Trump’s Science Cuts Threaten Public Research Data
NASA is another agency in trouble. Three of its main Earth-observing satellites are in urgent need of replacement. This includes the Aura satellite that hosts the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), which measures changes to the ozone layer. The OMI project—a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, European science and technology institutes, funding schemes, and national meteorological institutes—is an international undertaking. It’s now feared that 20 years of data-gathering will be discontinued and retired.
The US Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health (NIH) are also affected. Almost two dozen repositories of research and public health data are marked for review. While other government datasets or webpages, including NASA’s and NOAA’s, could be transferred, NIH data requires a cumbersome disclosure review process.
Beyond raw data, there are concerns about aggregate databases such as NASA’s repository of Astronomy and Physics literature (hosted at Harvard but financed by NASA) and PubMed, a database hosted at NIH with millions of references for biomedical sciences.
This disconnection from scientific data will affect Australia. For instance, for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, ‘international partnership and cooperation is of critical importance […] in technology development and data exchange’ and involves US institutions such as NASA and NOAA. The bureau relies on ‘free access to data from around 30 satellites, operated by Europe, the US, Japan, India, and others.’ Similarly, the agency services assist the Australian Defense Forces and the Defence Science and Technology Group in weather forecasting, advanced defense science, and planning of land, aerial and marine operations.
AUKUS is also involved, given the partnership’s focus on the subsea domain for future operations and the joint development of defense tech capabilities.
Grassroots initiatives are already underway, aiming to safeguard research and data. Safeguarding Research & Culture, for example, was established in February after Trump signed a series of executive orders related to research agencies. The community seeks to create ‘an alternative infrastructure for archiving and disseminating of cultural heritage and scientific knowledge’. In Switzerland, the University of Geneva issued advice to staff to reassess the use of Open Science Framework, a commonly used platform, and to redirect data to servers outside of the US.
But if Trump’s administration continues at the same speed and relentlessness, these actions may be too little, too late. Mitigating the most dramatic consequences will require coordinated effort from like-minded governments.
In its 2030 cybersecurity strategy, the Australian government committed to the protection of ‘datasets of national significance’. This policy initiative should be expedited and should include overseas datasets.
But this will take time to come into effect. In the short term, the government should check in with federal, state and territory agencies, as well as universities, and do a stocktake of current dependencies on US and US-hosted scientific data. It should establish a point of contact to which researchers can report issues, concerns or rescue initiatives. Australia could also work with the US’s other science and technology partners to negotiate a transition period with the Trump administration, developing a handover plan through which Australia could become a data safe-haven.
Bart Hogeveen is deputy director of ASPI’s Cyber, Technology and Security Program. Mike Copage, head of ASPI’s Climate program, and ASPI data scientist Jenny Wong-Leung contributed to this article. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
