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Bullying Trump Officials Wage Stalin-Style War On Science In Washington

A little over a year ago, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia sent threatening letters to editors of several leading medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, CHEST, and the American Journal of Public Health. Edward R. Martin, the conservative activist-attorney who now manages pardons for the president, questioned their editors’ alleged bias against “competing viewpoints” when deciding what to publish.

Several replied with ringing defenses of their editorial practices. “As practicing physicians, our editors recognize our responsibility to doctors and patients. We use rigorous peer review and editorial processes to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the research we publish,” NEJM editor Eric Rubin wrote Martin. “We support the editorial independence of medical journals and their First Amendment rights to free expression.”

Critics warned the letters true intent was “to send a message to academic publishers to avoid crossing the Trump administration and push them to publish viewpoints more favorable to the current administration,” STAT reported at the time.

The Health and Human Services Department under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. subsequently canceled much of the research into racial health disparities, reproductive health and the social determinants of health, branding such studies as “woke” and a waste of taxpayer money. A Trump administration HHS spokeswoman said, “Spending billions on divisive, politically driven D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives that don’t deliver results is not just bad health policy — it’s bad government.”

Kennedy sent clear signals prior to his confirmation that he intended to attack science. During his run for president, he threatened to prosecute medical journals under federal anti-corruption statutes for allowing drug companies to influence their editorial decisions. His anti-vax organization’s research, which claimed vaccines caused autism, never made it past journal editors and peer reviewers. The one study published over a quarter century ago that found such a link had been retracted as fraudulent.

“There is a substantial resentment that they’ve not been able to get traction for these heterodox ideas within the scientific community itself,” Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington and a frequent critic of low-quality science, told Stat. “So, they are willing to tear down the fabric of science in order to try to impose these ideas on the community.”

Kennedy’s group wasn’t the only Trump coalition faction seeking to force changes in the scientific publication process. Christian conservatives have frequently attacked the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and their publications for promoting abortion, LGBTQ rights, and birth control access.

Just two weeks before the interim district attorney letter was sent to Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG’s flagship journal), the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative advocacy law firm, demanded the HHS secretary cut funding and investigate the group. “Paying ACOG to spend taxpayer dollars (is) inconsistent with this administration’s policies on the biological basis for sex, ending racial discrimination and ‘equity’ programs, and preventing taxpayer funding for the promotion of abortion,” its letter said.

A new assault on science

This week the Trump regime escalated its war on science by attacking the independence of the vetting process for studies appearing in medical and scientific journals. For the most part, the process relies on independent peer review, both at the agency level when making grants and at the journals after study results are submitted for publication.

The Office of Management and Budget proposed a rule that will subject every federal research grant to a second political review. The rule, which is open for public comment until July 13, essentially gives political appointees at agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration veto power over grant proposals.

The proposed rule also allows political appointees to summarily cancel already-awarded grants; use what an editorial on the Science magazine website called “vague criteria” for giving favored institutions preferable treatment; and subject every grant that involves spending money abroad to political review. “This bureaucratic hurdle would effectively prevent most if not all (international) partnerships from moving forward,” an editorial in Science said.

Even before releasing this proposed rule, the regime’s editorial intimidation strategy, and the publicity surrounding the initial letters sent to journal editors, triggered a dramatic slowdown in publication of articles on the subjects that Trump’s most avid supporters find objectionable. This week, I conducted a small research project measuring the number of articles catalogued on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website that mention various hot-button issues in either their title or abstract.

Here’s what I found: Over the first five months of 2026, when compared to the similar period a year ago, there was a 24 percent drop in articles and research studies published about abortion and LBGTQ health; a 23 percent reduction in articles published in the medical literature that include the terms “race” or “racial” and “health disparities”; and a 15 percent decline in articles mentioning the “social determinants of health” and “health disparities.”

The reductions in published research in those four areas far exceeded the general slowdown in published new studies, which through May 30 was about nine percent below the comparable period a year ago. Public health experts say a number of factors are driving the overall slowdown: Cuts in research spending; the time it takes to “scrub” publishable studies to avoid topics or phrases that might get researchers or the publications in trouble; and disruptions to the peer review process. Beleaguered researchers in every scientific field have less time under Trump for conducting peer reviews as they struggle to maintain funding for their own projects and labs.

“If you can’t get reviewers, there is going to be a slowdown in getting stuff published and that’s across the board,” said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology and an American Cancer Society clinical researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “My university had a total blockage of grant funding for a period of time, no matter what kind of research you were doing. If you were doing a clinical trial or a genetic study that had nothing to do with health equity, your lab was affected.”

All science under attack

The attack on science isn’t just affecting medical research. The National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) division, which funds more than 60 percent of all psychology, sociology and economics research, is threatened with closure. The NSF, whose budget is just a sixth of NIH’s $48.5 billion annual budget, has also ended all support for doctoral-dissertation research in archaeology, linguistics, geography and anthropology. Six weeks ago, it fired the 22 members of the agency’s board.

The Atlantic reported last month that the NSF has awarded just five social science grants this year. In a typical year, it makes about 250 grants. A White House spokesperson told the magazine’s reporter the administration will fund “advancements in hard sciences, not in ideologically driven social sciences.”

What that ignores are the advances in NSF-funded social science that help improve the nation’s health. In the 1990s, NSF financed the economics research that created major improvements in the kidney-donor-matching system. The SBE division is the primary funder of three major social-science surveys, including the world’s longest running survey of families, child poverty and economic mobility. At least nine federal agencies rely on its data.

The Trump regime’s unceasing attacks on “woke” science, coupled with its demands that prestigious journals pay more attention to quack theories, has an historical precedent. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin promoted an obscure agronomist named Trofim Lysenko to be the Soviet Union’s top scientist based on his rejection of genetics and natural selection. Lysenko claimed acquired traits could be passed along to children. Many of the scientists who opposed his views wound up in Stalin’s Gulags. Some were shot. Russia never recovered, having yet to play a major role in the biological sciences.

The Trump regime’s science overlords, when the media come calling, have downplayed their embrace of quack science by characterizing studies of racial disparities in health outcomes, the social determinants of health and reproductive and LGBTQ health as “waste.” Their spokespersons claim “billions” of taxpayer dollars are being frittered away on diversity, equity and inclusion-motivated research.

Yet during 2025, the total number of articles, studies and commentaries mentioning those terms in their titles or abstracts (7,798) accounted for less than one-half of one percent of all studies listed in PubMed for the year (nearly 1.9 million). Given that the average NIH grant ($622,000) generates an average of about 6.5 published articles, the total amount spent on “woke” research can be roughly estimated at about $766 million — not the “billions” claimed by HHS spokespersons. “To say there is a waste of funding on this kind of research is empirically false,” Harvard’s Krieger said.

If the U.S. truly wants to reduce health care spending and make it more affordable for everyone, it needs to step up its investment in researching the causes of racial disparities in health; the role the social determinants of health (food, housing, poverty, social stress) play in driving health outcomes; and the various roadblocks subcommunities of Americans face in addressing their health needs and achieving better health.

Congress has historically defined NIH’s mission as both identifying the causes of disease as well as developing cures. It cannot come up with cures for the chronic diseases plaguing this nation unless it addresses the social factors that are its primary cause. That requires more research into those social factors, not less.

The Trump regime’s proposed rule will set back that kind of scientific research for years. That’s probably why the editors of Science issued a clarion call for political action this week, something one rarely sees in the academic literature.

“Higher education and its associations need to firmly oppose these changes, which would create a massive morale and financial problem in addition to curtailing important research,” Editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp wrote in the editorial. “The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized.

“I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then,” he wrote. “The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.”

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health care and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News

Trump And Kennedy Render America Defenseless Against A Deadly Virus, Again

When ominous reports of a highly lethal and potentially communicable illness reach our airwaves, Americans now must rely on foreign authorities to reassure us — or to warn us.

The hantavirus is at our doorstep, but the Trump administration, and specifically its top health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have dismantled the federal scientific infrastructure that traditionally protected the nation from such threats and substituted literally nothing in its place. While we may escape the direst consequences of their vandalism for the moment, there is no guarantee that far worse is not coming, and soon.

The ruinous public health impact of Donald Trump's return to the White House was just as predictable as his rush to enrich himself and his family by every corrupt means. We knew what he is because we saw what he was. His historic failure to competently manage the COVID-19 pandemic mostly occurred in plain sight, as he tried to ignore and then downplay a deadly onslaught of which he had been duly warned.

With his presidential messaging warped by egomania, Trump promised that the spreading pandemic would swiftly and "miraculously" fade away. He knew that was a lie but resisted a sound public testing program because he didn't want "bad numbers" as the election season began. He failed to provide critically needed hospital supplies as doctors and nurses died. And he undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidance on safety protocols while promoting quack cures, comic-book science, and loony ideas like "injecting" bleach.

Trump's mindless, chaotic response led to many thousands of unnecessary deaths, for which he somehow mostly escaped blame, while right-wing media demonized veteran public health officials. And all that insanity occurred while responsible federal officials were still in office — meaning before Kennedy got the chance to pursue his impulse to destroy the public health edifice that required decades to build.

That course of destruction accelerated as soon as Trump and Kennedy took over last year, although the dismantling had begun during the first Trump administration. Within weeks after his second inauguration, the president signed an executive order terminating United States membership in the World Health Organization, a token of his pig-ignorant attitude about the global vectors of diseases that know no borders. At the same time, he ended U.S. observance of International Health Regulations that govern cross-border investigations of disease outbreaks like COVID-19, Ebola and now hantavirus.

Trump's malign commands are not only leading to the deaths of millions of innocent people in other countries, suddenly deprived of essential medicines and care, but now are jeopardizing American access to vital, timely, lifesaving information. Whatever capable officials are still left in our government can no longer see the WHO surveillance databases or communicate with its working groups of doctors and scientists — who played a major part in our defense against Ebola during the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, Trump's sycophant Kennedy has directed an even more damaging reign of ruin on the systems that protect us within our own borders. Apparently motivated by an urge for vengeance on the CDC, which thwarted his anti-vaccine propaganda, Kennedy ousted nearly a third of the agency's employees. Among the functions most harmed by his stupid waves of firing and rehiring was the renowned Epidemic Intelligence Service, whose medical detectives are trained to investigate and assess infectious outbreaks like hantavirus (or, to take another topical example, the measles epidemic conjured by Kennedy's anti-vax imbecility).

According to Dr. Celine Gounder, everyone who worked for the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program, which monitors cruise ship health conditions, cashiered all its full-time civilian workers in early 2025. (Most of them were later rehired.) Only an idiot would imagine that the government should save money by ruining such precious public services.

The demoralizing impact of Trump and Kennedy on American public health will take a toll that has scarcely been felt yet.

"I hope it's fine," said the president when asked about the hantavirus on Sunday. This time it probably will be. But his halting answer was an eerie echo of what he said in January 2020 — before he and his stooges demolished the best public health system in the world.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Kennedy's CDC Chief Censors Research Proving Benefits Of COVID Vaccination

Previous administrations, including Donald Trump’s first, usually upheld the ideal that the Food and Drug Administration and other federal health agencies would adhere to the “gold standard” for research.

For the FDA, whose jobs include the approval of new drugs, vaccines and medical devices, the gold standard meant requiring rigorous clinical studies to prove that experimental products were both efficacious and safe. That usually means a manufacturer has to submit at least two trials, both of which are placebo-controlled and double-blinded (neither patients nor their physicians know if they received the real thing). Patients in the trials are randomly assigned to one group or the other — hence its name, the randomized controlled trial or RCT.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is charged with monitoring the extent and seriousness of health threats in the U.S. Its gold standard is different because it involves epidemiological studies, where researchers measure the extent of a disease and its outcomes in the population by mining medical records or conducting surveys drawn from well-matched cohorts. It often relies on data collected by state and city public health agencies.

In recent weeks, the press has reported that both agencies’ staff scientists have had studies withdrawn from medical journals (the FDA) and an in-house publication (the CDC). On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that “In October, (FDA) scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid-19 vaccine studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals. In February, top F.D.A. officials did not sign off on submitting abstracts about studies of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a major drug safety conference.”

Two weeks ago, the Washington Post and other publications reported top officials at the CDC refused to allow publication of a study showing the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine in reducing hospitalizations. It had been scheduled for publication in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency’s well-regarded in-house journal.

Jay Bhattacharya, who runs the National Institutes of Health and is the interim head of the CDC, defended his decision to deep-six the study in a a op-ed. “I raised specific concerns about the statistical methodology chosen for the study in question,” he wrote. “These concerns about the test-negative design used go directly to the validity of the study’s conclusion.”

I’ll have more to say on test-negative design in a moment.

A new journal for CDC

Bhattacharya also announced plans for the agency to launch a peer-reviewed journal “to elevate scientific rigor across all CDC publications,” he wrote. “Peer review remains the gold standard because it subjects findings to independent scrutiny, forces transparency about limitations and strengthens confidence in the results.”

The peer review panels for this new journal, when chosen, will definitely warrant “independent scrutiny.” Should they follow in the footsteps of how the CDC has remolded its vaccine advisory committee, it should provide plenty of grist for the Retraction Watch, which monitors medical and scientific journals for published retractions. The RW website database lists tens of thousands of incidents where peer reviewed failed to catch factual errors, deliberate falsifications and other misfeasance and malfeasance in the academic journal publication process.

I have served on several peer-review panels. I will never forget the note I received from one author after I made a number of pointed suggestions for improving his study’s conclusions. He thanked me for giving him one of the most comprehensive reviews he had ever received, one that was very helpful in improving the manuscript.

I don’t offer this anecdote to pat myself on the back. It confirmed something I’ve often heard said about peer review. A better name for the process might be “colleague review,” or “friendly review,” or even “ideological fellow-traveler review.” It would be out of character (and I will be pleasantly surprised) if the Trump regime’s CDC sets a higher standard.

“I cannot recall CDC stopping an MMWR report in the publication phase after scientific clearance and editorial review.” — Michael Iademarco, who directed the CDC center that publishes MMWR from 2014 to 2022.

Bhattacharya, who trained as an economist and physician at Stanford, has never worked as an epidemiologist or as a practicing physician. But he emerged as an expert during the Covid pandemic by co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for allowing the general population to opt out of vaccination while adopting special measures to protect seniors, who were most vulnerable to the disease. The one country that tried that approach (Sweden) quickly abandoned it due to mounting mortality among its working-age population.

'Test-Negative' Epidemiological Research

His demand for something better than “test-negative” design sounds to me like obfuscating jargon that could be used to call into question most epidemiological research. “The core problem” with that approach, he wrote, “is that, to measure the effectiveness of a vaccine in keeping people out of a hospital (for instance), this method throws away all data about people, vaccinated or not, who are never hospitalized. Instead, it replaces data with unverifiable assumptions, leading to bias. Factors such as prior infection, behavioral differences and who shows up for care can all skew results in ways that are hard to adjust for.”

Yes, all epidemiological studies that compare outcomes among two groups that haven’t been randomized have unmeasured factors that might skew the results. And there’s lots of junk science in the medical literature that makes no attempt to adjust results for unmeasurable factors. Here’s one: Martin Makary’s most recent book (he now runs the FDA) cited a study that “proved” fluoride reduces intelligence by comparing the average IQ scores in two Canadian communities, only one of which had fluoridated water (and slightly lower IQ scores among its school age children).

But most studies, especially those published in reputable journals, attempts to adjust for those unmeasured factors. The Times in its story pointed out that the “test-negative” design has been used in numerous CDC studies over the years and is well accepted in the peer-reviewed medical literature. It was used in a 2021 study on Covid vaccine effectiveness that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and in numerous peer-reviewed studies published in journals like JAMA Network Open, The Lancet, and Pediatrics.

The Post, in its story two weeks ago, quoted Michael Iademarco, who directed the CDC center that publishes MMWR from 2014 to 2022, which included Trump’s first term in office. “I cannot recall CDC stopping an MMWR report in the publication phase after scientific clearance and editorial review,” he said.

That is, not until contrarians like Bhattacharya and Makary and the anti-science, anti-vaccine Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the agencies that are charged with protecting the public’s health. Now, science is whatever they say it is.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News

Watch AOC And Democrats Strip The Bark Off RFK Jr. In House Hearing

House Democrats dragged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a hearing on Tuesday in which he attempted to defend President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal. While last week’s hearings focused on RFK Jr.’s failures to protect public health, this round focused on his complicity in the corruption of the administration’s health care policies.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York led the charge, highlighting the contradiction between Kennedy’s rhetoric and his recent policy decisions—specificially, sending billions to major health insurers he has previously accused of fraud.

“United [Healthcare], CVS, Aetna—they’re defrauding the American public to the tune of $80 billion a year,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And so I was surprised to see, about two weeks ago, you had decided to give them another $13 billion, and it was used through the mechanism of the MA [Medicare Advantage] reimbursement rates, but I want to know, why did you do that?”

After Kennedy acknowledged concerns about the industry, he offered up a meandering response, which Ocasio-Cortez politely threw back in his face.

“The industry is saying that they’re increasing these costs, but the industry is defrauding the public. So we know they’re lying,” she responded. “They’re lowering their reimbursement rates, they’re increasing denial. So we know that these folks are lying. We know that they’re bad actors. And if I’m hearing you correctly, we are giving them more money because they’re saying that they need it?”

Things didn’t get easier when Rep. Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, pressed the health secretary on the nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts the Trump administration has used to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

“You had mentioned the rural-hospital piece—$50 billion, largest investment—but there’s a reason why the Senate Republicans asked for a $50 billion rural-hospital investment,” Landsman said. “[It’s] because of the nearly trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid.”

“There’s no cut in Medicaid,” Kennedy replied. “Look at the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] report from this week.”

“Then just do the math with me,” Landsman responded. “That means that they added $3.5 trillion to the deficit. You gotta find a trillion dollars. You either added a trillion dollars to the deficit, or you cut Medicaid by a trillion dollars.”

Finally, Democratic Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts took off the kid gloves, focusing on the Food and Drug Administration’s National Priority Voucher Program—an initiative widely criticized for being vulnerable to corruption. Auchincloss pointed to the recent controversy involving podcaster Joe Rogan, who boasted about texting the president in order to get the FDA to fast-track research for the psychedelic ibogaine.

“Secretary, this flies in the face of your stated commitment to putting science over politics,” Auchincloss said. “We are literally seeing politics put over science.”

“Do you want to grandstand, or do you want an answer?” Kennedy interrupted.

“I want safety and efficacy to be the standards by which psychedelics are approved, not the president’s attempt to shore up support from his base for a disastrous war in Iran,” Auchincloss shot back.
Like all of Trump’s unqualified cabinet members, Kennedy’s glaring inadequacies continue to haunt Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

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