Soviet scientists in the 1930s knew what could happen if they bucked the party line: denunciation, firing and banishment from the scientific establishment, even imprisonment and death. Political reprisals against those who opposed the views of dictator Joseph Stalin and his followers — and the dubious science they endorsed — led to the starvation of millions, as well as to decades of lost progress in fields from agriculture to molecular biology.
Now, scientists are warning that history could repeat itself — but in the United States.
A new proposal from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget would put political appointees in charge of funding decisions traditionally overseen by scientists. In recent years, the federal government has funded about 40 percent of basic science research in the United States.
The OMB’s more than 400-page proposed rule change would let political appointees decide how to hand out federal research funds and who can get them. It would cut funding for collaboration with scientists in other countries and restrict scientists’ ability to communicate their findings. What’s more, it could prevent research on matters that President Donald Trump’s administration has deemed “not in the national interest” — such as studies on health disparities, mRNA-based vaccines and research that doesn’t recognize biological sex as a strict binary.
The new rules would also give OMB the power to rescind previously approved research funds. The proposal “poses a sweeping threat to federal grantmaking and the responsible stewardship of American taxpayer dollars,” the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science Foundation said in a report. In addition, it would impact nonscientific grants supporting services for mental health, housing, education, veterans and Tribal nations, affecting the health and well-being of millions.
So far, OMB has received more than 98,000 comments on the proposal. The public comment period closes July 13. It then will be up to OMB to decide whether to keep the rule as is, revise it or scrap it.
A dark side of scientific history
These far-reaching measures are already drawing parallels to dark moments in scientific history. Some researchers say the recent mass firings, policy changes and grant cancellations at federal research institutions, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, closely mirror what happened in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. “A similar threat now hangs over U.S. science,” the editorial board of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote in June.
Its editorial invoked the example of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist and astute political operator who rose to power in the 1930s Soviet Union under Stalin.
Until the 1930s, “the Soviet Union was a real powerhouse in the field of genetics,” says Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Then, Lysenko came along. “This guy was your sort of classic charlatan,” Dugatkin says. “He had the equivalent of a mail order degree in agriculture, but he was quite good with the press, and he started to basically spread this idea out there that he was capable of dramatically increasing crop yield, particularly wheat.”
Lysenko’s supposed innovation was a process called vernalization and amounted to soaking seeds in freezing water. The resulting plants — and all their offspring — should be resistant to the U.S.S.R.’s famously cold winters, Lysenko reasoned.
His reasoning was based on a disproven idea in evolutionary biology called Lamarckian inheritance. French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his followers thought that things an organism experiences in its lifetime can be handed down to the next generation. The classic example is a giraffe that has to stretch to reach leaves producing offspring with long necks.
This idea ran counter to Mendelian genetics, which holds that genes — not environmental influences — control traits and are passed to offspring. Mendelian geneticists thought it would take five years to breed more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it in two to three years.
Stalin didn’t have time to wait. He was trying to get collective farms going and needed to increase crop yields to feed more than 150 million people. Large parts of the country had already suffered from famine in 1932 and 1933 and about 6 million people died. Some resorted to cannibalism.
Stalin embraced Lysenko’s quick-fix approach. That decision, says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University, was “something that the majority of people at the time, and everyone since, considers the wrong side of the dispute.”
Lysenko was put in charge of a prestigious genetics institute and forced his scientifically unsound farming practices on the collective farms. His methods were disastrous.
Soaking seeds in freezing water hampered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions starved. Meanwhile, Mendelian genetics was branded a “whore of capitalism,” and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs. Many were jailed, and almost a dozen were executed or died in prison.
Falling behind in science
The Soviet Union lost its scientific leadership role and sat on the sidelines for important scientific discoveries of the 1950s and beyond. One, Gordin says, was the development of “massively” productive hybrid corn. The country also missed out on the discovery of DNA and the advent of molecular biology, putting Soviet genetics decades behind the rest of the world.
Soviet genetics did not recover from Lysenko’s influence until after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gordin says. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who thinks that … Russia is today, or Ukraine, or any post-Soviet successor state, is a leading molecular biology country.”
Biochemist and Nobel Prize Laureate Katalin Karikó grew up in Hungary, an Eastern Bloc country with strong ties to the Soviet Union. “We lived in a system that we knew that we cannot openly protest,” she says. She learned that there was a difference between the truth and the official government position. “If you stood up against [it], you were crushed, so you had to compromise constantly.”
At her university, Karikó had two genetics professors, one who taught Lysenko’s view and one who taught molecular biology. She and other students saw molecular biology as the key to the future, but they still had to take exams for the other professor and espouse Lysenko’s views. “We said the stupid thing[s], because that’s what was required.”
Karikó, who has returned to the University of Szeged in Hungary, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2023 for basic research on messenger RNA, or mRNA, which ultimately led to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
That’s one area of U.S. science that’s already been swept up in the shift in administrative priorities. Despite championing the technology during his first term, in the second term, the Trump administration pulled funds for research on mRNA therapies for cancer and genetic disorders and on vaccines against many infectious diseases.
If the United States doesn’t pursue mRNA technology, other countries will, Karikó says. China, which has already surpassed the United States in the number of clinical trials registered for mRNA therapies, is a prime example. And patients don’t care where their medicine comes from, she adds.
Casting a pall over U.S. science
Meanwhile, at the CDC, firings gutted much of the public health workforce and funding cuts hampered responses to measles outbreaks and other illnesses. The agency’s directorship has changed multiple times, with some career scientists being fired or resigning because they refused to sign off on politically motivated directives.
In one case, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer by training, personally asked CDC to halt spending on its flu vaccine campaign. “You have people who are not trained, not experts, being put in positions within the scientific world where they’re making decisions in which they have absolutely no credibility,” Dugatkin says.
Lysenko’s example also shows that when an administration has an agenda it wants to enforce, Dugatkin says, “how easy it is, if you say what they want to hear, to get them to pay attention to you, regardless of what the data says.”
Former NIH program official Elizabeth Ginexi sees that process playing out at her former institution. In a June opinion piece for MedPage Today, she wrote: “Lysenko replaced legitimate science with a politically acceptable alternative, enforced by the state, and destroyed the careers of scientists who practiced disfavored methods.” At the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, she wrote, leadership was restructured either by firing, reassignment or resignation.
“It’s not like you can turn off the spigot on politics, but you can definitely think very carefully about what kinds of politics are going to be shaping your science.”
Michael Gordin
The institute’s staff were also instructed to remove references to “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” from its materials. And, she writes in another piece, NIH canceled at least 110 funding announcements from January 2025 to May 2026. Many focused on infectious diseases, vaccines or health disparities. Under Kennedy, the Trump administration has also disfavored research on antidepressants and promoted work on psychedelics. “That is a system operating on political instructions,” Ginexi wrote.
There have even been calls to jail prominent U.S. scientists, including former head of NIAID Anthony Fauci for actions he took while in office.
Gordin worries that as scientists in the United States face uncertainty about funding and academic freedom, training pipelines will be disrupted. “So smart undergrads don’t go on to grad school, smart graduate students don’t complete their degrees, they don’t stay as postdocs, they don’t stay in the research environment.” Science operates as a transmission of knowledge, skills and theories that develop and evolve over time. “You can’t just remove a five-year period and then hope to restart it again.”
The role of democracy
The Lysenko analogy isn’t perfect, some historians warn. In the U.S.S.R., “there was a specific kind of society where one person [Stalin] believed or disbelieved in certain scientific theories, and this influenced the direction of the science,” says Georgy Levit, a historian of science at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in Germany. He adds that Soviet society was based on an ideology that penetrated the whole of society — and that scientists and others in opposition were powerless to fight back. In contrast, he says, “the United States is a democratic state, and certainly there are powers fighting against these tendencies.”
History has not favored efforts to restrict science, Gordin says. Measures “that involve trying to bar people from doing science or imposing nakedly political criteria, like partisan criteria, have been viewed in retrospect as deleterious to scientific development and advancement.”
But there’s also plenty of precedent for politics to play a role in science. “It’s inevitable,” Gordin says. Partisanship and presidents’ pet projects or peeves can — and do —influence how much money is spent, or not spent, on certain types of science. Gordin cites the Manhattan Project and the development of radar as two examples “where the federal government has funded science with a very specific end in mind.”
There is no such thing as nonpolitical science, Gordin says. But political engagement and buy-in doesn’t have to disrupt funding, alienate scientists and put politicians in positions to make scientific judgments. “It’s not like you can turn off the spigot on politics, but you can definitely think very carefully about what kinds of politics are going to be shaping your science.”
