In 1975, New York City was a husk of itself, its spirit choked by the ineptitude of regular politicians that allowed a consortium of financiers to have a stranglehold on the city for decades to come. As Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation (first released in October 2016) reveals, bankers, wielding austerity like a chainsaw, slashed public services, leaving subway tunnels smeared with graffiti, parks overrun by thorns, and schools crumbling under neglect. More than a decade of decay and stagnation followed which resulted in a recomposition of the city’s population from artists and creatives to mechanically thinking neoliberal elites re-engineering the country’s future iterating toward off-balance sheet securitized financial instruments that would later cause the 2008-2010 financial crisis. A stark warning of what happens when human needs are sacrificed entirely for a sterile, simplified vision of control and austerity management by self-interested parties alone.
Today, a more insidious force engulfs the US’s research engine. The second Trump administration’s brutal cuts to research funding are not mere budget tweaks; they’re a deliberate torching of peer-reviewed science—the unvarnished curiosity that has made the U.S. a global crucible of innovation for decades. Trump’s cuts embody the apex of neoliberalism, what Hypernormalisation calls a “system design” government of a machinery devoid of human politics, where messy negotiation and compromise across self-organizing groups are replaced by a clean, over-simplistic, and fundamentally false narrative to manage or placate millions of disaffected people.
A feat that could only be achieved by a serial conman who bankrupted every business he personally managed & operated, including casinos. His only success managed by others depicting him as a successful businessman in a fictional show masquerading as a reality TV show. In this world, a cult-of-personality leader, armed with only a second-grade vocabulary and racist falsehoods, sought to squash society’s last sparks of inquiry while lining his pockets with foreign corruption and destroying the nation’s future ability to interrogate truth through evidence-based research.
DOGE’s promise was efficiency but lacked all effectiveness and accountability leading to enormous fraud, waste and abuse that our country has not seen in over a century. A government supposedly streamlined by markets, technocrats, and over-simplified explanations of the world within four months is failing to deliver under Trump and his South African-born co-president Elon Musk’s assault.
It is estimated to be costing the federal government more than the Biden administration last year with the careless and negligent methods employed by unqualified teenagers in terminating federal employees, gutting already appropriated programs with national security strategic aims, and leading to public health and safety concerns across agencies from not being able to manage diseases to nuclear energy to water quality to counterterrorism and cybersecurity.
The outright corruption of granting government contracts to Musk’s businesses under his control without competition or proper review as well as stopping all government oversight into Musk’s business’ malpractice from labor law to environmental violations would be unbelievable if written in fiction yet serves to inflict violence upon tax payers and societal contributors as Tesla and SpaceX rape and pillage more government handouts and welfare and at the same time avoid paying income taxes.
The technologies we lean on daily—the Internet as a vehicle for our digital lives, TCP/IP’s communication arteries, NIST-led cryptographic methods to secure our digital presence, GPS’s celestial compass, mRNA vaccines’ lifesaving shield—are all examples of public goods born from federal government investment, only shared because no corporation’s self-interest would have freed them. Yet these miracles, and the unscripted questions that birthed them, are now at risk. By slashing science budgets and elevating fringe narratives, the administration is dismantling the messy, human pursuit of academic and industrial research, replacing it with a hypernormalised myth that serves to control masses, not discover a better future.
Research & Innovation As The Pillars of Modern Life
Every tap on your phone, every email darting across oceans, every secure transaction guarding your money flowing over the Internet, using TCP/IP or cryptographic techniques championed by NIST/NSA and industry partnerships. TCP/IP was forged by a Department of Defense contract (DAHC 15-73-C-0370) awarded to Stanford and collaborators in the 1970s. It was a decades-long odyssey, funded by DARPA. Researchers grappled with chaos: messages, shattered into packets, had to traverse mismatched machines over networks, arriving whole and ordered at their destination. By 1983, ARPANET adopted TCP/IP, laying one of the internet’s cornerstone (also created by federal research funding earlier). No company would have shared this universal protocol; only research curiosity, untainted by profit, unlocked its $2.6 trillion economic impact (McKinsey, 2024). Yet its slow forging, from the 1960s to 1980s, required a tolerance for complexity now under Trump’s assault.
Now picture a storm-soaked night, your phone’s GPS a lifeline through rain-slashed streets. The Global Positioning System, a constellation of 31 satellites 12,000 miles above, was sparked by Department of Defense funding in 1973. The Naval Research Laboratory, Johns Hopkins, and The Aerospace Corporation labored for 20 years, aligning orbits and ground stations until GPS went live in 1993, open to civilians by 2000. It steers your commute, guides fleets, and fuels $1.4 trillion in annual U.S. economic activity (2019 study). No corporation would have gifted this to the world; only federal government vision, rooted in open inquiry, made it so. But its long arc, from idea to sky, is the kind of patient bet Trump’s tidy narrative rejects.
Recall the COVID-19 abyss: hospitals choked, economies stalled, dread creating a constant malaise while the masses doomscrolled. mRNA vaccines, a beacon of hope, slashed severe illness and deaths. Born from NIH grants AI060505, AI50484, DE14825, and R01-AI127521, the work of Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, and Jason McLellan at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Texas at Austin spanned decades. Their discoveries—stabilizing mRNA and the coronavirus spike protein—enabled vaccines at lightning speed. By the end of 2021, tens of millions were vaccinated, societies reopened, and $3 trillion in global GDP was saved (IMF estimate). No pharmaceutical titan would have shared this platform to collaborate without federal funding instigating this. Yet its roots, planted in the 1990s, demanded the messy, human politics of sustained investment now scorned by the dictator-wannabee who took all the credit for the vaccines in 2020.
Breakthroughs require benefits that outweigh costs, even if delayed. The Internet, TCP/IP, cryptographic techniques like asymmetric encryption, GPS, and mRNA vaccines offered early glimmers in areas such as military networks and communication, warship navigation, and lab-tested mRNA before reshaping our modern existence.
Trump’s over-simplified explanation of the world, however, abhors such complexity, and Trump’s cuts sever the threads of curiosity that wove these wonders for his own authoritarian and corrupt aims.
The Unraveling
Since January 2025, the administration has brandished its budget destruction with cold precision. The NIH, science’s beating heart, faces a 20-30% cut, strangling research on cancer, Alzheimer’s, and pandemics (Nature, February 2025). The NSF, cradle of physics, chemistry, and environmental science, braces for a 25% slash, with young researchers fleeing a field bled dry (Science, March 2025). The DOE and NASA’s earth science programs face 15% cuts, stalling climate solutions as storms batter coasts (ClimateWire, April 2025).
This is no fiscal pruning; it’s a way purge curiosity’s last bastions. Peer review, the crucible of interrogated truth, is smeared as “elitist.” Fringe claims—on health, climate, technology—gain traction, propped by figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose unvalidated narratives and miseducation in such areas thrive in a system that prizes control and simplicity over nuanced complication of describing the world we can measure and understand. Funds are diverted to projects that glorify allegiance—border walls, immigration enforcement terror campaigns by new brown shirts, normalizing media outlets continue their circus masquerading as reality—while innovation labs fade to black (yes, I used to like old Metallica).
Today I read a formal methods article which notes clients in the high assurance software space often reject “correctness” for quick fixes. This lazy idea is everywhere, especially in industry that is used to being handed innovations they can build upon for profit without needing to provide significant investment themselves and reaping all the profits themselves. Venture Capitalists like Marc Andreesen comically suggest Silicon Valley’s innovations have never depended on government funds yet the only reason he rose to wealth and prominence is due to his prior work at NCSA, a government funded (NSF) unit at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (a state funded university) that paid his salary to build a web browser that only made sense because it was built on top of the World Wide Web which was launched by CERN labs, an intergovernmental organization partially funded by US federal money years before. He would never have been able to launch Netscape without that experience.
The Trump administration discards research’s rigor and nuance for a hypernormalised tale spun by venture capitalists saying human needs (in favor of tax cuts only for the wealthiest people already not paying a fair share, leeching off of everyone else’s contributions in society) are entirely expendable to fit a neat, false term sheet that also conveniently benefits Trump’s dictatorship aspirations.
A Generational Eclipse
The fallout is a slow-creeping dusk. Science is no machine; it’s a living organism, its roots stretching across decades. Innovations take 15-30 years to flower, nurtured by unscripted questions by the most curious minds. Today’s research cuts threaten quantum computing, biotechnology, and climate solutions—seeds that may not bloom for decades but will shape the future.
The Counterargument
Defenders of the cuts cry fiscal discipline, claiming funds serve urgent needs—jobs, security. Yet science is a budget whisper: NIH’s $45 billion in 2024 is a speck in a $6.5 trillion ocean, but each dollar ignites $2.60 in economic flame (2023 study). TCP/IP DoD Contract DAHC 15-73-C-0370, GPS DoD-funded, and mRNA vaccines NIH AI060505 et al. fueled prosperity and defense, proving science’s dual power. Others claim the administration backs “practical” science, not “ivory tower” quests. But reproducible science is practicality incarnate: GPS reroutes your drive, mRNA shots reopened the world, TCP/IP binds global trade. Slashing climate research as storms roar (ClimateWire, April 2025) betrays this legacy for a simplified, false narrative.
If fiscal discipline was really a priority, then a tax cut to the wealthy and corporations – already paying the lowest income tax rates due to loopholes and tax cuts designed just for them by Trump’s majority in his first term – at the detriment of the deficit while also stripping away Medicaid and food stamps from some of the poorest people in the country would never have been approved by a Trump-controlled House of Representatives.
A Call to Action
The embers of American curiosity are fading, but the fire can be rekindled—if we act now. The administration’s cuts to NIH, NSF, and DOE budgets are a deliberate snuffing of the laboratories that gave us innovations that modern life currently depends upon. These cuts, paired with the rise of fringe, unvalidated “science” by figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., threaten to replace peer-reviewed rigor with untested claims, a hypernormalised myth that risks our health, prosperity, and rule of law. But everyday Americans can shatter this narrative. Here’s how you, today, can rise to defend reproducible science:
- Contact Your Representatives and Senators: Pick up your phone or open your email. Call or write your congressional representatives—find their contact info at Congress.gov. Urge them to restore NIH, NSF, and DOE funding to pre-2025 levels, citing the $2.60 economic return per dollar invested in NIH (2023 study). Mention how TCP/IP, GPS, and mRNA vaccines, born from federal grants, power your daily life. A single call takes five minutes; a flood of voices can shift policy. Demand they reject unverified health claims, like those pushed by RFK Jr., that undermine peer-reviewed, evidence-backed, and reproducible science.
- Join or Donate to Science Advocacy Groups: Organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists or the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are fighting for peer-reviewed science. Join their mailing lists at ucsusa.org or aaas.org for free, or donate $10 to fuel their lobbying against cuts and misinformation. These groups translate complex science—like mRNA’s decades-long journey—into messages that sway policymakers, much like formal methods experts clarify value to clients. Your small contribution today strengthens their megaphone.
- Attend or Host a Local Science Event: Check for science marches, town halls, or university talks in your community—many are listed on Eventbrite or local university websites. Attend one this week to learn and connect with advocates. Or host a coffee meetup to discuss science’s role in your life, using resources from 500 Women Scientists. Share how federal funding birthed GPS or TCP/IP, not corporate greed, and why reproducible science trumps unvalidated claims. A single conversation can spark a movement.
- Vote and Organize for 2026: The midterms are a year away, but preparation starts now. Register to vote at Vote.gov if you haven’t, and commit to supporting candidates who champion science funding and peer review over fringe narratives. Join a local political group via Indivisible.org to canvass or phone-bank. Your vote and voice can ensure leaders prioritize evidence, not allegiance, preserving the labs that keep America’s future bright.
These steps, small yet mighty, mirror the incremental wins of science itself that led to world-changing breakthroughs. As Hypernormalisation warns, accepting a simplified tale (science as dispensable) dooms us to decay. By acting today—calling, organizing, joining, speaking—you reject this myth, ensuring the rigor of peer-reviewed science, not untested claims, shapes our path. Free societies thrive on evidence and curious interrogation; your actions are its shield.
Run for Office To Be the Change You Want To See
If advocacy feels like shouting into the wind, take a bolder leap and run for office. You don’t need a political dynasty to champion curiosity; you need passion and a community. Run as an Independent, a Democrat in regions the party has forsaken, or by primarying a Republican who puts loyalty to a gilded figure before our society’s future. Don’t fixate on Congress—local and state roles like city councils, county boards, school boards, or state legislatures shape science’s fate too. A city council can fund STEM programs; a county board can bolster public health research; a state legislator can shield university budgets. In 2025, thousands of these seats are open, many uncontested—70% of local races in 2024 had no competition, per BallotReady. Your candidacy, grounded in evidence, can fill that gap, countering fringe narratives like RFK Jr.’s with the clarity of peer-reviewed, evidence-backed, and reproducible science.
Start today with these steps and resources:
- Explore Local Opportunities: Visit Ballotpedia.org to find 2025-2026 elections in your city, county, or state. Look for roles like mayor, county clerk, or state representative, which influence science funding and education. County clerks, for instance, oversee elections, ensuring science-based policies reach voters. Filing deadlines loom—some as early as March 2026—so act now.
- Run as an Independent: Independents face hurdles (e.g., signature requirements) but resonate with voters weary of partisanship. GoodParty.org offers a step-by-step guide to running as an Independent, with ballot access tips and free campaign tools. Their playbook helps navigate local election boards and build grassroots momentum without party strings.
- Run as a Democrat in “Written-Off” Areas: In rural or Trump-leaning districts, Democrats often don’t run—51% of 2022 races lacked a Democratic candidate, per Contest Every Race. ContestEveryRace.com recruits Democrats for these races, offering grants and organizing support. Their 2025-2026 grant application opens February 26, 2025, to fund local campaigns. Join their network for mentors and volunteers.
- Primary a Trump-Aligned Republican: Challenge Republicans who prioritize allegiance over science in GOP primaries. RunForSomething.net supports progressive candidates, including those primarying incumbents, with training, mentorship, and volunteer networks. Since 2017, they’ve helped elect 637 young candidates to local and state offices. Sign up for a candidate call to start.
- Train and Organize: TrainDemocrats.org offers free online courses for Democratic candidates, covering fundraising, messaging, and outreach. Their 30-Day Challenge guides first-timers through campaign basics. For all candidates, Indivisible.org provides organizing toolkits to build local teams for door-knocking and rallies. Start canvassing now to gauge voter support.
- Leverage Grassroots Power: Tap into groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists for science-focused campaign talking points.
Running is daunting, but it’s revolutionary. In 2025, a Wisconsin Democrat won a Supreme Court seat against a Trump-endorsed rival, fueled by grassroots grit (The Nation, May 2025). A Nebraska Democrat flipped Omaha’s mayoral race, wielding science’s appeal (The Washington Post, May 2025). Your campaign, even in a “red” county, can reshape the science climate, ensuring evidence, not falsehoods, guides policy. The formal methods article urges starting with “cheap” methods; a local race, like a small grant, yields vast impact. Break neoliberalism’s myth that curiosity is powerless by claiming a seat at the table.
Conclusion
The Trump administration’s funding cuts are an inferno, scorching the roots of American curiosity, innovation, and ultimately sustainable growth (if you care about such things). Modern innovations forged over decades by federal vision, DoD grit, and NIH patience, are the United States’ lifeblood, shared because public truth trumped private gain. To let them wither is to surrender not just science but the nation’s soul to a destructive system where nuance is crushed, and gilded falsehoods reign. Shatter this hypernormalised myth—that curiosity is dispensable—by acting, running, leading. Fund the labs, claim the ballot, save the truth, for America’s future burns bright only if we reject Trumpism’s false design.
Leave a Reply