In the first week of his second term, US president Donald Trump has thrown the country’s scientific apparatus into chaos, while at the same time anointing a new tech oligarchy. With a blitz of executive orders, he’s set the US on a path that will derail climate goals, biomedical research and pandemic readiness.
On 20 January, the first day of his presidency, Trump declared a “national energy emergency” and proposed expanding fossil fuel production on federal land, including a controversial move to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling and mining. He also enacted a temporary ban on federal permits for wind energy projects.
The biggest blow to climate action was the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. This was Trump’s second withdrawal attempt – the first, which came into effect in 2019, was later reversed by then-President Joe Biden. This time, the US will be out for at least the majority of Trump’s presidency, if not beyond.
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That move could lead to lowered climate commitments from major domestic industries; while the clean energy transition is likely to continue around the world, Trump has effectively sidelined the US. This is all happening against the backdrop of the Los Angeles wildfires – some of the most destructive in the country’s history.
“The world has just endured yet another hottest year on record, with countless communities reeling from a spate of deadly and costly climate-driven disasters,” said Rachel Cleetus at the Union of Concerned żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs . “The Trump administration seems hell-bent on worsening the toll by greatly expanding fossil fuels while stymying progress on clean energy and climate resilience.”
The impact of these policies may be exacerbated by Trump’s desire to speed up the rollout of energy-intensive artificial intelligence development, which threatens to strain the US electrical grid and potentially increase greenhouse gas emissions.
With tech billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, front and centre at Trump’s inauguration, not to mention Musk’s seemingly powerful yet ill-defined role within the new administration, it is clear the new president wants a rapid acceleration of AI. He rescinded a Biden order requiring AI developers to share safety information with the government, while also announcing a $500 billion plan to build out massive data centres to support more AI development, though the exact source of this funding is unclear.
Global health impact
While Trump aims to make the US a global leader in AI, he is retreating from its existing leadership on health. One of his first moves was to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). With the US fighting to hold back an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in people, it is a dangerous time to walk away. The US contributes around 20 per cent of the WHO’s total budget, so the loss will certainly hobble global vaccine programmes – such as the one that eradicated smallpox – and surveillance for potential new pandemics. Global HIV and AIDS treatment programmes will take a hit as well, and could be further affected by another Trump order to pause foreign aid for 90 days.
The damage doesn’t stop there: at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, Trump abruptly cancelled the grant review process that helps fund research on everything from cancer and dementia to heart disease and depression. These grants pay the salaries of researchers and graduate students.
NIH researchers have also reported that they can’t purchase vital equipment – including test tubes, animal feed and liquid nitrogen to cool samples – to continue their current work. It is effectively halting some studies, and some research may have to start over from scratch. “We’ve never seen anything like this. This is like a meteor just crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas,” Victoria Seewaldt at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center told .
It is also unclear how quickly we’ll learn of specific repercussions. In one of his most authoritarian moves, Trump enacted a gag order on major US health agencies, including the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, temporarily halting direct communications to the public. For the first time in more than 60 years, the CDC didn’t release a key weekly report on deaths by disease and state. The same report in the 1980s led to the understanding that AIDS was an emerging epidemic.
Though some of these changes may be temporary, the limits on health agencies could have ramifications for weeks or even months, and for cases where climate progress is being reversed, they could reverberate for decades. Trump has promised that his presidency would bring about a “golden age” for the US – but if his first week is anything to go by, it will be a dark age for science.
