The outlook is especially grim for social sciences. In response to a detailed list of questions, the White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me in an email that the administration ‘is committed to cementing America’s dominance in cutting-edge technologies of the future—innovation that is being driven by advancements in hard sciences, not in ideologically-driven ‘social sciences.’” –Hana Kiros in The Atlantic, May 2026.
It is hard to overstate the threat posed by conservative ideologues to the vital, multidimensional social sciences that yield vital social capital so important to the nation. The trouble starts with the Trump Administration but extends to hostilities toward the human sciences from states like Florida and Texas, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and too many in the American and occasionally European population who don’t know what they don’t know. Modern societies have advanced to a point where they can be smart about how to enhance humans living in close proximity to others. The UK’s Prime Minister once offered the stunning conclusion that “There is no such thing as society.” For her and other primitives, there are only individuals: men and women as creatures buffeted by whatever physical and circumstantial circumstances intersect with their lives. Likewise, for a shallow and narcissistic thinker like Donald Trump there is no moral issue with his government cutting basic human needs programs like jobs, healthcare, or housing and personal safety. As summarized by the New York Times, his administration has formalized its intention to cut funding to “initiatives that ‘promote anti-American values,’ contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration.” All of these values are viewed as “anti-American,” even while including some of the founding principles of the nation.
If a person is like him it is easy to miss the myriad ways humans work to create a fabric of interdependence. “I did it all myself” is the lie delusional narcissists will tell themselves. This kind of hole in the soul is so extensive that it can end up not noticing the vast trove of what we have learned about the history and adaptability of various human groups.
In the case of the social sciences, we are talking about core fields of human inquiry that include sociology, cultural anthropology, geography, linguistics, history, various branches of psychology, and their many offshoots and subdivisions. For these pretend-independents, the ideas of “social intelligence,” “compassion,” or the “social contract” are alien and hostile to the sentimental view of humans as independent agents. With this kind of thinking it is easier to cut research on subjects such as disease contagion patterns, gender equality, education methods, reducing the homelessness, lowering rates of child abuse, and so on. The idea of social progress is so vast and all-encompassing it is difficult to comprehend its detractors.
Major university faculties appear to be the targets, with unclear and ersatz criteria to defund any work through the National Science Foundation and other Federal funding sources. This draconian purge combines a dangerous form of anti-intellectualism with an irrational fear that a “woke” understanding of the variables of the human condition may yield new insights that will be required to adapt to rapidly changing social conditions.
To be sure, not all social science methodologies and approaches are fruitful. Methods of investigating the causes of certain common behavioral outcomes can be slippery. Cause and effect theorizing about human behavior is not for the faint at heart. In addition, qualitative methodologies such as straight narratives are out of favor in many fields: a serious oversight taken in the name of rigor. Quantitative methods so often reduces the subtleties of human variability, something we all sense in research or corporate efforts to survey subjects with closed-ended questions.
Even with the methodological challenges, the discovery of revealing patterns of human interaction will surely be impeded by the incoherent federal administration. But progress will occur regardless of the retrograde puritanism it displays. Violent crime has been reduced in most of the U.S. in large part because of tested methods for controlling its causes. We have a far better understanding now about what keeps families together. Various states have seen dramatic improvement in reading outcomes using new and tested hardware and methods. If we are going to meet the collective challenges of this nation will have to continue to find new insights about our social selves; we will need supported graduate-level study, human development labs, and modern informatics. Anything less sinks us deeper into risky ignorance.
