Donald Trump's first term in the White House left a bitter taste in the mouths of the scientific community. Created in November 2016, the Silencing Science Tracker site has meticulously recorded the ills the sector suffered during this period when among other things, climate related information was censored, jobs were cut, staff arbitrarily relocated, expert committees dismantled, research hindered and biased communication disseminated There was a substantial number of cases with over 400 listed between 2016 and 2021.

The moment Donald Trump returned to the White House, supported ostentatiously by the digital industry's big bosses, he started on his ideological purge of federal programs (as can be seen in an article of January 30 in Science). And it raises the question of what lies in store for the scientific community, Yet there are those who would like to believe that they are now better prepared to deal with this kind of interference. A recent article in the New York Times was even cautiously optimistic with the headline, "Trump targeted scientists in his first term. This time, they're ready.

Do scientists enjoy better protection against political interference today than they did in 2016? The Scientific Integrity Task Force, created in the wake of a presidential memorandum in January 2021, took up the issue of scientific independence and, coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council, was charged with devising a general integrity framework to be applied by the federal agencies.

IPublished in January 2023, it emphasized that "measures to prevent and address political interference ... should be at the forefront of agency practices to bolster high standards of scientific integrity." Their work brought about the recent successive revisions to the policies of the National Science Foundation (February 2024), NASA (May 2024), the American National Institutes of Health (September 2024) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (January 2025), which prohibit political interference in the design, conduct, management, evaluation and communication of scientific data, research and activities, and to this end reiterate the role of integrity referents.

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