---
title: "Political interference with science agencies by the first Trump administration"
chunk: 1/10
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interference_with_science_agencies_by_the_first_Trump_administration"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:13.322702+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

During his first term as president of the United States (2017–2021), Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly politicized science by pressuring or overriding health and science agencies to change their reporting and recommendations so as to conform to his policies and public comments. This was particularly true with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also included suppressing research on climate change and weakening or eliminating environmental regulations.
Trump and his appointees pressured federal health and science agencies to take particular actions that Trump favored and to support his public pronouncements. He sometimes claimed that there was a "deep state" conspiracy among federal scientists, whose members delayed approval of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments because they wanted to hurt him politically or prevent his re-election.

== Background ==
Trump, inaugurated as president on January 20, 2017, did not name a Science Advisor to the President until July 2018, when he appointed meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier to the position. Science advisory committees at multiple agencies including the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration were disbanded. Many of Trump's first cabinet picks were people with a history of opposition to the agency they were named to head, including Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy and Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. In the science area the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, had repeatedly sued the EPA when he was Oklahoma attorney general, and described himself as a "leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda".

== Survey ==
In a survey of scientists at 16 federal agencies conducted in 2018, 50% of respondents agreed that "the level of consideration of political interests hindered the ability of their agencies to make science-based decisions"; 69% of scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 76% of respondents at the National Park Service, and 81% of scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency agreed.

== Health agencies ==