Day One Task: Depoliticizing the Federal Science Agencies

which means money, money, and money

Donald Trump has spoken very clearly about his day-one determination to end the mutilation of children in the service of gender ideology, but let’s look for the roots of that poison tree. Via Billboard Chris, here’s a sample descriptive section from a National Institutes of Health grant given to a pediatric gender physician in Los Angeles, and read this carefully to find the most important sentence:

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has worked to push gender hormone treatment down to eight year-olds, with research funding from the federal government. Now, big finish: the dates on the NIH grant that Billboard Chris highlighted:

This is a project — gender hormones for eight year-olds — that operated with federal funding during the first Trump administration. Policy expressed in words meets policy expressed in cash. This is what matters, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike (click to enlarge):

The money, the money, and the money. What you fund is what you’re doing. It may not seem like a big target, but the politicization of federal science funding is a root cause of institutional decay and pathological narrative-making, and cutting the money pipeline to politicized science is the policy action that will matter for decades. Remaking the funding pipeline for federal science grants is a day one priority, because the money will shape policy far more than any declaration of intent.

The problem is everywhere: the NIH, the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and so on. SpaceX is catching rockets; NASA is funding this: “21-EEJ21-0020 ASSESSMENT OF THE GULF COAST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE LANDSCAPE FOR EQUITY.”

And this: “EXPLORING SYNERGISTIC OPPORTUNITIES BETWEEN CHARLOTTE-AREA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AND NASA EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION.”

Pick a federal science grant website and spend some time exploring it. Here’s the National Science Foundation’s funding opportunities page. Sample grant program: “Growing Research Compliance Support and Service Infrastructure for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity.”

Today’s funded program for transformative science equity and environmental justice is tomorrow’s new policy measures. This is the pipeline to programs. What you fund today is what you’re going to do in five years.

Science — or, as we call it now, The Science™, that thing we’re supposed to believe in and obey — is distinctly and increasingly political . When the American Association of Geographers holds its annual meeting in March, it’ll be “Making Spaces of Possibility.”

What does that mean? It means that geography locks horns with settler colonialism to produce climate justice: “To make spaces of possibility is to leverage geographic insight, knowledge, and tools to counter the historical legacies of racial exclusion and (settler) colonialism, to address current challenges to democracy and the environment, and to work toward climate justice.”

Sample call for papers:

Session Title: Designing Evidence for Climate Justice

Organized as part of the CLIMATE RIGHTS Project by Alexander Arroyo, Grga Bašić, and Sol Kim, Urban Theory Lab / Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), University of Chicago in collaboration with INTERPRT

This session invites participants from all backgrounds to reimagine the role of evidence in advancing climate justice through emerging political and legal mechanisms of climate action. We do so in response to the surge in climate-related litigation driven by frontline communities around the world. Such cases have more than doubled since 2017, becoming an increasingly widespread strategy across diverse jurisdictions ranging from cities to Indigenous territories, small-holder agrarian landscapes, and international alliances of states. Building on these bottom-up efforts, major cases presented to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IaCHR), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) are poised to establish new obligations of states under international law to act in response to various contemporary and historical aspects of climate emergency, with important implications for the future of the Paris climate treaty and more radical activist movements. In parallel, countries across the Global North and South are adopting legislation to criminalize socio-environmental harm, with proposals to the International Criminal Court led by the government of Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa to make “ecocide” a fifth crime under the Rome Statute. 

Under pressure from below, these legal fora are quickly turning into key strategic spaces to bring complex problems of transboundary socio-climate causality to bear on questions of responsibility, restitution, and reparations. Drawing inspiration from the “forensic” approach to environmental and climate justice, this session inquires into how we might design evidence to advance struggles for climate justice in spaces within and beyond the courtroom.

Science is for lawsuits and prosecutions. Science is politics, consciously. A Trump administration that pays for things like this will be making policy accidentally, through inattention and permissiveness.

And as I’ve written before, the root of all social media censorship is federally funded disinformation science.

If the Trump transition isn’t working with close focus and persistence on the problem of federal science funding, it will be using federal funds to undermine itself, all day and every day, and to undermine future Republican administrations. The money matters, and there’s a lot of it.