind to the ubiquity of the authoritarian parallels and playbook or as trying to give the White House political cover.

In a recent essay, Dr. Josephson of Colby College cast Mr. Trump’s acts as brazenly totalitarian. He cited the firing of thousands of scientists, the support of anti-vaccine propaganda, and the elevation of unqualified officials to science management.

“Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had,” Dr. Josephson wrote. “He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.”

Dr. Treisman of U.C.L.A. said that despite Mr. Trump’s war on science and the federal bureaucracy, he saw reason for hope.

He said democracies often have “politicians like Trump who would like to remove all constraints on their power. The difference between them and successful ones like Mr. Orban isn’t so much in their approach but in the level of resistance they encounter.”

Dr. Treisman said the critics of Mr. Trump might prevail. His own belief, he added, “is that the many forces of civil society will continue to constrain him.”

William J. Broad has reported on science at The Times since 1983. He is based in New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/scie ... crats.html