- The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research and Public Health – Part 1. July 31, 2025;
- The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research and Public Health – Part 2. August 31, 2025;
- The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research and Public Health – Part 3. September 30, 2025;
- The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health, and the Rule of Law – Part 4. October 31, 2025;
- and The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health, and the Rule of Law – Part 5.
In the five articles referenced above, all published in 2025, the goal was to bring awareness to the scope, impact and specificity of the Trump administration’s relentless barrage of attacks designed to overwhelm, weaken and in many cases, deconstruct, the U.S. research enterprise. The roadmap for these attacks against science and research was clearly and transparently articulated in the 922 page manifesto sponsored by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” features “30 chapters spanning all aspects of the federal government.” The manifesto, commonly referred to in the press as Project 2025, is no longer available to read free on the Heritage Foundation site, but must be purchased. The full text version remains available, free, here.
For context, the “Mandate for Leadership” was first published 40 years ago. It remains the exemplar plan of the far right wing conservative legal movement’s long game.
This policy bible” aims to provide administrations with a blueprint of policy solutions. The Reagan administration implemented nearly half of the ideas included in the first edition by the end of his first year in office, while the Trump administration embraced nearly 64% of the 2016 edition’s policy solutions after one year.”
When Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2024, Russell Vought operationalized the Mandate [Project 2025], and along with Elon Musk’s DOGE, rapidly executed the project’s succinct and aggressive strategies “to make White House more friendly to the right”…and ensure that “more and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision…so “the President alone” can “direct his agenda across the executive branch.” In alignment with the four pillars of Project 2025, using the conservative vernacularization of an expression from Black culture, ‘woke,’ Vought and Musk took direct aim at a broad swath of organizations, policies and regulations enacted across multiple administrations. The targets, characterized as ‘woke’ polices that funded and promoted work in areas including public health and medicine, weather and climate, the environment and public lands, diversity and education, and international aid, were terminated. Entire agencies whose role and responsibilities were focused on efforts in these areas were rapidly eliminated, de-funded or dismantled. It is estimated that more than 317,000 federal employees left the government in 2025, and the office buildings they worked in closed, repurposed, torn down or listed for sale. While physically demolishing the vestiges of the old ‘deep state,’ the Trump administration has constructed its own new version of the deep state. This has been accomplished by fracturing the fundamental principles of our democracy, collapsing the three branches of government, and elevating the singular control of one branch, the executive, which is immunized from the legal ramifications of unconstitutional rule.
Firing federal employees across the country, closing federal office buildings, adding to the economic impacts for cities who rely on related commerce and taxes, are all blows to areas of the country, blue and red states, struggling with the repercussions of new tariffs, growing unemployment and cuts in federal spending. America is experiencing higher costs for food, energy, healthcare, and massive cuts in services that especially target advances in medical care and safety net services for children, the retired, elderly and the disabled. On a more granular level, Katherine J. Wu writing in The Atlantic says, “Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” as documented by Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science [via a project called Grant Witness] Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made…”In addition to the work of Grant Witness, the Science & Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMaP) “through interactive, data-driven visualizations…aims to help Americans explore how science and health research fuels the economy, supports jobs, and improves health outcomes. The White House has ordered large cuts to federal funding for scientific research. These changes include a proposal to reduce support for all health-related research nationwide, and cancellations of many grants for specific research projects. We aim to share how these proposed changes impact science, the economy, and healthcare.”
To the general public, however, the connection between politics, science, the economy, and healthcare are not well-defined, but the dependencies do have immediate and long term consequences. Just one example is an unprecedented outbreak of over 2,000 cases of measles in the United States in 2025, “a higher annual total than the country has seen in decades.” And as reported by the New England Journal of Medicine, “A dozen former leaders of the Food and Drug Administration warned [December 4, 2025] that plans for a stricter approach to vaccine approvals risk undermining the nation’s ability to fight infectious diseases and could threaten the health of vulnerable Americans. Prasad [Vinay Prasad, CBER Director, US FDA] is challenging long-standing vaccine policy, urging the FDA to rethink its framework for annual flu shots, examining whether Americans should receive multiple vaccines at the same time, and requiring larger studies to gain approval for certain shots…” The result of this administration’s policies, in its first year in power, is far less research, clinical trials and potential treatments for all forms of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease, heart disease, and and updated vaccines for deadly contagious viruses. This is what America has yet to fully comprehend. There is an incalculable price our country will be paying for decades to come as innovative, leading edge medical, scientific and vaccine research are systemically decimated by the actions of this administration.
As we approach January 20, 2026, the one year mark of the second Trump administration, Americans are witnessing the exercise of vast, often illegal, and unconstrained presidential powers, unprecedented in our history. The impact of these powers, within our government, the private sector, and around the globe, continue to resonate. Part 6 of this series gives special attention to how operationalizing the full scope of actions outlined in the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” has impacted the lives of ordinary Americans, regardless of where they live, with which party they may be affiliated, their age, ethnicity or gender.
Consistent with the previous five parts of my series, this article examines only one month, December 2025, of the Trump administration’s war on research, policies, laws and regulations that support and protect our public health and public safety, our environment, our system of education and our democracy. I have anchored my research with references to the two articles that follow immediately below. As a law librarian, researcher and educator for over four decades who began her career in a large law firm library filled with monographs, looseleafs and journals, the first reference I cite breaks my heart. Taken together these articles are bookends that define the destruction of knowledge, history, achievement and national identity that has occurred in just the last month of 2025. This article clearly identifies the cataclysmic ways in which “Trump broke the federal government.” From libraries to data, people, programs, missions, protections, this eleven month assault on the rule of law continues, with no end in sight. I plan on continuing this series throughout 2026 to document the further erosion of our 250 year national experiment in democracy.
Bookend One
NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts [gift article]. Holdings from the library at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which includes unique documents from the early 20th century to the Soviet space race, will be warehoused or thrown out. December 31, 2025. The Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else. Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away. “This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property,” Mr. Richmond said. The shutdown of the library at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026. “This is a consolidation not a closure,” said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. The changes were part of a long-planned reorganization that began before the Trump administration took office, she said. She said that shutting down the facilities would save $10 million a year and avoid another $63.8 million in deferred maintenance.
See also According to @NASAEarthWatch @nasaearthwatch.bsky.social “Goddard Space Center library is due to disappear. It is not about when, but how and where the books will go. Another casualty in this relentless attack to #science and culture. It has a Facebook page. Let’s see how long it lasts.” Keith Cowing NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.
Bookend Two
The Nation’s Data at Risk: 2025 Report – “This report continues ASA’s multiyear effort to assess the state of the U.S. federal statistical system, with a focus on developments in 2025. It highlights challenges and opportunities across five dimensions: staffing and capacity; system structure and funding; innovation; congressional engagement; and stakeholder support. It concludes with a set of nine new recommendations to Congress, the administration, the statistical agencies, and professional associations to strengthen and modernize the nation’s statistical foundation.” “This December 2025 report finds: Immediate action must be taken to halt the severe decline in the federal statistical agencies’ ability to meet their basic mission and be positioned to keep up with increasing information needs and to address uncertainty in the trustworthiness of federal statistics.” [It’s all about the data.]
CONTENTS
- DOGE – Firing Federal Employees
- Public Health
- The Modern Research Ecosystem
- Courts
- Weather and Climate Research
- Energy and the Environment
- Education
- Freedom of Information
1. DOGE – Firing Federal Employees
The year Trump broke the federal government. How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy. The Washington Post [no paywall] December 21, 2025. “…It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.” He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up in a once-unthinkable overhaul of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, carried out in less than a yearby one of the most polarizing presidents in American history. Missions have shifted or shattered. Entire agencies were deleted. Nearly 300,000 employees were forced out of the federal workforce. The Trump administration froze or shut off billions of dollars in scientific research, gutted or eliminated offices and programs devoted to civil rights and diversity, rewrote the federal hiring system to reward loyalty to the president, and shrank Social Security while installing Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents in hundreds of new offices across the country. More changes are coming: Trump officials are planning to cut tens of thousands of open positions from the Department of Veterans Affairs, downgrade performance ratings across the government, and replace the State Department’s traditional condemnation of torture and the persecution of minorities worldwide with scrutiny of abortion and youth gender transitioning in other countries….This account of what happened inside the U.S. government in 2025 is based on a year’s worth of messages and interviews with more than 1,200 current and former federal workers. More than 200 also agreed to fill out a Washington Post survey asking about their experiences. Thirty participated in nearly 60 hours of video and phone interviews, with many speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their families…”
2. PUBLIC HEALTH
People’s CDC: The Deletion of Federal Health Data. The Trump administration has ordered the deletion of thousands of public health informational pages from federal websites this past week (link:) as a means of implementing US president’s January 20th executive orders “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” Healthcare workers and public health officials rely on these vital reference materials for healthcare providers and patients on HIV guidance and testing, health disparities in populations such as LGBT youth and racialized populations, and health guidance for pregnant people. ACA Signups, an independent online project started in 2013 to compile and analyze enrollment data around the Affordable Care Act and to organize it on a transparent public platform has taken on the labor of indexing every single page of the CDC, FDA and CMS websites as they existed pre-the Trump administration data purge. The complete CDC website as it stood pre-January 27th, 2025 (includes ~7,200 pages) can be accessed here (https://acasignups.net/cdc-website), and the complete FDA website (~5,800 pages) is here (https://acasignups.net/fda-website), while the complete CMS website (~75,000 pages) is in progress and can be accessed here (https://acasignups.net/cms-website).
Childcare Is Being Shut Down Nationwide. AP, December 31, 2025. The Trump administration has said it is freezing child care funds to all states until they provide more verification about the programs in a move fueled by a series of fraud schemes at Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents. All 50 states will be impacted by the review, but the Republican administration is focusing most of its ire on the blue state of Minnesota and is calling for an audit of some of its centers. Minnesota Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement Wednesday that he was “exploring all our legal options to ensure that critical childcare services do not get abruptly slashed based on pretext and grandstanding.” It is unclear how much more robust the verification process for states will be than it already has been. Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill called the decision a response to “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country” in a social media post announcing the change on Tuesday. Here are some things to know about these moves…
Health subsidies expire, launching millions of Americans into 2026 with steep insurance hikes. AP. December 31, 2025. The expired subsidies were first given to Affordable Care Act enrollees in 2021 as a temporary measure to help Americans get through the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats in power at the time extended them, moving the expiration date to the start of 2026. With the expanded subsidies, some lower-income enrollees received health care with no premiums, and high earners paid no more than 8.5% of their income. Eligibility for middle-class earners was also expanded. On average, the more than 20 million subsidized enrollees in the Affordable Care Act program are seeing their premium costs rise by 114% in 2026, according to an analysis by the health care research nonprofit KFF.
States step into the breach as Obamacare subsidies lapse. Politico, December 29, 2025. Even state governments that want to help can’t completely cover rising insurance premiums. At least a dozen states are working to shield people from soaring health insurance costs following Congress’ failure to extend Obamacare subsidies for tens of millions of Americans. The efforts, which include actions taken by state leaders in California, Colorado and Maryland, in nearly every case come with a major caveat: They will only be able to help a portion of the people whose health insurance will be too expensive without the enhanced subsidies that Congress opted not to renew before leaving Washington for the year. “We can carry the cost for a little bit, but at some point, we will need Congress to act,” said Javier Martínez, speaker of the House in New Mexico, the only state so far to cover all lapsed subsidies. “No state can withstand to plug in every single budget hole that the Trump administration leaves behind.” The speed at which the mostly Democratic states have taken action underscores the mounting national anxiety about the medical and political impact the end of these subsidies will have. Millions of Americans will no longer be able to afford health insurance, straining the budgets of state welfare programs and hospitals that are already in the red, and threatening to erode access to care to a level not seen in years.
American Academy of Pediatrics sues RFK Jr. over funding cuts. The Hill, December 24, 2025. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the nation’s largest professional organization of doctors who treat children, said Wednesday it is suing the Trump administration after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) abruptly terminated nearly $12 million in federal grants to the group. The organization says seven longstanding grants were cut in retaliation for its outspoken opposition to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s changes to federal vaccine policy, in violation of the AAP’s First Amendment rights. The HHS says the grants were canceled because the programs no longer align with the agency’s priorities. “This coordinated attack to strip critical funds from AAP was not the result of a routine reappraisal of whether the terminated awards furthered agency priorities … but was a decision from HHS leadership to punish AAP for its speech that contradicted and criticized HHS’s views on high-profile health policy issues,” the lawsuit alleges. The AAP said the canceled grants funded initiatives including preventing sudden unexpected infant death, improving early detection of developmental disabilities and birth defects, strengthening pediatric care in rural communities, supporting adolescents facing substance use and mental health challenges, and improving standards of care for newborns.
The Quiet Commission That Could Break the Vaccine System. Unbiased Science. December 23, 2025. A holiday meeting, an obscure commission, and the future of vaccine access. There are almost endless levers RFK Jr can pull to impact your access to vaccines. From spreading falsehoods on social media to federal vaccine policy bodies like the ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices). But there is one lever being positioned in the background, and it’s likely one you’ve never heard of but has profound implications, even for states doing all they can to protect vaccine protection: The Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (or ACCV). Why are we bringing this up now? The Federal Register quietly published a notice of a meeting on December 29th for this commission. Four brief sessions in a single afternoon. At 30-minute intervals. The timing alone should raise eyebrows. To be clear, the ACCV is overdue for a meeting. By charter, it’s supposed to meet four times per year, but it hasn’t convened since July 2024. So the fact that a meeting is happening isn’t suspicious; it’s the choice of when. A meeting on December 29th is highly unusual for a federal advisory committee like the ACCV, which typically meets during regular business hours to maximize participation and transparency. Scheduling a meeting in the narrow window between Christmas and New Year’s predictably limits attendance from committee members, federal staff, the public, and the press. While legally permissible, the timing departs from normal practice and reasonably raises concerns about reduced visibility and accountability.
Trump Moves to End Gender-Related Care for Minors, Threatening Hospitals That Offer It. The New York Times, Gift Article. December 18, 2025. “The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.”
Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera. ProPublica, December 18, 2025. On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate. For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank. There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field. Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed. By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction. In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake. By now the broad story of USAID’s ruin has been widely told: The decree handed down by Trump; Elon Musk, who led the new Department of Government Efficiency; and Russell Vought, who holds the purse strings for the administration as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, to scuttle the agency and undo decades of humanitarian work in the name of austerity. Publicly, the administration tried to temper international backlash by promising to keep or restore critical lifesaving programs. But that promise was not kept. Instead, a cast of Trump’s lesser-known political appointees and DOGE operatives cut programs in ways that guaranteed widespread harm and death in some of the world’s most desperate situations, according to an examination by ProPublica based on previously unreported episodes inside the government as well on-the-ground reporting in South Sudan. In some cases, they abandoned vital operations by clicking through a spreadsheet or ignoring requests in their inboxes
This HIV Expert Refused To Censor Data, Then Quit the CDC. KFF Health News, December 10, 2025. John Weiser, a doctor and researcher, has treated people with HIV since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. He joined the CDC’s HIV prevention team in 2011 to help lead its Medical Monitoring Project, the only in-depth survey of HIV across the United States. The project has shaped the country’s response to the epidemic over two decades, but the Trump administration censored last year’s findings and stopped funding it. Weiser spoke with KFF Health News on the evening before World AIDS Day, which the U.S. government, for the first time since 1988, didn’t acknowledge this year. That was only the latest blow to efforts to combat HIV. The Trump administration has cut funds to provide lifesaving HIV care abroad, withheld money to prevent and treat HIV in the U.S., and fired HIV experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Weiser was fired from the CDC during mass layoffs in April, was rehired in June, and then resigned. He continues to treat patients at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. In November, he published an article that warns against complying with presidential orders to censor data about transgender people.
CDC advisers drop decades-old universal hepatitis B birth dose recommendation, suggest blood testing after 1 dose. University of Minnesota, CIDRAP, December 3, 2025. This morning [December 3, 2025], after contentious discussion, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 8-3 to drop the recommendation for a universal birth hepatitis B vaccine dose and 6-4 to suggest that parents use serologic testing—which detects antibodies in the blood—to determine whether more than one dose of the three-dose series are needed. Under the first recommendation, only infants born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B would receive a birth dose, while parents of other babies would be advised to postpone the first dose for at least two months. ACIP makes vaccination recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including those for different age-groups and disease risk status, as well as on US immunization schedules for children, adolescents, and adults. The CDC director has ultimate discretion whether to approve ACIP’s advice, and physicians can make their own decisions about whether to comply, but ACIP recommendations have historically affected insurance coverage of vaccines.
3. The Modern Research Ecosystem
American Science, Shattered. A multipart series (10 articles) published by StatNew in December 2025, on how the Trump administration has disrupted labs, upended lives, and delayed discoveries. An eight-decade partnership between universities and the federal government made U.S. science preeminent. It took Trump less than a year to shred that crucial alliance. A multipart series on how the Trump administration has disrupted labs, upended lives, and delayed discoveries.
For a substantial group of U.S. researchers, 2025 will be remembered as the year their path to a career in science was closed off, their dreams dashed. For others, it will go down as a chaotic game of red-light-green-light that left them constantly unsure of what work would be funded or halted, but that they managed to survive. For nearly everyone, the last 10 months have revealed that the research enterprise that catapulted the country to the technological fore was much more brittle than expected. Sure, the courts have stepped in to restore billions of dollars in terminated grant funding to colleges and universities. Yes, the National Institutes of Health, despite layoffs and seemingly endless hurdles, managed to spend its entire budget for the fiscal year. And Congress, in a rare rebuke to the president, has so far refused steep cuts to the NIH budget in 2026 as well as a White House plan to consolidate its 27 institutes. But in the larger scheme of things, the Trump administration has, with shocking speed, ripped up the longstanding social contract that existed between scientists and the federal government.
What cuts to research under Trump have meant for science in 2025 – December 22, 2025. Heard on All Things Considered – Transcript – Trump administration officials say changes to federal agencies engaged in science were made in the interests of better science that benefits more Americans. Many scientists we spoke with disagree. Government staffing cuts and instability, including this year’s prolonged shutdown, could be hindering US digital defense and creating vulnerabilities.
Office of Inspector General – all site content taken offline. No access to these materials: Reports & Publications; Browse audit reports, semiannual reports, top management challenges; Whistleblower Info – Read about your rights and protections if you report evidence of wrongdoing; Case Closeout Memoranda, View summaries and outcomes of closed investigative cases; Outreach – View our conference presentations, fact sheets, and more.
Less Independent Peer Review at NSF. Easing the Path to Politicization of Scientific Research. SciLight. December 18, 2025. Jeff Mervis in Science reports that the National Science Foundation is substantially changing the process of proposal reviews. The new process reduces the requirements for external reviewers, allowing program officers to make funding recommendations with as little as one reviewer external to NSF. That’s a slippery slope towards completely politicizing research funding decisions. The ostensible reason for the change in process is the Foundation’s need to cope with the workload of funding research with a much smaller staff and without the longstanding practice of bringing in outside, temporary program officers (rotators) from the science community to help manage the review process. The policy memo to NSF staff linked to in Mervis’ article states this clearly, but of course those staff reductions were made by the Trump Administration (and DOGE) without any understanding of the science funding process. We don’t doubt that program officers at NSF, and indeed all NSF staff are struggling with a huge workload because of the administration’s thoughtless cutbacks, the government shutdown, the withholding of grant funds, the attacks on universities, and the added need to scour for any hint of concerns for diversity and equity. These added burdens scrambled, hindered, and confused the research funding process at NSF and other federal agencies with knock-on effects throughout the US science enterprise. Moreover, the memo states, rather laughably, that “External review is a tenet of Gold Standard Science and remains a hallmark of NSF’s merit review process.” But we have noted before that this Administration’s so-called Gold Standard explicitly calls for political appointees to make decisions on what constitutes the best available science, despite independent review or evidence. From our personal experience as research scientists, we have enormous respect for the capabilities of NSF program officers and staff. They are consummate professionals who know their disciplines intimately. Program officers at NSF and other agencies are a key part of what has made US science great. And unlike the direction in the new policy memo, in our experience program officers have always acted apolitically. We trust they will continue to do so to the maximum extent possible under the current administration. Our concern is whether they will be allowed to do so.
NIH Grants Policy Under the Second Trump Administration. CRS Report, December 11, 2025. Since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—the nation’s leading health and medical research agency—changed grant policies, award processes, and the total number of grants awarded compared with prior years. NIH has provided several policy justifications for the changes, including federal cost savings, government efficiency, and realigning NIH’s grants portfolio with the Administration’s overall policy objectives. In many cases, these changes have differed from prior agency practice. Background on NIH Grants – In FY2023 and FY2024, NIH awarded over 64,000 extramural research and training grants to universities, medical centers, and other institutions each year. NIH has been the largest federal funder of research at U.S. institutions of higher education; according to National Science Foundation data, NIH funding accounted for about 56% of all such federal research funding in FY2023. NIH also has been the world’s largest single public funder of health and medical research. Its funded research spans all areas of health and includes topics ranging from basic investigations into the fundamental mechanisms of biology to testing of investigational drugs in human clinical trials. Virtually all NIH grants are awarded through the scientific peer review process. Through this process, NIH evaluates all research funding applications that meet basic requirements using a two-stage, committee-based review. In the first stage, a group of mostly nonfederal scientists from the relevant research field review, evaluate, and rate each application based on scientific and technical merit. In the second stage, the advisory councils of NIH’s 24 research institutes and centers (IC) make final funding recommendations by weighing the proposal’s scientific and technical merit with other considerations, such as agency priorities. An IC Director makes the final funding decision…
4. COURTS
Supreme Court seems likely to back Trump’s power to fire independent agency board members. AP, December 8, 2025. The Supreme Court on Monday seemed likely to expand presidential control over independent federal agencies, signaling support for President Donald Trump’s firing of board members. The court’s conservative majority suggested it would overturn a unanimous 90-year-old decision that has limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members [Federal Trade Commission] — in part to try to ensure decision making free of political influence — or leave it with only its shell intact. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the crux of the issue is that the officials who direct the agencies “are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries” without being accountable to anyone. Liberal justices warned that a ruling sought by the administration to overturn the decision known as Humphrey’s Executor would give the president, as Justice Elena Kagan said, “massive unchecked, uncontrolled power.” Federal judges say the U.S. government lied in 35+ court cases, falsified records, fake declarations, sworn statements built on fiction. This isn’t a paperwork mistake. It’s systemic deception. When judges and legal scholars are saying it looks intentional, the rule of law is already on life support.
What cuts to research under Trump have meant for science in 2025 – December 22, 2025. Heard on All Things Considered – Transcript – Trump administration officials say changes to federal agencies engaged in science were made in the interests of better science that benefits more Americans. Many scientists we spoke with disagree. Government staffing cuts and instability, including this year’s prolonged shutdown, could be hindering US digital defense and creating vulnerabilities.
The Trump administration on December 29, 2025 reached a deal with researchers and Democratic-led states who sued over cuts to funding for diversity-related research, agreeing to review grant applications that were stalled or rejected during the legal battle. Reuters via Yahoo News. December 29, 2025. A federal judge in Boston previously ruled that the National Institutes of Health unlawfully canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants because of their perceived connection to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The U.S. Supreme Court in August partially put that decision on hold, ruling that legal battles over the terminated grants should be handled by a different court that specializes in monetary disputes with the government. The Supreme Court left unresolved a second piece of the litigation concerning the NIH’s processing of applications for future funding. Monday’s agreement resolved part of the battle over the NIH grants, with the government agreeing to conduct new reviews of grant applications that were frozen, denied, or withdrawn after the new policy was announced. The agreement does not require NIH to fund any particular research proposal. The researchers who sued NIH said Monday that the proposed grants will advance public health issues, including HIV prevention, Alzheimer’s disease, LGBTQ health, and sexual violence. “This agreement allows my grant application, and many others, to move forward for review after an arbitrary and destructive freeze,” said plaintiff Nikki Maphis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of New Mexico who is studying Alzheimer’s disease and alcohol use in the aging brain. This agreement does not impact U.S. District Judge William Young’s earlier ruling in the case blocking the NIH’s policy of ceasing grant funding for diversity-related research. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has appealed that ruling, and has said it stands by its decision to end funding for research “that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people.”
Justice Department using fraud law to target companies on DEI – Wall Street Journal via MSN, December 28, 2025. The Trump administration has launched investigations into the use of diversity initiatives in hiring and promotion at major U.S. companies, built on the novel use of a federal law meant to punish businesses that cheat the government. The civil probes are proceeding under the umbrella of the False Claims Act, which has traditionally been used to go after contractors who bill the government for work that was never performed or inflate the cost of services rendered.
The DOJ took down a report on Indigenous people — mandated by a law Trump signed — to comply with an anti-DEI order. Mississippi Today, November 15, 2025. The Trump administration took down a congressionally mandated report on missing and murdered Native Americans from the Department of Justice’s website nearly 300 days ago to comply with an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s still not back online yet, and the senators who worked to pass the law are furious. The Not One More Report was the product of The Not Invisible Act of 2020, which intends to provide tribes with solutions to combat the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people and educate the general public about the crisis. The act was signed into law by President Donald Trump in his first term. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a moderate Democrat from Nevada who sits on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and introduced that act, said she was “outraged” to see the report had vanished from the federal forum. “It is astounding that an administration that actually signed these bills into law, that wants to address the issue of keeping our communities safe from violent criminals, including our tribal communities, thinks that this isn’t an important issue,” Cortez Masto told NOTUS during an interview in her Capitol Hill office. The report was taken down amid a purge of material from federal websites that the Trump administration deemed DEI-related. Both Cortez Masto and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, told NOTUS that they reached out to the administration to inquire about restoring the Not One More Report…A commission including tribal leaders, human trafficking survivors, relatives of victims, and federal partners compiled the report from over 250 testimonies from tribal members about how the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people has affected their lives. It also gave recommendations on how to alleviate the crisis — like having the U.S. Marshals Service help tribal law enforcement address the MMIP crisis, the premise of legislation that Cortez Masto recently introduced alongside Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
5. WEATHER AND CLIMATE RESEARCH
The U.S. Is on the Verge of Meteorological Malpractice. The Atlantic [no paywall], December 18, 2025. The Trump administration says it will dismantle a premier climate center, while somehow keeping weather forecasting intact. On Tuesday afternoon, the risk of wildfire in northeastern Colorado had risen high enough that Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility company, announced that it would shut down power in much of the area the following day. Expected high winds, combined with the current dry conditions, meant that a downed electrical line could spark a catastrophe. Local institutions responded by announcing closures yesterday, among them the Boulder, Colorado–based National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. Shortly after the Xcel announcement, USA Today broke the news that the Trump administration planned to “dismantle” the center. Climate scientists know NCAR as one of the largest weather-and-climate-research institutions in the world; Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, described it as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” NCAR had already reduced its staff in anticipation of drastic budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, which provides about half of the center’s funding. In March, a major NCAR project meant to track hurricanes and other severe storms was canceled after the administration pulled back money appropriated for it. Now efforts to dissolve the center would begin “immediately,” USA Today reported, and would include a full closure of the center’s Mesa Laboratory—whose distinctive rose-hued towers, designed by I. M. Pei, have overlooked the city since the 1960s. (The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately return a request for comment.)
Like many of the institutions and agencies targeted by the Trump administration this year—USAID, the Forest Service, the National Institutes of Health—NCAR is vulnerable in part because so few Americans know what it does, if they’ve heard of it at all. Established in 1960 to advance the field of meteorology, which had flourished during World War II but languished in peacetime, the center was designed to coordinate research on “the problems of the atmosphere” and provide the large-scale computing facilities necessary for that work. It now employs more than 800 researchers and makes its facilities available to thousands more each year.Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, called NCAR “quite literally our global mothership.” Daniel Swain, a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist known for his commentary on extreme-weather events, hosted a “rapid response” livestream yesterday morning. “Most academics in the weather and climate world,” he said, “have in some way passed through or connected with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.” Swain, himself a research partner at NCAR, spoke to his audience from Boulder, warning that the area’s planned power shutoff could bring his report to an abrupt end. He described the administration’s plans for NCAR as “a genuinely shocking self-inflicted wound.”Whether or not Americans know it, research at the center has contributed to enormous advances in the weather forecasts they consult each day. Three-day forecasts have been more than 80 percent accurate since the 1980s and are now about 97 percent accurate; five-day forecasts hit the 80 percent threshold in the early 2000s, and seven-day forecasts are approaching it today. NCAR researchers have also enabled more precise predictions of tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and other extreme events. The center has been so successful, Swain observed during his livestream, that we now take for granted “the fact that we are not caught by surprise when a hurricane makes landfall, the fact that we can predict the occurrence—literally, as I speak, the winds are picking up outside the window—of these extreme fire-weather conditions.”…
The Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, moving to dissolve a research lab that a top White House official described as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” PBS, December 18, 2025. White House budget director Russ Vought criticized the lab in a social media post Tuesday night and said a comprehensive review of the lab is underway. “Vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location, Vought said. The research lab, which houses the largest federal research program on climate change, supports research to predict, prepare for and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters. The research lab is managed by a nonprofit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities on behalf of the National Science Foundation. A senior White House official cited two instances of the lab’s “woke direction” that wastes taxpayer funds on what the official called frivolous pursuits and ideologies. One funded an Indigenous and Earth Sciences center that aimed to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered,” while another experiment traced air pollution to “demonize motor vehicles, oil and gas operations.” The lab “is quite literally our global mothership,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University, in a post on X. “Nearly everyone who researches climate and weather — not only in the U.S., but around the world — has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources.” She continued: “NCAR supports the scientists who fly into hurricanes, the meteorologists who develop new radar technology, the physicists who envision and code new weather models, and yes — the largest community climate model in the world. That too. Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”
Trump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center. The New York Times (Gift Article). “The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions. The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming. But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution. Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.” …Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere. For decades, the center has operated with the freedom to develop outside-the-box ideas that have advanced weather forecasting. Its researchers identified atmospheric patterns that meteorologists rely on today to predict the weather
‘A willingness to lie’: Why the EPA’s latest Trump-era change is especially concerning. Fast Company, December 11, 2025. Human activity is driving climate change; that’s a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a web page explaining climate change’s causes. It’s yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. An EPA page titled “Causes of Climate Change” once began by directly noting that “since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earth’s climate.”
Internal Forest Service report finds ‘unpassable trails, unsafe bridges’ “The Trail Status Program Report, obtained by The Washington Post. [no paywall] December 16, 2025. concludes public lands are deteriorating quickly after the Trump administration cut staff. Trails maintained by the U.S. Forest Service nationwide are being “abandoned” and deteriorating rapidly, threatening visitor safety, after the Trump administration cut staff, according to an internal report obtained by The Washington Post….The report states it is based on the accounts of nearly 300 district-level workers whom the Forest Service sent out to assess the state of the agency’s trails…The December report finds that some Forest Service districts have lost up to 100 percent of their trail staff under President Donald Trump, departures representing “hundreds of years of trail expertise”; that the remaining staff members are suffering widespread burnout and low morale, leading to “poor customer service”; and that millions of dollars in unspent grant funds have been returned to the agency, often because of vacancies or extra red tape imposed by the Trump administration…”
Trump’s EPA Rewrites Climate Reality. SciLight. December 9, 2025. The Environmental Protection (EPA) changed its website, removing all reference to anthropogenic climate change. Only natural drivers of climate change are now included. This despite overwhelming evidence that the largest driver of climate change is from human activities as the rest of the world acknowledges. Reportedly, the EPA spokesperson said that the changes aligned government information with the priorities of President Donald Trump. I find that flabbergasting, worrying, horrific, and frankly nonsense. Huh? Government information isn’t based on research, evidence, analysis, lived experience, traditional knowledge or any other process by which society understands the world around us! No need, government information is just whatever an elderly man in the White House says it is. In other words, government information no longer really can be considered “information.” It is now fully an expression of unsubstantiated opinion. Unfortunately, the EPA isn’t the only culprit of course. Data sets are disappearing all across our federal government. Organizations such as the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) are working to save federal data before it disappears. It’s a huge task! But it matters. Because, no, government information should not ever be just the unsubstantiated opinion of any person. It should be real information that people everywhere can rely on.
EPA Removes Information on Human Drivers of Warming from Its Website. Yale Environment360, December 10, 205. The EPA has scrubbed most of its website of any mention that human activity is driving climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency has scrubbed from its website information on how humans are driving warming. A web page that once explored the central role of fossil fuels in heating the planet now only mentions natural drivers of climate change. Previously the web page on the causes of climate change explored the role of greenhouse gases in trapping heat, noting that it is “extremely likely” that humans are the “dominant cause” of recent warming. The agency has since updated the page to focus on factors such as volcanic eruptions, solar output, and changes in the orbit of the Earth. The “near-exclusive emphasis on natural causes of climate change on the U.S. EPA’s website is now completely out of synch with all available evidence demonstrating overwhelming human influence on contemporary warming trends,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain.
6. ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Elon Musk may have left the Trump administration months ago, but his stink still lingers in just about every federal office building. Gizmodo, December 30, 2025. The latest agency to get bogged down by the legacy of the Department of Government Efficiency is the Energy Information Administration (EIA). According to Bloomberg, the department missed the publishing time for the Weekly Petroleum Status Report, a crucial update that is closely watched by players in the energy industry. On paper, the delay may not seem like much. The report, which contains weekly data on the state of the US oil market, was slated for 10:30am on Monday but got pushed back until 5pm, after trading markets had closed for the day. But delays are very rare for the report, and the EIA was hit hard by DOGE cuts earlier this year. According to Bloomberg, the agency lost more than 100 of its nearly 350-person staff, leaving those remaining extremely shorthanded as they try to keep everything running smoothly.
EPA National Advisory Committee (NAC) and Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) website was deleted as of 12/23/2025. The Internet has a capture of the website (12/17/25). The National Advisory Committee (NAC) and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) advise the U.S. Representative (the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) on the development of U.S. policy positions regarding implementation of the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), now superseded by the Environmental Cooperation Agreement (ECA) and the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) Free Trade Agreement. The NAC and GAC provide a valuable venue for public input and help shape U.S. policies that improve the environment and health conditions of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
EPA eliminates mention of fossil fuels in website on warming’s causes. Scientists call it misleading. PHYS.org. December 1, 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency has removed any mention of fossil fuels—the main driver of global warming—from its popular online page explaining the causes of climate change. Now it only mentions natural phenomena, even though scientists calculate that nearly all of the warming is due to human activity. Sometime in the past few days or weeks, EPA altered some but not all of its climate change webpages, de-emphasizing and even deleting references to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, which scientists say is the overwhelming cause of climate change. The website’s causes of climate page mentions changes in Earth’s orbit, solar activity, Earth’s reflectivity, volcanoes and natural carbon dioxide changes, but not the burning of fossil fuels. Seven scientists and three former EPA officials tell The Associated Press that this is misleading and harmful. “Now it is completely wrong,” said University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain, who also noted that impacts, risks and indicators of climate change on the EPA site are now broken links. “This was a tool that I know for a fact that a lot of educators used and a lot of people. It was actually one of the best designed easy access climate change information websites for the U.S.” Earlier this year, the Trump Administration removed the national climate assessment from government websites.
GSA Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) Database – content deleted, Fall 2025. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) database is used by Federal agencies to continuously manage an average of 1,000 advisory committees government-wide. This database is also used by the Congress to perform oversight of related Executive Branch programs and by the public, the media, and others, to stay abreast of important developments resulting from advisory committee activities. Although centrally supported by the General Services Administration’s Committee Management Secretariat, the database represents a true “shared system” wherein each participating agency and individual committee manager has responsibility for providing accurate and timely information that may be used to assure that the system’s wide array of users has access to data required by FACA. FACA database lists both as terminated as of 9/30/25.
A new report by NRDC exposes the catastrophic loss of federal protections for wetlands across the United States following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA. Using cutting-edge Geographic Information System (GIS) modeling, Mapping Destruction: Using GIS Modeling to Show the Disastrous Impacts of Sackett v. EPA on America’s Wetlands finds that tens of millions of acres of wetlands—critical for flood control, clean water, and biodiversity—are now vulnerable to pollution and destruction without federal safeguards that ensure harm to wetlands is avoided, minimized, and mitigated. “Our analysis confirms that the Supreme Court has gutted the Clean Water Act’s ability to protect our wetlands, exposing communities to increased flooding, worsening water pollution, and threatening habitats that sustain wildlife and local economies,” said Jon Devine, director, freshwater ecosystems, at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).“It also shows that if the Trump administration adopts interpretations of the case favored by polluters, the destruction will be far worse.” In the most comprehensive study to date, NRDC’s GIS analysis shows that, nationwide, wetlands covering an area the size of South Carolina are at risk even under the least harmful scenario considered, and in the worst case, 70 million acres—84 percent of the acreage of wetlands previously eligible for protection—could lose safeguards. This threatens drinking water, increases flooding, and accelerates habitat loss, underscoring the urgent need for stronger protections. [Note – missed this one previously so adding it to the year end article. March 24, 2025. NRDC.]
7. EDUCATION
Project 2025 and the Assault on Women in Higher Education. LegalAF. December 7, 2025. The Department of Education recently removed the “professional” classification from several female-dominated fields, including nursing, which means these programs will no longer qualify for the same level of federal loan support. This is not about lowering the cost of education, as the DOE claims, it is something far more deliberate. It is the execution of the Project 2025 agenda, outlined in a November 2024 document, which frames these changes as a strategy to increase the “married birth rate.” The Project 2025 fact sheet states: “Expensive and misguided government interventions in education are, whether intended or not, pushing young people away from getting married and starting families to the long-term detriment of American society. Reforms to reverse counterproductive government incentives could boost the married fertility rate significantly.” Later, the report goes on to say, “Reducing federal higher education subsidies and loan cancellation that place the federal thumb on the scale in favor of spending years in postsecondary work of questionable value will help young Americans to start and expand their families.” Let me be clear. They are literally saying we need to stop helping people pursue higher education because pursuing higher education means they delay—or even do not have—children. This is the Heritage Foundation’s argument. And this is exactly what Trump’s DOE just carried out by canceling or restricting loans for professions that are predominantly female.
How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year. The Hechinger Report, December 1, 2025. Decades of carefully built infrastructure aimed at improving and tracking how American children learn vanished in an ideological attack. Inauguration Day was a time of hope for the MAGA faithful who watched President Donald Trump take his second oath of office in the Capitol rotunda. But less than a mile away, at the Department of Education, fear and uncertainty reigned. Researchers, contractors and federal staff — the corner of the Education Department that I cover — braced for potentially devastating upheaval. Would the department itself be eliminated, as Trump had promised during the campaign? Would congressionally mandated research and statistical programs move to other agencies? And, if so, which ones? Amid the unease, a small but determined force was already at work. The consequences would be profound. As many as 16 members from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team embedded within the agency in early February, according to news reports. These Young Turks reviewed contracts, identified vulnerabilities and quietly plotted what some would later call a blitzkrieg against federal research. As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose.
8. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” U.S. Department of State Press Statement, December 23. 2025.
For the facts see A message to America: we are not your enemy Carole Cadwalladr. December 24, 2025. Last night, the US launched an all-out assault on the “global censorship industrial complex”…fascism never sleeps. And last night – after European offices had closed for the holidays – the US state department announced “Actions to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex” and that it would be barring five individuals from the United States. The so-called “global censorship-industrial complex” is a tiny world of academics and NGOs and journalists and policy wonks and lawmakers and disinformation researchers who for the last decade have been trying to understand the power and reach of the tech platforms, how they are invisibly controlling and manipulating our information spaces. I first heard the term from a friend at a US university after she found herself described as such on a target list back in the summer of 2022. We had a good old laugh about it and have used it ironically ever since. But the news last night was chilling. These “radical activists and weaponized NGOs” are my friends and colleagues and fellow fighters in the information trenches and this is a dramatic escalation. It’s Russia-level repression. It’s an all-out attack on civil society. And it’s specifically going after European efforts to legislate the social media giants for users in Europe. We are now the enemy…
Trump to Close Voice of America’s Overseas Offices and Radio Stations. The New York Times Gift Article. December 3, 2025. The push to close the offices appears to contradict a federal judge’s order from April, which required Trump officials to resume operations at V.O.A. The Trump administration last week told lawmakers that it would further shrink the broadcasting capacity of Voice of America despite a judge’s order to maintain robust news operations at the federally funded news group, which provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms. Kari Lake, a Trump ally who leads the broadcaster’s parent agency, wrote in a Nov. 25 notice to Congress reviewed by The New York Times that the administration intended to close its six overseas news bureaus and four overseas marketing offices, including in Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Nairobi, Kenya; and Prague, Czech Republic. The plans are part of the Trump administration’s broader, months long effort to shutter federally funded news groups. President Trump first moved to shut down Voice of America in March, and has also targeted other broadcasters, such as Radio Free Asia. The campaign has met resistance from courts and even from some Republican members of Congress, who believe V.O.A.’s reporting helps counter misinformation and propaganda campaigns from American adversaries like China and Russia. The expected closures appear to contradict a federal judge’s order from April, which required Trump officials to resume operations at V.O.A. so that it would “fulfill its statutory mandate” to serve “as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”