My mother supports Donald Trump. She has concerns but believes all politicians are corrupt. According to my mother, the key difference is that Trump doesn’t hide his corruption.
My mother’s political disillusionment is not unique. As of 2023, only 4% of Americans believed the political system was working well. Americans’ trust that the government will “do what’s right” at least “most of the time” dropped by half between 2000 and 2008, continuing to decline to an all-time low of 17% in 2025.
As a scientist, I’m deeply concerned. Scientists are often encouraged to avoid politics. But this advice is outdated, if it was ever correct in the first place. Science relies on public support.
For about 80 years, most fields of science enjoyed bipartisan support, allowing scientists to cling to an “apolitical” fantasy. But the scientific community can no longer afford to avoid politics when science is under attack.
As a program officer at the National Institutes of Health, I witnessed this attack firsthand. When I saw clinical trials cut short with callous disregard for participant safety, court orders ignored to achieve political ends, and mission-critical colleagues fired based on false accusations of poor performance, I first spoke up inside the NIH. When it became clear that internal objections were not working, I chose — together with hundreds of my colleagues — to blow the whistle and make the American public aware of the harm. Our dissent took shape in June 2025 as the Bethesda Declaration, an open letter of concern modeled after NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration.
Relying on my right to free speech as a civil servant, affirmed in Pickering v. Board of Education, I continued to bring the harms I witnessed at the NIH to light until Nov. 13, 2025, when the Trump administration placed me on administrative leave. Officially, NIH gave no reason for my leave, saying only that it was “not disciplinary.” Neither NIH nor Health and Human Services has yet provided further information. Instead, an unnamed HHS official called me a “radical leftist” in The New York Times, saying I was put on leave for criticizing the administration while I should have been working. Bhattacharya, breaking NIH policies that prohibit commenting on personnel matters, claimed I was twice investigated by NIH. To my knowledge, I have never been the subject of an NIH investigation. In fact, I have consistently received top scores on my performance evaluations and numerous awards for exemplary service.
So on Feb. 2, I filed a whistleblower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel alleging that HHS and NIH unlawfully retaliated against me and asking the NIH to restore me to my position. Recently, someone asked if, given the consequences, I now regret my choice to speak up. I would, without question, make the same choice again. In the words of a fellow Bethesda Declaration signer, “You can get another job; you can’t get another soul.”
Yet some argue that scientists should stay quiet publicly amid this chaos. In a recent essay, Science magazine Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp attempted to justify a behind-the-scenes approach. Thorp opens by claiming “things now are better than might have been expected a year ago.” Reading these words while home on retaliatory administrative leave for whistleblowing against unethical and unlawful policies at the NIH, I had to wonder: better for whom?
Not for racial, ethnic, and gender minority Americans who are excluded from NIH research via discriminatory grant screening processes. (These processes continue to this day despite being found unlawful). Not for the 74,000 participants affected by clinical trial terminations. Not for early career researchers whose futures are threatened. Not for the quarter of the U.S. research workforce who are foreign born and at risk of being detained, regardless of citizenship or green card status.
But Thorp is not tracking these considerations in his measure of success, which he defines narrowly as “the extent to which funding was restored.” While federal funding is necessary for science, it is certainly not sufficient.
To prove this point, we only need to look at 2025. With just about the same amount of funding as Congress appropriated in 2026, the Trump administration unleashed unprecedented harm on the scientific enterprise in 2025. As I’ve previously noted, science funds remain controlled by an administration that has repeatedly implemented an anti-science agenda. Just weeks after Congress appropriated 2026 funds for NIH, the administration is already stalling their release.
Thorp claims to credit activism, along with his behind-the-scenes approach. But the loaded language he uses to describe activism makes it hard to believe he truly sees its value. While activism is “seething” and “heated,” his heads down approach is “validated,” conducted by people “plugging away calmly” who are “players of the long game.”
But the fatal flaw in Thorp’s argument is not just this value-laden language. Rather, it is his failure to recognize that scientists must fight not just for funding but also for integrity. People can see right through those who are “cautious in their public comments in order to work more effectively with Republicans.” When you state one thing in public (silence does make a statement) and another behind closed doors, you damage trust.
While scientists largely retain public trust, at least compared with our peers in politics, we are not immune. The share of Americans with at least a fair amount of confidence that scientists will act in the public’s best interest dropped from 87% to 73% between 2020 and 2023, bouncing back slightly to 76% in 2024. While shrinking trust was fueled by concerted disinformation campaigns, we have also earned some mistrust through now infamous endeavors like the Tuskegee syphilis study. Regardless of cause, rebuilding trust is necessary for science to thrive.
To repair trust, leaders across sectors must embrace authenticity. Ephemeral as the concept may be, the American people hunger for leaders who display it. This desire for authenticity is seen in the abandonment of political candidates whose positions constantly shift to accommodate the latest polls. It is arguably why so many Americans supported Trump; his (ironically carefully crafted) speak-off-the-cuff, say-what-you-think, damn-the-consequences persona is widely perceived as authentic.
Scientists can start to demonstrate authenticity by remaining resolute in our values: truth, accountability, freedom of ideas, open debate, transparency, and public good. We stand by these principles, even when they are not universally popular. If a member of Congress will truly write off a scientific organization for publicly decrying unethical, unlawful, and harmful grant terminations, what have we really lost? As a “loud” and occasionally “seething” scientist, holding firm on ethics, free speech rights, and accountability has not kept me out of meetings on the Hill with members of both parties.
Even if speaking truth does close some doors, science organizations must weigh that risk against the risk of silence. It’s a psychological fallacy that humans far overemphasize the risk of acting while ignoring the risk of inaction. As a form of inaction, the risks of silence may be less visible. But silence is complicity. Scientific institutions represent a potential pillar of support for an increasingly authoritarian government. Through silence and even appreciation, too many science institutions are choosing to prop up an anti-science and anti-democratic administration.
Choosing silence also cedes our right to free speech. This right is enshrined in our Bill of Rights not just to protect the speaker, but to protect the American public. For those in positions of power, speaking up is as much a responsibility as it is a right.
While I do not believe silence is a defensible choice for those who call themselves leaders, I do not castigate the vulnerable for remaining silent. When my colleagues and I organized the Bethesda Declaration, we allowed anonymous signers because not everyone can withstand the risk that comes with being loud: people on green cards, single parents working in government, members of marginalized communities. As my colleague Elizabeth Ginexi recently wrote of many NIH staff: “They are not silent because they are indifferent. They are silent because speaking carries real risk. …”
We need people to remain quietly inside federal agencies, keeping trains running where possible and quietly sharing the greatest atrocities with those who can make them public. I have many brave colleagues still inside NIH whose names you will never know, but whose courage has changed lives.
But protecting those in precarious positions only amplifies the need for those with power to assume the risk.
Next, scientists must enter into conversation with the public. Public opinion is malleable. Through empathetic discussion, people’s views can change. But public sentiments do not shift through closed-door meetings on the Hill. (The inverse, however, is true. Voters’ views do affect Congress, even if people like my mother don’t believe it!)
To rebuild trust in science, we need authentic leaders who will make the case for evidence-based science policies, especially when they aren’t popular. Abandoning diversity, equity, and inclusion despite the supporting evidence is just as absurd as abandoning promising mRNA vaccine technology based on misinformed public belief. If we believe in the evidence we generate, we must do the work to bring the public along.
Finally, the scientific community must work together. On this, I do agree with Thorp. Solidarity is necessary to build the strength to stand up to those harming science. We must work together to elevate those able to speak up while protecting those who truly cannot. We must amplify one another’s voices as we communicate with the public, and reward those who, on top of their science, do this critical work for the common good.
By coming together, we can build strength in numbers, strategically assign roles to leverage skills and protect our most vulnerable, find support in each other, and build hope through action. Together, we are strong.
Jenna Norton, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a health equity and public health scientist, a signer and organizer of the Bethesda Declaration, an NIH program officer currently on administrative leave, and a mother of three young children. She writes in her personal capacity.