Irony is that Trump is destroying the universities that have made America great: Daniel Schrag

In the past two months, US President Donald Trump has sought to slash millions of dollars of government funding for research and education, especially related to health and climate. At a conference on climate change in Delhi, Sunday Times spoke to Daniel Schrag, a top Harvard scientist who served on President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, about the impact on research and academic freedom

We don’t know yet. But there are some ominous signs. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth has already cancelled some defence grants that have to do with climate. He said, ‘We don’t do climate crap’. And the big question is: is this tendency going to extend to the whole US Global Change Research Program which includes ten agencies such as NASA, department of energy, the Environmental Protection Agency. There’s a spectrum of possibilities, and everybody is just waiting. We’re anticipating that it’s going to be bad. The question is: How bad?
My understanding is that over the next six months to a year, cases will get to the US Supreme Court that will test the idea of what’s called impoundment — the President’s power to not spend money that Congress has allocated. If that power is allowed by the Supreme Court, it’s a complete reinterpretation of the Constitution. If it happens, then Trump unilaterally can stop spending money on any climate research. And that would be catastrophic. And I say that from a very wealthy university. But even Harvard can’t give us research money to make up for federal dollars.

What he is doing is singling out individual universities. My interpretation is that he’s doing this as a method of imposing his power over other universities. If he just said to all universities that he is going to withhold funds because of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion programs) or transgender policies, then they would all fight.

Right. If he goes after Columbia, they’re all terrified, and they then try to appease him. This is a method of autocracy.

The vast majority of research dollars come from the federal government. You have three major climate modelling groups — one at NASA, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at NSF (National Science Foundation). You also have institutes like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps, and dozens more dependent on federal grants. Even if the actions are on the low end of what we expect, my fear is that young people who are doing this work despite better economic opportunities will leave. The best young scientists doing climate research could easily make five times their salary for Google or Meta. They’re foregoing that because of their commitment to the field. If federal funding becomes scarce, they’ll just leave and then there will be a gap of talent. You don’t recover from that quickly.
The US has been a world leader in research and also collaborates with a lot of other countries. So that would be a huge blow…
US universities are the envy of the world. I don’t know a single country, including the UK, Germany, France, that wouldn’t give anything to have a Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley — all the great universities, public and private. And right now, we have a govt committed to destroying these institutions. That’s tragic. What is the source of American success over the last 100 years? A lot of it is innovation and technology, intellectual leadership, and that comes from these universities. Because of his narcissism, the President seems to be set on punishing universities because he doesn’t like the political views of young people who go there. That’s my interpretation.
It’s also maybe a sign of one of the problems that America — and the world — has had for a long time, which is inequality. When there are so many people in the US who feel they haven’t benefited from economic growth, and when the elite, the well-educated, have done very, very well, it creates resentment. That being said, Trump saying Make America Great Again when he’s literally destroying the academic institutions that have made America great — that’s a great irony.

There are a number of people who are taking advantage of the ignorance of a large segment of the population. And I think that blaming scientists for not explaining why they’re important is ridiculous. Some of us try to do that, but that’s not our job.
You are here for a joint program on climate change organised by the environment ministry and Harvard. How optimistic are you about such collaborations for climate action?
India is facing a formidable challenge as the temperature rises and many of us from all over the world feel that engaging with Indian scholars, practitioners, policymakers, to think about a wide variety of solutions, is critical. It’s hard. That doesn’t mean we don’t try. We have to try.