From Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman, writing in Substack on the Malignant Fascist's war on science:
"You’ve probably heard that the One Big Beautiful Bill will cause immense hardship via its cuts to Medicaid, which will amount to around 15 percent of the program’s spending. Well, the Trump administration wants to cut funding for NOAA by 40 percent.
Since NOAA is a tiny budget item compared with Medicaid, what’s this about? Actually, there’s no mystery. Among other things, NOAA research helps us understand and predict climate change, and America’s right is firmly committed to climate denial. So Trump officials want to end research that might tell them things they don’t want to hear.
Why not eliminate only research directly focused on climate change? Because that’s not how it works. When you have a pervasive phenomenon like climate change just about any research into the weather will provide evidence that it’s happening. So the MAGA/Project 2025 solution is to stop almost all research.
The same logic lies behind the drastic cuts at the National Institutes of Health: They aren’t about saving money, they’re about preventing researchers from discovering things — like evidence that vaccines work and are safe — that don’t match the prejudices of the people in charge." (our emphasis)
As Krugman points out, it's not about the money, and the shopworn waste / fraud / abuse cover story for the far right. It's about stifling and eliminating alternative viewpoints, specifically facts that don't square with right wing mythology or the interests of their wealthy patrons.
No comments:
Post a Comment