Eighty years after the dropping of the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War, President Donald Trump is systematically dismantling the public institutions of science and research that made American strength and prosperity possible, historian Garrett Graff wrote in a scathing analysis for The New York Times published on Tuesday.
Trump began attacking science from the outset of his presidency, with the National Science Foundation even red-flagging words like "female," "women," "systemic," or "trauma" in grant applications, and has since carried out mass layoffs and political reorganizations at agencies vital to scientific research.
All of this pales in comparison to how America did things in the Manhattan Project, which allowed the country to become a nuclear power, wrote Graff.
"That the Manhattan Project happened is itself a minor miracle. For nearly two years, the U.S. military seemed to want nothing to do with the effort of inventing an atomic bomb," wrote Graff. "From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first."
Initially, the military resisted — but ultimately America committed $2 billion to the effort.
From there, facilities "like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war," he noted. Agencies like DARPA and NASA owe their existence to this tradition — giving us everything from space travel to the internet to lifesaving vaccines.
Trump is now threatening all of this, Graff wrote.
"Agencies like the National Science Foundation have been gutted, and the administration’s war on universities is already leading to huge cuts at science and health labs around the country; the Republican Congress and Trump administration are squashing progress in technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles that the rest of the world is mostly keen to adopt, likely leaving the United States not only behind but potentially not even in the game," he wrote. "Even necessities like weather forecasting and high-quality government data collection face wreckage, and officials are starting to unwind public health advances like fluoride in water and mandatory childhood vaccinations."
Even the original Trump administration wasn't this shortsighted, he argued — after all, they bankrolled Operation Warp Speed to get COVID vaccines ready for rollout as quickly as possible. Furthermore, he said, "It is equally puzzling that this model of development is undermined by figures like Elon Musk, a one-time immigrant student, and MarcAndreessen, whose fortune came from Netscape, which was built on inventions supported by funding from the National Science Foundation."
The bottom line, he concluded, is that "if China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project."