Since Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025, the second Trump administration has launched a systemic attack on the federal scientific enterprise.
Attacks on Science Tracker
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has tracked attacks on science at the federal level since 2001, but the pace and scope of attacks under this new administration is truly unprecedented. In response to this rapid and broad-ranging dismantling of federal scientific structures, the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS has evolved its methodology to meet the current moment. This methodology, informed by UCS's longstanding work tracking attacks on science, includes a new approach to collecting, screening, and analyzing data to identify and categorize attacks on science.
Based on previous experience tracking attacks on science, UCS researchers programmed R scripts, through an iterative process, to automate the collection and organization of news coverage. The articles surfaced through this process are reviewed and analyzed by researchers to identify and categorize attacks on science. This system will allow UCS to more consistently and comprehensively track attacks on science and potential violations of scientific integrity in perpetuity.
The UCS Attacks on Science Tracker, showing attacks and potential scientific integrity violations committed by the second Trump administration, can be found here. A full description of the methodology is available below.
For further reading
- All R scripts programmed for this project are located on UCS’s GitHub page.
- The data that support the Attacks on Science Tracker can be found in Harvard Dataverse here. This resource will be routinely updated.
- UCS’s past work tracking Attacks on Science can be found here.