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This week marks one year of Trump 2.0. The president's guiding principles in the second tour of the White House are becoming clear in areas like foreign policy and immigration, but what do President Trump's actions reveal about his views on science? Looking back to 2025, NPR's Katia Riddle looks at what what we can deduce about his guiding ideology on science policy.
KATIA RIDDLE, HOST:
When the Trump administration first took office a year ago, it immediately began working to weaken federal agencies engaged in science - the National Science Foundation, NASA, the NIH, the CDC. Some libertarians, believing in smaller government, thought they'd hit the jackpot.
ROBBY SOAVE: We had a window of excitement. I was like, oh, we actually did win. This bet paid off. They're going to do my things.
RIDDLE: That's Robby Soave, an editor at the libertarian magazine Reason. He says, when it comes to science and health policy, there's been times in this last year when the Trump administration has been singing from the Libertarian hymnal.
SOAVE: There has been a movement on the rescheduling of marijuana, which is a huge, huge policy issue not just for libertarians.
RIDDLE: Libertarians also like Trump's assertion that Americans, not the government, should decide which vaccines they need.
SOAVE: You know, the broader MAHA agenda of RFK Jr. is exciting to many libertarians.
RIDDLE: But Soave says he and many other libertarians have been disappointed with Trump for, among other things, his lack of fidelity to, quote, "medical freedom ideology." Take policies around trans people, for example. One of the first things Trump did was sign an executive order declaring that the U.S. will recognize only two genders.
SOAVE: In terms of science and medical behavior, the libertarian ethos is, if you're not harming anyone else, it's your body. You should be able to do whatever you want.
RIDDLE: Soave notes that ideas about trans health care are more controversial among libertarians when it comes to minors. He says, while other president's ideologies have varied, Trump seems not to have one at all.
SOAVE: People who have a very coherent or worked out ideological set of views are always like, is Trump one of us? Is he against us? Yeah, that kind of thing. And it's just - it's - neither is the case.
RIDDLE: Officials from the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story. Some who study historical science policy under different presidential administrations say they do see a unifying theory of science under Trump. Naomi Oreskes is a scientific historian at Harvard.
NAOMI ORESKES: Science is the enemy.
RIDDLE: Oreskes points to things the Trump administration has done, like weakening environmental regulations, cutting the federal science workforce, ignoring scientific evidence or even misrepresenting evidence. She says this is not the first administration to view science as an adversary.
ORESKES: There's been a branch of conservative ideology for a long time now, going back to the Reagan administration, that has seen science as the enemy because science provides the factual basis that justifies a wide range of environmental regulation.
RIDDLE: Science gets in the way of profit, she says. Even Nixon, says Oreskes, famously hated scientists and intellectuals. But there is a key difference between Trump and other antiscience presidents like Nixon.
ORESKES: He never tried to fire scientists, right? He never tried to just unilaterally withdraw grants that had been legally authorized through, you know, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health.
RIDDLE: It's the disregard for laws and protocol around science, she says, that sets this administration apart. Sheila Jasanoff at Harvard studies how science, law and politics shape one another. She's been studying this field since 1978.
SHEILA JASANOFF: That's like getting close to half a century. And in that time, I've never seen a systematic shutting down of areas of inquiry under any president.
RIDDLE: Jasanoff says different presidents have wanted to steer scientific discovery in different ways but never halting it altogether.
JASANOFF: That is something pretty new in my experience.
RIDDLE: Freedom of inquiry in science, says Jasanoff, is fundamental to this country but is not fundamental to Trump's governing ideology or his relationship to the truth. Katia Riddle, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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