War on Science: HR edition

We’ve known for awhile about the “fork in the road” and reassignments and RIFs and budget cuts that have torn through numerous government agencies. Well, now we actually have numbers. Per Science, there are just over 10,000 fewer PhD STEM scientists in federal employ as of the end of November as at the start of 2025. That amounts to a loss of 14% of the PhD-trained workforce, a rate of loss nearly five times the overall rate of decline of government employees (3% smaller). A fair bit of this is from people leaving government service at a higher rate than usual, and another part is that hiring of PhD scientists is almost at a standstill. The agencies hit the hardest? NSF, EPA, Forest Service and DOE (NOAA is pretty close, too).

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, this is no surprise for an administration that doesn’t believe science whether the topic is climate or public health or anything in between. They want their biases accepted without contradiction, and if nothing else, scientists are a contradictatory lot.

Are We Past Peak Science?

With all the war on science stuff, it is easy to think that once this is over, science will spring back. In the sense that the US government will again provide money, this is in many ways returning towards normal. But there are other things stalking science.

One has long been the career scientist at the expense of the called scientist. If you will do whatever to keep your (scientific) job, then there is a risk of doing bad science that still counts towards a promotion or tenure. This has been evident for a long time (M. King Hubbert complained about it about 60 years ago). This is a long, slow process that we’ve encountered before. While this is an unhelpful evolution of the field, it doesn’t seem to be reversing science so much as slowing it. (A related issue are the junk journals that have been exploding over the past decade or two).

What might just cause science to go in reverse? How about AI.

War on Science: 2025 casualty report

It has not even been a full calendar year, but the damage reports keep rolling in. With so much going on, it is easy to lose track. So Katherine Wu at The Atlantic has taken the time to remind us of the scope and magnitude of the losses of 2025. While this isn’t a laundry list (the Silencing Science tracker kind of does that, if that is what you are looking for), it does take a bit of a step back to consider the magnitude of what has happened. Among the casualties are numerous collaborations, a retreat from ambitious research, interruption or destruction of long-term datasets, and damage to the pipeline of future scientists. Much of this damage is irretrievable. And so fighting to prevent even more damage, such as proposed elimination of the NCAR center in Boulder, is needed to try and keep as much alive through this time as possible.

Settled Science

Sitting in the basement with a head cold allows GG some time to wonder about science at a bit more removed distance, and such reflections are kind of encouraged as the year changes over. In the public sphere, science gets representing in many ways. “It is a process, not a collection of facts” shows up a fair bit. From the scientists’ side, it means that interpretations can change with new evidence, and there is a process of sorts for refining and improving our understanding of the universe, which can result in some “facts” changing. GG suspects a different interpretation from outside science is there, which is anything can be true. At the extreme, this produces a lot of “whataboutism” and “self-education” where people can do this science process stuff with the observations they trust more.

Now Richard Feynman years ago offered that “science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.” Arguably science is failing in a lot of corners these days as confirmation bias and avoidance of cognitive dissonance seems to permit a lot of fooling yourself. Jon Stewart once summarized questioning by a Congressman at a committee hearing as “I do not believe the scientists because it is their profession, not their hobby.” If the people actually working on the science produce results you don’t like, well, they must be dishonest as opposed to the noble hobbyists. Anyways, that kind of delusion isn’t really where GG wants to go today.

Let’s consider a more mainstream concern: So if science isn’t a collection of facts, just what does it mean to say “the science is settled”? Does this really happen? How might it work?

War on Science: Boulder Special

Update: So the protest on 12/20 went pretty well…for something arranged a couple days in advance, Boulder Indivisible had probably a dozen people dedicated to keeping the crowd safe and the bike path clear (it is a rather awkward location for a rally). Several politicians were there: Sen. Hickenlooper, State AG Weiser, Rep. Neguse along with several other local officials spoke at some point (it was pretty hard to hear them, though). Neguse, when asked if we should be calling his office to improve support, said that his office would make a phone tree for constituents to consult to convince members of the appropriations committees to defend NCAR. GG tried counting attendees and got about 1000 (maybe a hair less). A few photos at the bottom.

As we here in Boulder all were struggling to adjust to 100 mph winds and associated checkerboard power outages while some in our community were sharing their science at the American Geophysical Union conference in New Orleans, a different blast of wind came from DC. The budget director, Russell Vought, said “and there shall be no more NCAR”. Well, his actual words were “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” USA Today broke this story, noting that “The administration plans to identify and eliminate what it calls ‘green new scam research activities’ during an upcoming review of the center.”

Nothing speaks to carefully considered policy decisions like “climate alarmism,” “left-wing climate lunacy” and “green new scam.” Honestly, can this crew get even more juvenile?

This is enough of a big deal that Science and Ars Technica picked it up rather quickly, and GG expects there are some serious discussions going on in New Orleans as the AGU meeting peters out. Impacts here in Boulder are substantial. A lot of the details are shared in Boulder’s Daily Camera.

This is getting personal. GG can see the iconic NCAR building out the window as he types (you can see it in nearly all the news coverage of this). It is one of the very few buildings Boulder allowed to access city utilities while being that high on the mountainside; that special treatment should tell you something about how Boulder views atmospheric science. It is also a favorite hiking trailhead that has a weather trail where stations guide you to observe the weather. And so it might get some love this weekend when Indivisible Boulder has a protest on Saturday at 11-1 (though that will be on Broadway in front of more prosaic buildings housing NCAR).

War on Science: Red State Edition

Science has an interesting article describing all the additional angst scientists in (some) GOP-controlled states are facing. And one of the most striking elements is the large number of scientists not willing to use their full name despite, you know, this freedom of speech things we keep hearing about. The second most striking thing is this: “Nearly every person interviewed for this story knew someone who had moved to escape the new state policies.” Think on that. While there was a lot of speculation when Trump was first elected that a bunch of people would move to Canada, that never happened. So note the tense here: “had moved”. Not “are planning to move” or “considering moving” but had moved. So damage to the scientific enterprise is not only the national damage courtesy of the Trump administration, but by the piling on of empowered state legislatures and governors who smell political benefits by cracking down on perceived “woke” policies that most residents of their state find undesirable in theory.

Why say “in theory?”

How to mess up a gravity profile

GG has often criticized gravity profiles drawn from gridded datasets. Recently when asked about that, he decided it was worth showing in a simple way just exactly how bad things can get.

So start with this hypothetical distribution of gravity points on a profile:

In this case, there is a 2 km high mountain on the left side that is too rugged for getting gravity points other than a couple on the summits. So in the process of incorporating this into a gridded dataset, imagine that a linear interpolation is used. We then get this:

Now somebody comes along who wants to model this anomaly…

To fit the gravity, two bodies are introduced. A basin fill that is largely required by the gradient on the right, and some other anomaly on the slope of the range. This is assuming that the user of the gridded data is using the proper topography. If they assume things are flat, you get this:

(Not using measurements at the elevations where collected can produce sizable errors…here not so bad).

Well, this is all well and good until you consider the original model that produced the data:

Yes, just the basin fill was producing the anomaly (blue stars). Reliance on the gridded data would be a mistake. Now there clearly is uncertainty in the area where no gravity measurements were taken…and that is the point. If you show where data exists, you can surmise there is missing information.

Does this happen a lot? Well…probably more than many might admit (GG has seen it in a submitted paper long ago). A lot of things are easier with a gridded dataset, so these are widely used (it is hard, for instance, to filter gravity maps without a uniform grid). But too often, they are accepted as “data” rather than some kind of intermediate analysis. This has been an issue in the Basin and Range where historically the absence of good elevation control, large terrain corrections, and difficult access have limited gravity stations in the mountains. As widespread collection of new public gravity data seems absent or rare, a lot of datasets still have issues like these present.

So you’ve been warned. Gravity can be a great tool for a number of reasons, but you want to know what is really observed.

War on Science: Prisoner’s dilemma?

10/4: Another view from The Atlantic…

What dropped into 9 university leaders’ mailboxes was a document that, under different circumstances, would be canned as spam as this document is basically an ultimatum: turn over control of your campus to us, or else. The “or else” is losing access to all federal programs: student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax benefits, and immigration visas. Not to mention admissions policies will be set by the feds. Aside from that are a number of contradictory demands and some additional threats. Unfortunately the origin of the document is the federal government.

This document is so self-contradictory and extreme that it resembles the original demands made on Harvard. That of course led to a lawsuit. Will this one do the same?

Clearly none of this is in legislation from Congress; just as obvious is this Congress will do nothing about this. Will courts intervene? Probably not until universities turn this offer down and are punished. We’ve already seen that that path produces real pain even if the schools are in the right–the government appeals as slowly as possible as the courts seem to feel that holding back on these programs is OK pending some trial somewhere. While Ivies have the resources to fight, most of the rest of universities don’t have the bankroll to continue operations while fighting this. Which, of course, is what the administration is counting on.

There are precisely two outcomes: Every university says no, or we see the end of American research universities. It is that stark. Lurking in the demands is that every unit be politically balanced (where the definition of “balance” has nothing to do with ability) and that conservative voices are protected. You get the feeling that wrongspeak will be punished. Study showing climate change is real? That is offensive to conservative speech–you shall not get funding, you shall not get published, but you will get punished. All research will be approved by the Dear Leader and his lackeys. Loyalty tests are clearly in the possibilities from this contract.

So why a Prisoner’s dilemma? Once somebody says yes to this, it becomes a lot harder to say no. Because now there is somebody willing to take advantage of federal research funds (rare as those will become) at the expense of control over admissions and faculty recruitment and speech on campus, etc. That school being the poster child for this will no doubt get showered with the money taken illegally from other research schools. So funds that are allocated by Congress will be spent. That these terms are draconian will lose a real bite if there are schools that say, sure, let’s do this. The first to say yes get rewarded. Only if everybody says no is there real pushback to this.

While it feels like screaming into the void, letting Congress people know this cannot stand, letting university presidents know that “yes” is not acceptable.

War on Science: Win some, lose some?

There were signs that the federal government wasn’t going to leave academic science entirely, but then there is increasing evidence that science would be sidelined. There was movement in the Senate to restore most of the cancelled research grants at NSF. That the administration went to a recession bill to defund NPR and PBS suggests that they might not simply try to kill the impoundment control act by ignoring it, which would suggest that they will do something with the money still in the FY25 budget for NSF and NIH. That would also suggest that the Congressional reversal of the most brutal cuts in the FY26 budget proposal might stand up if they make it out of Congress. And the impact of killing research you don’t like has been getting wider and wider exposure.

But there are bigger fish to fry. Quick question: do you want government to act on best available science, or on gold standard science? The latter is what the Trump administration is pushing, and its origins are not terribly worthy: the so-called merchants of doubt that tried to protect cigarette smoking by insisting that more study was needed. While the tobacco story was in the courts and public opinion, the current incarnation of “gold-standard science” appears to be designed to give political appointees total freedom to accept scientific results they like and avoid using those they don’t like. This has been a long-term goal of parts of the right for some time (see the 2017 HONEST act), and the administration has seized on the “reproducibility crisis” as a justification for ignoring science. Toss in this business of kicking out all the in-house experts at EPA, and the writing on the wall is pretty clear. Even if Congress decides to fund science, the administration will happily ignore its results.

War on Science: Self-own?

Some of us have seen this coming down the pike, and anybody who was aware of the dishonesty of the (failed) HONEST act of 2017 (and the earlier attempts to use something like it as a cudgel against science) was just waiting for this shoe to drop. And drop it did when the President’s XO on “gold-standard science” came out. It’s taken a bit of time for this to sink in, but Science finally looked to catch up with the implications and found the problem is not in the stars, but in ourselves. Much like how the Democrats committed political malpractice with things like “defund the police”, well-meaning scientists set up the GOP with the “replication crisis.”

Now GG has opined in the past about reproducibility and found its presentation in public media misleading. Basically, GG’s suggestions would be that just picking something to test for reproduction might be a fine strategy for finding projects for graduate students, but it isn’t a great way to decide on major scientific initiatives. Really, only the science that you want to build on seems to potentially merit reproduction. Second, “reproduction” in its strictest sense is typically stupid; if you are to the point where you have to follow every step exactly as done before, at best you learn there was a mistake and more likely you learn that there was another step you didn’t quite get right. Instead, if you really are interested in the thing that the first study found, devise a new experiment. Third, if there are some things so incredibly basic in approach that multiple groups tried the same things to address the same problems and most failed to clear statistical tests on significance, then we need a repository for studies that didn’t quite make it. Relief that you can now publish papers that essentially duplicate the results of the first-to-publish studies suggests that there really are such problems [GG can’t think of one in earth science].

Well, the new Science news article points out that the sudden emergence of a “reproducibility crisis” (whose origins were an attempt to replicate psychology studies about a decade ago) was gold for those wanting to wish away scientific findings that they found inconvenient. Obviously all the science out there that hasn’t been through the replication process cannot be trusted! And to reproduce studies, we need access to all the raw data in its rawest form! A lot of this was aimed at studies of impacts of environmental factors or chemicals that had led to rules from the EPA and sister organizations. Many such studies gather data that is sensitive and so can’t just be dumped on the internet for any home-brew wannabe scientist to mess with. But handed a big brush (replication crisis!), antiscience opportunists wielded it aggressively. And so now we are faced with cleaning up this mess at the same time as we have to address why “gold-standard science” as proclaimed by the administration is a mirage being used to cripple the use of science in government.

Joy.