Does MAGA Actually Want American Science to Win?

In September, I published a profile in the New York Times of Jay Bhattacharya, the new director under President Trump of the National Institutes of Health, which funds over $40 billion a year in medical research. (An unpaywalled link is available at TheNewAtlantis.com/JB.)

Most of the profiles that had been written about Bhattacharya up to that point were framed around depicting him either as the great intellectual villain of the pandemic or as its hero. I think both framings miss that Bhattacharya has been offering a deeper critique of America’s medical research system than the standard populist-right complaints about Covid and wokeness. My aim was to air this critique and ask if he might wind up as a successful reformer.

The result: I found Bhattacharya’s reform vision to be more serious than he’s been given credit for, even by many of his admirers. Yet I also ended with pessimism about whether he is the man with the plan for this strange moment in the life of American science.

Now a few months on, I would like to offer some further thoughts on the profile — and a fresh note of pessimism about the fate of American science under our new political regime.

The starting point of the profile was two broad critiques that have been lobbed at the NIH and the medical research establishment in recent years:

First: They succumbed to groupthink, gatekeeping, censorship, and overt deception of the public during Covid and the peak fervor of the woke years. They tried to conduct science through a spirit of closure rather than openness. The NIH, led by Francis Collins with a big assist from Anthony Fauci, was a key culprit. This was contrary to the ethos of science, and it is why the old establishment lost public trust and political power.

And second: The NIH has become a listless behemoth. It has suffered embarrassing, avoidable failures on crucial research programs like Alzheimer’s. It isn’t delivering the tangible returns on its investments that it once did. Perhaps that is because it doesn’t even have a coherent view anymore of what return it is supposed to be delivering. Like many distended bureaucracies, its main purpose has become to perpetuate itself.

The first of these critiques is very familiar to the public, so I took as a given that readers would already have a settled view on it. I also took it as largely correct — both because there is no interesting question to ask about whether Bhattacharya might be a fruitful reformer if you believe this part of his diagnosis is fundamentally wrong, and because I believe it is correct.

If you are not familiar with the second critique, I highly recommend Daniel Sarewitz’s “Saving Science,” an essay published in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of this journal that achieved viral levels of readership, that heavily informed my profile, and that I consider among the most important essays about American science published in the last decade.

Or see the works of Robert Cook-Deegan, Stuart Buck, Caleb Watney, or Susan M. Fitzpatrick. Or the 2003 report by Congress’s National Research Council that concluded that the NIH probably needed fundamental restructuring, but that this was unlikely to happen because the agency is the “result of a set of complex evolving social and political negotiations among a variety of constituencies.” Or the 2011 article “Time to Rethink the NIH” by Michael Crow, then the president of Arizona State University, published in the prestigious journal Nature, that called for taking the agency apart and rebuilding it on new foundations. Or Bhaven Sampat’s ominous note in a 2023 article that the Biden administration, which had just created a new federal agency tasked with discovering breakthrough medical advancements, made sure to do so outside the agency, “on the theory that NIH cannot be fixed from within.”

If you are skeptical of the current administration, it is very hard not to hear this mode of critique as just a rationalization for populist agitation. But it goes back long before the Trump era and has been offered by a wide, bipartisan array of serious observers.

A starting point for making sense of what Bhattacharya may achieve at the NIH, then, is to accept both these critiques as saying something hard but necessary for science’s partisans to hear, and then to recognize that he has connected the two in a way few adherents of either have done so far. That is: perhaps the forms of politicized behavior that have been so prominently on view in science over the last decade actually share an underlying cause with the aimlessness that reformers have long been worrying about — because both are born of herd thinking, which is exactly the opposite of how science is supposed to operate. These are two strong diagnoses that go together well.

Bhattacharya’s theory of the politics of science is ultimately simple: However serious a dispute involving scientific questions is, just allow open inquiry to reign and the truth will win.

He points to what happened in Sweden during Covid as a proof of concept: because open inquiry reigned, the country avoided not only lockdowns but all the suffering that resulted from them elsewhere. I argue that both parts of that account are mistaken.

But I believe his theory falters also in looking at what happened here in the U.S. To wit: If this idea were correct, you would expect that, when Bhattacharya and his colleagues released the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 — the sensationally contentious statement that argued that the generalized disruption of normal life should end immediately in favor of a “focused protection” strategy targeting only certain vulnerable groups — well, that would have happened. But it didn’t, at least not nationally. American Covidtide groaned on for two more hard years.

There are a few ways to make sense of this problem for his theory.

First: You can say the open debate didn’t happen. In the fullest sense, that is true. But it should also be obvious to anyone who remembers that period that at least the basic idea — that the pandemic response might be a terrible overreaction to what was actually a normal-sized outbreak — was not only available but omnipresent from the moment the pandemic started. So why was that not enough?

Indeed, on many specific topics, counter-establishment thinkers enthusiastically argue that the truth is strong enough to win out even in the face of powerful gatekeeping. When I interviewed Bhattacharya, for example, he noted that 93 percent of American children have received the MMR vaccine (contrary to the influence of vaccine skeptics), while only 13 percent of children are up to date on the Covid vaccine (contrary to the advice of medical leaders), because parents are able to override these influences, assess the actual evidence about the benefits of these vaccines, and arrive at the correct conclusions.

I think this is a very sharp point. But then why did the truth break through just about Covid vaccines for children, but not about the larger claim that broad disruptions to normal life were a mistake? Again, as he notes, the parents of 87 percent of American’s children have broken with scientific leaders and decided not to keep their kids current on Covid vaccines. But, though he does not note this, most Americans today also remain by and large unpersuaded that the basic view the Great Barrington Declaration gave of the pandemic in 2020 was correct at that time. In 2024, 80 percent of Americans told Harvard pollsters that it had been a “generally good idea” to impose one or more of these measures: masking requirements in stores and businesses, health care worker vaccination requirements, indoor dining closures, or K-12 public school closures. Even 62 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of rural residents agreed with this.

To hold Bhattacharya’s accounts together, you would have to say that scientific gatekeepers won public opinion on closures, masking, and the rest by stifling open inquiry — but on Covid vaccines for kids they lost because, even though they stifled open inquiry, the truth was too powerful and the public too wise. I think you can find a certain measure of plausibility in each of those stories. But together they are a post-hoc game of choose-your-own-adventure explanation.

Second: You can say the theory of politics is right, but the account of Covid was wrong. From the same data points, we could instead conclude that the public really did consider whether Covid was a general crisis for everyone or a narrow crisis for only a few, and, for a long time, they decided the conventional view was largely correct. In other words, in both bucking the experts on Covid vaccines for kids, and agreeing with them on the core “keep life normal or not?” question of the pandemic for its first year or two, the public got it right. This explanation would salvage the theory — but sacrifice the most important object lesson that motivates it.

Or third: You can say the theory itself is wrong. As persuasive as it seems, perhaps it is a mistaken over-fitting of the lessons of the Covid era to the era after.

Whichever of these explanations is right, the story that the MAGA/MAHA/anti-Covidian fusion is telling itself about how it won power, though compelling, has serious holes. And this could be a problem for the movement if it hopes to successfully wield that power now.

Bhattacharya’s account trades on treating debate in science as more or less interchangeable with debate in politics. If your focus is on correcting for the errors of the establishment over the past decade, this is a persuasive shorthand: just as enforced groupthink was bound to fail in science, so it was bound to fail in politics.

But there is also an obvious disanalogy between these two models for resolving disagreement.

Science — and here I mean “science” not in the real form we would find if we actually spent a few years observing it, but the idealized, capital-S Science we are taught about in so many freshman seminars and Nova documentaries, the ideal against which Bhattacharya has encountered his disappointment — Science, I say, advances by having no taboos, by debating all ideas boldly and on their merits to see which wins. Science advances under total openness to fundamental disagreement, and stalls under closure.

But then it seems strange that the era of American life that we can all most readily call to mind as the heyday of national scientific prowess — the era spanning roughly the outbreak of World War II, through the most heated technological competition of the Cold War, and culminating in the Apollo moon landing — is also marked in our minds far more by its ideological uniformity than its diversity.

E pluribus unum: Yes, both the scientific and the democratic models of disagreement aspire to begin with open-ended division. But while science makes a virtue of this disagreement for its own sake, and in principle could sustain it indefinitely, hungering after ever new intellectual spaces to fight over, in the democratic model success is marked by eventually resolving fundamental division into new, stable forms of unity. And while not quite a universal law, it is rather easier to find examples from history of nations dominating in science as a result of a stable union in their social contract for science, not a fundamental division.

In October, the Hoover Institution released a video that usefully encapsulates the odd spot the populist right has gotten itself into over science. The subject was “Is the United States in decline or on the verge of renewal?” and the panelists were historians Stephen Kotkin, Victor Davis Hanson, and Niall Ferguson. Kotkin, in his public remarks over the past year, has been steadfast in arguing that Donald Trump’s election in 2024 was a success for democracy: the incumbent regime had used its power poorly, a challenger presented an alternative, and through democratic expression, the public delivered a deserved rebuke.

But in the panel, Kotkin also warns that if the Trump administration wants America to win the great-powers competition with China — if, to put it tangibly, it wishes America not to wind up stagnant, vulnerable, at war, or under the thumb of a posthuman authoritarian menace — then something is seriously amiss in its approach to our research system:

Kotkin: When you cut American scientific funding, you are not engaging in China policy properly….

The threat to American universities is leadership at American universities. Victor is a hundred percent correct. That doesn’t justify Trump’s approach of extortion, blackmail, misuse of federal power. He’s very good at identifying problems. But I need solutions. The problems are real, but where are the solutions? …

America’s universities are some of our absolute biggest assets. Why are 300,000 Chinese here? Because American universities are a waste of time? Why are there 1.1 million foreign students here? Because American universities are a waste of time? No, because they’re some of the biggest assets that any power has ever seen in history. I want reform, not destruction….

If there’s some fat in the science labs, that needs to be cut out. But fundamental science is very, very expensive….

Ferguson: I watched a great university destroy itself by trashing meritocracy, by adopting instead the whole plethora of discrimination that they called diversity, equity, and inclusion. I saw the corruption in their admission system and I watched the standard slide…. Now what was gonna stop that? Were the professors gonna wake up one day and say, oh, we’ve been so wicked? We haven’t stayed true to the principles of a university? No, that was never gonna happen. Something had to shock this country’s universities into returning to the fundamental principles of how a university should be run….

Kotkin: I’m asking for solutions, because we have the greatest biomedical establishment in the history of the universe and I don’t want them to be attacked because of the very diagnosis that I share with you…. I’m asking for “How do we get to a better place with these institutions?”

Hanson: We just said…. Shane the Gunslinger came in and he said, “I have a certain methodology that is abhorrent to you but it will be a catalyst,” and then he rode off and there was change.

The conversation goes on like this. No matter how many times Kotkin presses the point, the response his interlocutors keep repeating is that the administration’s punishment campaign against science is deserved and necessary. But that is simply a nonresponse to the question Kotkin is asking: Is this actually making America’s position stronger?

The exchange usefully tracks a dynamic I saw in the administration in reporting on the Bhattacharya profile, and in interviewing him directly: when asked how slashing support for science by about half, as the administration is proposing to do across its research funding agencies, will make American science stronger, the answer is always about how serious science’s ideological mistakes during Covid and the Great Awokening were, and how deserved and desirable is the correction — an obviously true claim that simply has nothing to do with the grave question being asked.

So where does Bhattacharya’s idealism — that all science needs to fix itself is to return to its first principles — go wrong? How does it lead to the blind alley we see populists stuck in in this exchange?

There is a hint of the problem in an interview Bhattacharya gave to Lex Fridman in 2022. It has lingered with me for its remarkably earnest idealism — wonderful in how out of step it is with this moment, and worrying for the same reason. Describing his view of the spirit of science, he says:

It’s a dialectical process, where if I believe A and you believe B, well, we talk about it, we come up with an experiment that distinguishes between the two, and while B turns out to be right, I’m all frustrated, but I buy you dinner, and I say, no, no, C, and we go on from there…. It’s a human activity, to have the truth unfold itself before us.

This is a beautiful sentiment. And it is a needed corrective, a truer and more human account of science than the one that has prevailed in American life for years, the model of “Science says” and “In this house we believe in science,” as if all that force of creative ingenuity ultimately amounts to so many technical monkeys churning numbers on spreadsheets and dumbly reading out the last line.

And yet even so there are important things this view conceals. This type of gentlemanly dispute, in which no holds are barred and no offense taken, calls to mind the scene of a college classroom. But the spirit of free inquiry we imagine in that scene is possible only because of many things we do not notice happening offstage. To permit that sort of totally free disagreement in the classroom, an enormous amount of prior agreement is required: about what the purpose of the course is, the criteria for which 15 people get to be there and which other hundreds of prospectives do not, why this is a more valuable use of this moment in these young people’s lives than the other things they could be doing, who picks the professors, what their job is for, whose dollars pay for the classroom and why, and on and on. Of course, it is easy to believe that these questions are not out of view at all, because the classroom is exactly the kind of venue where we are prompted to take them up, where we can sustain even heated disagreement over them, perhaps for a long time.

Yet it is always possible for there to arrive a point where this openness ceases to sustain itself. If, say, the debate proceeded in a way that led one half of the class to view the classroom and its values and selection criteria as a form of systemic injustice, and the other half to become so fixated on the corruption of the professor that they found nothing else worthy of discussing anymore, then the background conditions that had allowed that classroom to stay a space of open inquiry for so long would begin to break down. And maybe that would be fine: open inquiry would have done its job, defeated something that needed defeating, and the students and the professors would all migrate to any of the hundred thousand other alternatives on offer.

Except in the metaphor as I am drawing it out here, the classroom stands in not just for one little site of idea-trading but the very market system of scientific intellectual exchange, along with its close union to the American project, with the intimate benefits each provides the other in moral aspiration and material gain. And when the conditions of the system itself break down, there is no alternative to turn to. The old gentlemanly ethos of the open contest of ideas is no longer adequate to sustain itself, indeed is in the process of dynamiting its own foundations.

Jay Bhattacharya and his fellow usurpers pulled off a revolutionary victory. They held a very public trial of science for its sins. They won a conviction. That verdict was just. Now they are in denial of just how far their revolution succeeded. They had better take a hard look soon, or much more than science’s old establishment will wind up in the gallows.