The Trump administration recently issued a 123-page report heralding a "new golden age" for U.S. science.

The key, said the report, published in the name of Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was to ensure that the approval of federal research grants "rests purely on merit, not the political fashions of the day."

There isn't much to say about this goal, other than that the White House has some nerve. For years, dating back to the first Trump administration, I have been documenting all the steps Trump and his minions have taken to undermine American science.

Thanks to a group of University of California researchers who have gone to court to fight Trump's cancellation of their research grants, we now have the most explicit confessions by six federal agencies about how slipshod and partisan their actions have been.

They're the departments of Defense, Energy and Transportation, and the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

All were required by court order to stipulate how they came to their decisions. Those stipulations were filed in federal court in San Francisco on July 15. Taken together, the government admitted that it used non-scientific considerations, AI screens and illegal or unconstitutional consideration to terminate billions of dollars in grants.

It may be unusual for such forthright admissions of wrongdoing to come from an administration not known for scrupulous rectitude. In this case and others like it, however, the government's lawyers were under the gun of court orders to come clean.

"They admitted what was true," Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley's law school and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the researchers' lawsuit, told me. In any event, he added, "It's not like the Trump administration was hiding what it was doing."

The White House assault on scientific grants is an integral part of its general blitzkrieg on U.S. science. In a one-year retrospective on the current Trump term published in January, Nature counted 5,844 grants canceled or suspended by the National Institutes of Health, and 1,996 by the National........

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