In less than a week of assuming the presidency, Trump’s war on science is back in full force. This time, it’s going to be even worse.
In many ways this was to be expected. My scientific colleagues and I have been braced for impact since the moment Trump won re-election. We saw what happened the first time around, and we knew that whatever was heading our way wouldn’t be good.
Preparations began immediately. Scientists, public health and climate experts all steeled themselves for the threat of increased federal scrutiny, public attacks, lost federal funding and lost jobs. Yet somehow we were still underprepared for how swift and sweeping Trump’s anti-science tactics would be.
This is especially true in Colorado.
In Colorado, attacks on science and public health cut deeper. As a leading recipient of federal research dollars due to our high concentration of national laboratories, the prospect of losing federal research dollars and support is a much bigger economic issue here than it is for many other states — particularly many of the red states that support Trump so heavily.
Countless efforts statewide are already well underway to make us world leaders in innovation ranging from state-of-the-art quantum facilities to becoming a new climate tech hub. Regions such as Golden, Boulder, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs boast some of the state’s most well-known facilities, but other federal science funding finds its way into several mountain towns for remote locations.
Then there’s Colorado’s bioscience community, an economic sector that raised an estimated $2.15 billion in 2024. That’s a big piece of pie, and one that’s made possible with the significant help of federal funding, talent, expertise and local facilities — all of which are highly dependent on federal support, and all of which are now highly under threat by the Trump administration.
Take, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC was hit immediately with a gag order and information bans right off the bat by the new Trump administration, far more so than in past transitions, including Trump’s prior term. This halted major health reports, meetings, transparency and promptly damaged the U.S.’s standing internationally. These actions are made all the worse for residents of Fort Collins who work at the local CDC offices and suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs of a national fight.
Other scientists who work under federal agencies such as at NASA received orders to halt all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, including at NASA facilities in Colorado. All DEI federal staff are also already being ordered to be put on leave and ultimately laid off. Again, a damning prospect for locals associated with the agency.
Under the Food and Drug Administration, multiple gag orders, bans and DEI suspensions have been put into place by the end of the first week of Trump’s term. This includes a shocking development to many medical scientists, myself included, whereby the agency was ordered to purge all DEI efforts from clinical trial patient recruitment.
To expand a moment on the relevance of the latter, diversity in clinical trial representation is paramount to public health by two primary functions: increasing effectiveness and reducing the risk of medical devices, drugs and vaccines.
For example, race has been a correlating factor in the success of specific hypertensive drug treatment, and women’s heart attack symptoms were only discovered to be different on average from a man’s after gender-inclusive clinical trials were conducted in the 1990s. Excluding diversity efforts in clinical trials will therefore have massive implications on patient health and safety, as we sadly know from centuries of exclusion.
Meanwhile, with good information going out the door, the U.S. government now appears to be endorsing a private company, X, according to a source code line for doge.gov. As of Friday, the code line states the authoritative source of information for the new government site is X. It’s an unprecedented and blatantly illegal move and harbinger of Trump’s intent to continually circumvent U.S. laws.
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Perhaps, however, one of the biggest changes under Trump’s second term will be the silencing and instillation of fear in scientists and public health officials worldwide. While eight years ago these experts were harmed but ready to speak out, now they are being hushed with threats of dire consequences should they speak out — even anonymously.
Given Trump’s recent pardon of 1,500 violent insurrectionists combined with tech billionaires at his side, it’s not hard to see why they’d remain silent.
At the end of the day, no one knows exactly what the next four years will look like. But we do know this: Using threats to silence the nation’s top experts will only result in more chaos, economic downfall, national security breaches and ultimately further loss of life.
And if this is only week one of Trump’s second presidential term, I shudder to think what is possible in another four years.
Trish Zornio is a scientist, lecturer and writer who has worked at some of the nation’s top universities and hospitals. She’s an avid rock climber and was a 2020 candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado.
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