The battle of ‘woke science’ comes for the sake of space exploration

The Trump administration is doing a culture war on scienceand the latest salvo is in the form of a dry proposal, from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that could threaten the future of US science as we know it.

The proposal would give elected officials more control over their funding, the process by which scientists receive federal funding to conduct more complex space research such as space exploration. evidence of organic compounds on Mars or availability of one of the oldest galaxies in the universe.

The rule set by OMB provides for less than 100 public comments. This law has made more than 54,000 comments, and most of them to appear to be worthless, including a answer from the respected non-profit organization The Planetary Society, which has criticized everything from the proposed rules on published material to peer review to its implications for scientists across the board.

“Almost all of the proposed changes to these rules have negative or negative effects on scientific practice,” Casey Dreier, director of astronomy policy at The Planetary Society, said. Seaside.

“There’s harm in concrete, even if you’re not a scientist,” he says. A major obstacle is the restriction of funding for open access publishing, which is the way in which space science papers are made available to the public for free.

For more than ten years, NASA is arrogant by making public the data collected by NASA’s instruments, and the scientific papers that come from studying the archived data. These new developments are changing the way things are going, making science more difficult for everyone to access. Restricting the use of funding for liberal publications means that it will be difficult for people to see the research that their tax dollars supported.

“There’s no good argument for this, unless you’re trying to use it as a way to control the scientists themselves,” says Dreier.

Then there is the possibility of canceling contributions because of associations or political opinions of the scientists themselves. Think about the data collected by the Mars rovers – valuable data that cost billions of dollars and took many years of expertise to find – and a scientist, who does not work for NASA directly, who wants to study that data and has an old idea of ​​research that his fellow scientists think is important and valuable. On the face of it, the new rules would allow a non-specialist employed by the White House to control the funding of scientists because he posted an anti-Trump meme on X years ago.

It’s getting worse. “You don’t have to break the law anymore” to save money, Dreier says. Money can be canceled at any time, for any reason, if it is considered against the wishes of the president: “There are changes that are supported by these changes, and the lack of visibility of the election.”

Problems and laws are not just thoughts. They especially put a heavy burden: Would any scientist want to establish an international agreement, or go to a conference, or try to publish their data openly and for free, when doing so requires time and paperwork to request forgiveness that may or may not be granted by a government agency that has no expertise or interest in their work? Will they form a mutually beneficial alliance with other scientists in China, or Russia, or Canada, when doing so will jeopardize their careers, knowing that their lives could end when the president decides he doesn’t like another country tomorrow?

This is a different, though more serious, attack on science than that reduced funding for NASA which involves applications such as the operation of the Mars rovers. Under the proposed OMB rules, contracts under which NASA builds spacecraft and collects data would remain in place, but the support of scientists to analyze that data would be at political risk.

“There is a difference between data collection and science,” says Dreier. Building amazing instruments like the Mars rover or the James Webb Space Telescope and using them to collect data is just the first step forward: “Science is what happens when you get a scientist to sit down and look at data, interpret it, model it, measure it, and then show it and argue about it.”

“What do we collect, if we don’t help scientists learn?”

Although many people oppose the move, including a Senate hearing and the director of the OMB, Mr. Russell Vought, while the Democratic legislators described the effects of the law as “nonsensical” and “biased,” the OMB does not seem to want to go back and withdraw its law. Instead, it will face several legal challenges, including from a group of 24 governors and attorneys general who argue that the law is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers.

What’s at stake here is much more than limited funding or a temporary refocusing of the Earth’s resources for space exploration. “This is not a budget cut,” says Dreier. Budget cuts are easy to understand and easy to argue against. What is happening here is very bad: “This is a surgical, street-like attack on the true scientific method that is buried by rules of procedure and boring rhetoric.”