‘Trump and Musk are plunging American science into indescribable chaos’
Le Monde | March 3, 2025 | Stéphane Foucart
How to describe the breakdown of the institutional order now underway in the US? For American historian Timothy Snyder (Yale University), we must admit the obvious: It is a coup d’état, without quotation marks, that is underway on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, he said, it’s the first of its kind to be carried out by taking control of a state’s information systems….
… This digital coup also, and above all, enables a tight control of power over the conduct of science and the production of knowledge, which is nothing like what the first Trump administration (2017-2021) had implemented. A survey conducted by Romany Webb (Sabin Center for Climate Change Law) and Lauren Kurtz (Climate Science Legal Defense Fund), published in 2022, indicated that the “war on science” waged between 2017 and 2021 consisted, for researchers in federal institutions and agencies, of a series of ad hoc censures, deletions of certain data or even pressures leading to self-censorship.