The Trump administration's assault on science feels eerily Soviet todayheadline

todayheadline.co -- Friday, August 15, 2025, 5:47:16 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Categories: U.S.–Russia Relations, Presidential Campaigns, Economic Policy & Jobs

In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics. He believed nature could be bent to human will.

Lysenko denounced the idea that genes pass traits down as a "degradation of bourgeois culture," and couldn't understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had "advantaged ancestors." He attempted to "educate" crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and insisted that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli.

Such ideas catapulted Lysenko to the head of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In the midst of the famine his catastrophic policies helped create, Lysenko banned fertilizers and demanded farmers sow seeds close together, believing that plants of the same species wouldn't compete.

Lysenko's pseudoscientific ideas outraged his peers. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist who founded the world's first seed bank, openly challenged his rejection of genetics. Lysenko denounced him, and the secret police arrested him in 1940. Vavilov, who had worked to prevent famines, starved to death in jail three years later.

This kind of scientific misinformation and the consequences it can bring now sound eerily familiar to U.S. climate experts like Shaina Sadai. She has been stunned by how quickly politics have overshadowed science since President Trump took office. The most recent government climate report, which the Department of Energy released last month, for instance, so drastically misrepresented the studies it cited that the researchers whose work it drew from publicly decried it. "I'm just really having a hard time with the barrage of apocalypses every day," she said.

Sadai spent the last several years working international court cases, including a climate case law students from the South Pacific brought to the International Court of Justice. Over 130 countries signed on, and many outlined the existential threats they face from extreme heat, flooding, and other weather phenomena. Some, like Palau -- which could see large portions of its land vanish beneath rising seas this century -- argued that failing to curb emissions violates human rights under international treaties. Meanwhile, the United States urged the court not to overreach. This galled Sadai, who advised several of the countries supporting Vanuatu's case, including Sierra Leone and Namibia. "I want so desperately for my country to be on the right side of things," she said. Instead, Judge Yuji Iwasawa delivered the court's decision that countries must act on climate change the same day the U.S. moved to weaken one of its primary tools to do just that.

The timing underscored a growing global divide: As the world moves toward greater climate accountability, the United States is pulling back, once again exiting the Paris agreement and undercutting decades of environmental regulations. This retreat comes amid a broader weakening of democratic norms, said Timothy Frye, a professor of post-Soviet politics at Columbia University. When power becomes heavily concentrated, protections begin to fray, something seen with recent revisions to the Endangered Species Act or key provisions of the Clean Water Act. "The U.S. democratic erosion is happening much faster, and along a much wider array of fronts, than a lot of the more recent cases," like Turkey or Venezuela, he said.

One hallmark of this backsliding is how seemingly small changes can accumulate into a system that becomes far more autocratic. The piecemeal approach often borrows the most authoritarian elements from otherwise democratic governments, though each policy may appear initially defensible -- a form of governance political scholar Kim Scheppele coined "the Frankenstate." The Trump administration, for example, has declared an "energy emergency" which allows federal agencies to bypass environmental reviews and fast-track fossil fuel projects. The move is now facing a lawsuit from 15 states, who claim the emergency is fake.

This patchwork strategy makes it easier for politically connected companies to sidestep or shape laws to serve their interests. After soliciting $1 billion in campaign funding from oil and gas companies, for example, Trump has signed $18 billion in tax incentives for the industry and granted at least $6 billion in tax breaks. "The lack of constraints on the executive allow politically connected companies to either get around existing laws or to write laws in such a way that they're toothless," Frye said.

Autocratic leaders, he explained, like to build their economies around natural resources because they are easier to control than service or technology industries. Oil and gas firms, for instance, tend to be less transparent and less mobile, making them more susceptible to political pressure. At the same time, Frye noted, the economic clout of natural resource companies often turns into a political advantage.

One of Trump's biggest donors this year was billionaire Kelcy Warren and his pipeline company Energy Transfer -- the firm that sparked mass protests at Standing Rock. In 2025, it contributed $25 million to MAGA Inc., the super-PAC backing Trump. Soon after, the president lifted a pause on liquefied natural gas exports, clearing the way for an Energy Transfer project in Louisiana. The company is also now suing the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, challenging how the agency enforces its rules; a victory could give major Trump donors greater control over how their industries are regulated.

The pattern of placing industry-friendly figures in key roles extends to Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency. He also has longstanding ties to the fossil fuel business. Over the years, Zeldin received around $300,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, and before joining the agency he was a top executive at the America First Policy Institute, a group co-founded and funded by fracking billionaire Tim Dunn. Under Zeldin, the EPA has enacted sweeping changes: In March, it announced its intention to roll back dozens of rules, including limits on power plant emissions, coal ash disposal, and wetland protections, in what Zeldin called "the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history."

Zeldin's latest target is the EPA's landmark endangerment finding, a legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases. He claimed repealing it would "end $1 trillion or more in hidden taxes on American businesses and families." The Clean Air Act clearly says such costs can't be considered in the process. To do so, the agency would have to reject established climate science and overturn a 2007 Supreme Court case that required the EPA to make decisions based on scientific evidence.

Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who led the EPA under President George W. Bush, said Zeldin's approach undermines the agency's mission. "There's more leniency for industry now," she said. "This administration is doing nothing to improve the environment. What they're doing is improving the bottom line of a lot of corporations."

This is happening across the federal government, where institutions once trusted to provide objective oversight and data are being reshaped to serve the president's goals. A nonprofit tracking alterations to environmental regulations on federal websites has recorded 879 revisions, many involving omissions and erasures. The Energy Department, for instance, has taken previous national climate assessments offline and suggested that it would rewrite them. This makes the United States a global outlier: Even in Russia, said political scientist Thane Gustafson, there's less politicization of climate science, where "the climate change narrative is accepted, all the way from Putin on down."

Much like during Lysenko's era, when Soviet policies dismissed scientific integrity, political scientists like Frye now worry that American federal institutions are drifting from their foundational principles. There's a gnawing feeling that the systems meant to protect us are rotting. What once felt stable begins to feel staged. This kind of dissonance has a name: hypernormalization. Coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak after studying post-Soviet Russia, it conveys the feeling that governing bodies have been stripped of real power. "That describes the EPA at the moment," said Whitman.

The old standards of government have been swiftly gutted. Trump officials fired advisory panels that interpret science, overturned longstanding environmental regulations, dispensed with public comment periods, and centralized authority. What's taking shape now is a shift not just in who holds power, but how that power is wielded.

The White House has a unique authority to manage and share facts. This ability to shape public perception operates largely beyond the reach of the law -- as became clear when Trump abruptly fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just hours after a disappointing jobs report, or when he planned to close the observatory that monitors carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa, one of the world's most important sites for tracking climate change.

Losing belief in government is perilous: It makes disengaging feel like the only choice. "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true," Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism."

As what's real and what's purported to be real grows increasingly blurred, controlling the narrative can become more powerful than governing. The White House is taking this principle literally: After Paramount paid President Trump millions to settle his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, the administration approved its merger on the condition CBS install a "truth-arbiter" to monitor its coverage. Anna Gomez, the lone FCC commissioner appointed by a Democrat, objected, saying, "no government -- regardless of party -- gets to decide what is true, who gets heard, or which voices are silenced." Similar mechanisms of control are being applied to the flow of federal dollars, with political appointees now deciding which research and science projects move forward.

Perhaps the most eerie part of living through the last six months is how these kinds of disquieting developments continue to unfold beneath a veneer of normalcy. While he's deeply concerned about the country's future, Frye said that, on a daily basis, competitive autocracies can look quite normal. Though he's better placed than most to recognize the warning signs, he still has classes to teach, deadlines to meet. "Life goes on," he said. Looming threats become banal, both impossible to ignore and somehow routine. "It's usually not the case that there's one point in time when you can point and say, 'Ah, this is when we became an autocracy,'" he said.

Sadai, like many, is finding the discord hard to overcome. She's unemployed and struggling to find a new academic job, thanks to federal budget cuts. She tries to find refuge in taking breaks to spend time in the New England woods that remind her of what she's trying to protect. But when she returns, her phone lights up with notifications about people being abducted off the streets by masked government agents, or reports of coal-fired power plants receiving exemptions from air regulations. "It's become so much harder to put everything aside for a few minutes and not have just a barrage of intrusive thoughts."

"I just have to sit there, and break down, and then pull myself together," she said. Though it often feels inadequate, she's spending her days working through publication reviews and job applications, clinging to the hope that her life's work might still contribute to climate policy, even as her elected leaders turn away.

Naming the collapse is the first step toward resistance. The question is whether we can see the failure clearly enough to imagine what comes next. "I don't know what else to do but keep trying," Sadai said.

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