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Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration’s relentless war on the U.S.’s scientific infrastructure has picked up speed.

The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman reported in late April that over the past months, more than 1,500 top scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development have either been laid off, pushed into early retirement, or reassigned to desk jobs that have nothing to do with their field of expertise. Friedman’s article referenced a medical doctor with a specialty in lung disease being reassigned to a financial job and an epidemiologist being moved over to a job issuing permits for handling hazardous waste.

Less than 10 percent of the scientists — who run the gamut from biologists to epidemiologists, from toxicologists to greenhouse gas emissions specialists — now remain at the agency. Moving forward, they will be under a political commissar, and their research will have to “align with agency and administration priorities.” Translation: They will no longer be able to do the groundbreaking work on pollution and its health impacts that for decades made the office a world leader in environmental health research. Instead, their work will be co-opted to end regulations that have placed some limits on the levels of pollution that can be spewed into the environment.

The assault on the EPA’s scientific expertise, which closely resembles attacks on independent science by other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes over the past century, hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. Also last week, the 22 members of the National Science Board — which oversees the 76-year-old National Science Foundation (NSF) and helps allocate federal science grants in an independent, nonpartisan manner — were all fired on short notice, despite each of them being appointed for staggered six-year terms. This comes in the wake of a slew of Trump administration attacks on independent advisory boards to the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.

“We hope it only means that new people will be put into place, but that the fundamental work of the National Science Foundation will continue........

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