The Trump era

On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump, a New York real estate developer and reality TV star, was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. He had won the election the previous November, losing the popular vote by 3 million to Hillary Rodham Clinton, but beating her handily in the Electoral College. Many pundits called it a stunning upset. In truth, it wasn’t. It’s true that Clinton had run a poor campaign, that shortly before Election Day FBI director James Comey had revealed the reopening of its investigation into Clinton’s emails, and that Russia had run an effective meddling effort to help elect Trump. If any one of them hadn’t happened, the outcome might have been different.

But, in truth, the election hinged on the votes of a large segment of the American population that had been left behind, even as the nation as a whole had prospered. Trump’s twin messages, “Make America Great Again” and “America First,” resonated strongly with a disaffected, disillusioned, and despairing sector of the American population. A few astute political observers predicted that the ensuing populist wave would carry Trump into the White House, but they constituted a small minority.

It’s not my purpose to expound on the election in general, but rather to highlight how science and technology might have affected the outcome and how the Trump White House began to dismantle accepted science and technology policies in the first five hundred days of his presidency. The connection between technology and the disaffected voters who elected Trump in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is quite strong. It’s true that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade pacts led to American manufacturing job losses. It’s also true that environmental policies accelerated coal’s transition to the back burner, and that immigrants—some of them undocumented—crossed the southern border to fill a lot of low-paying jobs.

But as the 2008–2010 auto bailout amply demonstrated, robots can perform many of the traditional assembly-line tasks faster, cheaper, and more reliably. Workers discovered they were expendable not only in Detroit, but in manufacturing plants across the nation. And Barack Obama’s Advanced Manufacturing Initiative might have helped American industry compete more effectively in global markets, but it did not deliver tens of thousands of new low- or medium-skilled jobs. To be fair, that was never its primary objective. The initiative, endorsed by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, focused much more on innovation and global competitiveness. Manufacturers cheered. Workers didn’t, and 8 years after the financial meltdown and the resulting economic crisis, they expressed their dissatisfaction and anger at the ballot box.

The collapse of the Eastern coal mining industry also owes its demise to science and technology. Trump railed against environmental regulations; he said they stole jobs from patriotic Americans. Miners and their families swarmed to his side, when he asserted that policies established to keep waters pure, air clean, and carbon emissions down were too stringent and needed to be rolled back. In truth, though, coal mining in Appalachia began to disappear when high-tech Western surface mining became more economically advantageous. Eastern (Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky) deep mining simply couldn’t compete.

Cheaper natural gas also began to displace coal as the major source of energy for electricity generation. That, too, was the result of technology. Hydraulic fracturing—also known simply as “fracking”—which opened up vast reserves of formerly inaccessible gas, is an extraordinary example of how disparate scientific advances can give birth to a new industry. Geology, chemistry, physics, computer science, and materials science converged to allow drilling companies to tap shale gas reserves, using horizontal drilling and sophisticated mapping.

Policymakers and elected officials were asleep at the switch. They either were ignorant of the technological transformations that were sweeping across middle America, or they chose to ignore them. The result was an electoral outcome in the nation’s heartland that few expected. Give Donald Trump high marks for sensing the anguish many voters were feeling. But give him low marks for implementing policies to deal with it.

Trump entered the White House as a disrupter, and science and technology did not draw a pass from his intentions to shake things up. While he kept France Córdova as director of the National Science Foundation and Francis Collins as director of NIH, he made major changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and the office of Management and Budget. He chose Scott Pruitt, a well-known climate-change denier, as EPA administrator; Ryan Zinke, a land developer, as Secretary of the Interior; Rick Perry, who admitted he didn’t know what DOE did, as Secretary of Energy; and Mick Mulvaney, a slash and burn Tea Party conservative, as Director of the Office of Management and Budget and later White House acting chief of staff.

Finally, he allowed the position of Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to remain vacant for 18 months—twice as long as any of his predecessors—before nominating Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-respected meteorologist, to the post. Droegemeier would be the first presidential adviser without credentials applicable to nuclear weapons and nonproliferation policy. But as a former OSTP senior staffer remarked cynically, “It probably won’t matter. The president isn’t going to consult him anyway.”

Trump tore up the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—JCPOA). He attempted to place restrictions on legal immigration and imposed a ban on travel from seven mostly Moslem nations. He threatened to curtail granting student visas to Chinese graduate students, and he pressed his case for moving ahead with tariffs on high-tech goods. In short, he was delivering on his America First agenda. He was not pursuing a traditional isolationist policy, but rather a highly nationalistic policy—one that appealed strongly to his voting base, but threatened the global nature of science.

On tax and spending matters, he helped ram through Congress a $1.5 trillion tax cut, reducing the corporate rate to 21%, the lowest it has been in 80 years, and ballooning the federal deficit. As part of the 2017 tax package, he initially supported eliminating the industrial Research and Experimentation (R and E) credit, which Congress had made permanent only a year before. And to tackle the mushrooming federal deficit, he twice proposed cutting federal research spending by up to 30%. Congress rejected the proposals after striking a 2-year budget agreement in early 2018 that established spending limits for fiscal years 2018 and 2019.

As I am writing the Epilogue at the close of 2018, Trump’s science and technology legacy is far from complete. But to inform my observations, I spoke with three prominent Washington observers: Rush Holt, Jr., president and CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Glenn Ruskin, director of external affairs and communications for the American Chemical Society; and Mary Woolley, president of Research!America (R!A), a preeminent medical and health research advocacy organization. I asked all three to reflect not only on Trump, himself, but also on the mood of the country and how it relates to science. Here is what they said in brief.

Rush Holt (AAAS): Trump’s approach to science and science policy unfortunately mirrors much of the general public’s. It dismisses evidence if doesn’t fit a chosen argument. It rejects a hallmark of American science and technology policymaking stretching back more than two centuries—the importance of empirical thinking and fact-based decision making. It reflects a lack of scientific curiosity, probably characterizing the same lack among most of his supporters.

We probably haven’t reached a tipping point, but we need to find better ways to give people the ability to evaluate evidence and to appreciate how much science has contributed to their lives.

Glenn Ruskin (ACS): The American Chemical Society has attempted to be constructively vocal, assuming good intentions on the part of the president, even if he does not articulate them. That said, the White House and OMB have repeatedly declined to acknowledge any correspondence from ACS, including arguments that link science to economic growth and improvements in the nation’s infrastructure.

The ACS membership is divided on how much the Chemical Society should push back on Trump. Half believe ACS’s response has been too tepid, and half believe it has been too aggressive. Allowing science to become embroiled in politics has always been a third rail for ACS members. But many believe that Trump is no friend of science and wonder whether it’s necessary to draw a line in the sand before a tipping point is reached. They are concerned that “fake news”—Trump’s characterization of the mainstream media—will mutate into “fake science.” And that would be the tipping point.

Mary Woolley (R!A): Trump has the opportunity to take on a major medical issue and make a mark the way Nixon did with cancer and Reagan eventually did with HIV-AIDS. Trump, if he wanted to, could make opioids part of his legacy. Unfortunately, he responds less to scientific information than the echo chamber provided by social media and electronic media. By so doing, he his subverting the role of science in effective policymaking. The public probably recognizes the benefits of medical research more than he does.

It is too soon to evaluate the impact of Trump and his dedicated followers might have on the science and technology policies that will shape America and the world in the years to come. But without question, the Trump era will be remembered for its disruptions and doubts.