Stand Up For Science: Part 1

Post 03; stand up for science

You have that, "I can't believe I have to protest this shit in 2025" face and I feel the same way.

So said a friend of mine when he saw my new Facebook selfie back in March.

And I know that the thousand of us who gathered on the UC Berkeley campus on March 7th, and thousands more across the country that day, were all feeling it.

Hence the protests and the speeches. The scientific community had already seen mass government agency firings, and mass cancellations of research projects, during the Project 2025 Regime’s first six weeks in office. We knew that the firings and cancellations were ideological and not driven by analysis of scientific goals or outcomes. They were not driven by the tough choices that face a serious country with serious governance trying to balance a budget or provide a visionary technology roadmap.

Whether each of us as individuals had put it together yet or not, the same six weeks had seen the regime launch a Trump family meme coin, gut and manipulate watchdog agencies, weaponize the DOJ to reinvigorate political retribution, and declare the nonexistent national emergency that would allow the build-up of new immigration enforcement policies and establish a domestic military force accountable only to the executive. Executive orders were signed: these removed or reversed environmental and privacy constraints on corporations, attacked birthright citizenship, attacked reproductive health rights and policies, pumped markets with crazy tariff proclamations. Project 2025 is a specific plan to capture our democracy’s institutions, traumatize the Federal workforce, cut up our government, and deed the fresh scorched earth to the aristocracy. It’s a plan that lost no speed coming out of the gate, whether scientists were watching all these moving parts or not.

Now that I mention it, recalling all the assembled protest signs, I think a lot of us were watching it all right!

We scientists tend to speak in our own defense by saying that scientific inquiry has idealistic motives and that it drives progress and saves lives. We are always a small and quiet constituency in the greater scheme of things and are now in danger of being completely inaudible.

I advertised this blog to my science-supporting professional network and my science-supporting friends, with a promise to relay actions I authentically believe in. That begins today! There will be links I want you to click, and real people who will be grateful that you clicked them. (TL/DR: LINK)

The focal point of this story will be the EPA.

The story of the Environmental Protection Agency is one that can be told from a couple different angles. First, it’s in the news right now. I can start with the YOU ARE HERE, and go back in time to the publication of a letter of support – which is still up, and I’ll encourage you to sign.

You’ll become aware, if you aren’t already, of Stand Up For Science (standupforscience.net) and some other things that are happening.

And, I get to harsh on current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, with a fun story from the democratic primary days of 2018 when a number of grassroots activists and Democrats on Long Island were determined to unseat then-Rep. Zeldin from New York’s 1st Congressional district.

Before starting up this little time machine however, a few words about what it means to me, to authentically believe in actions we can take. Because there are two buckets I use to sort these actions and we need them both.

Bucket one

In bucket one: actions inside the still-functioning, not-dead-yet, government system. Calls to Congress. Comments on Proposed Executive Rules. State legislature bills, initiatives, and lobbying. Supporting candidates we believe in, for 2025, 2026, and 2028.

Every time the Project 2025 regime attacks an institution, we will be deluged with pleas to defend it. We needed to call about cuts to public broadcasting and we needed to call about removals of vaccine experts from panels and we needed to call when people were rendered to foreign death camps and we needed to call about too many things. Some of us call our Democrat in office, and they are already fighting hard to put tourniquets where the bleeding is the worst. Some us of call an R and we know they’re all-in with Trump and it seems a waste of time.

Actions in this bucket will not always work, but they will sometimes work, and everything that can be saved is worth saving. Just this month, Nature reported that massive cuts to NSF and NASA requested by the President were not supported by the US Senate Committee on Appropriations. According to the Nature report of 10 July:

If enacted, Trump’s proposal would have a devastating effect on US science; earlier this week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science released an analysis suggesting that the proposal would cut all federally funded basic research by one-third. Over the past several weeks, scientists, advocacy groups and lobbyists have been pleading with members of Congress to protect funding for research agencies. The campaign seems to be working: under the Senate committee’s bill, the NSF’s budget would drop by only 0.67%, rather than by the 57% Trump requested, and many NASA space and Earth-science missions would continue, rather than being shut down. “This bill protects key science missions,” Jerry Moran, a Republican senator for Kansas, said at the meeting.

And according to their update for 15 July,

[T]he US House of Representatives subcommittee that deals with the same science agencies discussed in this story put forward its numbers as well, which still need to be reconciled with the Senate’s. Under the House proposal, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) would be cut by about one-quarter, to US$7 billion. At NASA, the House would keep the agency’s funding flat at $24.8 billion overall, but cut its science programmes by 18%, to $6 billion. At NOAA, the House proposed cutting the agency’s operations, research and facilities by 6%, to $4.15 billion.

See the article from Nature at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02171-z .

Phoning our own Representatives and Senators: all good. Calls on issues will be logged. Organized campaigns to call on a given issue within a short time frame will be noted, will communicate that constituents know what is happening, will get press.

Same can be said for phoning Senators in other states. Their decisions affect us all, and their staffers will take the calls. I like to narrow it down by choosing a pertinent Committee, and using the Majority (R) members as a call list.

(Some activists will advise you to call House members in districts not your own, but I feel that there won’t be much return on the call. There are more-polite staffers and less-polite staffers but either way, they will ask for your address, and they log only the in-district calls.)

This bucket, of in-system actions, we have to believe in, even in our most cynical moods. There’s a temptation to believe that fair elections are finished and no one in office has to be accountable, but we can observe by the Electeds’ behavior how their heads are still wired: they DO believe that staying in office is desirable, and not guaranteed. Keep in mind that Elon Musk tried to buy a high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, and failed.

Collectively, we must do things in bucket one. If we care about NSF and NASA budgets, we should call some more – this is not yet resolved. Joining an advocacy organization like Stand Up For Science will organize and coordinate such actions. Remember that Project 2025 wants to take our government apart. Any scenario where the staff and the funding stay in place even a little longer, it’s a win. Join some orgs.

Bucket two

In bucket two: actions that we can file under “good trouble” and under “holding the line.”

A federal employee or other person with comparable responsibilities (for example, a journalist at a major newsroom) is holding the line if they remain in their role for as long as they can (something Timothy Snyder advises, in resisting fascism), and while in that office, they work as much as possible for the oath they swore to the institution, rather then speeding the demise of their institution as they will be pressured to do by its new masters and its antagonists.

Good trouble is nonviolent but disruptive. Let me quote The Tennessean for their take on the words of former Representative and civil rights activist John Lewis (1940-2020):

When Lewis spoke of "good trouble," he usually spoke of going against the grain and pushing for changes to our society, even if it meant being labeled a troublemaker or even going to jail. It was also his way of encouraging people to take action and speak out against injustices, even if it meant getting into "necessary trouble."

One of the most poignant examples of when Lewis used the phrase came when he returned to Selma for the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where Lewis and other Civil Rights activists were beaten by Alabama law enforcement during the first march for voting rights.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way,” Lewis urged the crowd from the Edmund Pettus Bridge just before his death in 2020. “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

My primary purpose with this post is to get you to click a link at Stand Up For Science.

My secondary purpose is to motivate reading and sharing some articles by Mike Brock that shine bright lights on the plain facts that what we’re fighting to preserve ought to be recognized as a specific political philosophy, which he terms Liberalism; and that fighting fire with fire means that when our opponent puts a grenade on the chessboard, we don’t try to capture it with our bishop. We recognize that what had once been chess is now something other and we must respond accordingly.

“Liberalism” in Brock’s context possibly doesn’t mean what you expect, so let me invite you to look at this quote, below, and at some point read the full posts: What Is Liberalism? and The Emergency Ethics of Democratic Defense.

Liberalism begins with a simple but revolutionary recognition: human beings are fallible, disagreement is inevitable, and yet we must somehow organize society together. This creates what I call the fundamental liberal problem: How do conscious beings pursue truth and build institutions across disagreement, uncertainty, and difference?

Every other political philosophy tries to solve this problem by eliminating it. Authoritarians impose a single vision through force. Religious fundamentalists appeal to divine revelation. Technocrats defer to expert knowledge. Revolutionary movements promise to create new humans who won’t disagree. But liberalism does something different—it builds systems that work because people disagree, not despite their disagreement.

We are advocating for constitutional constraints on power, independent institutions, free expression, open debate, rule of law, and democratic accountability. Project 2025 is trying to eliminate all of these. We don’t get out of this situation unless we work with actions from bucket two.

The Staff of the EPA Held The Line and made Good Trouble.

And they were sanctioned for it.

Let’s start telling it at the YOU ARE HERE:

• The EPA announced, 18 July, that a reduction in force will delete over three thousand jobs in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development. Budget will be reduced by $748.8 million.
  

• NPR reported, 20 July, that “The agency is closing the Office of Research and Development, which analyzes dangers posed by a variety of hazards, including toxic chemicals, climate change, smog, wildfires, indoor air contaminants, water pollution, watershed destruction and drinking water pollutants. The office also manages grant programs that fund universities and private companies.”
  
  Speaking of private companies, NPR quotes the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers: that organization "supports EPA evaluating its resources to ensure American taxpayer dollars are being used efficiently and effectively to meet the Agency's statutory requirements. If necessary, that includes shifting resources from certain offices." — Surprised?
  

• The Guardian reported on this as well, 19 July, and told us:
  Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House science committee, called the elimination of the research office “a travesty”.
  
  “The Trump administration is firing hardworking scientists while employing political appointees whose job it is to lie incessantly to Congress and to the American people,” she said. “The obliteration of ORD will have generational impacts on Americans’ health and safety.”
  
  EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement that the changes announced Friday would ensure the agency “is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment, while Powering the Great American Comeback”.

And there are intriguing tidbits to be found on the InsideEPA.com site at this moment. Seeking new homes for ORD laboratory test animals, but hedging on whether animal testing will actually be halted. ORD staff learning about the upcoming RIF from the EPA press release. Staff levels will be the lowest since the Reagan area. And the planned 2026 budget provisions to support the deregulatory agenda and block enforcement of Biden-era regulations.

We scientists tend to speak in our own defense by saying that scientific inquiry has idealistic motives and that it drives progress and saves lives. We are always a small and quiet constituency in the greater scheme of things, and have been in danger of being completely inaudible.

About two weeks prior to the announcement about ORD, EPA staff got loud.

Here’s the Associated Press reporting, posted by the Federal News Network:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” with its policies, accusing them of “unlawfully undermining” the Trump administration’s agenda.

In a letter made public Monday, the employees wrote that the agency is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment. The letter represented rare public criticism from agency employees who knew they could face blowback for speaking out against a weakening of funding and federal support for climate, environmental and health science.

In a statement Thursday, the EPA said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting” the Trump administration’s agenda.

Good Trouble! “Bureaucrats” is Fox-News-Speak for our civil service; and as for “tolerance,” I’m not surprised if the Project 2025 regime can only use the word in a sentence when it has the “zero-” part in front.

Here’s the part of my post where we click the link to Stand Up For Science without jumping ahead of the narrative. At the EPA, one hundred and eighty-six courageous scientists had signed their names to a public Declaration of Dissent.

This Declaration closes by saying:

Administrator Zeldin, we urge you to honor your oath and serve the American people. Going forward, you have the opportunity to correct course. Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts to fulfill EPA's mission.

The Declaration having made clear, naturally, that the undersigned understood, in detail, exactly Zeldin IS doing at the EPA: undermining public trust, ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters, reversing progress regarding impacts to America’s most vulnerable communities, dismantling the Office of Research and Development, and promoting a culture of fear among the staff.

When I first read this Declaration back in June, the names of the 186 signed staff were published, along with anonymous signers. As of now, the Declaration shows 620 anonymous signers only. The number of staff reportedly put on leave is 139. I do not know whether the names were removed for safety concerns or because staff on administrative leave could not represent with their former affiliations. Maybe both.

Stand Up For Science is still asking for support, and I am seeing on LinkedIn that EPA staff are still circulating this news and are thanking us for expressing our support. So if you have not yet, please do go to the site and click the button that looks like this:

By the way.

Administrator Lee Zeldin is a terrible person. He was Tea Party from his first minute in Congress in 2014. He lied without limit to moderate conservatives in our district about his supposed concern for the environment – which on Long Island, with its farms, fisheries, and fragile fresh water aquifers, not to mention crowded septic fields, leaking landfill facility near the lowest income neighborhoods, and fast-eroding coastlines, is a real economic as well as moral responsibility. Trump could do no wrong, as far as Lee Zeldin was concerned, and he’d be on Twitter accusing local Democrats of calling people rude names at the exact moment his own supporters were standing outside of the Dems’ post-primary unity rally, holding up signs that said — well, let’s have a look at the pictures:

Smithtown photos courtesy

The Radical Pragmatist

.

Top – A couple hundred Dems in Smithtown; we’d just finished the NY-1 and NY-2 primaries in June 2018, and rallied to unite behind our chosen candidates. (Happy to have found a pic of myself waving thank-you for the thank-you’s after shaking Perry’s hand. Still unemployed, I canvassed for Perry every week for the next three months. Zeldin won in the general election, unfortunately.)

Bottom – five very happy Zeldin supporters hanging at the edges of our event. Especially love the earnest lady with the capri pants and sparkly handbag holding her sign that says “NAZI DEMS CALL FOR MOB RULE.” Ten days later, Zeldin’s Twitter account complained something something somebodies keep calling people Nazis. And what was Zeldin actually doing, during the Dems’ Unity Rally on June 28th? He was within a mile of us at the Smithtown Elks Lodge, kicking off a fundraiser with disgraced white supremacist Sebastian Gorka.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Standing Up For Science

It doesn’t start here or end here.

I was on the email list to get timely news of the EPA Declaration in part because I had already signed in support of the Bethesda Declaration, published on June 9th by the public servants of the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

At the time, I wasn’t organized to communicate to as many colleagues at once, but I sent some emails out, and an NIH colleague who’s a friend of mine pinged me back: “Thank you.”

What we decide to do — it matters.

Thus, I hope to finish typing and post this today.

Because this morning, our heroic colleagues at NASA published their Voyager Declaration.

At this moment the site shows 131 staff who have publicly signed, 156 whose names are unlisted.

The future is still unwritten. See you out there.