A Democracy Drive Thread
Gutting research, denying climate change and vaccines, purging scientists, and elevating quackery — a chronological, sourced record of the administration's assault on science and expertise.
From climate data scrubbed off government websites to vaccine panels purged and replaced, from defunded labs to pseudoscience promoted from the nation's top health office, this thread tracks the war on science and expertise. Entries are in chronological order, each with sources.
January 27, 2025
Trump again pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and set about dismantling federal climate work — moves Project 2025 spelled out in detail. The plan called for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized” and its climate research “disbanded”; the administration moved to eliminate NOAA’s research office, shut down climate.gov, ended the billion-dollar disaster database, and defunded the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
April 8, 2025
The Commerce Department cut roughly $4 million in federal climate-research funding to Princeton, claiming the work promoted climate “anxiety” — part of a broad defunding of climate science.
June 11, 2025
The EPA proposed rolling back rules limiting greenhouse-gas and hazardous pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants.
June 28, 2025
The Pentagon abruptly ended sharing of key satellite microwave data that forecasters rely on to track hurricanes and sea ice — weakening storm prediction at the start of hurricane season.
July 29, 2025
The EPA proposed rescinding the 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health — the foundation for nearly every federal climate regulation.
August 5, 2025
The EPA moved to cancel $7 billion in “Solar for All” grants meant to put rooftop solar on low-income households, drawing lawsuits from states. In September 2026 a federal judge ruled the EPA had illegally canceled the program.
August 19, 2025
The Agriculture Department announced it would stop funding solar and wind energy projects.
August 20, 2025
Trump announced the U.S. would not approve new wind or “farmer-destroying” solar projects, moving to halt the country's fastest-growing sources of new electricity.
August 26, 2025
U.S. officials pressed allied governments to drop climate commitments and embrace fossil fuels.
September 11, 2025
The EPA moved to vacate parts of the first federal limits on toxic “forever chemicals” (PFAS) in drinking water.
November 7, 2025
Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed the UN's COP30 climate summit as a hoax as the U.S. retreated from global climate talks.
February 12, 2026
Following through on its proposal, the EPA finalized repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, stripping the legal basis for regulating climate pollution.
April 6, 2025
As a measles outbreak grew past 1,000 cases — producing the first U.S. measles deaths in a decade, including two unvaccinated children in Texas — Kennedy called the situation “not unusual,” gave only a lukewarm endorsement of the MMR vaccine, promoted unproven treatments, and falsely suggested the vaccine itself causes deaths “every year.” In April he also falsely claimed measles outbreaks happen because “the vaccine wanes very quickly” — two MMR doses give about 97% protection, typically for life.
June 9, 2025
Kennedy abruptly removed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — the panel that recommends vaccines and shapes what insurers must cover — calling it a “clean sweep,” then named replacements including prominent vaccine skeptics. The American Medical Association said the unprecedented move undermined a process that had “saved countless lives.”
June 10, 2025
The NIH moved to end funding for HIV-vaccine research consortia, halting a decades-long effort to develop a vaccine against the virus.
August 6, 2025
HHS announced it was winding down mRNA vaccine development under BARDA, cancelling 22 projects worth nearly $500 million — including a Moderna bird-flu vaccine — citing safety claims contradicted by the evidence. A former BARDA director called it “a huge blow to our national security.”
August 27, 2025
Under RFK Jr.'s HHS, the FDA approved updated COVID-19 vaccines only for adults 65 and older and high-risk people, narrowing access for healthy younger Americans who had been eligible.
CDC Director Susan Monarez was forced out about a month after confirmation amid clashes with RFK Jr. over vaccine policy; several senior CDC leaders resigned in protest.
September 1, 2025
Trump publicly demanded that pharmaceutical companies prove COVID-19 vaccines worked, echoing vaccine-skeptic talking points.
September 3, 2025
Florida announced it would eliminate every school vaccine requirement, the first state to do so.
September 12, 2025
At a CDC vaccine meeting, FDA officials presented contested data suggesting COVID vaccines caused child deaths, alarming outside scientists.
September 26, 2025
Kennedy removed Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who had succeeded Anthony Fauci as head of the NIH's infectious-disease institute.
October 10, 2025
Kennedy's HHS moved to fire over 1,000 CDC staff in a single night, gutting the agency's workforce.
December 10, 2025
Measles cases climbed past 2,000 in 2025 — the most in three decades — amid falling vaccination rates and federal vaccine skepticism.
March 4, 2026
In court, a Justice Department lawyer argued Kennedy could promote getting measles “with impunity” and that his vaccine decisions were not reviewable.
March 16, 2026
A judge halted Kennedy's attempt to reshape the CDC childhood immunization schedule, finding he likely exceeded his authority.
April 21, 2026
Hegseth scrapped the long-standing requirement that U.S. troops be vaccinated against influenza, over health experts' objections.
June 24, 2026
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made flu vaccination voluntary in April 2026, ending a requirement that had stood for U.S. troops since 1945. By late June, a flu outbreak at Joint Base San Antonio–Lackland — where only about 40% of new trainees had been vaccinated when it began — had grown from 159 cases to 275 in roughly a week, with recruits hospitalized. The military then quietly reinstated mandatory flu shots for Army, Navy and Air Force recruits.
“But we will not force you”
January 20, 2025
Days into the term, the administration froze billions in NIH grants, disrupting medical research across the country.
March 9, 2025
A French space researcher traveling to a conference was turned away and sent home after border officers searched his phone and found messages critical of the administration's science policies, French officials said.
April 8, 2025
Federal grants for a pediatric artificial-heart-pump project (PediaFlow) and related infant-heart research were cut.
May 2, 2025
The budget called for gutting NASA's science programs, threatening dozens of active and planned missions.
May 3, 2025
Trump's NASA budget proposed canceling the Mars Sample Return mission, abandoning samples already collected by the Perseverance rover.
May 5, 2025
Trump signed an executive order halting U.S. funding for gain-of-function research and related work abroad; scientists warned the vague, sweeping definition could choke off legitimate pathogen and vaccine research.
June 1, 2025
The FDA rolled out an AI assistant, “Elsa,” to speed drug review; staff reported it fabricated nonexistent studies and citations, raising alarm about AI “hallucinations” entering regulatory science.
August 4, 2025
The administration targeted NASA satellite missions that track carbon dioxide and global warming for shutdown.
August 21, 2025
The Supreme Court allowed cancellation of $783 million in NIH grants tied to diversity and health-equity topics.
September 11, 2025
The DOJ removed studies and data on far-right and white-supremacist violence from its research arm.
March 1, 2025
Under an order to purge content it deemed negative or ideological, the administration started removing historical and scientific information — including on climate — from national-park materials, prompting lawsuits.
April 18, 2025
The federal covid.gov site was replaced with a page promoting the lab-leak theory and attacking Biden and Anthony Fauci.
July 3, 2025
The administration removed public access to the National Climate Assessments — the government's flagship reports on how climate change is affecting the United States — pulling them from federal websites.
August 8, 2025
Agencies were directed to purge records of employees' COVID-19 vaccination status.
August 20, 2025
Instruments to monitor air and ocean pollution were removed from NOAA's next-generation weather satellites.
September 30, 2025
The DOE instructed staff to stop using terms such as “climate change” and “energy transition.”
December 15, 2025
The NIH began screening and pausing research grants containing disfavored terms such as health equity and structural racism.
January 22, 2026
Park exhibits on slavery and science were taken down under a content-purge order, prompting a lawsuit alleging the erasure of history and science.
April 1, 2019
Trump asserted that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer and tanks nearby property values — claims with no scientific basis that he would repeat for years as he fought wind power.
April 28, 2025
Beyond formal policy, Kennedy used his platform to elevate long-debunked claims: he asserted the MMR vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” (it does not), vowed on Dr. Phil to stop “chemtrails,” and promoted raw milk — lending federal credibility to ideas the scientific community had repeatedly rejected. The pattern traces to his rejection of germ theory itself: in his 2021 book he dismissed it in favor of the discredited idea that disease comes from the body’s “terrain,” not microbes.
May 22, 2025
Kennedy’s “MAHA” commission released its marquee report on children’s health — and researchers quickly found it cited multiple studies that do not exist, with dozens more broken or wrong citations bearing the hallmarks of AI generation (the marker “oaicite” appeared in footnotes). The White House called them “formatting issues.”
July 10, 2025
The EPA published pages addressing the long-debunked “chemtrails” conspiracy theory about aircraft contrails.
September 21, 2025
Trump asserted a causal link between the painkiller Tylenol and autism, a claim rejected by medical experts.
September 22, 2025
After promising in April to identify the cause of the “autism epidemic” by September — and floating a registry to track autistic people — Kennedy and HHS announced a claimed link between Tylenol (acetaminophen) use in pregnancy and autism, recommending a folate-based treatment. Scientists said the evidence did not support the claims. Within hours, Trump’s own FDA undercut him: its notice to doctors said “a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies,” and that acetaminophen remains reasonable to use in pregnancy — while Trump repeatedly told pregnant women not to take it.
October 28, 2025
Kennedy ordered the CDC and Surgeon General to investigate purported health harms from offshore wind — a fringe claim.
October 31, 2025
Consistent with the MAHA agenda, the FDA acted to remove ingestible prescription fluoride drops and tablets for young children from the market, advising against them for kids under three — reversing decades of guidance on a public-health measure credited with preventing tooth decay.
May 4, 2026
Over the objections of his own health officials, Trump pushed the FDA to approve fruit-flavored e-cigarettes, which it then did.
August 25, 2019
On the ground
Trump denied it. Scientists have long explained that a nuclear blast would not stop a hurricane and would spread radioactive fallout.
May 8, 2020
In his own words
At a May 8, 2020 White House meeting with Republican lawmakers, asked how necessary a vaccine was, Trump said: “This is going to go away without a vaccine. It’s going to go away, and it’s — we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.” Fauci had said a vaccine would be needed before society could relax mitigation measures. More than 75,000 Americans had already died.
“This is going to go away without a vaccine. It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
January 20, 2025
On the ground
Executive Order 14155 cited the WHO’s handling of COVID-19 and claimed the U.S. paid more than China. It paused U.S. funding and recalled U.S. personnel working with the agency.
February 18, 2025
On the ground
Emails seen by CBC News directed NOAA staff to submit any international correspondence involving scientific data for review. A Canadian ecologist said a planned call with U.S. collaborators about Great Lakes fish sampling was denied.
March 5, 2025
In early 2025 the DOJ removed from its website a National Institute of Justice study — funded by a DOJ grant and led by University of Wisconsin researchers — that analyzed Texas arrest records from 2012 to 2018 and found undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens for violent and drug crimes, and about a quarter the rate for property crimes. The page came down without explanation, under a banner saying content was being reviewed “in accordance with recent Executive Orders.”
April 14, 2025
On the ground
The letter asked how journals “protect the public from misinformation” and handle allegations that authors misled readers. At least two other journals received similar letters. Doctors and editors said it was an attempt to intimidate scientific publishing.
May 8, 2025
On May 8, 2025, NOAA announced it was retiring its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database — the authoritative record, kept since 1980, of every U.S. weather event causing at least $1 billion in damage, relied on by governments, insurers, and researchers. Past reports stay online but will no longer be updated, cutting off the official accounting of disasters' rising toll just as they grow more frequent and costly. NOAA cited “evolving priorities” and staffing changes.
On the ground
NOAA posted a notice that the database would be archived and no longer updated, citing “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.” Insurers, emergency planners, researchers and journalists relied on it to measure the growing cost of extreme weather. Its former lead economist, Adam Smith, rebuilt it at Climate Central; its first update in October 2025 showed more than $100 billion in losses in the first six months of 2025, the most expensive half-year since tracking began.
May 28, 2025
In May 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to stop NIH scientists from publishing in the top peer-reviewed medical journals — The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The Lancet — claiming they are “all corrupt” and controlled by pharmaceutical companies, and to create government “in-house” journals instead. Former NEJM editors called the plan retaliation rather than reform, warning it would cut federally funded science off from independent peer review.
“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we're going to create our own journals in-house.”
May 29, 2025
The Make America Healthy Again report, released by the White House in May 2025 as RFK Jr.'s blueprint on children's health, cited multiple studies that do not exist. At least seven references could not be found; named researchers said papers attributed to them were never written; and citation URLs contained “oaicite” markers indicating they were generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT. The White House dismissed the fabrications as “formatting issues” and quietly swapped in real citations.
“It is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved in.”
On the ground
SB46, defended by state Rep. Kimberly Landry Coates over concerns about white streaks behind aircraft, passed the House on May 29, 2025, after its penalties were stripped. The EPA explains that the streaks are contrails — water vapor that condenses from hot exhaust in cold air. NBC News reported Republicans in many states were advancing similar bills.
June 2, 2025
On the ground
The budget sought $10 million for the NOAA office, down 84%. In July 2025, 450 companies from seven industry groups, including SpaceX and Amazon’s Kuiper unit, wrote that without TraCSS “U.S. commercial and government satellite operators would face greater risks.” The administration said private companies “have the capability” to do the job. About 12,000 active satellites share orbit with thousands of pieces of debris.
July 1, 2025
On the ground
NOAA budget documents released July 1, 2025 detailed the plan: eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, cutting its funding by about 75%, and cut NOAA’s overall budget by more than 27%, ending funding for climate laboratories, cooperative institutes, regional climate data and Sea Grant. The NASA proposal would halt nearly every future science mission. The administration also moved to end the lease for the Mauna Loa observatory office, home of the Keeling Curve record of atmospheric CO2 since 1958.
July 9, 2025
On the ground
The departures are in GS-13 to GS-15 positions, with more than 1,800 in core research and space-exploration areas. Goddard Space Flight Center stands to lose 607 people.
July 10, 2025
In his own words
The EPA launched pages on contrails and geoengineering, which state the government is not aware of any contrail ever intentionally formed for geoengineering or weather modification. But Zeldin framed the effort as answering public suspicions, after Texas floods fueled conspiracy theories. Kennedy praised him. KFF Health News later reported the chemtrails theory had gained traction inside HHS.
On the ground
The board has a budget of about $14 million and fewer than 50 staff. Trump tried to defund it three times in his first term. Congress again funded it in the 2026 spending law.
July 14, 2025
Under a mid-2025 NIH “security” change, researchers in China, Hong Kong, Macau, and other designated countries were blocked from the National Cancer Institute's SEER database — the U.S. cancer registry covering about 48% of the population and long open to scientists worldwide — greeted with a notice that access “cannot be restored at this time.” The move walled off one of the world's most important cancer-data resources, slowing collaborative research on incidence, survival, and treatment.
August 15, 2025
In 2025 the administration moved to shut down NOAA research into the stratospheric pollution — aluminum, black carbon, and nitrogen oxides — created by the surging number of rocket launches and re-entering satellites, even as Starlink satellites were re-entering the atmosphere several times a day. Separately, the FAA backed off a proposed rule that would have required companies like SpaceX to remove dead rockets from orbit within 25 years. Both eased scrutiny of Musk's space business.
September 20, 2025
On the ground
The survey of about 40,000 households, run since 1995, is the largest study of food insecurity in the U.S. It was canceled in September 2025, weeks after Trump’s tax law cut SNAP food aid. Advocates said losing it removes a key source for policy on fighting hunger.
September 27, 2025
On the ground
The video, made to look like a segment on Lara Trump’s Fox News show, had an AI Trump saying: “Every American will soon receive their own medbed card. With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation.” He called it “the beginning of a new era in American healthcare.” Fox never aired any such segment. The post was not labeled as AI and was deleted hours later.
December 16, 2025
In his own words
Vought said on X that the National Science Foundation “will be breaking up” NCAR and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved.” NCAR’s overseers warned it would set back the nation’s ability to predict and respond to severe weather. CNN reported officials believed the move was meant to punish Colorado Gov. Jared Polis amid Trump’s feud with the state over imprisoned election-denier Tina Peters; a lawsuit later made the same allegation. Colorado’s senators blocked a spending bill in protest.
“one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country”
January 2, 2026
On the ground
NASA permanently closes the library at Goddard Space Flight Center, its largest, which supported Hubble and Webb. The closure is part of a reorganization shutting 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering labs on the campus by March 2026. Some of the 100,000-volume collection was set to go to a warehouse and some to be discarded.
January 27, 2026
On the ground
Using Office of Personnel Management data, Science found the 14 research agencies it examined lost on average about three times as many Ph.D. experts in 2025 as in 2024. The National Institutes of Health lost more than 1,100, up from 421 the year before. The National Science Foundation’s net loss of 205 Ph.D.s equaled 40% of its pre-Trump Ph.D. workforce, and NSF, EPA, the Energy Department and the Forest Service lost a larger share of their Ph.D.s than of other workers.