Who is going to be advising him?
Meanwhile, Trump is leaving executive branch science jobs unfilled, which means he has no science advisers on staff.
Mr. Trump’s first budget proposes slashing $5.8 billion, or 18 percent, from the National Institutes of Health and $900 million, or about 20 percent, from the Energy Department’s Office of Science, which runs basic research at the national laboratories. The Environmental Protection Agency would be cut by 31 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump issued executive orders that roll back Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have closed hundreds of coal-fired power plants in an effort to curb planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
Those actions have been taken without advice or guidance from scientists and engineers inside the White House. The few remaining policy advisers have ceased distributing daily memos on policy issues like climate change, machine-learning regulation, or the ethics of big data collection.
“They are flying blind when it comes to science and tech issues,” said Kumar Garg, who left the Office of Science and Technology Policy as a senior adviser after the election.
And they’re hardly a scientifically literate crowd.
Obama expanded the office from 50 people to 130.
Mr. Obama turned to the science office during crises like the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa; the 2011 nuclear spill in Fukushima, Japan; and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
The staff of the science office developed the White House’s recommendations for regulation of commercial drones and driverless cars at the Transportation Department. Last year, the staff produced an attention-grabbing report that raised concerns about the threat that robots posed to employment and that advocated retraining Americans for higher-skilled jobs. The staff also put on the annual White House science fair.
Trump doesn’t understand enough about science to understand how it can be useful to him. He doesn’t even understand enough about it to understand that he doesn’t understand.
Under Mr. Obama, the science and technology office included 19 policy advisers in the environment and energy division, 14 in the national security and international affairs division, nine in the science division and 20 in the technology and innovation division.
“We are all sitting on the edge of our seats hoping nothing catastrophic happens in the world,” said Phil Larson, a former senior science and technology adviser to Mr. Obama. “But if it does, who is going to be advising him?”
Oh I’m sure Steve Bannon will step up.
The insane leading the blind and deaf. One former president at least had qualifications as a “nucular engineer”. With all the life-long training this one has had we can only hope he knows one end of a golf club from the other.
Short-term, bottom line “thinking.” If it looks like an expense with no immediate return for him, then it’s expendable. Increasing the military budget give him more toys to play with. I’m sure we’ll be getting photos of Trump behind the wheels of tanks, planes and submarines as and when the photo-ops are scheduled.
The decision to destroy infrastructure should take the deepest and most informed thought. I’ve had to disassemble teams because someone felt they were not immediately profitable, only to find – surprise sur fucking prise – that we’d lost that expertise for good when it was realised we needed it after all.
This happened several times when I worked in academia and we didn’t just lose that knowledge and expertise from the university, we lost it from the world. Infrastructure isn’t something you can just rebuild. First, you have to rebuild the means of building infrastructure.
Doesn’t every toddler know this?