By Bill Mefford
In a recent article in the NY Times, the authors interviewed numerous government workers - current and former - who told the story of this current administration’s strategy of stripping the federal government’s funding for scientific research and the intentional effort to undermine science in general. This seems to be part of their overall goal of eliminating any and all restrictions on corporations as well as feeding the anti-science wing of their rabid evangelical base. And it is dangerous.
As the article states,
At a time when the United States is pulling back from world leadership in other areas like human rights or diplomatic accords, experts warn that the retreat from science is no less significant. Many of the achievements of the past century that helped make the United States an envied global power, including gains in life expectancy, lowered air pollution and increased farm productivity are the result of the kinds of government research now under pressure.
The article shows how this strategy is being born out in numerous ways:
DC-based Department of Agriculture workers were told they must pack up their families and move to Kansas City in just a few months’ time or lose their jobs. No plan has been shared for filling the numerous positions of the many workers who opted to not uproot their families.
Last year, Matthew Davis, a biologist whose research on the health risks of mercury to children underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from coal power plants, was asked to roll back those same rules. He left the EPA where he had worked for over a decade.
In San Francisco a study of the effects of chemicals on pregnant women has stalled after federal funding abruptly ended. (So much for being supposedly “pro-life.”)
Who can forget trump pressuring the nation’s weather forecasting agency to change their reports to support trump’s idiotic assertion of the wrong path of the hurricane. Thankfully, they didn’t alter the map to fit his nonsense.
This year, the National Park Service’s principal climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from his supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global warming posed to national parks. He was speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University California, Berkeley, a position he also holds, so this letter was clearly an effort to intimidate and hinder his work.
Lastly, this administration is trying to simply starve the government. For instance, staffing at the EPA has fallen to its lowest levels in at least a decade. Hiring freezes and departures have made it harder to conduct scientific work. In June, the White House ordered agencies to cut by one-third the number of federal advisory boards that provide technical advice.
And there are many, many more examples.
We would do well to remember that this administration’s war on science is not just a singular isolated strategy that is not linked to a deeper ideology. This isn’t just more incompetent stupidity that this administration seems at times drowned in. Invalidating science goes hand in hand in hand with fundamentalist Christianity and promoting unrestrained free market capitalism. It always has.
Look who is cheering on these moves described above. Despite the practical good that research does for people, especially the poor, starving scientific research is red meat to an unthinking base driven by fundamentalism, which now makes up the majority of his base. Further, industry lobbyists love the moves made by the trump administration against scientific research (which explains his astronomical fundraising totals). Oil and gas industries are freer to wreak havoc on clear air and water and groups like the Heritage Foundation regularly applaud the elimination of what they see as “government waste” though “government waste” is never, ever leveled at the corporate welfare doled out to defense contractors by the Pentagon’s ballooning budget.
Since the turn of the 19th Century when robber barons like Rockefeller funded fundamentalist evangelists like Billy Sunday and Dwight Moody because they preached a gospel that urged poor people to be good workers and to not question their place in society, or the place of owners like Rockefeller. Moody and Sunday regularly denounced leaders in the Social Gospel movement for their efforts to secure rights for workers and to work for a more just society. These fundamentalists would fit in nicely with the current list of evangelical suck-ups and palace priests.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the ever-increasing economic vertical hierarchies created by mergers and unrestricted corporate greed (something not predicted by the father of free markets, Adam Smith who wrote well before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution), fundamentalism has not stopped endorsing an unjust status quo through bifurcating the spirituality of the gospel from the suffering of the poor in real life. Fundamentalism has proven itself to be the opiate of the people.
So, liberationist Christians must commit ourselves to support scientific research for evidence-based solutions for they really are the most effective way to bring about real change. Facts matter, science matters, and faith still matters. God never intended for these to be broken a part.