This isn’t the retirement Rick Spinrad had planned. He was going to move out of Washington, D.C., at long last. Join a board or two. Get back to the music he loved but never seemed to have time for during more than 40 years as a scientist and administrator.
Then came Trump 2.0’s ferocious war on science, and on the government agencies that have funded and nurtured research for three-quarters of a century.
During the Biden years, Spinrad, an oceanographer, ran one of those government agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But since his “retirement,” he is spending each day fighting for what he and his fellow scientists had built.
“I didn’t expect, for the six months after I left, that I’d be spending so much time just defending what are some pretty fundamental tenets, concepts, and positions that had been built over decades of the scientific enterprise. So it was, it is, a bit of a shock.”
Spinrad has done everything from lobbying Republican senators to discreetly carrying messages from government scientists who are too besieged, or intimidated, to speak themselves.
Far from being an outlier, Spinrad is one of hundreds of scientists who find themselves called to advocacy roles they had not been prepared for or expected, shedding their lab coats to either resist the Trump administration’s assault or looking for alternative ways to support data-gathering and research.
“I don’t think any of us saw this coming the way it came in,” Spinrad says. “Even with the predicate of Project 2025, a lot of us thought we would see Act Two of the kind of ineptitude we saw in the first Trump administration. Not these measured and somewhat malicious attacks on what many of us considered sacred institutions of the American enterprise. So this is different.”
The scale is breathtaking. Trump appointees are going far beyond just undoing established practice on public health, the environment, and even economic science. They are challenging the basic research those practices are based on and even the research process itself.
At times Trump appears to be at war not just with science writ large but with the scientists who actually work for him. The Food and Drug Administration, clearly seeking to accommodate Robert F. Kennedy’s autism anxiety, advised doctors that in treating low-grade fevers in pregnant women they should “consider minimizing the use of acetaminophen,” the active ingredient in Tylenol.
But the F.D.A. scientists, hemmed in by the research, added that, “to be clear, while an association between acetaminophen and autism has been described in many studies, a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature.”
Trump just blew past all that scientific process: “They’re waiting for certain studies. I want to say it like it is: don’t take Tylenol.”
The Autism Science Foundation declared Trump’s advice shocking and dangerous. “President Trump talked about what he thinks and feels without offering scientific evidence,” says Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation.
There are so many parallel examples. The Environmental Protection Agency (emphasis added) just proposed dropping requirements that major polluters such as power plants and steel mills report their emissions of greenhouse gases. At virtually the same time, the Department of Health and Human Services withdrew its findings that even one drink of alcohol was risky, a conclusion the beverage industry said was biased.
One of the researchers went public in protest. “The American public deserves to know what they’re putting in their body and what kind of health outcomes they can cause,” Professor Katherine M. Keyes, a scientist at Columbia University, told The New York Times. She said they would publish the findings independently.
“This is an incredibly uncomfortable place for scientists to be,” says Jacquelyn Francis, founder and director of the Global Warming Mitigation Project. “It isn’t something that they’re trained for. It isn’t something that they like. They’re inspired by the work they do, and the scientific method of doing the research, putting it out there with their peers, having those conversations. So, this idea of even having to fight for their own validity in the science is not comfortable for them.”
Certainly, Megan O’Rourke is learning as she goes. O’Rourke was a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But when Trump threw her work into limbo this year, she quit and decided to run for Congress in a northern New Jersey swing district currently held by a Republican.
“I feel compelled to do this,” she says. “I couldn’t sit and be victimized anymore. I’m running because I’m standing up to this administration. I’m standing up for science.”
Science magazine was so taken by this scientist turned politician (a unicorn, they noted, since only three current members of Congress hold Ph.D.’s in a STEM field) that they sent a reporter to her first campaign event.
“She rambled a little bit,” one attendee told the magazine. “I need to figure out how to speak loudly,” O’Rourke acknowledged. “I would literally like to take voice training.”
For Andrew Dessler, the moment of truth came as he read with increasing concern a remarkable document from Trump’s Department of Energy. To boil it down, that report, from five handpicked critics of the scientific consensus on climate change, argues that the rising level of carbon dioxide is not, really, the big threat scientists have made it out to be. If that were true, then the Obama administration’s finding that rising CO2 levels endanger the nation’s health is wrong and should be withdrawn, collapsing American climate policy.
Dessler was supposed to be preparing a new course for his students at Texas A&M, where he is a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather. But this was a Category 5 political wind.
“Faced with a federal agency publishing something that so clearly had no respect for science, I felt I couldn’t just let it go unchallenged,” Dessler explains. “Then I realized that many other scientists felt the same way and wanted to contribute. So I set aside my other work and organized this large group of scientists to respond.”
Scientists generally work over spans of years or decades, even generations. Dessler worked in a matter of weeks to recruit more than 85 experts from around the world to write a 400-page review that “systematically dismantles the D.O.E. report’s claims,” as he puts it.
One important force resisting Trump’s attacks on climate science is, well, the rest of the world, which is largely rejecting, or worse for him, ignoring his claim that global warming is a con job.
“Action on climate change is the entry fee to credibility and to engagement” by the U.S.A. in Asia and the Pacific, said Australia’ s prime minister, Anthony Albanese.
By its nature, much of this fight for the public mind is taking place in plain view. Spinrad says he has leaned heavily on journalists to carry his message and has turned to social media to publish an inventory he created to show Republican senators how Trump’s cuts to scientific research would affect their states.
But he also acknowledges a behind-the-scenes fight that he says feels like a different country.
He tries to stay in close, but discreet, contact with colleagues still inside the federal government, communicating on their behalf messages they are no longer able to communicate, required as they are to pledge fealty not just to the Constitution but, under the president’s executive orders, to the Trump worldview.
“They’ve learned how to do their jobs furtively, and many of them are, I don’t want to say trying to hide, but they’re trying to stay below the radar. They’re in those jobs because, in most cases, they have a deep affection for and dedication to the science, and to service. Certainly, in the case of NOAA, people working for the National Weather Service, most of them are there because they want to help save lives and protect property. That sounds trite, but it’s true.”
That is no easy task when the issue is, say, whether Hurricane Erin will make landfall, or the Guadalupe River in Texas will overflow its banks. “It’s hard to stay out of the limelight,” Spinrad says. “But they’re doing everything in their capacity to find ways to do their job and not unnecessarily draw attention to the work they do.”
There is a lot of conversation about stepping into voids created by Trump withdrawals. Blue states on both the East and West Coasts have drawn up plans to preserve access to vaccines, although this would produce a patchwork map of protection that would look much like the map of where abortion is legally available.
Christy Walton, a Walmart heir, has funded the private Vaccine Integrity Project to identify steps to “ensure that vaccine use stays grounded in the best available science, free from external influence,” as the announcement framed it.
“This project acknowledges the unfortunate reality that the system that we’ve relied on to make vaccine recommendations and to review safety and effectiveness data faces threats,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm, who launched the vaccine project through his Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, at the University of Minnesota. “It is prudent to evaluate whether independent activities may be needed to stand in its place and how non-governmental groups might operate to continue to provide science-based information to the American public.”
As one of their first actions, the project adopted a strategy about vaccines almost identical to what Dessler and his colleagues did for climate. They reviewed 1,406 scientific papers to counter Trump’s vaccine skeptics.
“Immunizations are an effective tool to reduce health risks for all populations from flu, COVID, and RSV, and have a strong safety profile,” they concluded. “The studies reviewed … found no significantly elevated safety risks from US-licensed immunizations for these conditions.”
For Ralph Keeling, this all strikes very close to home. In 1958, his father, Charles, began measuring the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide from a station on the slopes of Mauna Loa, the Hawaiian volcano. Within a few years, the data proved what scientists had feared: carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels was building up in the atmosphere. Eventually, Ralph took over the monitoring from his father, and the upward bend in atmospheric carbon became known as “the Keeling Curve.”
“The world’s longest continuous measurement of the single biggest factor driving anthropogenic climate change,” as Ralph Keeling wrote in an op-ed, which forced him to step out of his scientific style and adopt an advocacy voice.
Because Keeling’s partner in these measurements is NOAA, the proposed cuts would poke the eyes out of the monitoring of the atmosphere. “This swing of the ax would certainly be a personal blow,” Keeling allows.
But it would be something worse, he added. “Even if you believed—against the evidence—that the cost of curtailing emissions outweighs the benefits, it does not justify a head-in-the-sand approach.”
Michael Oreskes is a co-author of The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country—and Why It Can Again
