There’s a reason why the chainsaw is such an apt symbol for the current assault on American science: because you can cut a tree down in minutes, but growing it back takes decades.

The coronavirus pandemic was notable for being the first global event when the validity of expert scientific advice was loudly and routinely questioned by those unqualified to judge it. 

This rebellion against informed counsel was not driven by an illiterate mob – sometimes it might have been a reflection of people’s fear and anger at their powerlessness and a desire to make sense of things around them, but in its worst instances it reflected a profound disdain for experience, for acquired knowledge, and sometimes a disdain for formal learning too. 

The ongoing assault on science in the USA is a continuation and perhaps a culmination of that schism. What we see in the current Trump administration and in particular, the acts of the Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is the same backlash against science as occurred during the pandemic. 

Why should science find itself under attack in this way? Why the hostility to the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and all the rest? After all, until now the NIH and its parent body the department of Health and Human Services has been virtually the only area of US government legislation to enjoy broad bipartisan support (perhaps not unrelated to the fact that so many lawmakers are elderly and acutely aware of their mortality).

The reason, ultimately, is that science is inherently anti-authoritarian. Science provides a worldview whose tenets are based on data and evidence instead of appeals to authority and rhetoric. All scientific conclusions that enjoy broad support are based on data that could be verified by any expert qualified to go back through and check it, and the pandemic was the moment when a society-wide, data-driven approach was what was needed to combat the virus and protect society’s most vulnerable.

Such a worldview is anathema to people such as Musk and Trump, whose adherence to libertarianism is not really libertarian but closer to Aleister Crowley’s credo that “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. They might promote themselves as champions of free speech, but you can see the lie in it from their reactions to anyone who exercises that very same freedom to criticise them. And to fully embrace those impulses means freeing yourself from the inconveniences of fact and truth and data – let feelings and rhetoric and force of will carry the day. 

It’s checks on their behaviour – i.e. regulation – that Trump, Musk, and their ilk object to, and it breeds an anger and contempt for anything that does not let them do what they want.

The other source of hostility to intellectualism is because education is the great equaliser. Education empowers a population, strengthens society, and helps people achieve their full potential regardless of the circumstances in which they started their life. Veneration of education is a commitment to a tool for betterment. 

Why should Trump and Musk have such an apparent hatred for these pillars of formal learning? Because anti-intellectualism encourages promotion through patronage rather than ability. The current White House may scorn Diversity, Equity & Inclusivity (DEI) initiatives as being anti-meritocratic, but DEI movements are the opposite – they are broadening participation beyond the confines of privilege. What rich and powerful people like Trump and Musk want is to be able to dictate and control who prospers, namely those who owe them something.

So the chainsaw massacre of the NIH, the CDC, the FDA continues. PubMed was down for nearly 24 hours over the weekend. Thousands of scientists, many of them the early-career researchers who would have formed the bedrock of American science in decades to come, are being jettisoned from the public sector.

The chainsaw is an apt emblem for what’s happening, because once you’ve chopped down a tree, you can’t just stick it back in the ground and expect it to start growing again. If you fell a forest, then it can’t be reversed or rebuilt, it has to be regrown – and that takes decades. You can’t fix that kind of damage quickly because it’s experience that you’re getting rid of, the very experience that the vandals disdain. 

“Move fast and break things” might be the motto of Silicon Valley, but what that philosophy actually means is that it’s ok to be unafraid of trying radical new solutions –  because you also learn from your mistakes, and challenging norms can bring fresh ideas. I don’t think it’s meant to mean breaking things beyond repair, breaking them to pieces.  

What we’re seeing in the USA right now isn’t reform, it’s wanton destruction.