4 key steps to transform the USA back into a scientific nation

In every civilized society around the world, there’s a trade-off that must be made. The protection of individual freedoms, on one hand, enable the people living there to pursue their own goals, dreams, and ideals, whatever they may be. But those pursuits must not infringe on the rights — including the health, safety, and general welfare — of others. When it comes to issues like the health, safety, and long-term prosperity of our society, there is no greater tool or resource we have to assess accurately them than science.

It might seem like, at the start of 2025, we’re headed in absolutely the wrong direction. Mass firings and layoffs at the NIH, the NSF, the CDC and more, coupled with the installation of a number of prominent anti-science cabinet members, the first deadly measles outbreak among children in a decade, and the USA’s withdrawal (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement all signal a national move away from science.

But this is not new. The fact is that Americans have been resistant to heeding the scientific consensus on matters of public policy for many decades, preferring stances that agree with their ideological preferences instead. This was highlighted in 2020 and beyond, as many refused to mask, vaccinate, or isolate at even the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This disregard for scientific facts extends even to the vilification of the scientists that find them, resulting in policies that recklessly endanger not only the health and safety of Americans today, but provide new generations with long-term challenges that they’ll need to either reckon with or face the consequences.

But hope remains, as we’re just four key steps away from putting America back on the right track. Here’s what we can do.

This illustration, from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, shows the consequence of deforestation for agricultural purposes in Rondonia, Brazil, over the time period 1975-2012.

1.) Put an end to the “false equivalence” game. It is a fundamentally misinformative act to present multiple sides of a controversial issue equally when the scientific consensus overwhelmingly favors one perspective. And yet many will make appeals to:

• common sense,
• our gut instincts,
• a single piece of evidence,
• our internal moral compasses,
• or the opinions of influential members of society.

These might be persuasive tactics, but all are fundamentally meaningless when it comes to a scientific matter. If something can be decided by evidence — and the full suite of collected evidence is decisive in nature — then and only then will we achieve a scientific consensus. It is never based on how convincing an argument is, but rather how compelling the full suite of evidence and data is for supporting all plausible hypotheses.

We have this dangerous myth in our society that science is often wrong, and that listening to mainstream science is restrictive and locks us into what will someday be an archaic way of thinking. That is completely false, and sorely misrepresents how science actually works. Only in the presence of decisive evidence can consensus be achieved. Consensus is not “the end goal” of science, but rather a starting point for future advances: the foundation of what is not just known, but is widely accepted for good reason, at present. Consensus is, to be blunt, what the overwhelming majority of professionals have concluded is already strongly established by the existing evidence so far.

A recent, but dubious, study links exposure to fluoridated tap water during pregnancy to lower IQ scores in infants. Several outside experts expressed concern over its methodology and questioned its findings. Fluoride has been added to community water supplies in industrial countries to prevent tooth decay since the 1950s. Very high levels of the mineral have been found to be toxic to the brain, though the concentrations seen in fluoridated tap water are generally deemed safe, and by a large margin.

Here are just a few examples of where a scientific consensus has been reached, and how far it takes us:

• We know the relative angular sizes of the Moon and Mars; we know that Mars will never appear even 2% as large as the full Moon in the sky.
• We know that our planet isn’t flat; in fact we know what the shape, curvature, and circumference of the Earth is.
• We know that the CDC-approved course of vaccinations is safe and effective, and demonstrates no relationship with autism in vaccinated individuals.
• We know that fluoride is a safe and effective public health intervention, reducing tooth decay and cavities most prominently for the children in the lowest-income households (by about 40%).
• We know that mandating the wearing of seat belts saves lives: thousands to tens of thousands per year.
• We know that long-term, regular tobacco use causes cancer and other health problems.
• We know that human-caused CO2 emissions are the primary driver of global warming and global climate change.

And yet, you might not “know” these things just by consuming mainstream news. Unfortunately, what passes for news reports in the modern world often present two sides to a story — granting equal airtime and equal legitimacy to both sides — even when one side (and definitively not the other) is fully supported by the scientific consensus. Our modern civilization is built atop the accumulated knowledge of all of humanity, with every single technological advance of the past 10,000+ years arising from applications of the scientific consensus in one sense or another. To publicly advocate for its rejection and devaluation is nothing short of an act of violence against human society, and should be treated as such.

In simpler terms, we must both seek and tell the truth, not to simply give uncritical airtime to authority figures who make untrue statements without rigorous fact-checking.

When people reject science in favor of whatever their preferred ideology is, they can come to absurd and destructive conclusions that harm us all. The fact that, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (and even afterward) people opposed wearing masks, advocated against testing, vaccines, and other public health interventions routinely demonstrated an unconscionable act of science denial, leading to millions of unnecessary infections, deaths, and long-term disability.

2.) Make “reckless endangerment” illegal. If you drive while intoxicated and kill a pedestrian or crash your vehicle into a piece of property, you’re liable for the damage your reckless actions cause: criminally and civilly. If you poison someone’s drink, you’re liable for the consequences that befall them. And if you took a needle infected with the blood of someone who’s HIV+ and injected it into a stranger’s body, you’d be prosecuted for assault, among other charges. These criminal acts endanger the lives of others, and — as a results — we have laws and regulations that make these behaviors illegal, with significant punitive consequences for those who dare to endanger or harm the lives of others.

But plenty of reckless actions that put the health and safety of others at risk have inconsistent regulations (including none at all) across the nation. We have drinking water in various locations across the country that fails to meet the federal standards for safety. People constantly recklessly endanger others by opting out of vaccines against preventable diseases for no justifiable medical reason, leading to deaths among those who are unable to protect themselves: the immunocompromised and those too young to vaccinate. And, as we saw during the most recent global pandemic, people willfully chose to defy public health recommendations without suffering any punitive consequences, leading to the unnecessary illness of tens of millions and deaths of over a million in the United States alone.

Even though there are a small percentage of people who would survive an otherwise fatal accident if they didn’t wear a seat belt, a far larger majority of lives are saved from people who do wear them. An estimated 15,000 additional deaths would occur annually in the United States if there were no seat belts in cars; if everyone wore them, an additional 2,500 fewer deaths would occur.

It should not be legal to knowingly endanger the health and safety of others, particularly when the science is overwhelmingly decisive. Just because the harm isn’t visible or immediate doesn’t make it any less of an act of recklessness. We have the means, the knowledge, the resources, and the capability of:

• making every municipal water supply in the country safe to drink,
• practically eradicating preventable diseases that have resurged (such as measles) in recent years,
• supplying 100% of our energy needs with green (nuclear, solar, wind, or other renewable) sources by 2050 or sooner,
• and drastically curtailing the spread of respiratory diseases, including the flu and COVID-19, in the American population,

just by bringing our national policies in line with what science has already taught us. Instead, we’re focusing our policies on supporting the reckless endangerment of others under the guise of a very insidious and inaccurate phrase, “personal freedoms,” while simultaneously casting blame where it is unmerited onto the underlying cause of these societal banes.

If we let science, rather than ideology, be our guide, we will have a safer, healthier, and more sustainable society for generations to come. We can choose to go down this road at any time.

Traditional power plants, based on the combustion reactions of fossil fuels, such as the Dave Johnson coal-fired power plant shown here in Wyoming, can generate tremendous quantities of energy, but require the burning of an enormous quantity of fuel in order to do so. The ash produced by this burning sends large quantities of particulate ash into the atmosphere, where it will eventually settle into the soil and onto the ocean bottoms, where it may become incorporated into materials found in the same location, while simultaneously adding long-buried carbon molecules back into Earth’s atmosphere.

3.) Value society’s right to benefit from humanity’s accumulated knowledge. One of the beautiful things about science is that it’s for everyone, equally. Regardless of the circumstances of your life, including:

• your place or time of birth,
• your race,
• your religion,
• your economic status,
• your educational background,
• your gender,
• your sexuality,
• or any other trait,

science is just as much for you as it is for anyone. Even if you don’t understand it, its lessons are just as true for you as they are for anyone else, and you still have the right to reap the benefits that it can give to all people living in our society.

We fundamentally understand this in some regard. We recognize that people need access to modern amenities like electricity, drinking water, and sanitation; these are public utilities because they are public necessities. Similarly, whenever we’re without access to the internet, we’re severely disadvantaged in the modern world. Following that recognition and imagining what could be, we could live in a society where the benefits of modern science and technology were equally accessible to all. Where research performed with public money was freely accessible by the public; where the results obtained — even null results — were made universally available; where science is performed openly and its conclusions are applied to the maximal benefit of all.

This map shows the global temperatures in each region of Earth for the year 2024, relative to the average recorded temperature of that region from 1951-1980. Regions where the 2024 temperature was greater than that average are shown in red, while colder than average regions are shown in blue. Note the ubiquity of red and orange colors, as well as the dearth of blue or even white (neutral) ones.

A scientifically literate society is not necessarily one where everyone knows the answer to certain questions. It doesn’t matter whether 25% of people incorrectly think that the Sun revolves around the Earth; it doesn’t matter whether people mistakenly doubt whether humans have walked on the Moon; it doesn’t even matter whether someone is afraid that vaccinating their child will result in their child getting sick. What matters is whether we’re aware of what the enterprise of science is, and whether we appreciate the value that science brings to our society.

We can imagine a society where legitimate expertise was valued, and where all claims were subject to the scrutiny of the scientific consensus. We can envision a society where charlatans and snake-oil salespersons were exposed as frauds rather than lauded as celebrity gurus and appointed to the President’s cabinet. And we can create an environment where it’s safe to go about our daily lives without a legitimate fear that those we come into contact with will infect us, or our loved ones who may be at an elevated risk, with a routinely preventable disease. We can trade an illusory and fallacious idea of what “freedom” is for actual freedom: the freedom to go about our lives knowing that the simple act of doing so won’t put our lives at unnecessary risk.

This graph shows NASA’s budget, from 1959-2025, as a percent of the total federal budget. Although the inflation-adjusted dollar amount of ~$25 billion, in 2025 dollars, has remained relatively constant since the early 1990s, the federal spend on NASA has decreased as a percentage of the total federal budget, underscoring our need to adequately and sufficiently fund science.

4.) Fund science — including basic, fundamental research — as a national priority. You might get to this point and ask, “is all of this just a ploy to get additional funding for scientists?” Quite to the contrary: it is a call for us, as a civilized society, to collectively invest in the one thing (science) that will benefit us all to a far greater degree than any other investment. That means we need to fund:

• the basic, fundamental research that enables the discovery of new scientific phenomena and our understanding of them,
• the pipeline of researchers — undergrads, graduate students, postdoctoral research scholars, etc. — that drive the scientific endeavor forward,
• the developmental research that translates into successful, useful applications of those phenomena,
• the technological incubation that transforms those applications into potentially novel, scalable technologies,
• and to leverage those technologies into successful, nationwide programs to solve the problems facing our society today.

All of these stages are important, provide a strongly net positive return-on-investment (generating several dollars for every dollar we invest in them), and represent how science benefits society, with NASA alone producing over $75 billion of economic activity, annually, on a budget that’s less than a third of that figure. Funding science adequately can only occur if the society we’re a part of supports and values the science that continues to drive us forward.

People watch the smoke and flames from the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on January 07, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. As of February 2025, the estimated damage of these wildfires exceeds $250 billion in total cost of what was destroyed.

We know what needs to be done, for example, to manage our forested lands and dramatically mitigate and reduce the damage caused by wildfires annually. Yet the entire budget of the National Forest Service, which is tasked with managing nearly 200 million acres of forested land, remains at under $10 billion dollars, whereas the damage from the California wildfires in January alone of 2025 is estimated at over $250 billion.

We know what it would take to land humans on Mars, but NASA’s entire budget — which is tasked with doing a whole lot more than putting humans in space — is less than 0.4% of the federal budget: a 60-year low, down from a high of more than 5% during the Apollo era.

We could phase out fossil fuels completely over the coming decades, replacing them with a mix of nuclear and renewable energy. We could restore the dream of clean air to every American, and clean water to everyone on a municipal water supply. We could restore the benefits of a clear, dark, pristine night sky. And we could reap the benefits of untold advances that we cannot anticipate. But only if we invest, together, in becoming a scientific society at long last.

Starting in the 1990s, North Korea began to deforest much of their land to serve agricultural purposes. However, just a few years later, flooding issues, largely related to that very act of deforestation, led to food shortages and famines. More than 30 years on, these issues continue to plague the North Korean people.

The annals of history are littered with disasters to the health and safety of its people where science was ignored in favor of an ideologically driven path instead. Rejection or disregard of science has led to famines, flooding, and environmental disasters, with the death tolls from various events rising into the millions. Ongoing deaths from respiratory diseases, including COVID-19 and influenza, are reaching a high not seen in more than half a century here in the 2020s. Meanwhile, a lack of long-term vision for societal success pervades our present political policies. It’s reminiscent of the warning that the former Governor of China’s Hainan Province issued concerning the Three Gorges Dam:

“We simply cannot sacrifice the environment in exchange for temporary economic gain.”

There are a great many challenges facing us at the present moment: individually, as a nation, and as a planet. Successfully navigating them will require learning all we can and following the best course of action as determined by the full suite of knowledge we can gather: according to the best recommendations of science. Whether we listen to what it tells us or not, we’re all going to have to live with the consequences. If we value both our present and our long-term prosperity — as individuals, as a nation, and as a planet — we’ll choose a path that’s fully aligned with science at long last.

A version of this story was first published in October of 2020. It was updated in February of 2025.