When Peter Foukal published his letter in the Boston Globe arguing that the scientific community had “brought Trump’s funding threat on itself” by straying from pure research into what he called “advancing a social agenda,” he articulated a view that sounds reasonable on its surface but collapses under the weight of history, evidence, and basic logic. Two responses from researchers and legal scholars dismantle that argument with precision — and together they illuminate something far more alarming than a bureaucratic rule change: a deliberate effort by the Trump administration to subordinate scientific inquiry to political ideology.
Foukal’s central premise — that science, when left alone, operates free of bias — is not merely naive. It is demonstrably false. Renée M. Landers, professor of law and faculty director of the Health and Biomedical Law Concentration at Suffolk University Law School, catalogues the wreckage that assumption has historically produced. The Tuskegee syphilis study, in which Black men were denied treatment as part of a government-sanctioned experiment, stands as perhaps the most notorious example. The segregation of healthcare facilities before Medicare, the eugenics movement, the systematic exclusion of women and nonwhite patients from medical research trials, the well-documented health disparities organized along lines of race, gender, and sexuality — none of these were aberrations. They were the products of a scientific establishment that refused to interrogate its own assumptions, that treated the status quo as neutral when it was anything but.
The consequences of that refusal persist today. Just last week, a New York Times report reprinted in the Globe highlighted that the National Institutes of Health’s human genome database remains overwhelmingly populated with DNA from people of European descent, severely limiting its usefulness for assessing disease risk in the populations it excludes. This is not a fringe concern raised by activists hostile to science. It is a structural failure with direct, measurable consequences for human health — the precise kind of failure that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in research are designed to correct. Attacking DEI in science does not protect scientific integrity. It protects the conditions that produced these failures in the first place.
Landers also makes a point that deserves particular emphasis: research into the health effects of tobacco, alcohol, gun violence, and vaccines does not end at the laboratory door. It generates findings that demand policy responses, and advocating for those responses is not a corruption of the scientific mission — it is a fulfillment of it. When the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget proposes to replace scientific criteria with political, ideological, and religious considerations in grant funding decisions, it is not restoring some imagined purity to research. It is sabotaging the entire enterprise.
John Raymond, a former colleague of Foukal’s, sharpens this point considerably. He argues that Foukal’s focus on the anti-DEI language in the OMB proposal misses the larger and more dangerous ambition embedded in the rule changes: the transfer of funding decisions away from scientists and into the hands of political appointees whose primary loyalty is to the ideology of the party in power. Raymond reaches back to the Soviet Union for a historical parallel that is instructive precisely because it is not hyperbolic. Trofim Lysenko, a bureaucrat with no serious scientific credentials, rose to dominate Soviet agricultural science in the 1940s by promoting a theory of heredity that conveniently aligned with Communist ideology and promised spectacular crop yields. The actual result was catastrophic crop failures and the imprisonment of geneticists who dared to contradict him. Science subordinated to political power does not merely stagnate. It causes harm at scale.
The parallel Raymond draws is not decorative. The OMB proposal, as he reads it, would open the door to exactly this kind of substitution — replacing evidence-based evaluation with politically motivated claims. Conspiracy theories about vaccine safety and ideologically driven denial of climate science, Raymond warns, could move from the fringes of right-wing media directly into the criteria by which federal research funding is allocated. That is not a slippery slope argument. It is a description of a mechanism already visible in the Trump administration’s broader pattern of behavior toward federal science agencies, from the gutting of the EPA’s scientific advisory boards to the suppression of climate data across multiple departments.
What both Landers and Raymond make clear, from their different vantage points, is that this fight is not really about DEI at all. DEI is the wedge, the piece of the proposal most likely to attract sympathy from people who have absorbed years of conservative messaging about political correctness in academia. But the target is much larger: the independence of the scientific enterprise itself, its capacity to generate findings that contradict the preferences of whoever holds political power. A government that controls which questions researchers are permitted to ask, and which answers they are permitted to find, does not have a science policy. It has a propaganda apparatus dressed in a lab coat.
The scientific community did not bring this on itself by caring about equity. It finds itself under attack because genuine, independent science — science that documents health disparities, validates vaccine safety, quantifies the human cost of gun violence, and confirms the reality of climate change — is inconvenient to an administration committed to outcomes that the evidence does not support. The appropriate response is not for researchers to retreat into a false neutrality that history has already proven illusory. It is for the rest of us to understand clearly what is being proposed, and what would be lost if it succeeds.