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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.