How Trump’s attack on science also affects Dutch researchers

Lex Burdorf, professor of Determinants of public health at Erasmus University, tells that together with some colleagues, he wrote an article about the effects of climate change on construction workers’ health. It was set to appear in an American scientific journal, but was rejected at the last minute. The vague reason: ‘specific circumstances’.

Burdorf states: “We strongly believe this is due to Donald Trump saying: I don’t want to see any research on climate change anymore.” Meanwhile, the journal is seemingly defunct.

Donald Trump has only been president of the United States for a few months, and the repercussions for science are clearly visible. Trump cut science funds, shuts down climate research, bans words like ‘diversity’ and ‘gender’, and expels international students and researchers who don’t meet his approval. He launched a full assault on academic freedom.

In Burdorf’s field, the new regime is leading to self-censorship among scientists, he explains. “I am involved in research on health differences between men and women, but you can’t say that anymore in the U.S. They talk about ‘medicine aimed at specific groups’ or ‘personalised medicine’. Bizarre, isn’t it?”

In his emails to colleagues at American universities, he is careful with his words, as you never know where those emails end up. Hundreds of scientists are losing their jobs, and he doesn’t want to put his remaining colleagues in jeopardy.

He notices that he is turning away from the U.S. “With new research plans, we are less likely to invite Americans, because that could lead to trouble”, says Burdorf. “Moreover, I have decided for myself not to go to America for at least the next two years. I don’t believe I would feel at home in a country where such bizarre things happen.”

Burdorf is just one example of how the new course of the American government is also felt in the Netherlands. But there are more. Dutch researchers are losing American science funding or experiencing long-standing collaborations falling apart. Datasets are at risk of disappearing or is no longer accessible. Conferences have been postponed or cancelled.

Together with NU.nl and the Investico platform, the Higher Education Press Agency conducted a survey this spring, which more than two hundred researchers from twelve universities completed. One third reports feeling direct effects from Trump’s policies.

In addition to well-known fields such as climate science and gender studies, areas like history, political science, paleontology and computer science are also affected. Sometimes the researchers are financially hit: 22 respondents say that promised funds have been stopped or withdrawn, for example by the American health institutions (NIH), or have become uncertain.

We spoke in depth to over forty researchers. They described how the policies impact them and how uncertain they are feeling. Can they travel to the U.S. or not? Who can they turn to for advice if they lose their funding or data?

Historian and television maker Manon Portos Minetti (pronouns she/they) looks on in horror at the developments in the U.S. Portos Minetti is conducting PhD research in Leiden on the white, right-wing, evangelical media landscape in the U.S. – think ‘televangelism’ – and analyses how conspiracy theories in that circle contribute to the re-election of Donald Trump and the ideal of a ‘pure’ white America.

Portos Minetti would like to conduct archival research and spend time in the U.S. as a visiting scholar. “But given my subject, people have now said: don’t even try it. Under Trump, you are only allowed to highlight the positive side of American history, and I am doing the opposite.”

The implications are not only professional but also personal: as a queer person of colour with a Uruguayan background, Portos Minetti does not feel safe in the United States. They don’t even know if they’d be allowed into the country and wo’nt try to find out.

Travelling to the U.S. would contradict their principles during this time. Sometimes researchers complain about cancelled conferences or trips. “I might be oversimplifying, but I think to myself: would you also have gone to Nazi Germany in 1939?”

Gender, racism, climate change, diversity… Research into such topics is likely to be a target in Trump’s regime. But even seemingly neutral disciplines such as astronomy are experiencing the consequences.

“It’s a disaster”, says Simon Portegies Zwart, professor of astronomy in Leiden. “I am in daily Zoom calls with American colleagues, but they are too afraid to talk about it for fear of reprisals. You never know who might be listening in. They are going from a reasonably functioning democracy to the China of the 1970s.”

At the American space agency NASA, diversity policies are now at risk of being dismantled, he explains. He also points to proposed budget cuts: “If those really happen, NASA will be nearly shut down.” Planned satellites are being cancelled, and an important telescope is in jeopardy. Portegies Zwart notes: “It’s also so short-sighted. Elon Musk’s space programme is a result of publicly funded space research, and now they’re cutting it.”

Departments at NASA related to atmospheric science and oceanography deal with climate change, which somewhat explains why Trump targets them, but why astronomy and space travel? “The only thing I can think of”, says Portegies Zwart, “is that science produces people who think critically about the world. Those are not Trump’s friends. It seems primarily motivated by resentment.”

And yes, Portegies Zwart notices that resentment in the Netherlands as well. The cuts in higher education are a sign of that, according to him. “The direction of politics is currently anti-science”, he says. “I don’t understand how that can be: the people in those parties are usually highly educated, yet they have developed a certain resistance to nuance and facts.”

That is another outcome of our survey. We asked respondents: apart from government cuts, do you feel that the academic climate is also changing here in the Netherlands? Most don’t see it (‘Not yet’, one person says), but a third of the respondents do. It is less extreme here, but still.

Most respondents have little trust in the Dutch government. “Absolutely nothing”, responds someone when asked what they expect from minister Eppo Bruins. “Resignation”, suggest others. Most remain more serious; they would like to see him stand up for science and speak out against the developments in the U.S.

However, the government primarily doesn’t want to rock the boat with the United States. Prime minister Dick Schoof recently advised against an opposition proposal to set up a fund to bring top scientists from the U.S. here. A fund is fine to him, but it shouldn’t be specifically targeted at the U.S., was his criticism.

Meanwhile, minister Bruins has indeed established a more neutral fund of 25 million euros to bring ‘endangered’ researchers here. However, they don’t necessarily have to be from the U.S. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has not received additional funding for this, by the way.

Other European countries appear to be moving more decisively. Recently, thirteen European ministers of education and science (including from France and Germany but excluding Bruins) sent a letter to the EU Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Ekaterina Zaharieva. While they do not mention the U.S. specifically, they do call for the protection of scientific freedom. The European Union should welcome talents from abroad who are suffering from political interference and brutal funding cuts, they state.

The European Commission received the letter with open arms. Chair Ursula von der Leyen has since announced half a billion euros in additional investments to bring scientists here. She also wants to enshrine academic freedom in European legislation.

Minister Bruins didn’t put his signature under the letter ‘because there are several proposals mentioned in the letter that exceed the minister’s portfolio’, his spokesperson explains, ‘such as an immigration framework and re-prioritisation of resources within the EU budget’. Of course, Bruins does support the importance of academic freedom and attracting talent, his spokesperson emphasises.

From our conversations, it appears that researchers don’t always know whom to turn to for advice when faced with issues such as foreign travel, lost funding or securing data.

Most universities do provide general advice. They urge their staff not to fill out American questionnaires about their research. It raised eyebrows when two Wageningen researchers received such a questionnaire in their mailbox.

Also, researchers can turn to policy advisors, managers, knowledge security specialists, and so on. In Rotterdam, there is a specific contact point for students and researchers who wish to travel to the U.S. In Groningen, they are working on a general reporting point, but it’s not yet in place.

However, inquiries at the universities reveal they don’t always have insight into the problems their staff are facing. “The developments are concerning and are happening rapidly”, says a spokesperson from the University of Amsterdam. “The impact is broad, but we don’t yet have a complete understanding of the full scope.”

The University of Maastricht even claims to be experiencing ‘no direct consequences’. Still, three scientists from that university in our survey note that funding has been lost, that American colleagues are no longer allowed to participate in their research, and that access to some scientific information is disappearing.

“The impact is currently limited”, thinks Tilburg University. “Some researchers have questions, and they can turn to their managers. We mainly want to maintain calm.” Regarding the potential disappearance of datasets? “In theory, datasets from American applications could go missing, but we have no reason to assume this will happen. We always ask scientists to store their data in a safe and proper manner.”

Safely storing your data yourself, that is not so simple, says astronomer Portegies Zwart. “I am worried about American databases for which there are no copies around the world. They are large files, you cannot just buy a 10 terabyte hard drive and download overnight. You might need an entire data centre for that. Moreover, much of that data is updated daily; do you then need to make new copies every day?”

The danger is real. At the end of April, physical oceanographer Sjoerd Groeskamp from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) received a concerning email from NOAA, the American ocean research centre. Someone warned that a large number of databases would be taken offline. “My time at NOAA is up”, the email stated, “and therefore I want to encourage my scientific friends around the world to preserve these for the future.” Groeskamp would like to store that data, but feels like a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness: there is no coordination.

Some action is already being taken. Here in the Netherlands, SURF is working hard on securing various databases. SURF is the ICT organisation for education and research. So far, 100 terabytes of data have been retrieved.

It may sound old-fashioned, but data is being stored on tapes. The idea is that they can be stored on shelves without cooling, which saves a lot of energy. Since Trump’s inauguration, the tapes have been recording.

Which data are involved, is a secret. “We don’t want to give Trump ideas”, says innovation manager Magchiel Bijsterbosch. “If he knows what we’re storing, he may remove it even quicker.”

SURF does feel the urgency: a request for data storage can, in principle, be approved within 24 hours. However, Bijsterbosch will not decide which data scientists want to preserve. “I am simply here to do what is necessary.” For NOAA’s ocean data, he hasn’t yet received any requests, for example.

Ideally, this should be coordinated within Europe, suggests president Marileen Dogterom of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. “Otherwise, you might end up with all kinds of duplicates and forget something else. But coordinating is easier said than done; it needs to be done per field.”

We speak to Dogterom to take a look to the future. The KNAW, after all, is known as the guardian and voice of science. How does she view the events in the U.S.: are they casting a shadow ahead, and is something similar happening in the Netherlands?

“The developments are very harmful to American science, and therefore also to ours”, says Dogterom. “We are strongly intertwined; we have been collaborating for decades. I have also worked there for five years. American science is simply top in various fields. European science is top too, no doubt, but we all progress further when we work together.”

What needs to happen? European storage of data is a start but still needs to be established. Dogterom: “We need to become less dependent on the U.S. That is possible, but it’s of course not our first choice. Ultimately, everyone loses if you cease collaboration, just like in that trade war.”

Moreover, researchers here cannot do much else than offer moral support to their colleagues in the U.S., she says. “We can only encourage them to resist.” She is glad that, for example, Harvard is taking a stand, but she’s also worried about the less wealthy universities that provide the majority of education across the country: “They cannot afford to lose as much money as Harvard.”

However, Dogterom is not afraid yet that the American situation will quickly spill over to the Netherlands, if only because no single party has absolute power here: the Netherlands is a coalition country. Still, Dogterom criticises the government. “The minister does speak out, but for now, it remains at mere verbal support of academic freedom. In practice, we see cuts to unbound research. Systematically screening researchers for knowledge security and determining the language in which education may be provided does not contribute to academic freedom in the Netherlands.”

Of course, the attack on science in the United States is a dystopia. Dogterom: “The events in America show how quickly academic freedom can slip away. That’s something we want to guard against, to ensure that doesn’t happen even slightly in the Netherlands.”