The attacks on science have come fast and furious since January, when President Trump and his administration moved back into the White House with one hand holding the Project 2025 playbook and the other making an illegal power grab.
Last month, UCS published Science and Democracy Under Siege: Documenting Six Months of the Trump Administration’s Destructive Actions, a report that catalogs 402 attacks on science between January 20 and June 30, 2025.
Co-author and UCS Analyst Jules Barbati-Dajches helped create the methodology used behind UCS’s expanded attacks-on-science database that formed the basis of this report. As an expert in communication science, Dr. Barbati-Dajches sees throughlines from the toxic public language used to discuss public policy issues, to the administration’s list of forbidden words being excised from public places and federal research, to the executive orders attacking science and making people and communities less safe and secure.
AAS: Why is it important to track all the negativity and harm done by the administration?
JULES BARBATI-DAJCHES: Politicizing science is a common tactic for groups in power who find the science inconvenient to their agenda. At UCS we’ve tracked attacks on science for more than two decades through Republican and Democratic administrations.
In the past, we’ve seen how authoritarian regimes around the world have targeted science and scientists. Regimes like this want to control the narrative instead of letting science speak for itself. It’s helpful to document the methodical way the current administration is dismantling federal scientific systems, as well as the immediate and predicted impacts of these attacks on science, because we can share this with elected officials and decisionmakers. This report is evidence of the real impacts these attacks are having on their constituents. We can use this evidence to advocate for the kind of legislation needed to protect science, and by extension, protect people from the harms of anti-science policies and actions.
AAS: What did the team find when they started sorting through the administration’s actions?
JULES BARBATI-DAJCHES: First, the administration’s efforts to ‘put federal workers in trauma’ resulted in 120,000 workers, including many scientists, being ripped from their jobs at agencies like Department of Energy, National Oceanic Atomospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Institutes of Health. These are agencies that employ scientists who conduct research and inform public safeguards surrounding energy use, extreme weather events, chemical hazards, and diseases like cancer. We all depend on the work these scientists have done.
Second, at NIH, the world’s premier agency for biomedical research—a place super important for increasing our knowledge of cancer treatments, autoimmune diseases, and preventative care—in just six months there have been 54% fewer project grants awarded compared to the previous 9-year average. And almost 3,000 grants were terminated because of their association with the administration’s list of “taboo words” about LGBTQ+ health, vaccines, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Third, 532 industrial facilities in the country—facilities like coal plants and commercial sterilizers—were offered the chance to be completely exempted from Clean Air Act regulations for an additional two years, and more than 100 have already taken the administration up on that offer. Ninety percent of those facilities are 5 miles from a school or daycare, and more than 70% of the facilities disproportionately harm communities of color, communities with low income, and people who do not speak English as a first language.
Fourth, 27% of the government’s active science advisory committees have been terminated or disbanded. These are groups of volunteer experts from academia, state government, tribal organizations, and other organizations who give their time and expert advice to the federal government.
And fifth, of the nearly 850 substantive changes to environmental and climate government web pages we documented, 67% of those changes reduced public access to information. Access to this information and these datasets is funded by taxpayers.
AAS: That’s a damning list. Did any attack stand out to you and the team?
JULES BARBATI-DAJCHES: It’s hard to highlight only one attack. In the report, we did want to draw attention to how, by delaying Clean Air Act regulations, the Trump administration bypassed years of coordination between the federal government and the public through public comments and the best available science on toxic air pollutants. This decision ignores people who have worked hard to try to protect their children and their communities from being exposed to dangerous chemicals like mercury and ethylene oxide, chemicals that are known to cause cancer and lifelong neurological impairments.
An early pattern we noticed were the “downstream effects” of President Trump’s early executive orders that sought to encourage the use and production of fossil fuels, ignore the existence of transgender and intersex people, and outlaw environmental justice in the federal government. These orders are already having an impact. Implementing these orders contributes to the attack on public access to information. Web pages and datasets on LGBTQ+ communities, communities that are historically underresearched and minoritized in public health and policy, are being taken down. These orders are also connected to how federal grants and funding have been politicized because of their perceived association with minoritized groups, health equity, and climate change. These are only some of the impacts covered in more detail in the report.
AAS: As an expert in the science of communications, what do you make of the list of taboo words being used to justify cutting grants and ending research helpful to vulnerable groups?
JULES BARBATI-DAJCHES: Much of what the administration is doing originated with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The people behind that have been strategic in how to discuss and frame the science behind public policy issue areas and communities of people.
The use or omission of words can be a powerful tool, especially from people in positions of power.
These language changes can shift the conversation around science-informed policy inconvenient to political agendas, and exclude groups and topics from scientific research. The administration is using language changes to undermine scientific consensus and expert knowledge on climate science, vaccine safety, hazardous chemicals, and the science that helps inform public safeguards that protect our communities. Words can be used to isolate and demonize marginalized groups of people who have been historically excluded from having a seat at the table, both in scientific research and in policy. Words can be used to minimize the urgency and severity of climate change.
We’ve seen words used in all these ways, certainly during President Trump’s first term but even more so in the first six months of his second.
It’s easy to discount the power of words, but how these groups of people and how these scientific topics are discussed matters. This isn’t just word choice—it’s a a strategy that we’ve seen used throughout history to control political discourse, to the detriment of our health and our planet.
AAS: Since January, it has felt like an avalanche of news, with nearly 200 executive orders from the administration and 325 legal challenges. How did the team figure out where to begin and how to count, categorize, and characterize everything happening?
JULES BARBATI-DAJCHES: We wanted to develop a methodology that was comprehensive to try to capture this avalanche.
Our definition of an attack on science is “an action, statement, or decision that originates from an elected official or political appointee at a federal agency that results in the censoring, manipulation, forging, or misinforming of scientific data, results, or conclusions, conducted within the government or with federal funds.”
We use news articles as our data source. I collect the stories that could contain a possible attack, then a team of trained human coders—all UCS staff, including myself—codes the potential attacks using a methodology called content analysis. Content analysis is a social science methodology that allows trained human coders to identify what academics call, “constructs of interest” from different types of media, like news articles or television shows. The training component is important, because you want to make sure that different people reading a text or watching a video are categorizing things consistently. We are still coding and documenting attacks, with more research currently ongoing. The methodology is spelled out in more detail in the report.
AAS: What should people do with this research?
JULES BARBATI-DAJCHES: It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for protecting science, and there are a lot of ways that people can get involved! We would like people to join us in the fight to defend federal science. Our partners and supporters can take this comprehensive report and help us push for legislation on scientific integrity. We need our decisionmakers and members of Congress to show up for the American people and put public safeguards into place, public safeguards informed by science. We need help holding these protections and holding the line against these attacks.
People can start by reading the Recommendations section of our report and staying up to date via UCS social media channels.