While it may not make for a good bumper sticker or hat, President-elect Donald Trump has a mandate to make science great again. He should start with federal research grants.
November’s election was, in part, a referendum on the Left’s distorted view of science. One party — we’ll let you guess which one — insisted that COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures, so-called “gender-affirming care,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates were all scientific certitudes — never mind the nonexistent or fabricated data to support them. The other party promised to try to send men to Mars.
President Joe Biden made DEI a top priority for federal scientific grant-making, part of a whole-of-government commitment to this Marxist worldview. According to an analysis by the House Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the National Science Foundation subsequently spent about $2 billion on DEI-related grants. We conducted our own analysis and found that the Biden administration had a particular focus on science education, dedicating $827 million to inject it with their equity agenda.
The Trump administration should no longer fund $750,000 grants for gems such as “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building a Sisterhood in Computing.” Officials need to scrap DEI for a better-guiding acronym such as EMC: excellence, methodological honesty, and credible authorship.
Let’s start with the easiest of the three: excellence. The NSF should issue a “Dear Colleague” letter making its objective unambiguous: that grants are to be awarded on the merit of the research — and the merit of the researchers.
Second, methodological honesty. From Alzheimer’s research to behavioral science, a truly unconscionable number of scientific frauds have been exposed in recent years. But what’s really been the consequence? Through either rule-making or budget reconciliation, whatever procedure it will take, the Trump administration must make clear that any federally grant-funded research proven to be fraudulent will be clawed back and recanted by the government. Put simply, the institution must be on the hook for the fraud of its faculty.
Similarly, the “replication crisis” has shown that much of science can be faked without resorting to outright fraud, with what’s known as “p-hacking.” Basically, p-hacking means torturing the numbers until they tell you what you want them to tell you.
The NSF should establish some bounty mechanism for exposing p-hacking frauds. A few bloggers and professors began the replication crisis almost on a whim. What if professors could instead be rewarded for data-sleuthing through a fake study, gaining a portion of the grant clawed back from the p-hacker’s institute?
Right now, there is every professional incentive for researchers to fake or fudge their findings. That must be eliminated.
Third and finally: credible authorship. Ousted Harvard President Claudine Gay taught us that even an Ivy League president can be a serial plagiarist. Just imagine who else might be. American taxpayers have a great interest in the intellectual integrity of the professors whose salaries we subsidize. Journalists have already exposed numerous plagiarists such as Gay. So, there needs to be a way to demand credible authorship. Research teams could compete for federal money with plans to feed specialized large language models the entire corpus of academic literature. That would begin a comprehensive offensive against all academic plagiarists.
Beyond these three priorities, which could be accomplished via a “Dear Colleague” letter, the Trump administration should also stop subsidizing politicized organizations that masquerade as knowledge brokers.
Scientific American, for example, endorsed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and its editor-in-chief had a meltdown on social media after Trump’s win, smearing the president-elect’s supporters as “fascists.” To borrow a term from the campaign, it was unhinged.
Taxpayers have spent an average of $4 million federal dollars a year on Scientific American’s parent company, Springer Nature, since 2021. Maybe we should stop.
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Likewise, the president of the American Association of University Professors called Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump fascists. Maybe we shouldn’t let taxpayer-funded universities subsidize membership in explicitly partisan organizations that embrace and promote racial stereotyping with our funding.
Obviously, the shift from DEI to EMC would give leftist “science” a drubbing over the course of a few years. But once there is a credible incentive mechanism for exposing fraud and fakery and the plagiarists have been exposed and purged from academia, people should, for once, have a reason to, as they say, trust the science.
Max Eden is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Amber Todoroff is the deputy policy editor for Open the Books.