Europe must learn from America’s assault on science

In June 2026, several prominent diabetes researchers, including Steven Kahn, editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, were removed by police from the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) after distributing copies of an editorial [1] criticizing the Trump administration’s policies towards biomedical research [2]. The incident was striking not because it was wholly unprecedented but because of where it happened. A scientific conference devoted to one of the world’s major chronic diseases became a site where dissent over science policy was treated as misconduct. The ADA sought to justify this action by appealing to its duty to be ‘non-partisan’ [3]. Yet, while many would agree that scientific institutions should avoid party-political campaigning, they cannot be neutral about the conditions that make science possible: independent peer review, freedom from political punishment, transparent methods, open communication, and protection from conflicts of interest. When these conditions are attacked, silence is not neutrality; it is institutional acquiescence.

This is not only an American story. It is a warning to Europe. It is not just that science can be defunded, censored, or ignored. It is that science can be captured while being praised: by redefining rigour, relocating authority from independent experts to political appointees, and making institutions pay a price for dissent.

The most effective assaults on science do not always present themselves as such. Often, they claim to restore integrity, objectivity, and methodological discipline. The danger lies not in the language itself, but in who gains the power to define it, enforce it, and punish deviation. The pattern is by now familiar [4]. First, claim the language of scientific rigour. Second, relocate authority from independent experts to political appointees. Third, demand institutional compliance. Fourth, describe resistance as elitism, bias, ideology, or obstruction. What follows illustrates how this sequence is being enacted across the American scientific and policy landscape.

The tobacco, alcohol, and fossil fuel industries have long claimed the language of scientific rigour, promoting what they portray as good research practice, which in reality seeks to make it impossible to prove the harm associated with their products [5–7]. Such doublespeak is not only a well-documented feature of science denialism [8], but also a feature of authoritarian regimes seeking to control and redefine language. The Trump administration, similarly, claims to be pursuing ‘gold standard science’. What scientist could object to transparency, reproducibility, freedom from conflicts of interest, rigorous peer review, or clear communication of uncertainty? The problem is who is given the authority to define it, enforce it, and punish deviation [9].

In May 2026, the White House Office of Management and Budget decided that it would. It determined that the ultimate decisions on awards of federal grants, including research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, would lie with political appointees [10]. Scientific review would be solely advisory. We can see the consequences playing out in real time. In the last year, ‘gold standard science’ has been invoked in decisions affecting tobacco regulation, vaccination policy, environmental protection, and climate science. The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed restrictions on flavoured tobacco products [11], members of the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices have been replaced (ostensibly to ‘restore trust in vaccines’ [12]), protections against PFAS, or ‘forever chemicals’, have been delayed or withdrawn [13], and a major NOAA climate portal has been dismantled [4].

The Trump administration has deployed a wide range of tools to enforce compliance. Universities have faced threats to federal funding, tax status, accreditation, patents, international students, and research partnerships. Some have accepted financial penalties, revised disciplinary procedures, altered admissions practices, abandoned diversity commitments, or handed information to federal authorities. Others have resisted, often at substantial cost. For instance, Harvard University’s legal fees increased from $80 m in 2024 to $127 m in 2025 as it tried to counter the Trump Administration’s attacks [14], and this does not capture the many lawsuits launched early in 2026. This is part of a wider pattern. Law firms, which might have been expected to defend legality and constitutional norms, have in some cases accommodated executive pressure. Corporations, despite their enormous resources, have often prioritized political access and advantage over democratic responsibility.

Yet, while those who resist have been attacked, there have been judges, scientists, some universities, civil society groups, and movements such as Stand Up for Science who have shown that resistance remains possible [15].

Europe must not just be a spectator of these events. The United States remains a major global contributor to biomedical science, public health research, environmental monitoring, pandemic preparedness, and regulatory standards. When American scientific institutions are weakened, the consequences travel. Evidence networks are disrupted. International collaborations are chilled. Research agendas shift. Young scientists reconsider careers. Public trust in expertise is damaged far beyond national borders.

Europe has been here before. Two decades ago, concerns about political interference in American science under the Bush administration were already framed in Europe as a matter of public health [16]. The difference today lies in scale, speed, and the explicitness with which political authority seeks to redefine the standards by which evidence is judged.

There is also a deeper reason for concern. The American experience exposes a vulnerability that exists in all democracies: institutions often fail to defend themselves until it is too late. Universities, journals, professional associations, courts, public agencies, and scientific bodies can resist authoritarian pressure, but history shows that many capitulate. This can be a consequence of fear, opportunism, or ideological alignment, or simply a wish to avoid controversy [17]. Democratic backsliding often proceeds not through spectacular rupture, but through executive aggrandisement, legal manipulation, and institutional accommodation [18, 19].

This matters profoundly for public health. The health of populations depends on systems that can generate, assess, communicate, and act on evidence. When vaccine evidence is distorted, children are harmed. When environmental risks are suppressed, communities are exposed. When research on health inequalities is defunded, marginalized groups disappear from policy. When international research is curtailed, preparedness weakens. Recent analyses of the Trump era have described the dismantling of evidence and institutions as a direct threat to public health, one that requires both reconstruction and resistance [15, 20].

The United Kingdom offers a particularly important warning to Europe. The rise of Reform UK and the collapse of traditional party loyalties make it unwise to dismiss the possibility of a populist radical right party entering government. The UK lacks a written constitution. Many scientific, health, and environmental public bodies depend on ministerial appointments, government funding, and conventions of restraint [21]. Those conventions, sometimes described as the ‘good chaps’ theory of government [22], presume that those in power will respect expertise, due process, and the public interest [23]. Recent British history has already shown how fragile that assumption can be. Reform UK has also signalled admiration for aspects of the US approach, while proposing measures that could weaken legal and institutional safeguards, including withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and changes to equality protections [23].

The wider European context is no safer. Hungary and Turkey have shown how universities, courts, media, and professional bodies can be weakened through law, finance, intimidation, and elite complicity [24, 25]. These cases should not be dismissed as peripheral to Western Europe [24, 25]. In Germany, Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) in their 2026 manifesto for the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, have promised to defund the ‘climate rescue industry,’ abolish commissioners for equality, disability rights and climate, dissolve ‘unnecessary’ public bodies, abolish gender science, explicitly fund research critical of climate change, and replace competitive research grants with more direct core funding to restore ‘political neutrality’ [26].

The experiences of Hungary and Turkey show how quickly democratic institutions can be hollowed out while the formal language of legality remains intact. They also show how universities and expert institutions can become convenient populist scapegoats: portrayed as arrogant, foreign, ideological, or hostile to ‘the people’. The AfD explicitly describe universities as ‘captured by progressive ideology’ [26]. The populist attack on expertise is never only about expertise. It is about changing who has the authority to describe reality.

Europe needs to recognize the naivety of viewing the defence of science as a matter of better communication, whereby populist politicians can be swayed by reason. Better messaging will not protect science if a populist government has set out to undermine science itself or if the very institutions that produce and interpret that evidence can be captured through political appointees, funding or regulatory pressures.

Scientific bodies, academies, journals, universities, public health agencies, and professional associations across Europe should now ask themselves some uncomfortable questions:

• What legal protections do they have?

• How dependent are they on government funding?

• What would they do if their leaders were investigated, defamed, or prosecuted?

• Could they defend members who refused political interference?

• Do they have alliances across countries, disciplines, and institutions?

• Have they agreed, in advance, where engagement ends, and complicity begins?

This last question is decisive. Authoritarian populism thrives when each institution believes it can survive by remaining quiet a little longer, while its peers fall. The ADA’s subsequent statement in our opening example was a masterclass in how to say nothing [3]. There is a difference between declining party-political alignment and remaining silent when scientific independence itself is under attack. Silence then becomes policy. Caution becomes obedience. Neutrality becomes alignment. The defence of science requires the opposite: visible solidarity, transparent standards, independent review, and a willingness to bear costs before the damage becomes irreversible. This is why anticipatory obedience is so dangerous: it gives power to what it has not even had to demand yet. Science is not protected by calling it ‘gold standard’. It is protected by institutions that can say no [27].

What is happening in the United States is the attempted conversion of science into a political tool, tolerated when useful, punished when inconvenient, and redefined when it resists. The danger lies not only in false claims, anti-vaccine rhetoric, or attacks on particular agencies. It lies in the political capture of the very criteria by which truth is judged. Europe must treat this as an urgent warning. It’s not just that it could happen here. It already happened here 100 years ago, and it took decades to recover. It happened in Hungary this century. It is happening now in Serbia [28] and Turkey [25]. We have no excuse for failing to prepare.

Conflict of interest: None declared.

Funding

No additional funding.

Data availability

Not applicable.