Trump Goes To War Against Fake Science

Just a couple of years ago, if you can believe it, leading scientists from all over the country held a symposium in Washington along with federal officials from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to a senior director at the NIH, the point of the symposium was to address a “defining issue” of the current era. So the A-team was going to tackle one of the most difficult and pressing matters in the entire field of scientific and medical research.

Hearing that, you might conclude that these scientists were going to discuss, say, a cure for cancer, or a major breakthrough in gene-editing. Or if nothing else, they might talk about the development of the 50th COVID booster or something like that. Surely, at a minimum, they would discuss a topic that had some kind of relevance to the fields of “health” or “science” or “technology.” Those would all seem to be safe assumptions.

And yet — at the risk of spoiling the symposium for you, in case you were hoping to catch a re-run — that didn’t happen. In fact, that didn’t even come close to happening. Instead, here’s what they came up with, at this symposium full of leading medical and scientific experts in Washington. The first speaker in this clip is a professor at Notre Dame, and the second one is from the National Institutes of Health. Watch:

For a second, try to ignore the fact that these people are making up fake complaints about the plight of LGBTQ people in STEM. Pretend they’re not talking like dime-a-dozen panelists on MSNBC, instead of actual scientists. That’s actually not the worst part of this footage. The worst part is that, already, you can tell that everyone at this symposium is saying the same thing. There’s no debate whatsoever. This whole event was an extended struggle session in which only one point of view was allowed. And that point of view is that, for some reason, gay people are being forced out of math classes.

It should go without saying that this is a complete bastardization of everything scientists should be doing. They’re supposed to be asking questions, using the scientific method and finding evidence to support every single one of their conclusions. This is supposed to come naturally to them. It’s their job. Instead, they spent the entire event explaining why it’s important to think the exact same way about this particular issue, even though every sane person knows that their theory makes absolutely no sense.

For example, as the symposium goes on, one researcher with a nonprofit attempts to articulate why it’s so important to hold struggle sessions like this. And then a senior official at the National Science Foundation offers his take. Watch:

Every speaker is somehow more unbelievable than the last one. The first guy’s trying desperately to explain why they’re holding this symposium at all. And the best he can come up with is, “When we don’t ask these questions, we live under the myths that these matters don’t matter.” This is the kind of word salad that you have to produce when you know that, in fact, these matters do not matter, and that all of these concerns are completely made-up.

And then the official from the National Science Foundation comes in, and pretty much makes that point as explicitly as he can. He says that, “We shouldn’t have to wait on the data,” because “we know we’ve got an issue.” So like Nike, we should “just do it.” In other words, who cares about facts and data when you have a narrative to push? All he knows is that we need DEI and affirmative action in science and medicine. He doesn’t care if there’s no reason whatsoever to justify any of this. He just knows it needs to happen.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

For a very long time, the National Science Foundation — along with the NIH and many other federal agencies — has operated like this. They rake in billions of dollars’ worth of tax revenue with the promise of funding scientific advancements that benefit America. And then they’ve squandered it to advance a political agenda. To be clear, I’m not cherry-picking soundbites here, or taking anything out of context. This is something we can quantify. The Senate Commerce Committee just released a report documenting precisely how much money the National Science Foundation, or NSF, has wasted in recent years. Again, this is an agency of the federal government we’re talking about here.

As The Daily Wire reports:

The Senate committee found that one in 10 grants awarded [by the National Science Foundation] between January 2021 and April 2024 had to do with oppression, social or environmental justice, gender, or race.

In other words, one in 10 grants have been completely fraudulent. There’s no reason we should’ve been funding any of it. But the Biden administration made sure that we did. They kickstarted a lot of this fraudulent spending. The Senate report found that in 2021 — the first year of the Biden administration — less than 1% of grants from the NSF were focused on DEI initiatives. But by 2024, after three years of the Biden administration, more than a quarter of new grants to the NSF pushed “far-left perspectives.”

The Daily Wire has a searchable database of these grants right now on the website. You can page through around 3,000 grants from the National Science Foundation that involve DEI. For example, in 2022, NSF gave Columbia University more than $4 million so that they could study ways to “decolonize geoscience.” Meanwhile, a professor at Northwestern received a million dollars in 2023 so that he could put together “Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM,” featuring insights from Karl Marx. Over at the University of Pittsburgh, a professor received a million dollars to argue that artificial intelligence should not be neutral because that, “only serves the capitalist, racist, heteronormative, patriarchal, etc society.” Another study funded by the NSF, to the tune of $500,000, determined that the concept of “peer review” was racist: “The accepted values and practices in science can serve as roadblocks and barriers to the inclusion and advancement of minoritized scholars.”

Again, there are thousands of grants like this. We’re not talking about one or two examples. This was systemic fraud. And the only way to deal with systemic fraud like this is to clean house at the National Science Foundation, which is exactly what the Trump administration is now doing.

Just because it feels appropriate, I’ll share some reporting on this development from POLITICO, which is yet another organization that’s just had its federal funding cut dramatically:

One of the United States’ leading funders of science and engineering research is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months, a top National Science Foundation official said Tuesday. The comments by Assistant Director Susan Margulies came at an all-hands meeting of the NSF’s Engineering Directorate. … ‘A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening,’ a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management said.’

As significant as this development is, it’s important to keep in mind that NSF is just one small part of the much larger fraud that’s been taking place in the government, when it comes to research funding. The National Institutes of Health is a far bigger offender, in terms of financial waste. DOGE just found that the NIH had a contract worth more than $180 million for administrative expenses that didn’t involve healthcare in any way. That included a contract to build a Tony Fauci exhibit at the NIH museum, for example.

The Trump administration has also found that the NIH spends vast amounts of its research budget on so-called “indirect costs.” Last year, roughly $9 billion of the $35 billion that NIH spent on research ultimately went to these “indirect costs”, which is a fancy way of saying “administrative overhead” for universities and research institutions. For some institutions, these indirect costs amounted to more than 60% of their total grant funding. In other words, in a million-dollar grant to conduct cancer research, more than $600,000 might be going to non-research expenses, like office supplies and things like that. Of course, in almost every case, there’s no reason for this. There’s no reason for Harvard or Yale to rake in huge amounts of money for non-scientific purposes, when the grant is supposedly a scientific grant. It’s a pure grift in every sense. So now the Trump administration is ending this practice. They’re capping these administrative payouts to around 15% of the total grant.

What you may not know is that this isn’t the first time Donald Trump has tried to do this. As the New York Times reports:

In 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, a similar proposal would have reduced the overhead payments to 10 percent of the award amount. … The effort faltered. Congress then acted to ‘ward off’ a future effort and passed a budget bill that prohibited changing the fees from the levels that had been negotiated between federal officials and each research institution.

In other words, Trump tried to cut waste at the NIH during his first administration but Congress shut him down. They actually passed an appropriations bill that prevented him from cutting the administrative funding. And now, citing that appropriations law, a new lawsuit is trying to stop Trump from cutting the NIH funding again.

And so far, the plan is working. The other day, a federal judge halted the NIH cuts with a preliminary injunction. This has been happening constantly, as you may have noticed. Individual federal judges have also blocked the Treasury secretary’s access to internal files, prevented DOGE’s buyout offer for federal workers from going through, and attempted to block the closure of USAID. It’s clear that this will be a theme of the second Trump presidency, as it was in the first one. Judges are going to do everything they can to overturn what voters want, which is for the executive branch to determine how the executive branch operates.

But already there are signs — most notably from J.D. Vance — that the administration recognizes that these judges are breaking the law, and that their rulings may not be respected. In particular, Vance wrote:

If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.

This is an approach that obviously shouldn’t be necessary. If we had judges who respected the separation of powers, there wouldn’t be an issue. But increasingly, unelected judges are telling the executive branch how to spend money and who to employ. That’s not just unconstitutional, it’s also unsustainable. There is zero popular political support for continuing these expenditures to corrupt agencies like NSF and the NIH.

That’s because — between these revelations at the NSF, everything that happened with COVID, and the embrace of gender theory — mainstream science has completely discredited itself. Now when the public celebrates as scientists lose their funding and their jobs, they’ll blame us for being anti-science. But our problem with them is precisely the opposite.  The people we have been paying huge sums of money to — we’re talking about billions of dollars — have been spending it on political propaganda and social engineering. They’ve been doing it for decades, on the assumption that no one would ever notice or do anything about it. But now, very abruptly, that has changed. Everyone can see that many of the so-called scientists in the federal government were the ones who were actually “anti-science.” And now that they’re losing their jobs and their infinite supply of taxpayer money, the work of serious people — of actual scientists — can finally begin.