In America science-sceptics are now in charge

BY ANY REASONABLE measure, Michael McGehee’s laboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder looks like a good investment. With a four-year $8m grant from the Department of Energy (DoE)—a rounding error in the agency’s almost $50bn budget—a small team of scientists has been refining a technology that could transform the economics of renewable energy. Tandem solar cells, formed by topping a layer of silicon with a special crystal known as a perovskite, have an efficiency well beyond that of conventional panels.

But achieving commercial success will depend on making perovskites less fragile. In October 2025, just as Dr McGehee and his team were hitting their stride, Donald Trump’s administration abruptly terminated their grant. Since then Dr McGehee has laid off three of his nine scientists. With only one employee remaining who can maintain the lab’s equipment, and no money to pay him beyond June, Dr McGehee is contemplating closing shop for good.

All incoming presidents change scientific priorities and modify budgets in line with their policy goals. But the nature and scale of Mr Trump’s interventions are unusual. He and his allies have attempted to upend American science wherever it is conducted, from university laboratories to federal agencies. Some of this onslaught has been successfully held back: $5.1bn in proposed cuts to the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency were rejected in the budget passed by Congress on January 15th, for example. Grant Witness, a project that tracks federal research funding, says that courts have overturned or paused some 5,000 of 8,000 grant terminations (although approximately $30bn remains cut).

This protection has not, though, been uniformly distributed. Two particular bêtes noires of Mr Trump’s base have been most vulnerable to his actions. Funding for renewable-energy research has been gutted. And the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy junior as health secretary has wreaked havoc on America’s vaccine regime. Both moves will not only harm Americans but risk weakening the country’s influence on the world stage.

The renewable-energy funding allocated by the DoE was particularly badly hit in the budget which Congress passed in January. Research into solar energy was cut by 31%, wind power by 27% and bioenergy by 11%. Funding for nuclear energy, which the administration requested be cut by 19%, received a 6% boost. At the same time, investment in coal research (and not just to reduce emissions) swelled by 260% (see chart 1). Three months earlier the administration had cancelled another $7.5bn of DoE research funding, which included Dr McGehee’s grant. Russell Vought, the White House budget director, posted on X that these grants were all part of the “green new scam funding to fuel the left’s climate agenda”.

Although a federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled that the cuts were unlawful (among other things, fully 314 of the 315 cancelled grants were in states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024), the ongoing legal fights will take time. As they play out, researchers look for more stable jobs elsewhere and labs like Dr McGehee’s unravel.

The broader shift across the DoE manifests itself in other ways. Employees at its energy-efficiency office have been instructed to avoid the term “climate change”. Chris Wright, the fossil-fuel executive turned energy secretary, has said that calling carbon dioxide “a pollutant is just nuts”. The “bigger risk”, he says, is not too much CO₂ but “too little”.

All the while, the world is heating up. According to temperature records, 2024 was the hottest year in America on record. As America retreats from clean energy, China’s government has expanded investment in renewables, including the tandem solar cells Dr McGehee is devising. “It is a race to get this technology working first and to build the world-leading companies that do it,” he says. Alumni of his lab have founded startups collectively valued at some $4bn. With funding disrupted to similar labs across the country, America is now likely to produce fewer of these firms.

Political battles have long raged over money for renewable-energy research. But Mr Trump’s assault goes beyond funding—and is not limited to things related to climate change. His appointees are reshaping or dismantling the hitherto uncontroversial panels of outside experts, known as federal advisory committees, that counsel the government on technical matters. The Economist’s analysis of the past decade’s worth of data from the Federal Advisory Committee Act shows that some 200 committees at science agencies have been terminated, suspended or had their work delayed this past year—a record number. Severe disruptions have affected the DoE and the Health Department (see chart 2), in each of which two in five committees were inactive or terminated in 2025.

The most notable victims are vaccine research and policy. Mr Kennedy, who believes, against all evidence, that vaccines cause autism and other ills, oversees these fields as health secretary. Besides yanking at least $1.2bn in Health Department grants to develop mRNA vaccines (like those which helped defend against covid-19), in his first year in office he has made pernicious changes to four committees relating to vaccines.

One, which reviews clinical data before vaccines are licensed, dismissed Paul Offit, a leading vaccine scientist, without explanation. Another, which sets priorities for vaccine research, did not meet last year. A third, which advises the health secretary on how to compensate patients harmed by the vaccines they have taken, was required by law to meet four times a year. It convened four perfunctory 30-minute meetings on December 29th. In January Mr Kennedy removed half its members without explanation.

The fourth panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP), makes vaccine recommendations. In June it was abruptly reconstituted with vaccine sceptics, despite senators saying that Mr Kennedy assured them otherwise. Last month the Health Department cut the list of recommended routine childhood immunisations from 13 to 7 without any of the customary analysis. The last time a disease had its jabs removed was in 1972 for smallpox, the last known American case of which occurred 23 years earlier.

ACIP’s priorities have become increasingly untethered from the scientific literature. In December members proposed a working group to investigate aluminium, a common immune-boosting ingredient in vaccines and a frequent bugbear of anti-vaccine activists. Studies have found no evidence the metal harms children. This could be just the start. On January 22nd Kirk Milhoan, a cardiologist who serves as ACIP’s chair, told a podcast, “I don’t like established science,” adding that “science is what I observe.” He then cast doubt on the necessity of the polio and measles vaccines, which have prevented some 107,000 deaths in America since 1994.

This rhetoric may already be taking a toll. America is experiencing its largest measles outbreak since 1991. The economic costs will accumulate: in 2019 researchers at Emory University estimated that responding to a single measles case can cost $142,000. Harder to estimate are the consequences of retracting funding for future treatments; mRNA vaccines, for example, could be transformative for those with ordinarily fatal cancers and help prevent the spread of future pandemics. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month the boss of Moderna, which developed an mRNA covid jab, said it would invest less in clinical trials because of the administration’s scepticism.

The most troubling scientific consequence of the Trump era, however, lies beyond any one research area. The president has shown that expert panels and funding, like many other things over which the executive branch holds sway, can be wielded as a partisan cudgel. This may foster exactly the sort of mistrust of America’s scientific bureaucracy that he and his allies have long harboured. This time, tragically, the mistrust would be justified. ■