For MAGA, Ignorance is Strength

Research cuts aren’t about shrinking government, they’re about killing science

I start almost every morning the same way. First I start the coffee brewing. Then I feed Jack, our cat. Then I fire up the weather app on my phone, to help plan my day.

Of course, as someone who basically spends his life staring at a computer screen, I’m not nearly as affected by the weather as, say, a farmer, or someone who lives in a flood-prone area. But weather forecasts — and the research that leads to better forecasting over time — are extremely useful to almost everyone.

So why is the Trump administration making severe cuts in the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service? The Times had an excellent and alarming report on these cuts, which by all indications will go forward despite the disaster in Kerr County. But I had one quarrel with the report: Its attribution of the administration’s actions to “an effort to shrink the federal government.”

That’s not what this is about. This is an attack not on government but on science.

Traditionally, conservatives calling for smaller government want to see a less generous social safety net. Things like protecting Americans from economic hardship and guaranteeing health care, they argue, aren’t essential roles of government. And it’s true that those of us who want a stronger, not weaker safety net are mostly making a judgment about what kind of society we should be rather than an economic argument.

But weather forecasting and the research that supports it aren’t like retirement income or health care. They’re what economists call “public goods.” That is, they’re things provided by the government because they’re valuable to everyone but can’t easily be monetized, because there’s no good way to limit access to paying customers.

I say no good way advisedly. Republicans have long sought to restrict access to National Weather Service data to private companies like AccuWeather, which in turn would provide forecasts only to paying customers. And they may succeed. But this would be obvious profiteering, creating artificial middlemen for access to information generated at taxpayer expense. And it would at best support forecasting, not the research that makes forecasting better.

For now weather forecasting is, as it should be, a publicly provided service. And the federal government has provided that service for a very long time: The National Weather Service was created by U.S. Grant in 1870. Furthermore, it’s an immensely valuable service. Putting a dollar value to its payoffs is tricky, but there can’t be much doubt that money the government invests in weather prediction and analysis has a very high rate of return to America as a whole.

Yet DOGE’s depredations have already created serious staffing shortages at the weather service, which may have contributed to the Texas disaster. And the Trump administration is getting ready to effectively zero out the research that underlies improvements in weather forecasting. This includes shuttering the lab that sends teams of hurricane hunters into storms to collect data and drastically cutting a program that maintains river gauges to help predict floods. In this case Trump and company aren’t shrinking government, they’re basically dismantling it.

You’ve probably heard that the One Big Beautiful Bill will cause immense hardship via its cuts to Medicaid, which will amount to around 15 percent of the program’s spending. Well, the Trump administration wants to cut funding for NOAA by 40 percent.

Since NOAA is a tiny budget item compared with Medicaid, what’s this about? Actually, there’s no mystery. Among other things, NOAA research helps us understand and predict climate change, and America’s right is firmly committed to climate denial. So Trump officials want to end research that might tell them things they don’t want to hear.

Why not eliminate only research directly focused on climate change? Because that’s not how it works. When you have a pervasive phenomenon like climate change just about any research into the weather will provide evidence that it’s happening. So the MAGA/Project 2025 solution is to stop almost all research.

The same logic lies behind the drastic cuts at the National Institutes of Health: They aren’t about saving money, they’re about preventing researchers from discovering things — like evidence that vaccines work and are safe — that don’t match the prejudices of the people in charge.

So Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting “La, la, la, we can’t hear you.”

Will the war on science hurt America? Massively. As I said, estimating the benefits of NOAA research is tricky. But two first-rate economists, David Cutler and Ed Glaeser, have made a stab at estimating the impact of cuts at NIH. Their analysis suggests that these cuts might save $500 billion in federal spending over the next 25 years — while imposing more than $8 trillion in losses.

But don’t expect studies like these to change policy. America is now run by people who believe that knowledge is dangerous, and ignorance is strength.

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