In 1897 legislators in Indiana’s house of representatives decreed that, henceforth, the awkward, but to engineers vital, constant Pi - the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, 3.142 – would be deemed to be 3.2. Luckily, before unsteady new bridges and buildings started to collapse, the state senate saw sense and blocked the bill’s passage into law.
But the wonderfully crazy episode appears an apt metaphor for the altogether contemporary war on science and fact from a US president who admits he regards facts as subjective opinions, to be rewritten when politically inconvenient, and who has no time for the notions of “established scientific” truths or of independent scientists. A president who believes in shooting the messenger if the message is not to his taste.
Donald Trump has a pattern of accepting results that benefit him and denigrating those he dislikes, like election results, denouncing them as rigged or part of a scam. As the president’s hero, Winston Churchill, once, perhaps apocryphally, proclaimed: “I only believe in statistics that I have doctored myself.”
The recent firing of the respected head of the equally respected Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, is just one case in point. Why? Because Trump did not like the bureau’s “rigged” latest assessment of the jobs market, with no evidence of this adduced by the president beyond “my opinion”.
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The sacking, and imminent appointment of a placeman successor to “put things right”, may well fatally undermine trust in an organisation crucial to the transparency of US markets’ operations, providing essential data for investors. Previous examples internationally of states that attempted to rig economic data to shield poor results, such as Argentina and Greece, demonstrate vividly the perils of such tactics. Revenge by the international markets was brutal. In Turkey cooked inflation figures have helped push millions into poverty and fuel a property bubble.
[ Trump’s answer to negative economic news: Sack the statisticianOpens in new window ]
In the bureau itself, precedents bode ill. In 1971, when favourable data wasn’t spun in a way that suited Richard Nixon, he instituted what would become known as a “Jew count”, to purge supposedly subversive elements. Four people, singled out for having “Jewish-sounding” surnames, were demoted or reassigned.
“Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains. Janet Yellen, former head of the Federal Reserve, described it as “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
The New Yorker’s Fergus McIntosh warns of the undermining of public confidence in vital independent state institutions: “Trust can be earned, but distrust can be taught. Trump’s most orthodox supporters learned not to trust the government long ago. Everyone else is now learning the same lesson.”
Never was this more true than during the Covid pandemic. And Trump’s willingness to draft into his administration arch-vaccine sceptic Robert Kennedy as health secretary marks another low in the president’s cynical and deadly pandering to the anti-science far right.
Although he has now endorsed, after long opposing them, measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, to the fury of his Maga supporters, Kennedy has ordered health bodies to stop recommending the fluoridation of water, long a fringe cause. Utah is the first state to ban it. And this week he cancelled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines. In May, his department revoked a nearly $600 million contract to the drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine against bird flu.
First used during the Covid-19 pandemic by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response. The technology, which won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023, is reported by scientists to have saved millions of lives during the pandemic. They say a video posted by Kennedy in which he claimed falsely that mRNA vaccines do not protect against respiratory illnesses such as Covid and the flu, and that a single mutation in a virus renders the vaccine ineffective, is “wildly inaccurate”.
Trump, a long-time sceptic of human causation of climate change, continues to champion coal and is working to dismantle anti-global-warming measures such as mandatory vehicle exhaust targets. Having fired hundreds of scientists and experts working on the government’s flagship report on climate change’s effect, the administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research.
More widely, funding for general science is being gutted. For basic science research, the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports, the overall budget next year will fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, roughly 34 per cent. For science funding overall, the group warns the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, down 22 per cent.
Trump has yet to turn his attention to Pi, but it is early days.
