The Trump administration is manipulating government-sponsored research to get the answers it wants.
“Since its first days, the new Trump administration has clearly shown where it thinks scientific attention should not be focused: It has attempted to censor federal scientific data, cut billions in government spending on research, and compromised care for some of the world’s most at-risk populations. Now, as the nation’s leaders have begun to encourage inquiry into specific areas, they are signaling that they’re willing to not just slash and burn research that challenges their political ideology but to replace it with shoddy studies designed to support their goals, under the guise of scientific legitimacy. [..]
[Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F] Kennedy [Jr.], who has no scientific or medical training himself, also seems confused about what a scientifically rigorous investigation would entail—and how long it might take. During this month’s Cabinet meeting, he said that by September, HHS would complete “a massive research and testing effort involving hundreds of scientists from around the world.” At last week’s press conference, however, his comments suggested that HHS might rely heavily on AI and electronic-health-record data, which aren’t gathered uniformly, can depend on self-reporting, and cover only populations that interact with the health-care system. And Jay Bhattacharya, the new, Trump-appointed director of NIH, recently gave a presentation detailing the administration’s plans to source data for these investigations from hospitals, pharmacies, wearable devices, and other private sources with limited reach.
That approach, experts told me, can’t provide enough evidence to definitively pinpoint autism’s cause, much less guide policy to eliminate it. “The chances of getting garbage are so high,” Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, told me. [White house spokesperson Kush] Desai said that Kennedy had promised “an exhaustive examination of the underlying causes of autism,” which “naturally would include use of data points such as electronic health records, among other data sets,” and noted that the secretary is focused on fulfilling President Donald Trump’s directives “with the Gold Standard of Science.”
[..] One way to rigorously gather more data on autism’s causes would involve following a large, representative sample of the American population over time, tracking participants’ exposures, taking into account their genetic and health history, and monitoring whether any of them develop autism. The process would take years—and still may not yield causes as clear-cut or easy to “eliminate” as Kennedy seems to expect. But an administration that already knows the answers it wants doesn’t need years to find them.
The outcomes of gender-affirming care do need further study across the age spectrum, experts told me. Scientists still don’t have a full sense of the long-term outcomes of transition on mental and physical health, or how to best tailor interventions to patients. (Extended use of certain hormones, for instance, could raise people’s risk of some cancers or cardiovascular complications.) More research is needed, in particular, on how best to support gender-diverse youth, a growing sector of the population. But the kinds of research that the Trump administration is pursuing won’t help clarify or alleviate those concerns. And of all the scientific questions that could be asked about trans health, “regret and detransition aren’t the major problems,” Arjee Restar, a social epidemiologist at Yale, told me: Studies have found that adults and adolescents are generally very satisfied with the outcomes of hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries, and that rates of regret following surgeries are about just 1 percent.
NIH officials found the memo’s directives appalling. “This is not how we do science, ever,” one of them, who requested anonymity out of concern for professional retribution, told me. “This is politicized research, exactly what we were always told we would never do.” In his memo, [previous acting NIH director Matthew] Memoli specified that studies into the outcomes of gender-affirming care should deploy “methods that don’t themselves subsidize or incentivize such practices as previous NIH studies have done.” (Desai pointed to a case in which an NIH-funded researcher cited politics to help explain her hesitation to publish a study with unfavorable results about puberty blockers.) But previous NIH studies have never “subsidized or incentivized” gender-affirming care, the NIH official told me. Rather, they followed the recipients of that care over time, and observed the results.
In contrast, Memoli’s memo unabashedly advertised the conclusion that the administration is pushing for: that gender-affirming care is harmful and regrettable. The directive also implicitly solicits researchers who “are following the administration’s example,” Logan S. Casey, the director of policy research for the Movement Advancement Project, an equality-focused think tank, told me—and potentially, for participants who might share those viewpoints as well. That makes it all the more likely that those projects will produce the skewed results the administration wants to see.
This is consistent with everything Trump and his allies have revealed about their views on science since January: that it is not a means to better understand objective reality, but a political weapon that they must guard against, or deploy themselves. In recent months, Kennedy has accused the expert committee that counsels the CDC on its nationwide vaccine recommendations of being in the pocket of vaccine manufacturers; the administration has also fired from HHS several scientists who were prominent leaders in the COVID-19 response, including a few closely affiliated with Anthony Fauci, whom Trump has ridiculed as a “disaster” and an idiot and Desai derided as one of many “demonstrably fallible ‘experts.’” Last week, administration officials also redirected two federal websites, once used to share information on COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines, to a page promoting the idea that the coronavirus pandemic began as a lab leak, rather than Fauci’s “preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.”
The causes of autism, the outcomes of gender-affirming care, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are all topics worthy of scientific investigation. But how questions are asked can influence the answers they yield—and directly affect the populations they’re asked about. The language in the NIH memo is “alarming and inflammatory,” Camie Nitzel, a psychologist who specializes in transgender and gender-diverse people, told me: It shows that the administration is pursuing these studies not from a place of genuine inquiry, but from prejudice. Disdain is coded into the administration’s methodology on autism, too: In his briefings on HHS’s new pursuits, Kennedy has repeatedly described autism as a scourge worse than COVID-19 that “destroys” families and children, and insinuated that it should be purged from the population. But the implication of both the administration’s statements and its proposed studies is that neither trans people nor autistic people should visibly exist in America. Science is now yet another tool that the government is using to disappear anyone it deems undesirable.”
Full article, KJ Wu, The Atlantic, 2025.4.24