My friend and AEI colleague Tony Mills — director of the AEI Center for Technology, Science, and Energy — has been on a tear lately. Today, I share four of Tony’s essays published in the past month on public trust in science, reform of NIH, COVID’s long-term costs, and how virologists lost the gain-of-function debate.
Enjoy, and see you in the comments!
The Strange New Politics of Science (Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2025, with Price St. Clair)
Surprising as it might seem today, Republicans expressed higher trust in science than Democrats until the turn of the century, eventually dipping lower around 2008, according to the General Social Survey. And while some Democrats have also become more distrustful in recent years—especially since the COVID-19 pandemic—the gap between the two parties has nevertheless grown extreme. Over the past decade, trust in science has emerged as a central dividing line in our society, fueling a strange new politics of science. . .
What is causing this polarization of trust in science? Common explanations point to ignorance, “anti-science” attitudes, anti-government ideology, manipulation by special interests, or some combination thereof, frequently couched in clichés such as “science denial” or a “war on science.” But a closer look at the data suggests that while these explanations do contain partial truths, they ultimately fail to make sense of what is going on in public life today. The polarization of trust in science is a complex phenomenon—one that is both shaped by, and increasingly also shaping, our political identities.
We suggest that a central, though often overlooked, factor driving these dynamics is the wariness a growing share of the public exhibits toward powerful institutions—scientific and otherwise—they perceive as insensitive, unresponsive, or even hostile to their own priorities and concerns. This situation, coming in the wake of large socioeconomic, political, and cultural shifts, cannot be remedied by the scientific enterprise alone. But it should prompt the individuals and institutions that comprise the scientific enterprise to consider how to rebuild trust and assure integrity in this new environment.
Read the whole thing here.
The New NIH Director Has His Work Cut Out For Him (The New Atlantis, April 3, 2025)
In the wake of Covid, trust in scientific and medical experts has eroded and become starkly polarized, threatening the ability of science agencies to sustain broad public support. The National Institutes of Health in particular has become a lightning rod, due to the controversial roles of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins during the pandemic as well as the agency’s funding of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Many Americans have grown reluctant to delegate political power to such expert bureaucracies.
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House and Republican majorities in Congress, it seemed almost inevitable that the federal scientific establishment was in for a shake-up. President Trump’s selection of Jay Bhattacharya — best known today as a critic of the Covid response, but also a longtime advocate of science reform — to lead the NIH was a hopeful sign that the administration was serious about reform. These conditions created a historic opportunity to overhaul an institution that, though essential to scientific and medical progress, has for decades resisted many of the reforms that experts from across the ideological spectrum have argued are badly needed. But these hopeful prospects for reforming the NIH gave way to something else in the two months before Bhattacharya took office this week.
A barrage of unilateral executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and capping indirect costs have engendered chaos and confusion not only inside the NIH but also in the thousands of universities, research laboratories, and medical schools across the country that receive NIH funding. . .
Read the whole thing here.
We Still Haven’t Reckoned with Covid’s Costs (National Review, March 27, 2025)
It is often said that a major problem with our pandemic response was that science got politicized. A bigger problem was that our politics got scientized — and both sides were complicit. By reducing disagreements over policy to disputes over facts, experts, along with journalists, politicians, and their critics, effectively suppressed the moral and political dimensions of pandemic decision-making. The result in many instances was not rule by experts but rather rule by no one — a tyranny without a tyrant, as Hannah Arendt once put it — which produced controversial decisions with insufficient political accountability and drove many Americans to lose faith in their governing institutions.
The slogan “Follow the science” infamously became a rallying cry of those on the left — a badge of tribal affiliation as well as a way to rationalize their policy preferences while dismissing dissent. But it isn’t frequently acknowledged how susceptible many critics on the right are to the same style of thinking.
Read the whole thing here.
How Virologists Lost the Gain-of-Function Debate, (The New Atlantis, Spring, 2025)
In the years leading up to Covid, the debate over gain-of-function research played out in the pages of scholarly journals and inside Washington bureaucracies in a largely technical language befitting those expert institutions. The result of this long and often highly fractious dispute was a new policy framework, released in May 2024, that was designed to strike the right balance between benefits and risks. That framework was in the early stages of implementation when Donald Trump won the presidency a second time. Now, there may be no balance left to strike.
Trump — along with key advisors such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Jay Bhattacharya, his nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health — is poised to ban gain-of-function research via executive order. Whether such an order effectively becomes the permanent policy of the administration or gets refined by executive agencies into yet another policy framework remains to be seen. But one thing appears almost certain: the virologists who argued so vehemently for the importance of their research have suddenly found themselves completely sidelined.
How did we get here? Why did the virologists lose the debate over gain-of-function research? And what lessons can we glean from their failure? The history of this debate, and my conversations with experts on both sides of it, point to a conclusion that many in the scientific community may find hard to swallow: that the governance of gain-of- function research was never a technical problem to be solved internally by specialists themselves, however pure their motives and however valuable their expertise. Rather, it was always a political issue of public concern, requiring accountability by the scientists and moral deliberation by the country. By failing to fully grapple with this reality, the experts brought upon themselves the crisis of public doubt that was looming over them.
Read the whole thing here.
More from Tony Mills in the podcast below.