The New York Times is smug about the big Democratic takeovers of the House and Senate. While Sunday’s front page portrayed Republicans as old and stuffy, two other weekend print stories took the "GOP hates science!" route.
It took four reporters (Benjamin Mueller, Carolyn Johnson, Cade Metz, and Kenneth Chang) to report out a "news analysis," “Capitol Hill’s New Wave of Scientists and Physicians Planning to Counter Trump.”
The Trump administration swept into office determined to undermine the postwar model of research spending that made the United States the world’s great engine of scientific discovery.
Much of that agenda — canceling studies, slashing scientific staff, imposing greater political oversight on grant making — went into effect without the cooperation of Congress, which even in Republican hands resisted the White House’s efforts to retool the country’s research machine.
Now Democrats are set to take control on Capitol Hill, and some are already promising to do more than play defense. They hope to begin reversing changes implemented under President Trump.
The part in bold seems like an important caveat to the alarmist tone.
Equally consequential were the administration’s efforts to remake the process of vetting and awarding scientific grants. Under President Trump, the overall dollar figures for research spending have remained about the same. But his administration has exercised more discretion over how that funding is spent, changes that are mostly beyond Congress’s power to undo.
Executive discretion regarding how tax money is spent is an alarming prospect the left.
Grants are now screened for disfavored terminology, vetted in some cases by political appointees, and overseen by scientists sympathetic to the priorities of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other political leaders.
And why not? Tax-funded academic research clearly needs some ideological filtering, given its present infected by identity politics and woke terminology and the skirting of any kind of right-leaning take on race, DEI, or transgender issues, which creeps into the most unlikely things, including mandatory masking in schools.
But worse was reporter Alexander Nazaryan’s story with the pompous online headline: “These Newly Elected Lawmakers Know Something Trump Doesn’t: Science.”
Screenshot from YouTube/Katie PhangThe incoming scientists represent “a real repudiation of what has been two terrible years for science and public health,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, a group that recruits Democratic doctors and scientists to run for office. Her group supported Democratic candidates who ended up winning in the House, as well as two incoming senators: Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, in Michigan and Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in South Carolina.
(In keeping with New York Times style, physicians and academics who stop practicing once elected to a political office are not given the courtesy title doctor.)
(So how to explain a Times campaign story that featured 24 mentions of Democratic Senate winner “Dr. Abdul El-Sayed,” who never even practiced medicine, yet somehow earned the flattering honorific of “Dr.”?)
Nazaryan had a simple explanation for scientific progress (never mind that much of it was military-related spending, a liberal taboo).
After World War II, the United States became a scientific powerhouse thanks to federal funding of research in the sciences. But decades of partnership between Washington and defense contractors, Silicon Valley and other sectors are being undermined by the Trump administration, according to a recently published Times investigation.
And what exactly does slowing Medicaid spending have to do with scientific advancement, except as a way to portray the administration in a more negative light for its liberal readership?
President Trump and congressional Republicans have enacted cuts to Medicaid and allowed the expiration of tax credits provided by the Affordable Care Act. His administration has sought cuts to science funding and has subjected research to political scrutiny.
Thousands of experts have left agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic whose Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has been accused of peddling junk science.
“Now is a good time to course-correct and actually provide some oversight,” said Ms. Naughton of the new crop of science-minded Democrats.
"Science-minded Democrats" are hardly a reliable source for objective science – just trying asking them to define a woman.
