Hit by ‘gut punches,’ scientists band together to protest Trump

On Feb. 8, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University, nervously announced to the online world that she was planning a national protest in defense of science. “I’ve never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world,” she wrote in a post on Bluesky, a social media platform.

A team of scientists quickly coalesced around her and formed a plan: a rally on the National Mall, satellite protests across the country, March 7. They threw together a website so rudimentary, initially, that visitors had to type the “www” manually, or else the web address raised an error. Within days, the (improved) site received so much traffic that it crashed.

The event, dubbed Stand Up For Science, is something of a revitalization of the March for Science that took place in cities around the world in April 2017, not long into President Donald Trump’s first term. But this time, in a greatly sharpened political climate and a post-COVID world, the protests are being organized by a completely different team, and with a distinct vision.

“The spirit of it is the same,” Delawalla said. But, she added, “now we are in a position of being on defense as opposed to offense.”

Many of the threats that mobilized scientists during the first Trump administration, such as the widespread deletion of federal databases and deep slashes to the science budget, never came to pass. But this time, within weeks of the presidential inauguration, Trump has already reshaped much of the federal scientific enterprise, which funds a significant chunk of academic research.

Often through executive orders, his administration has terminated funding for global health programs, fired disease screeners at the nation’s borders, gutted climate policy and attempted to suspend funding for nuclear protection. More than 1,000 workers across federal science agencies, including the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, have been laid off. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., widely seen as a vaccine skeptic, is now the health secretary.

Some scientific associations applauded Trump’s swift appointment of Michael Kratsios, an expert in technology policy, to the position of science adviser, rather than leaving the position vacant for more than a year, as he did during his first term.

Still, the barrage of changes landed as “gut punches,” Delawalla said. On that Saturday morning in February — her coffee growing cold as she doomscrolled on her phone — Delawalla was drawn to her bathroom mirror, where she contemplated her reflection with resolve.

“Are you somebody who lives by your values?” she asked herself. “If I really believe as a scientist that science is important for America, what am I going to do about it?”

The tradition of science activism stretches back through the environmental movement of the 1960s to the antinuclear protests at the end of World War II. “Historically, when scientists’ interests and livelihoods are threatened, they mobilize,” said Scott Frickel, a sociologist at Brown University who studies the relationship between science and society.

But the March for Science in 2017, which attracted an estimated 1 million people to protests in cities around the world, was distinct from past movements, Frickel said, because it was in reaction to a specific presidential administration, not to U.S. policy.

Some scientists worried that taking that step would heighten the perception of science as partisan. In 2017, Robert Young, a geologist at Western Carolina University, published an essay in The New York Times expressing concerns about the march. “Those who want to characterize scientists as just another political interest group will use that as evidence for that case,” he said recently.

A growing body of evidence suggests that scientists and scientific institutions engaging in political action does affect the way they are perceived by the public. One study found that trust in scientists among supporters of Trump declined after Nature, a prominent scientific journal, endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020. Another concluded that conservative attitudes toward scientists became more negative, and liberal attitudes more positive, as a direct consequence of the March for Science.

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