An equity and environmental justice assessment of anti-science actions during the Trump administration.

In the United States, science shapes federal health and safety protections, but political officials can and do politicize federal science and science-based safeguards. Many presidential administrations have politicized science, but under the administration of President Trump, these attacks on science-such as buried research, censored scientists, halted data collection-increased in number to unprecedented levels. Underserved communities bore the brunt of the harms. Such attacks disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, low-income communities, and communities of color, all of whom have long been burdened by pollution exposure and other stressors. We analyze the effects on underserved communities of the Trump administration's anti-science environmental and public health policy actions and offer policy recommendations for current and future administrations. Our goal is to strengthen scientific integrity, prioritize health disparity research, and meaningfully engage affected communities in federal rulemaking.

The disinformation playbook: how industry manipulates the science-policy process-and how to restore scientific integrity.

For decades, corporate undermining of scientific consensus has eroded the scientific process worldwide. Guardrails for protecting science-informed processes, from peer review to regulatory decision making, have suffered sustained attacks, damaging public trust in the scientific enterprise and its aim to serve the public good. Government efforts to address corporate attacks have been inadequate. Researchers have cataloged corporate malfeasance that harms people's health across diverse industries. Well-known cases, like the tobacco industry's efforts to downplay the dangers of smoking, are representative of transnational industries, rather than unique. This contribution schematizes industry tactics to distort, delay, or distract the public from instituting measures that improve health-tactics that comprise the "disinformation playbook." Using a United States policy lens, we outline steps the scientific community should take to shield science from corporate interference, through individual actions (by scientists, peer reviewers, and editors) and collective initiatives (by research institutions, grant organizations, professional associations, and regulatory agencies).