Episode 221: Anti-Science Mugging on the Right and the Ascent of American Anti-Intellectualism
Citations Needed | May 28, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
Adam: Yes, as always, if you like the show and you’ve been listening to it and you haven’t yet, please subscribe to our Patreon. It helps keep the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable. And we do have goodies there, like News Briefs every now and then, just for Patreon subscribers, as well as live shows and other goodies. So please, if you can support us there, we’d be very, very grateful.
Nima: “Jaw Clench Study Takes Tax Dollars,” United Press International cautioned in 1975. “‘Shrimp On A Treadmill’: Rand Paul Mocks National Science Foundation Studies,” reported Forbes in 2021. “Gov’t waste report finds $400K spent to give lonely rats cocaine: ‘Absurd’,” Fox News told its viewers in 2024.
Adam: These headlines paint a picture of a wasteful, woke, liberal government that’s been squandering taxpayer money on something wholly undeserving: frivolous scientific studies. Tens of thousands to millions of dollars, we’re told, are being handed out like candy so scientists can sit around watching monkeys clench their jaws, put shrimp on treadmills and give cocaine to rats. And who gets to choose which studies are funded? Wasteful, ultra-woke organizations like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Health and Human Services.
Nima: It’s true that some research doesn’t end up having all that much practical relevance. Indeed, this is the nature of scientific inquiry. There are sometimes cul-de-sacs and wrong paths taken, but the majority of the time, studies that are trivialized in the media and on the Senate floor aren’t superfluous at all.
Adam: While soundbites like “shrimp on a treadmill” paint a ridiculous picture, they’re also, of course, taken totally out of context, obscuring the scientific merit and moral importance of the research and researchers who worked for years on often obscure, tedious lines of inquiry, only to have their lives’ work reduced to a cheap punchline by bad-faith demagogues playing to the public’s ignorance and lizard-brain impulses.
Nima: So why is this media and political punchline so popular? And what’s the agenda of the lawmakers and media organizations that denigrate and misrepresent research and science more broadly, and the larger current of conspicuous anti-intellectualism that has always been present in American political culture, but in the last 10 years, has entirely taken over the modern American Right?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll discuss the decades-old anti-intellectual gambit of mocking and attacking so-called frivolous studies, examining how it warps and devalues science and international cooperation in a broader effort to defund public institutions, both scientific and social.
Nima: Later on the show, we will be speaking with Brenda Ekwurzel, Senior Director of Scientific Excellence at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a climatologist, geologist, geochemist and hydrologist. Dr. Ekwurzel has shared her expertise on climate science across a wide range of research and media, from ABC to NPR, the New York Times to the Washington Post.
[Begin clip]
Brenda Ekwurzel: Pay attention to what is being silenced and why would funding want to be stopped in certain areas, and that’s where you want to look under the hood and say, Who’s going to benefit from people not knowing this knowledge? And that’s what’s really going on.
[End clip]
Adam: This is a spiritual sequel to a couple episodes, namely the one, only two episodes ago, Episode 219: How Elites Concern Troll ‘Waste’ to Gut Social Welfare and Divide the Working Class, and Episode 147: The GOP’s ‘Rightwing Populism’ Rebrand. What we’ll argue in this episode is that this is fake. Nobody really believes that this is a true critique of government waste, especially someone like Rand Paul, who is, of course, a medical doctor who got a medical license from Duke, which doesn’t make him necessarily smart, but it makes him someone who certainly knows the basic logic of public science funding.
He is playing to the crowd. He is playing to people’s ignorance and bad impulses, knowing it gives him a reputation without really, again, attacking any traditional centers of power like the military, it gives him a reputation as someone who’s taking on waste and corruption because he knows that the public’s general view of science is not a broad and romantic vision. It is something that is viewed with suspicion. We are going to talk about why that is for large swaths of the population, despite the fact that they, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, sleep under the blanket of freedom it provides every single day. We all do it with advanced medical technology. They critique a system that many of these people who hate the gubmint take advantage of all the time, and that’s fine. It’s what it’s there for, but it’d be nice if they weren’t fucking pricks about it.
So we’re gonna get into why that is, why corporate forces in rightwing institutions want to defund the sciences, why they play to the crowd when doing so, and what the broader goal of privatization really is.
Nima: Now, the strain of anti-intellectualism, as we said before, is embedded in American political and social culture. But let’s start just in the middle of last century, when former governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, ran for president in 1952, and again in 1956, he was roundly mocked by the Republican Party, much of the media, and many American voters as being a quote-unquote “egghead.” This label was also applied to his supporters as well. Now, the term was first popularized for Stevenson himself, who was bald and also rather urbane, by Connecticut Republican John deKoven Alsop, and spread across media by making its way into the American lexicon by his brother, the influential New York Herald Tribune columnist Stewart Alsop. Now, Stevenson himself made fun of his Egghead nickname in one speech. He even joked that, quote, “Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!,” end quote.
In his 1963 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as a, quote, “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life,” adding that it prompted the view that “intellectuals … are pretentious, conceited … and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive …. The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise,” end quote. Ultimately, Hofstadter noted, “The preference for vocationalism is linked to a preference for character — or personality — over mind, and for conformity and manipulative facility over individuality and talent.” End quote.
Adam: Yeah, because what’s important to keep in mind in this episode is that the people who rail against intellectualism, the people who pose as anti-intellectuals in public to demagogue and to sort of appeal to people’s lizard brains, are almost all themselves educated in the liberal arts or have advanced degrees. This is a common theme you’ll see, similar to what we talked about, TV personality and faux-populist Mike Rowe, again, English degree from college. Steve Bannon, who constantly talks about the needs of the working man and rails against frivolous government waste, he went to Georgetown, got an MBA from Harvard. Batya Ungar-Sargon, who’s the new Trump, alleged spokesperson for the working class, who goes on these dopey cable shows and talks about how real Americans don’t want to fund all these frivolous liberal programs, she got a PhD from Berkeley and wrote her PhD thesis entitled, “Coercive Pleasures: The Force and Form of the Novel 1719–1740.”
All these people posing as sort of alleged protectors of the working class’s tax dollars know they’re full of shit. They’re all again from Trump’s Ivy League. I mean, we could do this all day. Rand Paul. Ted Cruz, who features heavily in the Senate floor, demagoguery against sciences, he went to Princeton and Harvard Law. They are playing you for a mark. This is not a genuine conviction for these people, they are playing to the crowd, and this is how they garner supposed anti-corruption, anti-elite bona fides, because they know it’s cheap and easy, and the people they’re defending and attacking don’t have any real lobby. They don’t have a way of defending themselves. This is really important to understand. These are not people who are of the soil. These are not people from the projects. These are not people from poverty. These are rich, educated elites who are doing a shtick. They are doing a form of demagoguery, knowing it’s a fucking lie.
Nima: Now, the snide dismissal of intellectualism has laid the groundwork for subsequent decades of attacks on, quote-unquote, “frivolous research,” what we’re going to focus on today, especially that which is made possible by public funding. In 1974, James D. Davidson, the executive director of the rightwing lobbying group the National Taxpayers Union, published a series of widely circulated articles listing examples of what he considered, quote-unquote, “wasteful” government spending, many of them related to scientific research. Here is an excerpt from a 1974 tirade by Davidson in The Washington Post. It was republished in multiple leading newspapers across the country, including the LA Times, which gave it the following headline, quote, “Where Do Taxes Go? A-Chasing Wild Boar, Tracking a Toad.” Davidson, in the article, wrote this, quote,
The cause of higher learning has been bolstered in ways that would have dazzled Gulliver more than his visit to the Grand Academy of Lagado. For reasons unknown, governmental research has located the frontiers of man’s knowledge in three remote countries: Poland, Burma and Yugoslavia.
Six thousand dollars went to study Polish bisexual frogs. $85,000 was consumed learning about the “cultural, economic and social impact of rural road construction in Poland,” and $20,000 was devoted to study the blood groups of Polish pigs.
In Burma $5,000 went to collect a rare moss, and another $8,000 went to track down specimens of a certain Burmese ant.
End quote. In case his feigned ignorant anti-science convictions as well as extreme xenophobia wasn’t clear enough, Davidson concluded with a series of further examples he found objectionable, including the following, quote,
$3,000 to research for Indian lizards.
$25,000 to study biological rhythms of the catfish in India.
$70,000 to classify and determine the population biology of indo-Australian ants.
$159,000 to teach mothers how to play with their babies.
End quote.
Adam: Now, there’s much to say here, including the fact that these expenses are a very, very small fraction of federal spending, especially when compared to defense budgets. The goal, of course, is to depict the studies as self-evidently trivial and redundant. And what you’ll notice with all these articles is that almost never do they actually interview the people whose studies they’re disparaging to defend them, ever. It’s just taken for at face value that, Oh, these are inherently kind of silly and frivolous. And isn’t this really a gag? It’s the pop-tort lawsuits, you know, of the year story that they do. It sort of sounds bad, knowing that if you actually interviewed the person you’re attacking, or interviewed someone who was at a group who defends people who do scientific research, you would probably get a far more nuanced explanation, which would kind of not make it so punchy.
Nima: They’re also bad punch lines, Adam, considering that at least those studies that Davidson points out in this article, they don’t actually sound absurd, even when they’re taken out of context. Ants, fish, lizards are essential parts of ecosystems, though. The idea that you would study the biological rhythms of animals on Earth is actually not in any way absurd. Thinking about parenting and relationships between mothers and babies, somehow, this is like a laugh line. This is somehow insane.
Adam: Yeah, and there’s a ton we’ve learned in the last 50 years about why early development play is important. You know, this is, in the 1970s, when this was written, you threw your kid in the crib, gave him some scotch, knocked him out, and went to go drink at the Spencer’s next door. I mean, this is actually kind of useful to know, right? It’s useful to know what’s good child-rearing practices.
Nima: That’s what I’m saying. Even the eye-rolling that is supposed to be conveyed here, the point isn’t even well made. It’s only if you’ve already decided to kind of dismiss this stuff as absurd. Now, Davidson wasn’t alone in doing this. At the same time, in 1975, Democratic Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin began a smug project called the Golden Fleece Awards, a play on how supposedly useless studies were, quote-unquote, “fleecing” the always-hallowed taxpayer. Proxmire would give a monthly award to an individual or government institution that he perceived as being wasteful and frivolous. Proxmire invited members of the public to submit nominations as well, adding an extra dash of folksiness to his PR campaign.
One of the first awards went to the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Office of Naval Research. According to Proxmire, the award was given to these institutions, quote, “for spending over $500,000 to determine under what conditions rats, monkeys, and humans bite and clench their jaws,” end quote. Now the jaw-clenching study Proxmire was referring to examined the causes of violent and antisocial behavior, using jaw-clenching as a signal for rising tension. The agencies associated with it reportedly sought to apply the study’s findings to alleviate conflict between people confined during space and undersea exploration, hence the funding by NASA and the Office of Naval Research.
Still, media got on board, largely taking Proxmire’s side. A widely republished UPI article dated April 19, 1975 ran the headline, quote, “Jaw Clench Study Takes Tax Dollars,” end quote, and started this way, datelined from Washington, DC. Quote,
It has cost the taxpayers nearly $500,000 for the government to determine that people clench their jaws when they are angry or alarmed, Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., said Thursday.
End quote. The news agency did quote the scientists behind the study, who defended the study as a means to understand the causes, and therefore treatment and prevention, of violent and antisocial behavior, as I said before, but the headline and lede indicate a clear editorial decision was made to sympathize with Proxmire’s views and add a dash of snark to report on scientific inquiry funded by the government.
Adam: Though it didn’t win anything from Proxmire, another one of his targets was a 1955 study regarding the sexual behavior of insects known as a screwworm fly. The study was funded by a $250,000 grant for the Department of Agriculture, which took an interest in the screwworm fly because it was a major livestock parasite, primarily in southern US and Mexico. One of the study’s authors, Edward F. Knipling, is credited with developing a mass-sterilization procedure that helped eradicate the screwworm fly. According to the USDA, the effects of eradicating the parasite include the following, quote,
Endangered wild species have a better chance of survival. Additional grazing areas previously subject to high rates of screwworm infestation are now available for use by livestock and wildlife. The quality of life for smaller farmers and ranchers, especially in Central America, was improved by relief from lost man-hours needed to treat livestock and risk of loss from screwworm infestation.
Unquote. Additionally, the eradication of the parasite ended up saving billions of dollars for the US and Mexico, though this is arguably not of such high moral concern.
Nima: According to Richard C. Atkinson, former director of the National Science Foundation, Proxmire later, quote, “freely admitted that the study of the sex life of the screw-worm fly had been of major significance to progress in this important field,” end quote. But much of the damage had already been done. According to a 1982 Christian Science Monitor article, the work of many recipients of the Golden Fleece Awards, quote, “was often shortened by agencies hesitant to continue or renew funds after earning a Fleece,” end quote. Now this didn’t stop outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times from referring to Proxmire as what else, Adam, but a, quote-unquote, “maverick.”
Now, the Golden Fleece Award was subsequently revived in the year 2000, after Proxmire’s retirement, done so by the austerity group Taxpayers for Common Sense, which relies entirely on the cynical waste, fraud, and abuse frameworks that we previously discussed on Citations Needed just two episodes ago. In July of 2000 the joint Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service reported on the development this way, writing, quote, “Golden Fleece award returns in watchdog role,” end quote. In addition to describing the awards as a watchdog, the news agency opened its article with some attempted levity to trivialize yet another series of scientific studies. It started this way, quote,
There was the $2 million patrol car, the $200,000 curriculum for watching television, and the study of whether drunken fish are more aggressive than sober fish.
There was the study of why people act rudely on Virginia tennis courts, the Medicaid payments to psychiatrists for attending basketball games, and the $1 million tab for preserving a sewer as a historical monument.
End quote. Many of these barbs are targeting pure research without considering the role it plays in practical science. This is how science works. A study in one area can lead to progress and innovation, knowledge and wisdom in completely other ways. For example, the carburetor was made possible by basic studies about air and fuel mixtures. And so the dismissal, the kind of routine dismissal of what, by and large, are not highly-funded studies and research, but still putting some kind of dollar amount that seems, you know, large to Joe Six-Pack, this is a tried-and-true way that this faux-populism not only denigrates science, but also makes you, the taxpayer, the ultimate victim of the eggheads.
Adam: Well, just like Musk’s stupid and selective and totally bad-faith attacks on these supposed wasteful government programs that he again mischaracterizes, misrepresents, lies about. Now, just a few years later, in 2006 another study would become a major target of derision. Its purpose was to find out more about how changing conditions in the ocean affect animals’ resistance to disease, which, as we now know, is quite important. But its methodology received much more attention. As part of the study, marine biologists put a shrimp on a treadmill. As writer Ben Goldfarb noted in 2015 for High Country News, quote,
In 2011, Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, included the federally funded experiment in his annual “Wastebook,” a compendium of supposedly frivolous government spending. Suddenly the shrimp was everywhere — skewered on a thousand websites, fried by talking heads, roasted in an AARP commercial.
Unquote. The Fox News show American Newsroom, hosted by Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum, got in on the action, highlighting Coburn’s report. Here’s a clip.
[Begin clip]
Bill Hemmer: Well, we have one creative federal government. According to a new report, it has quite the imaginations for spending your money. This is a shrimp exercising on a treadmill. Martha, do you know how much we spent on this research?
Martha MacCallum: How much, Bill?
Bill Hemmer: $500,000.
Martha MacCallum: It was worth every penny. I’m very curious about how that works out for the shrimp.
Bill Hemmer: That guy’s in good shape. And that is just one project.
[End clip]
Adam: The study found new life among DOGE boosters, including Elon Musk himself later on in 2024. In 2013, a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chaired by Republican Lamar Smith launched an inquiry of 60 National Science Foundation grants, many of which were focused on social sciences. The largest of the grants in question, totaling $5.65 million, was for a project designed to use new education methods to educate Arctic communities about climate change and related issues. Smith’s actions, which were tied to a bill to redistribute funding for the NSF, prompted the foundation to issue the following statement, quote,
Our broader concern is this: that NSF will be pressured to fund only ‘safe’ research that does not attract political attention; and that NSF peer reviewers will therefore reject potentially important but odd-sounding research proposals. Scientists and engineers, particularly young ones, should not be discouraged from pursuing unconventional, often groundbreaking scientific research — the kind that sometimes ends up winning Nobel Prizes and transforming science and society.
Unquote. But the NSF, contrary to Smith and other lawmakers’ depictions, doesn’t just write blank checks to anyone who asks. The process for applying for grants from the NSF and other government funders is actually quite rigorous. As Ben Goldfarb noted in the aforementioned 2015 article for High Country, approximately 20% of applicants receive funding. 80% don’t. Goldfarb went on to write the grants were, quote, “reviewed by a panel of experts; [and] would have received at least three written reviews and, along with other proposals in its category, been the subject of two days of in-person debate,” unquote. See, there’s this image that sort of money is just handed out willy-nilly. But again, anyone who’s ever applied for a grant knows it’s the most tedious paperwork, over-examined process in history, and I can guarantee you, the shrimp on a treadmill study had far more scrutiny than the $35 billion in grants that were handed out to Elon Musk.
Now still, other lawmakers have released their version of the Wastebook, because it’s kind of the way you chew the scenery and get on Fox News, right, many of which have some sort of folksy name and clunky, sardonic title. See John McCain’s “America’s Most Wasted” or Oklahoma senator James Lankford’s “Federal Fumbles: 100 Ways the Government Dropped the Ball,” unquote. Now Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who’s a huge admirer of William Proxmire, has made one of his signature causes pointing out the supposed frivolous studies on the Senate floor, again, to get on Fox News and to make headlines. Here’s a clip from 2021 where he’s making these remarks on the Senate floor. Let’s listen to that.
[Begin clip]
Rand Paul: National Science Foundation spent $4.6 million to study the connection between getting drunk and falling down. Now, you think that would be obvious. You get drunk, you fall down. But no, we had to go ahead and study whether getting drunk and falling down was something that happens. We spent $4 million to see, if you get drunk, when you fall down. This is insane. Not one person, a few of us, but not a majority, will stand up and say, enough is enough. The NSF needs less money, not more.
[End clip]
Adam: Now that, of course, is not what the study was finding. It wasn’t just finding, do you fall down when you get drunk? The study Rand Paul is ridiculing is clearly designed for the purposes of public safety and public health. If you look at similar studies, you’ll see an important context. A study from the NIH examines the, quote, “Usual Alcohol Consumption and Risks for Nonfatal Fall Injuries” stated this, quote,
In the United States, 9.2 million emergency department (ED) visits, 1.1 million hospitalizations, and 33,018 deaths were attributed to fall injuries in 2014.
Unquote. Now, even if one wants to make the purely monetary rather than moral arguments, the losses attributed to falls are far greater expenditures than those who study them. The NIH added, quote,
In 2010 (the most recent data available), the combined costs incurred by fall injuries for medical care and work loss from ED visits, hospitalizations, and fatalities were as high as $50.9 billion, $95.5 billion, and $8.3 billion, respectively.
So studying why people fall is actually quite important, because it’s a major problem that costs us billions of dollars. Rand Paul is implying that the study is somehow trying to find out if falls happen at all. But that’s not what the study is trying to find. It’s trying to find out the context and nature of the study so they can better prevent them.
Nima: Yeah, I mean the whole yuk-yuk nonsense is not done in any kind of good faith. It’s all a shtick, and not that we even need to put this in context, but I will also share that the entire budget at the time for the National Science Foundation was $8.5 billion. That is 1% of the Pentagon’s budget. So you can clearly see this is one tiny study that has serious, serious implications, and yet everything is just a ridiculous punchline.
Adam: Now, as science educators are quick to point out, and have been doing so recently, as they’ve seen these massive cuts from the demagogue to end all demagogues, the Trump-Musk administration, much of what is now considered major scientific breakthrough and life-altering applications for what would be perceived as frivolous research, or what we would call pure research, which on its face, doesn’t really have any kind of objective or seems silly or overly dorm-room-ish.
Nima: As Sebastian Furness of the University of Queensland, Australia, noted in an April 2024, article, and I’m going to paraphrase here, in the 1980s, John Pisano, a biochemist studying venom and a gastroenterologist named Jean-Pierre Raufman, worked with poisonous lizard venom from the Gila monster, a slow-moving reptile native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Their inquiry, which could have been easily mocked by a Rand Paul-type demagogue as the study of lizard spit, laid the groundwork for discovering a hormone-like molecule called exendin-4. This molecule stimulated insulin secretion via action at the same receptor as the GLP-1. Exendin-4 was not quickly metabolized by the body, and thus might be useful as a diabetic therapeutic, which eventually made what we now know as Ozempic, a drug so popular, the market cap of its Danish creator, Novo Nordisk, is $570 billion, bigger than the entire Danish economy itself.
Adam: Now, to be clear, something doesn’t have to be a blockbuster drug to have social value. The point is even that which is considered good by the libertarian logic of a Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, like creating a ton of market value, and of course, helping people reduce their weight and manage their type II, as well as apparently an increasing consensus that it helps with substance abuse, it can have applications and other values. It can somehow just, it can be useful just to kind of know, it doesn’t necessarily need to have capitalist value. But even by that logic, pure research is how you sort of begin the process. And even this work that created this sort of blockbuster drug has its own antecedents that date back 200 years.
Nima: And like most, if not all, research, it was preceded by previous inquiries, right, that laid the groundwork for later discoveries. For instance, as Furness noted, to get to the lizard-venom study, you had these antecedents. In the 19th century, French physiologist Claude Barnard sought to explain why large amounts of glucose, the main sugar in human blood, can be taken orally. 100 years ago, in 1922, Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered the hormone insulin. 10 years later, in 1932 Belgian researcher Jean La Barre identified that there was a hormone in the gastrointestinal tract responsible for stimulating insulin secretion. La Barre named this on creatine or incrétine, or incretin.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when new and sensitive ways to measure blood-hormone levels then allowed research to show a hormone called GIP was partly responsible for the incretin effect. This meant there must be another hormone whose discovery had to wait until the age of cloning in the 1980s. In cloning the GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide 1, biochemist Svetlana Mojsov demonstrated its stimulated pancreatic insulin secretion at 1/100 of the concentration needed for GIP.
Adam: Enter the lizard-spit research that makes this medicine possible. The point is, all of this research relied on previous research, which relied on previous research that relied on dozens and dozens of research that went nowhere, that went into a cul-de-sac or a black hole or led to some other thing that led to this other thing. It’s a non-linear dynamic. To a large extent, that’s kind of how human knowledge and increasing standards of living works. You keep at things, and then you build on them, and then the next person builds off them, and the next person builds off them.
And so when people attack this sort of, Lizard spit? What’s this study?, it feeds into this idea that every single research application or every single scientific inquiry has to have some jackpot that’s knowable, and that’s just not, and any scientist worth their salt will tell you this, that’s just not how science works. Now, should that mean that everyone gets to chase whatever kind of frivolous intellectual curiosity they have? No. That’s why there’s a process in place. But that process exists, and it is determined by scientists, not stupid fucking demagogues on the Senate floor.
Nima: And each one of those studies t on the road to diabetes treatment could have itself won Proxmire’s bullshit Golden Fleece Award. For instance, the study that isolated insulin for the first time was done by isolating insulin from dogs and then producing symptoms in dogs and then extracting insulin from the pancreases of cattle at slaughterhouses. So again, you can imagine the headlines. You know, blood drawn from dogs and dead cows gets funding in Toronto, like, this is the bullshit that we see all the time, these gotchas, these punchlines, these laughlines, because the entire point is just to denigrate science and research and demagogue the idea that taxpayer money should be going to this rather than to, you know, dropping more bombs on kids in Gaza. Because somehow that’s more noble, that’s less frivolous, as say, you know, figuring out how to save millions of lives.
Adam: We can’t be doing that. Which brings us to the Trump presidency and DOGE. Since Trump’s reelection, the NSF has become more vulnerable to attacks, particularly any initiative perceived as remotely associated with so-called DEI, which is this code for anything that impacts non- white, straight men. In April of 2025, the publication Nature reported that DOGE had frozen all new research grants and was reviewing grants for, quote, “terms associated with DEI,” end quote. Nature added this, quote,
The NSF has been under heightened scrutiny following the release of an October 2024 report authored by the office of Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas who now chairs the Senate Science Committee. The report alleged that 3,483 research grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024 by the NSF during the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, “went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets”, wasting $2 billion.
End quote. This all occurred after the agency had fired half of its probationary employees, temporarily frozen grant payments and cut the number of positions in its graduate research fellowship in half. Similar assaults have been happening in other scientific institutions, including the National Institutes of Health. The NIH’s new director, Jay Bhattacharya, has openly stated his support for HHS lead, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and willingness to cancel such essentials as diversity-related grants and clinical research in South Africa. In March 2025, just before Bhattacharya’s confirmation, Rand Paul questioned him about NIH spending. Paul created an imaginary dichotomy of false science and real science, claiming that supposedly useless sciences were the former. Let’s listen to that clip right now.
[Begin clip]
Rand Paul: This is from the NIH. $2.1 million, studying whether or not, when you’re at the Luby’s cafeteria and somebody in front of you sneezes on the food, are you more or less likely to take the food? I mean, that kind of stuff is ridiculous. You could have real science if you weren’t doing that, but that’s been going on for decades.
[End clip]
Nima: Now, soon after, Rand Paul would insist that the NIH solely devote resources to studying major diseases, as though there could be no relationship between the studies he dismissed as frivolous and the studies that he approved of. Here is another clip of Rand Paul making that distinction.
[Begin clip]
Rand Paul: The thing is, there’s lots of frivolous stuff out there that gives good science a bad name. I vote for almost no spending up here because it’s almost all inflated, but I have voted for money for the NIH, but they’ve got to do a better job. And one of the things I hope is, is that you will direct it towards diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, these big diseases. But I don’t think it’s just good people. We got to change the way the grants are such that somebody on the grant committee maybe should be, one from the major five diseases, should be on every behavioral study to make sure we’re not wasting it on you know, whether rats, lonely rats, use more cocaine than you know, well-liked rats use. I mean, that was from last year.
[End clip]
Adam: Now, obviously there’s an animal-rights criticism of animal testing, but clearly Rand Paul, who’s, you know, every third post on social media is him, like shooting a shotgun into some new animal, is not making that argument, right? This is not an animal-rights argument. We don’t want to be too aggressively pro-rat testing, obviously in terms of the animal-rights implications. But clearly those on the Right attacking animal-rights testing in this context, and all the other contexts mentioned, are not bleeding-heart members of PETA. So just to be clear, we’re going to address the arguments they’re making, not ones that maybe obviously those on the Left or in the pro-animal rights movement would be making. You’re studying the rats to study addiction, which kills millions of people and is actually really, really harming the US right now, with respect to fentanyl and opioids.
But Paul, like Lamar Smith and many before him, is primarily targeting the social sciences, which he suggests are somehow in opposition to the so-called real sciences of disease. But not only are they not opposed, they’re very much related. Social studies have historically broadened our understandings of poverty, which is a risk factor in many diseases, controlled the spread of infectious diseases like, say, I don’t know, a world-changing pandemic which can threaten people with diagnoses like cancer and other at-risk factors. In addition, social-science studies have helped reveal the dangers of sanctions and improve disaster response, among other benefits that directly relate to the impact of disease control. Because, again, anyone who studies these so-called big diseases, heart disease, again, smoking, poverty, what’s in our food, related social dynamics that become force multipliers to the underlying conditions. The idea that you could somehow separate social science from the so-called real science is a made-up thing. It’s not real. It’s just a way he can slash the federal budget and so private interests can come in and take over, because that’s what they ultimately want at the end of the day.
And this whole thing plays into this idea that there’s the kind of real sciences that presumably manly men do, and then there’s these other hifalutin, pie-in-the-sky, again, very much gender-coded, queer-coded, as kind of frivolous sciences, or kind of seen as overly fussy or unserious. And that’s just not, of course, how it works. And that’s not how inquiry works, and especially because we now know, more and more and more, the social and environmental reasons why people may just look at environmental pollution studies in certain low-income communities, those are directly related to increased heart disease, skin cancer, respiratory illness. I mean, we could go on and on and on. The idea that you could somehow isolate these two things is entirely without any empirical basis. It is a religious-like assertion, and the goal is to just reduce rich people’s taxes by cutting federal spending. That is literally all Ted Cruz and Rand Paul give a shit about.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’ll now speak with Brenda Ekwurzel, Senior Director of Scientific Excellence at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A climatologist, geologist, geochemist and hydrologist, Dr. Ekwurzel has shared her expertise on climate science across a wide range of research and media. Dr. Ekwurzel will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel. Brenda, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Brenda Ekwurzel: Thank you. It’s such a thrill to be here.
Adam: So we’ve been spending the past 30 minutes or so tracking the history of demagoguery and attacks on public science funding and really science in general, but with Musk and DOGE and Trump and the Heritage Foundation taking the reins of the federal government, these attacks have led to very real, the sort of culmination, the final boss, of this current, has led to indiscriminate cuts across the board, sort of too many to count, really, at this point. And of course, the parallel point of that is to create a chilling effect, especially around so-called political sciences, climate change, gender studies, things like that, to create self-censorship.
Now, the tactic we’re discussing on this episode, largely is something that’s been going on for decades. Rand Paul is a big fan of this, which is this idea of taking a seemingly absurd scientific study that superficially seems silly or unnecessary or, quote-unquote, “wasteful,” knowing full well that the public is not given any context about why it’s important. This is kind of Rand Paul’s bread and butter. Ted Cruz does this, a bunch of others do this, talking about half a million dollars for a study, to quote, “determine if lonely rats seek cocaine more than happy rats,” right? Cocaine rats. Oh, it’s a good sort of good water-cooler meme. But of course, this is one of the ways you study addiction, which is actually quite important, especially with the rise of the opioid crisis in the United States, etc, etc. There’s a million of these examples we’ve gone over. I want to talk a little bit about this tactic, because we are a media-criticism show, and this has been going on for decades, and it seems like it’s very effective. It’s kind of like the pop torts. There are these little water-cooler memes that are disseminated and given like an award every year for the most frivolous study. And it’s really this kind of suspender-slapping, like, Look at those fancy-pantsy scientists, and they’re wasteful while you work your real job. Talk about this tactic, and what do you think the sort of people who traffic in it are really banking on?
Brenda Ekwurzel: Yeah, that’s a fun example. I think, because as a scientific community, we’re studying everything from the center of the Earth that we live on all the way out to the outer parts of the universe, way back in time. So that’s a lot of critters and strange phenomena that you can make fun of anywhere, and that’s where it’s very easy. At the same time, even the scientific community sometimes will deter investigators from working on something that doesn’t seem important at the time. It’s not just politicians that might be worried about budgets. I think of the case of Jennifer Doudna, who was really intrigued by the story of the discovery of DNA as a little girl, and the scientific community was saying, DNA and studying that is the most important, and Dr Doudna really went off and said, Well, no one’s paying attention to RNA. I think that’s pretty fascinating. And it was a long road, and that ultimately led to breakthroughs that were able to bring vaccines, years of development and investment by the National Institutes of Health and others and the National Science Foundation and many inherently governmental funding of rare things that may or may not have a breakthrough, that helped accelerate getting vaccines that really save lives today.
Nima: Yeah, so this idea of, science doesn’t necessarily operate in a straight line, right that doing the research is the work, and you kind of follow where that leads. And it could be some place that you totally have no idea. You could be studying cocaine rats, but then find out about not only elements of addiction, but also you could find out about other aspects of health, other aspects of even behavior, that could have totally different implications. So what do you find in terms of the kind of public perception, or at least the pushing by some folks who are ideologically opposed to certain kinds of science, maybe all science, or just the idea of inquiry, the idea of knowledge and wisdom and learning, what do you think the misconception is that science operates in a straight line? You know, if you get funding, it should be for a study on something so specific that then the results will be about that one thing, which totally ignores the way that humans have learned for millennia.
Brenda Ekwurzel: Exactly. You think about the rat example. And there’s so many discoveries. First of all, not all rats are the same. There are differences in the makeup of a rat, in the brain of a rat. And if you find these differences, and you understand dopamine receptors, or how the firing of different neurons are going on in a rat, and they are a mammal and they are an analog for people before you want to start experimenting on people. Those early steps can sound funny or strange or it’s not going to lead to anything, but they are really important stepping stones to innovation and having major breakthroughs, that once it reaches daily lives, we’re still living off of, for example, the moonshot spending that was to deliver people out of low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit is a little bit easier than breaking beyond that and getting to another planetary body, like the moon, let alone landing objects on Mars and other things that science has delivered with the public trust that someday that might be benefiting us, and in other ways, just the awe of looking out at the stars and wondering all sorts of questions that you don’t have the time or energy to answer, and some people are allowed to do that.
Adam: Yeah, I want to talk a bit about this, because the whole thing is, they’re so greedy. Because in key ways, the way the US functions is the public subsidizes the underlying research that creates billionaires in Silicon Valley, in a couple counties in Virginia and New York. They already have a sweet deal. It’s effectively publicly subsidizing, even public education is publicly subsidizing, public, state universities, it’s publicly subsidizing the sort of groundwork of how you have a country with several thousand multi-millionaires and billionaires, but they’re sort of getting greedy now where it’s like, Okay, well, we don’t even want that. We want to take over everything. So there’s a line you get from Musk again. Musk is a little bit different because, of course, he has $35 billion in government contracts. He mostly wants to go after academia. He views as being leftwing-coded, gender studies, things like that, because he’s just, I think it’s fair to say at this point, there’s enough evidence, maybe the Sieg Heil at the inauguration, being chief among him, that he’s just kind of a white supremacist. But there’s a sort of idea that, like the private sector, can handle all this, that the pure sciences even, the quote-unquote, “pure sciences,” can be covered by, I don’t know, a consortium of Meta and OpenAI, who knows? What do you say to that? Because, like, it seems myopic to a lot of people, because this is not a conversation that’s happening in China or even in Europe. This is a very sort of a uniquely American conversation, in key ways, this kind of libertarian idea that, like, a consortium of private interests will do this sort of pure, quote-unquote, “pure science.”
Brenda Ekwurzel: Well, you raise a really, really critical understanding of how science works embedded in your questions, which is really brilliant. There have been breakthroughs in science when some of the hallmarks are that it’s transparent, it’s publicly shared, and anyone around the world who may have access, in a variety of ways, to some of these discoveries that they are personally interested in, and innovation occurs often really distant from the original funding for that science that had a breakthrough. And so much of the economies of the world, so many of the innovations and economic engines of jobs in the private sector and public sector have stemmed and can be traced back. In fact, the government tends to do that with most studies. They’re deciding, What should we fund? What should we not? There are parts of agencies that really look at that, what can be public benefit, and others are really looking at fundamental research that undertakes everything.
And so I would say that it’s something that, for example, you might think, wow, we just put all that money to have a Hubble Space Telescope, or putting these things in the sky, and they’re sending things that, how could that possibly relate to us? And I remember talking to, at an event that we were honoring a really esteemed researcher at a memorial service, and all the students and all their discoveries were being presented. It was truly remarkable. He studied black holes. And one of the scientists came up to me and was saying, Oh, well, you know, one of those telescopes we set up, that was really disappointing, that did not work very well. And we couldn’t achieve the original objectives because we just were stuck with this bum situation. But we discovered, in a way, with computing and post-processing, a way that we could see our original objective. And those innovations ended up being used in so many applications, such as mammograms, they now can have earlier detection because of what was spent on understanding space is now also helping people get earlier detection and save people’s lives.
Adam: Yeah, I want to talk about the counter to this, because I think one of the things that drives this, because, again, we can all agree that learning for its own sake is inherently valuable, and sometimes it’ll have downstream positive impacts, and sometimes it won’t. There’s going to be cul-de-sacs. That’s how learning works. Like I said, it’s not a linear process. But I want to talk a bit about the scarcity counterargument to that, and set aside the sort of Nazi wing of this, or the kind of religious Right who, who doesn’t like all the hifalutin eggheads, the kind of anti-intellectualism.
But I do think, especially as academia is increasingly defunded and gutted, and there’s a race to sort of, everyone’s jumping on funding, like it’s the last chopper out of Saigon, right? There is a scarcity element to this. And people say, Yeah, okay, in the abstract, assuming we have infinite funds, paying someone to learn about fifth-century manuscripts of some monastery in France, is like, Yeah, I would like that job, but I’m a pipe fitter, or I’m a waiter or I’m a truck driver, why should all this money go to the eggheads? There’s sort of like a class resentment, which on some level you can understand, because it’s like, Well, why do they get to have all the fun and get to sort of pursue their passions, even if it is good for society? There’s almost like a welfare queen, like they’re sort of living high on the hog, but me, I’m the sort of vaunted taxpayer, I don’t get to do those things. And so when the federal government decides who gets to have these funsy pursuits, what do you say to that argument? What do you say to that sort of scarcity argument? That someone ultimately has to do work that is tedious and boring and sucks, and that you know, so how do you sort of show it has social value?
Brenda Ekwurzel: Well, if you talk to any scientist, I always joke that it’s 99% tedium and 1% Eureka. [Laughter] Because I have spent many a time repeating measurements in the cold, up in the Arctic on an icebreaker, freezing to death, trying to collect repetitive samples that are hard to collect up in the Arctic to understand climate.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, it’s not as sexy as it appears in the movies, but nevertheless, there is a sort of class of people. I want to discuss this kind of class anger. There’s a class of people who seemingly look like again, when Rand Paul throws off these big numbers, who seemingly get paid to pursue something that they are on some level, there’s sort of an element of truth that there is a person deciding sort of who gets to do that in some level. And obviously, you and I would say that process is mostly transparent and mostly has a logic to it. If someone’s listening to this and does have a job that is pure drudgery without any Eureka at all, what would you say to them?
Brenda Ekwurzel: I would say, I totally understand. I would say, get involved and tell your leaders and your local community who make decisions about your local community budget, what do you want funded? We need to have more people demanding the science that is applicable that really will help people, and not having a few politicians deciding that the idea of representative government in theory is supposed to have that happen. And lots of times, we find that scientists are people, too, and they may be studying something that seems esoteric, and often they don’t get a choice on what they’re funding. My brother used to joke to me, Wow, after all these years of being in school, it seems the more you learn, the less you earn. Like, once I got my faculty position, he said, Really, after all that time, you went into debt and did that? It’s like an apprenticeship. It takes a long time for people to let you even do the work of a PhD or receive federal grants. It’s quite the vetting process.
At the same time, yes, you have a passion for the work people are willing to do many, many hours beyond what the taxpayer would, in theory, be funding, and you’re also delaying the time that you could even put money, maybe save a shekel here or there, and you’re doing it because you do like what you’re doing. At the same time, you don’t necessarily get to choose, while you’re doing this apprenticeship, you could be working for the military-industrial complex, because that’s what society is funding. They’re funding better weapons, or they’re funding this or that. You don’t necessarily know what your work is going to be used for. And then, really the public is part of the dialogue of, what are you training your scientists to do, and what do they get to study? And during times of scarcity, that’s when you find that the really junky art pieces do not stand the test of time. They get thrown out. Only the ones that people really love get passed down through the ages, even if they get discovered in an attic because someone said, I’m not going to throw out this one. This seems like a pretty good piece of painting.
Nima: Yeah, I kind of want to dig into the idea of what is often thought of as these kind of frivolous sides, rather than the kind of hard, more important science pieces, because I think this is where the Trump and Musk and DOGE narrative really comes to life, right? The idea that there is some stuff that just makes no sense, right? Like if you just think about it, you know, with your common sense, Why are we funding XYZ when really it should just be SpaceX? And so because of your work, Brenda, I would love to focus in on a lot of what the Union of Concerned Scientists are focused on, and that is everything from climate change, and anything that even vaguely touches on racism or sexism, gender studies, certainly anything that is now coded as DEI, this gets attacked instantly.
And we are speaking to you in late April of 2025, when there are new executive orders coming down rapidly, really targeting any nonprofit, any funder, any academic institution that is studying climate, that is trying to address policy that has to do with climate, also anything that has to do with race or gender. These things are being attacked in a way that, I think at least narratively, we don’t hear the same thing about what is maybe considered, quote-unquote, “less controversial” or apolitical, right? Things like particle physics or biomedicine, Big Pharma will obviously be able to continue, but as long as they don’t talk about gender, right? And so I’d love to kind of hear what you think and how your work has operated, especially as a climatologist, in terms of seeing these attacks coming, dealing with them, and the implications on not just your work, but the work of thousands, if not millions, of people dedicated to making this world healthier, safer, more knowledgeable about ourselves and our planet. What are the real implications of these attacks, both narratively and public perception, and also concretely in terms of public policy and funding?
Brenda Ekwurzel: Very good question. I, in my personal opinion, having worked on this for several decades, I thought it was an information gap problem, naively, as a scientist working on climate change, working on the climate change impacts, studying what’s happening and teaching students and grad students to continue the work, and we still do original research at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and we’re independent. We don’t have government money. We do not have corporate money. We have individual memberships and family foundations. Therefore we can do science that may not be funded, and we do do that work. And what I think is that, pay attention to what is being silenced, and why would funding want to be stopped in certain areas? And that’s where you want to look under the hood and say, Who’s going to benefit from people not knowing this knowledge? And that’s what’s really going on.
Adam: I want to ask about the state of science communication. We’re on the Left. We’ve criticized capital-S Science for, obviously, its ties to the military-industrial complex, or pushing STEM under you know, sort of military spending, and of course, the weaponization of certain scientific concepts by rightwing forces. But abstractly, we can all sort of agree, science, again, removed from that distinction, is objectively good. It increases standards of living. It can cure disease. You know, again, I don’t think it should come at the expense of bombing some village in Yemen, but nevertheless, again, it’s about who’s in charge, right? It’s about what the priorities are. Climate change, for example, being key among them of something that, yeah, scientists were really important to make it clear that if we don’t do something, the world’s going to boil. That seems very important.
But there is a distrust, especially in the United States, there is a current of anti-intellectualism that is sown and fueled by these reactionary forces, these rightwing think tanks funded by corporations. We could go down the list, as we did at the top of the show, that fund these organizations to sow distrust into the egghead community, this rampant anti-intellectualism. And popular science, kind of outward-facing science, or kind of Neil deGrasse Tysons, your Carl Sagans, you know, I think they do a lot of good stuff. Obviously, they sort of communicate very complex ideas. They explain why it matters. They provide stuff that’s interesting. Obviously, you have a lot of YouTube creators who do science education. But for whatever reason, the pro-science crowd, or the kind of idea of, like a generic public-good science is losing, and I think kind of losing badly, to this current of hyper-skepticism, what I think is misplaced skepticism, born from this idea that, yeah, they’re sort of correlated with modernity and sinister globalization forces or whatever.
What do you think, as someone who’s on that forefront, what do you think the science community can do better, really, to kind of maybe bridge that gap, or is this, the forces of reaction just too well-funded? Because they are extremely well-funded. I mean, the cynicism and the anti-intellectualism is not a natural feature of our culture. It is something that’s been contrived over decades. But what do you think they could do better, in your opinion?
Brenda Ekwurzel: Putting that responsibility on the scientists, it may not always be the scientists who people want to talk to. But there have to be people who understand scientists who can do some of the translation, because some scientists really should be just allowed to be free-roaming and doing the discoveries that take an inordinate amount of energy and capital to do that. What I would say is that there have been efforts to increase the communication with the public. Why are we doing this? If we were able to do that more efficiently, that would be one thing. But scientists have been, in the past, deliberately disrupted from talking to the public when they are in a federal agency. The scientific integrity has been compromised. If you look at, for example, the National Climate Assessment, we’re looking at it potentially being the mechanism, it’s one of the most, many, many entities, planners who want to know this information for their local communities depend on that National Climate Assessment that by Congress is mandated to come out every four years. And right now, the funding has been cut for the very people who help corral lots of scientists that are giving their time and energy to create that translation document that’s ready for policymakers and decision-makers, and it’s being cut right now. So what can the scientists do when they are not even allowed to gather and communicate? They care so much, they may even gather and communicate independently, because they care so much to get this information public. But it’s harder. It’s much harder.
Adam: Let me ask you a more blue-sky question, follow up then. If you had, someone said you personally, you have $10 million, you know, $50 million, what would you do to improve the public’s knowledge of what the eggheads are up to and why it matters?
Brenda Ekwurzel: That’s literally why I joined Union of Concerned Scientists. [Laughter] Because we invest in making sure that we have scientists and analysts engineers looking at all the original data the scientific community is creating, as well as do our own analysis and figure out, Guess what? We don’t have to mine as much lithium for these EV batteries, because if we really have policies to recycle the batteries that are being used in all sorts of places that had a circular economy, we could meet the demands of the growing electrification of the United States. Just looking at analysis in the United States, and you can find those reports for free on our website. We make sure when we publish, we pay for the no firewall, that the public has access to whatever we’re publishing in a peer-review journal, or publishing it through our, you know, following the transparency and the scientific integrity and external reviews and all that that happens with science for any reports that we put up. That’s why we invest and that’s why I joined that, because I saw these forces happening. I didn’t understand why. Why are people not paying attention to all the science work that they funded and paid for, and we’re telling them about it?
A lot of times, peer-reviewed papers are not really, that’s just very short communications between people who are really in the field, and taking the time to make it understandable to the public is what we do all the time at Union the Concerned Scientists. Yet academic centers, they have communication experts to help get that information out to reporters, and I think more scientists should take time talking to podcasts. I mean, I love your name, Citations Needed, because it signals that you care about what’s behind it. And you’re going to tell people, and you’re going to explore and ask the questions. Where people are asking questions, where they want information, I believe that’s the science that should be funded. And that communication up to the politicians that are deciding where the funding should go, that should be involved with the public, and we should have that vigorous dialogue, because scientists really want to help, and we don’t always know what needs to be studied. We just say, Hey, if you have a question like this, National Climate Assessment, IPCC, you need us to tell what country emissions are contributing to how much sea level rise is going on. We can do that calculation, all right, we’ll go do it.
Nima: Yeah, I think it’s so critical, as you said earlier, thinking about who benefits from people not knowing certain things, right? That extinguishing that kind of light of wisdom, of illumination, of innovation and inquiry, who is benefiting? And I think you know, when it comes to climate science, obviously you can draw a pretty straight line between, say, fossil-fuel companies and other corporations that benefit from the boiling of the planet, not wanting more public knowledge about what they are doing and its effects on people, effects on our environment. And I think that it’s so critical to kind of investigate that, because there are so many other places that maybe the straight throughline is not so apparent, but it is still there. So I think that question of who is going to benefit, if you don’t know certain things, as kind of a guidepost to why these executive orders are happening, why these anti-intellectual and anti-academic, anti-science policies are being put in place, and then, as we said, the communications and the narrative around it, why is that so important to kind of instill in the public. Before we let you go, Brenda, we’d love to hear about, you mentioned a little bit, but just some of the things that the Union of Concerned Scientists are working on right now, especially, it’s a very difficult world right now for you all to operate, I’m sure. But what can folks look out for? How can they learn about your work and also potentially become a supporter?
Brenda Ekwurzel: Sure. We are working on so many things. We have a global security program that is looking very deeply into what are worker safety within some of the national labs who are dealing with the nuclear materials that are being discussed in the public sphere about what are the policies that might be happening around nuclear weapons and defense and things like that, looking at the cumulative impacts that the Environmental Protection Agency has been working on with communities, that it’s not just one toxin, it’s many toxins that are coming from the fossil-fuel industry or chemical industry at places. What can we do to help study not just one element at a time? What is the cumulative impact? We have scientists working with scientists within the EPA on those types of issues, and a really important report that’s supposed to be coming out. We’re looking at making sure that that information is not lost. If something’s cut, or funding losses, we’re working with people who are trying to preserve data, because we see that what scientists care a lot about is if there’s long-term data that people are used to having access to, we want to make sure that people still have access to that data. We ourselves do a lot of our research depending on government data, and we do not want to see those data-access points or websites going down. So we’re very concerned about that.
And we are just in general, the whole scientific enterprise of the United States has been such a bastion of innovation, and at very low cost, actually, we have less people working in the federal government for science than earlier and yet, the innovation and the advances are phenomenal. You get a lot of return for your taxpayer dollar, in my opinion. We also are working on, how can we inform policy about trying to grow the energy infrastructure and the jobs of the future that are already needed right now, just to fund data centers, more people converting their homes to electric appliances that are more energy-efficient, less polluting and toxic, and improving the health costs. Also keeping people safe during heatwaves. We worry about extreme events, and making sure people have the latest information. People who have preconditions that might put them more at risk during a heatwave for cardiorespiratory or any sort of, say, ground-level ozone or smog and heat combined, you could really have some more lost work days due to children having to go to emergency rooms or asthma attacks, things like that. We work with the scientific community on issues of great concern to the public.
Nima: That really tells the story. I think folks should definitely go check out the Union of Concerned Scientists. You do incredible work. We have been speaking with Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel, Senior Director of Scientific Excellence at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A climatologist, geologist, geochemist, hydrologist, Dr. Ekwurzel has shared her expertise on climate science across a wide range of research and media, from ABC to NPR, New York Times to Washington Post and so many other places, including now Citations Needed. So thank you so much, Brenda, for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Brenda Ekwurzel: Thank you so much. Take care.
[Music]
Adam: Yeah, I think the current of anti-intellectualism and that bullshit, Foghorn Leghorn, Well, you know, I’m just a simple country senator, and I don’t understand. I mean, I just fucking hate that smarmy bullshit. I mean, I hate it, like, deep into my soul. You know, if you want to make an argument, a scientific argument, about this study or that study, then do that. But engage it on its actual terms. Don’t play to people’s ignorance. Don’t play to people’s cartoon idea of how scientific inquiry and how the eggheads do things. Be somewhat intellectually honest. God forbid, talk to the person you’re criticizing and try to accurately represent their position. I mean, it is just pure, raw, uncut demagoguery.
Nima: As is the idea that there’s just satchels of money just being doled out for bullshit, as if obtaining funding for this does not take an incredible amount of work, and also is done by people who are scientists and doctors and researchers who know what the fuck they’re doing, this idea that it’s just like, Oh, you want to study the, you know, farts of mice in Albuquerque? Okay, here’s $2 billion. That’s not what’s fucking happening, unless maybe that study could, you know, cure cancer one day.
Adam: I mean, what’s important to note is that in a lot of countries and a lot of cultures, this isn’t really a thing. This kind of runaway anti-intellectualism is in many ways uniquely American. There isn’t to say there isn’t anti-intellectualism in other cultures, but it’s completely ascendant and in charge and has power in a way unmatched in any other country. Maybe you could argue it’s more Anglo-American, but I’m sure we export it to certain countries as well. But there’s this runaway anti-intellectualism that hates and is suspicious of science, because it’s an attack on the liberal state. It’s an attack on the social state. It’s an attack on the pillars of the liberal and administrative state. So if you can attack those people, smear them, insult them, and, frankly, kick them off the payroll, you weaken what you view as your opposition, and you open up space for privatization and for, frankly, just a more ignorant public.
Nima: Yeah, it’s the capitalist version of the Catholic Church’s attacks on Galileo in the 17th century. There’s just a different power structure that wants to keep itself embedded, and therefore any kind of dissent or perceived heresy from that gets dismissed, attacked and threatened, all with the veneer of, you know, Hey, we’re just looking out for the real people here. And there are these other people who are trying to poison your mind.
Adam: Yeah, they’re playing to the cheap seats. And of course, they more or less just leave the Defense Department alone. It’s a way of engaging in austerity politics without touching any traditional centers of power, right? There isn’t some meaningful pro-science lobby. You have pro-science groups. But relative to the oil and gas lobby, the military-industrial complex, the polluter lobby, the, you know, the sort of interior industrial lobby, the Koch brothers, the polluters, they have so little power that if you’re going to want to play the game of anti-corruption and austerity and finding fraud, waste, and abuse, you’re going to pick off the lowest-hanging fruit. And of course, the eggheads, who most people are distrustful and resentful of for a variety of cultural reasons, are the easiest target. It’s the kind of easiest thing to demagogue, because, you know that the media isn’t really going to follow up on a lot of this. There’s rare occasions where they do it. You know you can just do this superficial, you know, Shrimp on treadmills, and everyone goes hrr hrr hrr, and then you move on, and no one really thinks about it. And it’s again, it’s easy, it’s cheap, and it plays to the fucking cheap seats. And so invariably, we’re gonna get it for the end of time, until we all boil ourselves to death.
Nima: On that happy note, that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, May 28, 2025.
