Trump’s research grant controls: a systemic attack on scientific autonomy and democratic knowledge production
Original framing: “‘The purpose of the rule is fascism’: scientists fight back against planned Trump research cuts” — The Guardian - World
Women and scholars of color receive only 10% of federal research grants despite comprising 40% of STEM PhDs, a disparity the proposed rule would exacerbate by centralizing power in already homogeneous review panels. Black and Indigenous scientists report being 3x more likely to have their research dismissed as 'political,' a bias the rule formalizes. The cuts also target fields like gender studies and environmental justice, which center marginalized communities—disciplines already under siege in conservative states.
The Trump administration’s proposed research cuts are not an aberration but the culmination of a century-long struggle to subordinate science to corporate and nationalist agendas, from the 1920s eugenics funding to today’s fossil fuel lobbying.
The framing of this as a 'scientists vs. fascists' battle obscures how the U.S. science ecosystem itself is a colonial project, built on stolen land, exploited labor, and the erasure of Indigenous and Global South knowledge. A systemic solution requires dismantling the extractive logic of research funding—replacing peer review with participatory governance, corporate grants with communal accountability, and nationalist science with a pluriversal model where Hermes (the trickster) and Coyote (the disruptor) are as valued as the 'objective' scientist. The path forward lies in decolonizing institutions, as Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, by centering those who have historically been treated as objects of study rather than subjects of knowledge. Without this, the 'fight for science' will merely reproduce the power structures that made such attacks possible.