Donald Trump and his stupid anti-science actions are discriminating against progress

They admitted what was true. It’s not like the Trump administration was hiding what it was doing. 

Los Angeles Times opinion "Trump replaces Science with Stupidity", by Michael Hiltzik

Partisan political filters and the search for “DEI” have resulted in billions of dollars in canceled scientific research grants,

A few days ago, the Trump administration issued a 123-page report heralding a “new golden age” for U.S. science.

The key, said the report, published in the name of Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was to ensure that the approval of federal research grants “rests purely on merit, not the political fashions of the day.”

There isn’t much to say about this goal, other than that the White House has some nerve. For years, dating back to the first Trump administration, I have been documenting all the steps Trump and his minions have taken to undermine American science.

Thanks to a group of University of California researchers who have gone to court to fight Trump’s cancellation of their research grants, we now have the most explicit confessions by six federal agencies about how slipshod and partisan their actions have been.

They’re the departments of Defense, Energy and Transportation, and the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

All were required by court order to stipulate how they came to their decisions. Those stipulations were filed in federal court in San Francisco on July 15. Taken together, the government admitted that it used nonscientific considerations, AI screens and illegal or unconstitutional consideration to terminate billions of dollars in grants.

It may be unusual for such forthright admissions of wrongdoing to come from an administration not known for scrupulous rectitude. In this case and others like it, however, the government’s lawyers were under the gun of court orders to come clean.

“They admitted what was true,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the researchers’ lawsuit, told me. In any event, he added, “It’s not like the Trump administration was hiding what it was doing.”

The White House assault on scientific grants is an integral part of its general blitzkrieg on U.S. science. In a one-year retrospective on the current Trump term published in January, Nature counted 5,844 grants canceled or suspended by the National Institutes of Health, and 1,996 by the National Science Foundation.

The cancellations were disproportionately aimed at projects concerned with “misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups.”

Both the NIH and the NSF reduced the number of new grants it issued by about 25%, Nature found — strangling the pipeline of basic research that is crucial for seeding research and development by industry. The Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, both of which have been heavily involved in research on global warming, lost more than 20% of their staff during Trump’s first year.

Deep cuts also were imposed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, perhaps accounting for the inability of America’s public health infrastructure to counteract the surge in measles cases and the eruption of cyclospora infections this year.

That brings us back to the stipulations the federal agencies filed in the UC researchers’ lawsuit. The researchers scored an early victory in the case in June 2025, when federal Judge Rita F. Lin granted them a preliminary injunction reinstating the terminated grants. Lin has scheduled a hearing for Oct. 20 on whether to make her injunction permanent and grant the researchers summary judgment against the government.

The agencies’ stipulations are part of the record Lin will consider then; they all include spreadsheets listing the terminated grants and the rationales for their terminations. In sum, they open a window into the administration’s ideological (obsessive) preoccupations.

The longest list — nearly 370 (❗)spreadsheet pages — was filed by the NIH, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency fingered grants for termination by searching for keywords and phrases in their applications such as “workforce diversity,” “equity, diversity, inclusion,” “sexual orientation,” “scientific evidence,” and “health equity.”

Some grants, the NIH confessed, appeared on a list provided by DOGE, the purported budget-cutting department headed by Elon Musk. In general, the goal was to “terminate grants presumed to express viewpoints ... that HHS-NIH no longer wished to subsidize.”

The National Science Foundation acknowledged that it relied in part on a three-page list of disfavored keywords and phrases provided by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), such as “advocacy,” “climate action,” “racism” and “gender preference.” The National Endowment for the Humanities searched for terms such as “transgenderism,” “green new deal social engineering policies” and “environmental justice.”

The most notable and explicit confession, though perhaps the least surprising, came from the Department of Energy.

Referring to a list of grant terminations announced in October 2025, the agency admitted that it terminated or canceled 283 grants “solely” based on whether their recipients were in states that had cast its electoral college votes for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and had two Democratic senators. Meanwhile, 340 other grants from states that voted for Trump were left in place.

The agency said it didn’t rely on “programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factors.” In other words, grants from blue states were cut simply because they originated in blue states.

The confession is unsurprising because the Department of Energy had made almost identical confessions in two previous federal lawsuits. In a case brought last year by the city of St. Paul, Minn., Energy Secretary Christ Wright acknowledged that seven grants were terminated based primarily on “whether the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State.’” Similar grants for red states were unaffected, he said. In January, federal Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District of Columbia ordered the grants reinstated.

The agency repeated the stipulation in a lawsuit brought this year by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers over 11 canceled grants. In June, Mehta ordered those grants reinstated.

Despite these confessions, department spokesman Ben Dietderich told me that “none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” He said that Wright had “explained this numerous times in briefings on Capitol Hill.”

In fact, Wright didn’t explain things so much as conduct a master class in weaseling. ❗ In an April 17, exchange with Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano), for example, he said that the blue state versus red state discrepancy was “a timing question, not a decision question. ... The selection of the decisions to be announced, not the decisions. ... The decisions were nonpolitical.”

But of course the decisions, not the timing, were the subject of the stipulations.

What’s perplexing is why major U.S. institutions have been reluctant to take the battle to the administration themselves.

As I reported last year, the UC faculty won a significant victory over Trump when Lin ordered the restoration of some $600 million in funding cuts and blocked a $1.2-billion fine the White House proposed to levy on UCLA for purported civil rights violations. (The White House abandoned its appeal of Lin’s order in February.)

But UC as an institution played no direct part in that case or any of the others brought to challenge Trump’s assault on the university.

“The University regularly evaluates its legal strategy, including in light of last week’s disclosures, and takes action when it is in the best interests of UC, our community, and our state,” the office of UC President James B. Milliken told me by email.

It’s true that the university has signed on as a co-plaintiff in several lawsuits brought jointly by the Assn. of American Universities and two other associations representing big universities. In each case, however, it was nestled within a cloud of about a dozen other big institutions. The cases are really being run by the associations.

Among educational institutions, Chemerinsky points out, only Harvard has stood up for itself in court — and it has been successful, thus far. Meanwhile Columbia, Penn, Brown and others have made settlement deals.

“It’s very disappointing that universities have settled with the Trump administration rather than going to court — and I think they would have won,” he told me.

The same goes for other institutions that should have been expected to carry the fight: Nine major law firms targeted by Trump capitulated with settlements, but four firms have fought Trump and prevailed.

When the history of the Trump era is written, the institutional cowardice will deserve a chapter, and the courage of those that fought a chapter of their own.

Donald Trump is seriously challenged by arithmetic! His false claims about reducing prices are mathematically impossible

Published in the Los Angeles Times and Yahoo.com

Echo letter to the editor: In the 1954 book "How to Lie With Statistics" 

by Darrell Huff, the book's author explains how graphs, samples, averages and other data can be used to mislead readers. 

Business columnist Michael Hiltzik's many examples show us how Donald Trump uses numbers as "rhetorical objects" (“Here’s how Trump gets away with using dubious ❓numbers, 🤥” Dec. 19. IOW- More lies❗). The bigger the numbers, the more overwhelmed are the people trying to digest them.

One thing in Hiltzik's piece that drew my attention was Trump's claim that he “slashed prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent.” Perhaps I am missing something, but if you slash a price by only 100%, doesn't that bring it down to $0? Forget 400% or more. That's mathematically impossible. 

As a matter of fact, I tried some mathematical trickery while I was volunteering to help fourth graders with math. I told them I deserved to have my pay doubled. They laughed. Even the kids knew it would still be $0.  Haha!

From Jerry Lasnik, in Thousand Oaks,California

Pharmaceutical companies do not make deals without a profit incentive- Pfizer's price reductions to Medicaid drugs is a cash cow for the company

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by business column writer Michael Hiltzik

 Trump’s deal with Pfizer on drug prices won’t do much for American patients, but it’s a great cash cow 💲 🐄🐄for Pfizer.

Pfizer accused of ‘bringing discredit’ on pharmaceutical industry after Covid social media posts. Watchdog rules company breached regulatory code five times including promoting unlicensed medicines. The Telegraph report August 2024 by Camilla Turner.

If you had nothing better to do on September 30, 2025, you might have tuned in to a White House event at which President Trump, standing side-by-side with Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, announced a deal with the big drug company that was described from the podium as “a massive win for the American people.”

Under the deal, according to the administration, Pfizer will sell its drugs to Americans “at a deep discount” from their list price. Pfizer, for its part, said the arrangement ensures that “U.S. patients pay lower prices for their prescription medicine.”

(US media has no understanding about how Medicaid is administered. In fact Medicaid beneficiaries do not pay for their medications so the "deal" announced to save money only benefits the Pfizer company and the federal government as the payor for the drugs. Medicaid beneficiaries qualify for this benefit based on their income and disabilities.)

As is the case with so many pronouncements issued from the Trump White House, there’s much less to this deal than meets the eye. Whether it will effectively reduce spending on prescription drugs for most Americans — or any Americans — is highly doubtful.

For Pfizer, however, this is a fabulous deal — never mind that the news media has portrayed it just as the White House and Pfizer hoped, as a major concession by the company to help the average consumer.

The truth is that the company won’t be suffering any significant reduction in revenue or profits by offering these “discounts.” It will, however, be exempted for three years from tariffs of 100% that Trump had threatened to impose on drugmakers.

How do we know that Pfizer is the principal beneficiary of the deal? Its stock price has risen nearly 15% in the five trading days since the announcement. Do you think that a deal that cut consumer prices for a company’s most popular products would really produce a stock market gain? Me neither.

Accordingly, it’s proper to take a close look at what we know, and more importantly, what we don’t know, about this deal.

“We’re still in a place where we don’t know everything we want to know,” said Peter Maybarduk, head of the access to medicines group of the nonprofit consumer organization Public Citizen. 

“That’s unfortunate, but it’s also by design.” Public Citizen has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documentation about the deal.

Pfizer and the White House both describe the deal terms as “confidential.” Pfizer told me that “more details” will be made available as the January implementation date draws nigh. The White House asserts that this deal is secret because it’s working out deals with other drug manufacturers.

Donald Trump Republican interference in the Social Security data base creates anxiety puts all beneficiaries at risk of loosing benefits

"Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare." Echo report by Michael Hiltzik published in the Los Angeles Times:

Trump’s Kafkaesque attack on Social Security--Declaring living people as dead.

In so many ways the evil Trump Republican administration has given us a window into a dystopian world — flouting a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court, elevating scientific myth into healthcare policy and so on. But its latest attack on the Social Security system is arguably the most frightening of all.

Reportedly pressured by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the current stewards of Social Security have allowed the government to declare 6,300 people “dead” in a crucial Social Security database, even though they’re very much alive.

The initial reports of this action were reported by the New York Times and Washington Post, but it was confirmed for me, if somewhat obliquely, by a White House spokeswoman.

Trump promised mass deportations and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” the spokeswoman, Elizabeth Huston, told me by email.

The White House claims that “DHS identified over 6,300 temporarily paroled aliens on the terrorist watch list or with FBI criminal records,” and as of April 8, “terminated” their right to hold Social Security numbers or receive benefits.

What’s that? It’s what is officially known as Social Security’s “Death Master File,” the database of deceased number holders.

Make no mistake: In effect, these 6,300 living, breathing individuals have been declared “dead” by Trump administration fiat.

“You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian,” says Devin O’Connor, an expert on Social Security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“These are people who are in the United States legally and need active Social Security numbers in order to work and transact personal business,” Richtman says. “By placing them on the list of dead persons, the Trump administration is needlessly preventing them from utilizing their Social Security numbers for legitimate reasons.”

Before we delve further into the consequences of this action — for the newly “dead,” for all Social Security beneficiaries and indeed American citizens, and for the Social Security system itself — a few words on how this came about.

It started on inauguration day, when Trump abruptly terminated four Biden administration humanitarian programs granting legal U.S. residence to applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela seeking asylum. By the end of Biden’s term, more than 500,000 applicants had been granted so-called parole via the programs known collectively as CHNV. Typically, they feared political violence or death in their home countries.

After passing national security and public safety scrutiny and showing that they had a U.S. sponsor to provide housing and other support, they were granted a “parole” of up to two years permitting them to work legally, which required them to obtain Social Security numbers and to contribute payroll tax to the program. During that period, they could seek more permanent permission to stay in the country. As of April 8, they lost those rights and obligations.

The White House, i.e., Donald Trump Republicans, have not specified what evidence it has that the 6,300 immigrants declared “dead” were members of terrorist groups or FBI-designated criminals.

As it happens, the termination order was blocked Monday by federal Judge Indira Talwani of Boston. In a 41-page order, Talwani raised the question of whether Congress had given Trump the authority, “after parole has been granted and individuals have entered the country on a lawful basis,” to revoke the grants of parole “en masse.” She wrote: “The answer is no.” The revocation, she ruled, would have to be on a case-by-case basis, just as their paroles had been granted.

Trump’s Kafkaesque attack on Social Security--Declaring living people as dead

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly demanded changes in Social Security’s database so living people could be classified as “dead.”

In so many ways the Trump administration has given us a window into a dystopian world — flouting a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court, elevating scientific myth into healthcare policy and so on. But its latest attack on the Social Security system is arguably the most frightening of all.

Reportedly pressured by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the current stewards of Social Security have allowed the government to declare 6,300 people “dead” in a crucial Social Security database, even though they’re very much alive.

The initial reports of this action were reported by the New York Times and Washington Post, but it was confirmed for me, if somewhat obliquely, by a White House spokeswoman.

You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian.

“President Trump promised mass deportations and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” the spokeswoman, Elizabeth Huston, told me by email.

The White House claims that “DHS identified over 6,300 temporarily paroled aliens on the terrorist watch list or with FBI criminal records,” and as of April 8 “terminated” their right to hold Social Security numbers or receive benefits.

“To prevent them from receiving any payments,” the White House told me, the Social Security Administration moved their numbers into what the White House calls the “Ineligible Master File.”

What’s that? It’s what is officially known as Social Security’s “Death Master File,” the database of deceased number holders.

Make no mistake: In effect, these 6,300 living, breathing individuals have been declared “dead” by the evil Trump administration fiat.

“You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian,” says Devin O’Connor, an expert on Social Security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“These are people who are in the United States legally and need active Social Security numbers in order to work and transact personal business,” Richtman says. “By placing them on the list of dead persons, the Trump administration is needlessly preventing them from utilizing their Social Security numbers for legitimate reasons.”

Before we delve further into the consequences of this action — for the newly “dead,” for all Social Security beneficiaries and indeed American citizens, and for the Social Security system itself — a few words on how this came about.

It started on inauguration day, when Trump abruptly terminated four Biden administration humanitarian programs granting legal U.S. residence to applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela seeking asylum. By the end of Biden’s term, more than 500,000 applicants had been granted so-called parole via the programs known collectively as CHNV. Typically, they feared political violence or death in their home countries.

After passing national security and public safety scrutiny and showing that they had a U.S. sponsor to provide housing and other support, they were granted a “parole” of up to two years permitting them to work legally, which required them to obtain Social Security numbers and to contribute payroll tax to the program. During that period, they could seek more permanent permission to stay in the country. As of April 8, they lost those rights and obligations.

The White House hasn’t specified what evidence it has that the 6,300 immigrants declared “dead” were members of terrorist groups or FBI-designated criminals.

As it happens, the termination order was blocked Monday by federal Judge Indira Talwani of Boston. In a 41-page order, Talwani raised the question of whether Congress had given Trump the authority, “after parole has been granted and individuals have entered the country on a lawful basis,” to revoke the grants of parole “en masse.” She wrote: “The answer is no.” The revocation, she ruled, would have to be on a case-by-case basis, just as their paroles had been granted.

Meanwhile, Tuesday in Baltimore, federal Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander convened a hearing over whether the Social Security Administration has complied with her earlier order to keep DOGE employees’ hands off the agency’s records — an issue on which the unilateral “death” designations may well be relevant. Hollander had ordered acting Commissioner Leland Dudek to appear for testimony, but the government has refused to allow him to appear.

That brings us back to the Death Master File. (The administration has said it should be referred to now as the “Ineligible Master File,” but its authority to change its official designation isn’t clear, and in any case this looks merely like an attempt to obscure the nature of the file itself.)

The DMF is one of the most important and closely supervised databases in the Social Security Administration’s possession. Currently it contains more than 141 million names of deceased workers, along with their Social Security numbers and their dates of birth and death. The program uses the information, according to former Social Security official Tiffany Flick, for the purpose of “discontinuing benefits payments to deceased individuals, confirming an individual’s right to survivor benefits, and identifying fraud” carried out by users of dead persons’ Social Security numbers.

The information is carefully vetted unless it comes from family members, a state agency or a funeral home, Flick said in a court declaration. The agency takes pains to verify reports from anyone else. Of the 2.9 million death reports received each year, Flick said, fewer than one-third of 1% typically have to be corrected.

Federal law requires the agency to keep the full database confidential. A redacted version, however, is marketed via the Department of Commerce to banks, credit agencies and other financial institutions — but only if they can pass an annual certification in which they have to show they can protect the data from illicit use. The limited version contains only information that is more than three years old.

There can be no question that “intentionally marking people who are still living as dead” in the master file “is unheard of and improper,” Flick stated.

Beyond that, “when Social Security incorrectly declares someone dead, it ruins their lives,” observes Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy organization Social Security Works.

In 2023, Altman notes, “a Maryland woman was wrongly declared dead and found her health insurance and Social Security benefits terminated, her home listed for sale, her credit cards canceled, and her water shut off. Her health deteriorated as she spent endless hours trying to undo the mistake. Indeed, she did actually die seven months later.”

Because the DMF is viewed as authoritative by financial services companies, adds O’Connor, its misuse can cause “disruption in your bank account access, your credit cards canceled, your pension benefits being cut off, your insurance coverage canceled or an insurance claim denied. If you apply for a job your application could be rejected, or have a denial of credit.”

The very idea that government bureaucrats can designate living persons as dead for reasons other than their actual death should send shudders through all Social Security participants, citizens and otherwise — especially given the manipulation of the program from Trump acolytes already and the absence of official oversight over DOGE’s rampaging minions.

“Now, if you’re included in the Death Master File even by accident, how do you show not only that you’re not dead, but that you don’t belong on the file for some other unknown, mysterious reason?” O’Connor asks. “It’s creating the potential for some Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares every time they make a mistake — and there will be mistakes.”

As for the administration’s contention that the 6,300 “dead” people are on a terrorism watch list or FBI list, the administration’s treatment of facts and statistics when it comes to immigrants or Social Security does not inspire confidence.

The administration, for instance, has consistently described Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it admits to having transported to El Salvador illegally, as an “illegal alien” and a member of the criminal gang MS-13. But he was in the U.S. legally, and no valid evidence has been produced to show he’s a member of MS-13 — quite the contrary, he may be a victim of MS-13.

DOGE’s claims about Social Security data are almost risibly ignorant. Musk asserted that DOGE found millions of dead people as old as 150 receiving benefits, but he was misinterpreting a software artifact.

The manipulation of the Death Master File itself has obliterated its validity as a data source for financial and commercial institutions. If those institutions can no longer trust what was once the gold standard for information about their present or future customers, how can it be used at all?

What’s scariest about the cavalier manipulation of the Death Master File is that Trump’s refusal to observe bureaucratic norms, statutory limitations, and even to respond to court orders, points to the question of how far he’s willing to go. Designating living persons as dead could be only the beginning.

“If they can do this to somebody,” O’Connor says, “they can do it to anybody.”