---
title: "Politicization of science"
chunk: 5/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:14.587410+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The issue of politicized science surfaced during the 2016 United States presidential campaign by then Republican candidate Donald Trump. Trump stated his intention to strip NASA's Earth Science division of its funding, a move that "would mean the elimination of NASA's world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena". Subsequently, the Trump administration successfully nominated Jim Bridenstine, who had no background in science and rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, to lead NASA. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy prohibited the use of the term "climate change". In March 2020 The New York Times reported that an official at the Interior Department has repeatedly inserted climate change-denying language into the agency's scientific reports, such as those that affect water and mineral rights.

===== Health =====
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration replaced career public affairs staff at the Department of Health and Human Services with political appointees, including Michael Caputo, who interfered with weekly Centers for Disease Control scientific reports and attempted to silence the government's most senior infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, "sowing distrust of the FDA at a time when health leaders desperately need people to accept a vaccine in order to create the immunity necessary to defeat the novel coronavirus." One day after President Donald Trump noted that he might dismiss an FDA proposal to improve standards for emergency use of a coronavirus vaccine, the Presidents of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine issued a statement expressing alarm at political interference in science during a pandemic, "particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and derision of government scientists". The administration reportedly sent a list to the CDC on words that the agency was prohibited from using in its official communications, including "transgender", "fetus", "evidence-based", "science-based", "vulnerable", "entitlement", and "diversity". The Director of the CDC denied these reports.

==== Biden administration ====
As part of an effort to "refresh and reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy", President-elect Joe Biden announced, before taking office, that he would elevate the role of Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet level position. Biden's removal of Betsy Weatherhead from her role as director of the National Climate Assessment has been criticized as being politically motivated.

==== Second Trump administration ====

== Scholarly studies of the politics of science ==
The politicization of science is a subset of a broader topic, the politics of science, which has been studied by scholars in a variety of fields, including most notably Science and Technology Studies; history of science; political science; and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. Increasingly in recent decades, these fields have examined the process through which science and technology are shaped. Some of the scholarly work in this area is reviewed in The Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (1995, 2008), a collection of literature reviews published by the Society for Social Studies of Science. There is an annual award for books relevant to the politics of science given by the Society for Social Studies of Science called the Rachel Carson Prize.

== See also ==

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Shawn Lawrence Otto, Fool Me Twice: Fighting The Assault On Science In America, Rodale Books, 2011, ISBN 978-1-60529-217-5
Steven Rose, "Pissing in the Snow" (review of Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, Johns Hopkins, January 2019, ISBN 978-1-4214-2673-0, 302 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 14 (18 July 2019), pp. 31–33.

== External links ==