In the US, the death of expertise

Back in 1980, science fiction and science author Isaac Asimov wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti‑intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” 

He didn’t know the half of it.

US President Donald J. Trump’s regime has aggressively cut federal science and technology research funding since taking office last January. Recently, one of those cuts hit home for me. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been closed, and while some of its materials will be stored, at least 85% will be thrown away. 

It was at Goddard in the mid-1980s that I learned I had a gift for technology, and, better still, I could explain it to other people. Put simply, that’s where my career as a tech journalist began. While there, I also got to know the engineers and scientists who’d pioneered space. This closure is a disgrace.  

I mean, who closes down a research library? (It’s not like they cost a lot of money, and libraries like this one contain a mountain of material that’s never been digitized.) The answer: an administration that has no interest whatsoever in science, knowledge, wisdom, or expertise, that’s who.

While personally painful to the people who used that library, there have been worse. NASA itself faces cuts, for example. As John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who flew five shuttle missions, said: “America is stepping back from leadership in virtually every science area.… The proposal for the NASA science budget is…cataclysmic for US leadership in science.”

It’s not just NASA that’s being cut into irrelevance. The administration halted National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant reviews shortly after Trump’s inauguration and by June 2025 had canceled around 2,100 grants worth $9.5 billion.

At the same time. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, has rolled back federal support for vaccinations and fired expert advisors, such as those on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — replacing them with anti-vax yes-men.  As Dr. Peter Mark, the former Federal Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine official, wrote in his resignation letter after being forced out by Kennedy: “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” 

Looking ahead, Trump’s FY2026 “skinny budget” seeks massive reductions, including nearly 40% ($18 billion) from NIH, 57% ($5.1 billion) from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and 14% from the Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science. Overall, the budget envisions slashing basic research by 34% and applied research by 38%, prioritizing private-sector alignment over “unfocused” federal investments. Critics warned such cuts could shrink the US gross domestic product by up to $1 trillion over a decade due to lost innovation.

That’s the rub. You see, government science research has essentially fueled the high-tech world we live and work in today. For example, you’re reading this today on the internet — the same internet that grew from ARPANET, a 1969 Department of Defense (DoD) networking experiment. 

If you’re reading this on a smartphone in an Uber, your driver is using GPS, which started as a military navigation system sponsored by the DoD, to get you to your destination. If you’ve avoided getting a bad case of Covid-19 or the flu, you can thank government labs and grants, which supported much of the basic science and early-stage work behind mRNA and other vaccine technologies. 

Heck, even artificial intelligence (AI), everyone’s current tech crush, wouldn’t be where it is today without the sustained public funding for neural network research and reinforcement learning in the 1980s and ‘90s. More recently, the NSF-led National AI Research Institutes and DARPA’s “AI Next” campaign fueled AI before every venture capitalist on the planet decided — for better or worse — to invest billions of dollars in it. 

We need federal funding for research. We need access and respect for real knowledge and expertise. Without this, we can only blindly stumble forward into the future. As John Holdren, a Harvard University physicist, put it, “The attack on science must be seen as one component of a larger attack on information, on facts, on independent analysis.” 

Whether it’s an increase in infectious diseases, such as the reemergence of measles (thanks to government-approved, anti-vax propaganda) or turning a blind eye to the speed at which AI technology is evolving, spreading and morphing — threatening to disrupt a whole host of industries and workers — or simply the loss of deep analytical knowledge, we must embrace expertise and the truth.

We cannot afford a future based on ignorance. That won’t turn out well for anyone. In the US, the death of expertise – ComputerworldRead More