Jeff Tollefson, Max Kozlov, Mariana Lenharo, and Traci Watson, Nature, Nov 8, 2024
From repealing climate policies to overturning guidance on the safe development of artificial intelligence (AI), Republican Donald Trump made plenty of promises during his presidential campaign that could affect scientists and science policy. But fulfilling all of his pledges won’t be easy.
Trump, now the US president-elect for a second time, will have some advantages as he re-enters the White House in January. The first time he took office, in 2017, his victory was a surprise, and many government watchers who spoke to Nature say he didn’t have a solid plan. By contrast, the Trump administration that enters office next year will be better prepared, and Trump himself is likely to face fewer checks on his power now that he has consolidated control over the Republican establishment, says Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University in Washington DC who studies the evolution of the modern conservative movement.
But that doesn’t mean he will be able to do as he pleases, Dallek adds. “There’s a kind of revolutionary sweep to a lot of Trump’s promises that may collide with the messy reality of implementation.”
Here Nature talks to policy and other specialists about what might be in store on a range of science issues during a second Trump administration.
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Health
In the weeks leading up to the US election, Trump teamed up with political figure Robert F. Kennedy Jr on a platform promising to “make America healthy again” by tackling the root causes of chronic diseases, removing toxic substances from the environment and combating corporate corruption. Trump has said that he will let Kennedy, who has questioned the effectiveness of vaccines, “go wild on” health, unnerving public-health and health-policy researchers.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will appoint Kennedy to a position such as director of US Health and Human Services (HHS) — or whether the US Senate would approve such a move — but it’s clear that Kennedy will have Trump’s ear on health issues.
Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association in Washington DC, worries about Kennedy’s role in the new administration because he has long cast doubt on the vaccine-approval process, threatening to undermine confidence in the jabs and cause a resurgence in illnesses such as measles. “People will get sick and die because of the confusion around vaccines, if [Kennedy and Trump] implement some of the things they verbalize,” he says.
Some of Kennedy’s goals, such as cracking down on ties to industry at regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration, are good, says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a non-profit think tank in Washington DC. But those goals don’t jibe with what occurred during the first Trump administration, when Trump installed people in important health posts who had close industry ties, such as former HHS director Alex Azar, so it’s hard to know what will happen, she says.
Considering Trump’s isolationalist approach and his past comments criticizing the World Health Organization, support for global health is also likely to be “greatly scaled back” during Trump’s second term, says Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and long-time observer of the US biomedical funding landscape at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The United States is “the key player” in the funding of global-health initiatives, says Emanuel. This includes, for instance, a programme that aims to end the global AIDS epidemic. So it’s “hard to be optimistic” about the future, he adds.
Foreign science partnerships
During Trump’s first term, his administration barred people from half a dozen countries that it said were “compromised by terrorism” from entering the United States and implemented an anti-espionage programme called the China Initiative that led to the arrests of a number of scientists of Chinese heritage. Although the Biden administration overturned the travel ban and ended the China Initiative, federal officials have continued efforts to guard against foreign interference in US research.
Specialists says it’s unclear whether the second Trump administration will revive the China Initiative, although the Republican-led US House of Representatives advanced legislation in September that would do so. But a reinstatement of the travel ban is likely, says Adam Cohen, a lawyer at Siskind Susser in Memphis, Tennessee, who focuses on academic immigration and who says the president has broad authority to institute such policies.
Like the first Trump administration, the new one will probably clamp down on granting visas to foreign researchers and students from some countries, says Jennifer Steele, an education-policy researcher at American University in Washington DC. Policies that make it harder for international and US researchers to meet would also make it harder for new scientific collaborations to arise, says Caroline Wagner, a specialist in science, technology and international affairs at the Ohio State University in Columbus. That’s because such partnerships are fuelled by face-to-face contact. “Collaborations don’t begin with people just e-mailing each other across the miles,” she says.
But there might be one bright spot on the collaboration front, at least for US–China partnerships. Denis Simon, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington DC, thinks that a crucial pact governing US–China scientific cooperation that has been expired for the past year is likely to be signed by the Biden administration before Trump’s second inauguration in January. Although a renewed agreement would probably be more limited in scope owing to increased US–China tensions, its existence would show that “both governments give their blessing” to collaborations, Simon says.
Read the full article in Nature here.